The oceanic inhabitants approached it confidently upon seeing it rolling like a mute and inoffensive whale.
In six years Ulysses changed his boat many times.

He had learned English, the universal language of the blue dominions, and was refreshing himself with a study of Maury's charts--the sailors' Bible--the patient work of an obscure genius who first snatched from ocean and atmosphere the secret of their laws.
Desirous of exploring new seas and new lands, he did not stop in the usual travel zones or ports, and the British, Norwegian, and North American captains received cordially this good-mannered official so little exacting as to salary.

So Ulysses wandered over the oceans as had the king of Ithaca over the Mediterranean, guided by a fatality which impelled him with a rude push far from his country every time that he proposed to return to it.

The sight of a boat anchored near by and ready to set sail for some distant port was a temptation that invariably made him forget to return to Spain.
He traveled in filthy, old, happy-go-lucky sea-tramps, in which the crews used to spread all the sails to the tempest, get drunk and fall asleep, confident that the devil, friend of the brave, would awaken them on the following morning.

He lived in white boats as silent and scrupulously clean as a Dutch home, whose captains were taking wife and children with them, and where white-aproned stewardesses took care of the galley and the cleaning of the floating hearthside, sharing the dangers of the ruddy and tranquil sailors exempt from the temptation that contact with women provokes.