There were so many drinks to be drunk, and as the warm magic poured through our veins and mellowed our voices and affections we knew it was no time to make invidious distinctions--to drink with this shipmate and to decline to drink with that shipmate.

We were all shipmates who had been through stress and storm together, who had pulled and hauled on the same sheets and tackles, relieved one another's wheels, laid out side by side on the same jib-boom when she was plunging into it and looked to see who was missing when she cleared and lifted.

So we drank with all, and all treated, and our voices rose, and we remembered a myriad kindly acts of comradeship, and forgot our fights and wordy squabbles, and knew one another for the best fellows in the world.
Well, the night was young when we arrived in that public house, and for all of that first night that public house was what I saw of Japan--a drinking-place which was very like a drinking-place at home or anywhere else over the world.
We lay in Yokohama harbour for two weeks, and about all we saw of Japan was its drinking-places where sailors congregated.

Occasionally, some one of us varied the monotony with a more exciting drunk.

In such fashion I managed a real exploit by swimming off to the schooner one dark midnight and going soundly to sleep while the water-police searched the harbour for my body and brought my clothes out for identification.
Perhaps it was for things like that, I imagined, that men got drunk.