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A return crossing becomes a scene of mass animal death, cable work, flies, and disease rather than adventure.

The bluntness of the page gives it force. It does not romanticize the voyage or enlarge it into symbolism; instead it records carcasses, rope, coping, and infestation with almost note-like precision, which makes the horror feel documentary.

Five flat lines that work like a refrain. 'Coming back across / The 4,000 dead carcasses / Had been taken up with cable and rope / While we did our best to cope / with the flies and mosquitos of disease.' The understatement is the whole effect - the mass death reduced to inventory and rope-work, the crew's only verb 'cope,' the horror left to the buzzing of 'flies and mosquitos of disease.' It reads as documentary rather than lament, a chorus the book keeps circling back to.