Bulkeley complained that “prayer had been entirely neglected on board,” and that in the Navy “devotion, in so solemn a manner, is so rarely performed that I know but one instance of it during the many years I have belonged.” He had brought with him a book entitled The Christian’s Pattern: or, A Treatise of the Imitation of Jesus Christ, and he seemed to approach the treacherous journey at least partly as a way of getting closer to himself and to God. Suffering can “make a man enter into himself,” the book instructed, but in this world of temptation, “the life of man is a warfare upon earth.”
