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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from The Human Drift by Jack London: longer sell farms to go to sea. But the time of which Dana writes
was the heyday of fortune-making and adventure on the sea--with
the full connotation of hardship and peril always attendant.
It was Dana's fortune, for the sake of the picture, that the
Pilgrim was an average ship, with an average crew and officers,
and managed with average discipline. Even the HAZING that took
place after the California coast was reached, was of the average
sort. The Pilgrim savoured not in any way of a hell-ship. The
captain, while not the sweetest-natured man in the world, was only
an average down-east driver, neither brilliant nor slovenly in his
seamanship, neither cruel nor sentimental in the treatment of his
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