He inclined his head, shutting his eyes under the large spectacles, and murmured:

“The sea⁠ ⁠… undoubtedly.”

The first member of the crew fairly knocked over was the steward⁠—the first man to whom I had spoken on board. He was taken ashore (with choleric symptoms) and died there at the end of a week. Then, while I was still under the startling impression of this first home-thrust of the climate, Mr. Burns gave up and went to bed in a raging fever without saying a word to anybody.

I believe he had partly fretted himself into that illness; the climate did the rest with the swiftness of an invisible monster ambushed in the air, in the water, in the mud of the riverbank. Mr. Burns was a predestined victim.