The Belted Seas by Arthur Willis Colton — Read

I invested the profits of the Hotel Helen Mar and the Ananias plantation in shares in the _Anaconda_, and shipped myself as second mate. She was carrying a cargo of steel rails for a railroad in Japan.

There was a man named Kreps who came aboard at Honolulu. He was a round-faced, chubby man, with spectacles and a trunk full of preserved specimens, and out of breath with his enthusiasm; and he was a German, too, and a Professor of Allerleiwissenschaft, which I take to mean Things in General. He was around gathering in culture and twelve-sided fish in the Pacific, and had a pailful of island dialects and sentiments that were milky and innocent. But I liked him.