Master Rockafellar's Voyage by W. Clark Russell

These three days of storm brought me into a tolerably close acquaintance with some of the hardships of the sailor's life. Our cabin did not leak, yet somehow or other the deck of it was always damp, with a noise as of the bubbling of water under the bunks. The scuttles were incessantly under water, and all the light we had was imparted by the dingy flare of our malodorous coffee-pot-shaped lamp.

The food was perhaps the hardest part to my young stomach. Every midshipman's father had been called upon to pay ten guineas mess money; yet I do not know that this ninety guineas obtained any stores for us, if it were not a cask or two of flour, a cask of sugar, a few dozens of pickles, and some cases of "preserved spuds," as potatoes are called at sea. We were therefore thrown upon the ship's stores, and fed as the sailors forward did. This I say was the hardest part to me, since, though my sickness had passed, my appetite had not recovered its old strength, and for a long time I was never hungry enough to eat with the least relish the greenish masses of salt pork, and the iron-hearted rounds and squares and cubes of salt horse, and the pans of lukewarm slush-flavoured water, at the bottom of which rolled a handful of peas, as digestible as musket-balls, and the dark-skinned puddings, compounded of the coarsest flour and the skimmings of the greasy water of the cook's copper, which the lad who waited upon us would come staggering with from the galley, and place upon the narrow slip of table, scarce visible in our twilight.