Sumner’s opium dependence

Patrick Sumner’s opium dependence is both a practical routine and a shifting refuge from distress. Laudanum first appears among the medicines he inventories for the voyage; later, he takes it in rum and settles into a nightly dose of twenty-one grains. Its effects offer relief and a temporary loosening of ordinary time, but the same return to carelessness can quiet his moral unease and defer action.

Access and Medical Context

Before the voyage begins, Sumner examines the medicine chest in his cabin and makes a list of supplies he believes are needed. He includes laudanum alongside absinthe, opium pills, and other medicines, while noting that many items already in the chest are unfamiliar and that the surgical instruments are old and blunt. The passage establishes his professional setting: as the ship’s surgeon, he is responsible for medical provisions, but his inspection also places the drug among the remedies he expects to have available.

The chest is not the only container that matters to him. After putting it beneath his bunk, Sumner checks the padlock on a battered tin trunk brought from India and confirms that he still has its key. The scene distinguishes his medical supplies from a separate possession he guards closely; it does not identify the trunk’s contents as part of his drug use. Laudanum’s later presence in the chest therefore belongs to the working conditions of the voyage, even as Sumner begins to rely on it for more than a medical purpose.

Use as Immediate Relief

In a tavern, rather than returning directly to the Volunteer, Sumner orders rum, opens a chemist’s package, and pours half a bottle into his glass. He drinks the mixture in one gulp and waits for its effects. The episode follows his reflections on betrayal, humiliation, poverty, disgrace, and earlier losses. He tries to understand his survival and his new position as a surgeon aboard a whaling ship as a possible form of freedom, then finds that idea too empty to settle his uncertainty.

The drug changes the terms of that reflection. Sumner comes to distrust abstract ideas and to favor action and events over words, yet the immediate improvement he experiences is bodily and chemical rather than the outcome of any new decision. He considers Brownlee and Baxter in more forgiving terms as the effects deepen, and notices that speaking may have become difficult. The scene presents laudanum as a source of short-term ease while showing how strongly it can shape his judgment and his sense of himself.

A Concealed Nightly Routine

During the seal hunt, Sumner’s dependence is quantified. He carries the expectation of returning to the warmth of his cabin and to five short-necked bottles of laudanum in the medical chest. He takes twenty-one grains every evening after supper. The regularity makes the drug part of the voyage’s daily structure, not an isolated response to a single crisis.

His use is also concealed from the other men. They believe he is working on his Greek while they play cribbage or discuss the weather; in fact, he is on his bunk under the drug’s effects. Sumner experiences a state of bliss in which he feels able to be anywhere or anyone, and his attention moves among places and periods of his life, including Galway, Lucknow, Belfast, London, and Bombay. Time seems to stretch or contract in that state. He questions whether the drug’s altered experience is false or whether the ordinary world of suffering and care is itself deceptive, without resolving the opposition.

Effects on Judgment and Action

A later episode shows the cost of relief in moral as well as physical terms. After agreeing with the captain that a boy will live, Sumner returns to his cabin, swallows laudanum, and lies down. He remains troubled by the boy’s failure to help himself and by the power another person may have over him. As the drug takes effect, however, his anger and disgust at Cavendish recede; the surrounding men seem less urgent to oppose, and Sumner postpones action rather than pursuing his questions at once.

The episode does not make the drug the cause of every decision Sumner makes, nor does it establish what he might otherwise have done. It does show a recurring relation between distress and dosing: concern and dissatisfaction are present, but laudanum turns them into remote impressions and supports delay. The same capacity that makes the drug feel like shelter therefore compromises the persistence of his attention to a troubling situation.

Narrative Significance

Across these scenes, dependence emerges through repeated circumstances rather than through a formal declaration. The bottle mixed with rum, the five bottles kept in the medical chest, the nightly twenty-one-grain dose, and the pretence of studying Greek give the pattern practical detail. The narrative also places that routine beside Sumner’s work and responsibilities: he is a surgeon who examines supplies and treats Drax’s injured hand, yet he uses the ship’s medical environment as the setting for a private and concealed habit.

The contrast between Sumner’s insistence on action and his drug-induced postponement is central to the portrayal. At the tavern, he concludes that ideas alone cannot make life manageable; later, when a particular concern presses on him, laudanum makes it easier to let the concern fade. The dependence thus offers no settled freedom. It provides intervals of relief and expansive, altered experience, while repeatedly drawing Sumner away from discomfort before he has decided what to do with it.