barracudas, kingfishes, red snappers, and a fish called the horse-eyed jack. The way the natives of the islands ascertain whether the fish is fit to eat is by trying it on a duck. If the duck dies, the islander makes his dinner that day off plantains.
One of our Navy doctors stationed at St. Thomas, V.I., heard there had been recent cases of fish poisoning on Culebra Island. He visited the island and found that earlier in the week ten natives who were dining off a twenty-pound male barracuda were all ill with symptoms of nausea, vomiting, and diarrhea. Cats, who had eaten of the same fish, died. Immediately warning was broadcast by means of the Fleet News Letter, a mimeographed sheet circulated to all ships' officers in the Fleet, not to buy any fish while in the Puerto Rico and Virgin Islands' area.
Every medical officer has an opportunity for a life of varied adventure during his service aboard ship, if he has a taste for adventure. Of course there are doctors whose interest is narrowed down to their strictly professional duties. In consequence, these men live a narrow and lonesome life aboard the smaller ships, where the personnel is limited. I have known medical officers so bored that when the ship put in to foreign ports where these men had never been before, they had not sufficient interest to go ashore. Once when the U.S.S. Illinois was going through the Magellan Strait and most of us were spending our time on deck, looking at the awesomely rugged and magnificent scenery, I went down to the wardroom for something. There lay one of our senior officers, stretched out on the transom. He raised himself on one elbow and demanded with a yawn: "Well, what ocean are we in now?"
Some of us enter into the life of the ship, learn the rudiments of navigation, stand watch on gunboats, take boats out for sailing and rowing during the various drills, and become interested in target practice. In the beginning of modern gunnery in the Navy, between 1904 and 1910, target practice was not the perfected affair it is today. I used to be considered an excellent spotter on the
