He had left England two years before, feeling obstinately determined to accomplish a certain difficult thing, but forces of nature combining with the circumstances of previous education and living had beaten him.

He had lost two years and all the money he had ventured.

He was going back to the place he had come from, and he was carrying with him a sense of having been used hardly by fortune, and in a way he had not deserved.
He had gone out to the West with the intention of working hard and using his hands as well as his brains; he had not been squeamish; he had, in fact, laboured like a ploughman; and to be obliged to give in had been galling and bitter.

There are human beings into whose consciousness of themselves the possibility of being beaten does not enter.

This man was one of them.
The ship was of the huge and luxuriously-fitted class by which the rich and fortunate are transported from one continent to another.