In an Unknown Prision Land by George Griffith

Everything, even quarantine, comes to an end in time; and so on the morning of the eighth day at anchor, and the thirteenth out from Pam, the sanitary policeman who formed our sole connection with the outside world brought with our morning letters and newspapers the joyful news that our imprisonment was to end at noon that day. Never did convicts hail the hour of their release more gladly than the passengers on board the Ballande liner _St. Louis_.

We had managed to make our durance vile tolerable by means of yarning by day, and cribbage by night. In the after saloon, an apartment measuring about sixteen feet by eight, there were four of us-three men and the wife of a mining superintendent in Pam. The miner was one of the good old colonial hard-shell type, a man of vast and varied experience, and the possessor of one of the most luxuriant vocabularies I have ever had reason to admire in the course of many wanderings. One night, I remember, we all woke up wondering whether the ship had broken from her moorings and gone ashore or whether the Kanaka crew had mutinied. It turned out that our shipmate had discovered a rat in his bunk, and was giving his opinion as to the chances of our all dying of plague before the quarantine was over. He knew that there had been fourteen deaths from plague only a month before on the miserable old hooker, and he was considerably scared.