ament. We could hear, at monotonously regular intervals, the flat explosive clap of sound as the bluff bows of the trawler crashed into the troughs of the steep-sided waves marching steadily eastwards under the goad of that bitter wind born on the immensity of the Greenland icecap, all of seven hundred miles away. We could hear the constantly altering variation in the depth of the engine note as the propellor surged upwards, almost clearing water level, then plunged deep down into the sea again.And we could feel the storm, a fact that most of those present clearly found a great deal more distressing than just listening to it. One moment, depending upon which side of the fore and aft tables we were sitting, we would be leaning sharply to our left or right as the bows lurched and staggered up the side of a wave: the next, we would be leaning as sharply in the other direction as the stern, in turn, rode high on the crest of the same wave. To compound the steadily increasing level of misery and discomfort the serried ranks of waves beyond the damask drapes were slowly but ominously beginning to break down into confused seas which violently accentuated the Morning Rose's typical fishing boat propensity for rolling continuously in anything short of millpond conditions. The two different motions, lateral and transverse, were now combining to produce an extremely unpleasant corkscrewing effect indeed.Because I'd spent most of the past eight years at sea, I wasn't experiencing any distressing symptoms myself, but I didn't have to be a doctor -which my paper qualifications declared me to be-to diagnose the symptoms of mal de mer. The wan smile, the gaze studiously averted from anything that resembled food, the air of rapt communic
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