There was, however, no cooled champagne
for Huxley.
"Life on board Her Majesty's ships in those days," he writes,
"was a very different affair from what it is now, and ours was
exceptionally rough, as we were often many months without
receiving letters or seeing any civilised people but ourselves.
In exchange, we had the interest of being about the latest
voyagers, I suppose, to whom it could be possible to meet with
people who knew nothing of fire-arms--as we did on the south
coast of New Guinea--and of making acquaintances with a variety
of interesting savage and semi-civilised people. But apart from
experience of this kind, and the opportunities offered for
scientific work, to me personally the cruise was extremely
valuable. It was good for me to live under sharp discipline; to
be down on the realities of existence by living on bare
necessities; to find out how extremely well worth living life
seemed to be when one woke up from a night's rest on a soft plank
with the sky for canopy, and cocoa and weevilly biscuit the sole
prospect for breakfast; and more especially to learn to work for
the sake of what I got for myself out of it, even if it all went
to the bottom and I myself along with it.
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