She Blows! And Sparm at That! E-Book

William John Hopkins

• Herausgeber: Publisher s11838
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018

Beschreibung

She Blows! And Sparm at That! written by William John Hopkins who was American scientist and children's fiction author. This book was published in 1922. And now republish in ebook format. We believe this work is culturally important in its original archival form. While we strive to adequately clean and digitally enhance the original work, there are occasionally instances where imperfections such as missing pages, poor pictures or errant marks may have been introduced due to either the quality of the original work. Despite these occasional imperfections, we have brought it back into print as part of our ongoing global book preservation commitment, providing customers with access to the best possible historical reprints. We appreciate your understanding of these occasional imperfections, and sincerely hope you enjoy reading this book.

Leseprobe

She Blows! And Sparm at That!

By

William John Hopkins

Illustrator: Clifford Warren Ashley

Table of Contents

NOTE

CHAPTER I

CHAPTER II

CHAPTER III

CHAPTER IV

CHAPTER V

CHAPTER VI

CHAPTER VII

CHAPTER VIII

CHAPTER IX

CHAPTER X

CHAPTER XI

CHAPTER XII

CHAPTER XIII

CHAPTER XIV

CHAPTER XV

CHAPTER XVI

CHAPTER XVII

CHAPTER XVIII

CHAPTER XIX

CHAPTER XX

CHAPTER XXI

CHAPTER XXII

CHAPTER XXIII

CHAPTER XXIV

CHAPTER XXV

CHAPTER XXVI

CHAPTER XXVII

CHAPTER XXVIII

CHAPTER XXIX

CHAPTER XXX

CHAPTER XXXI

CHAPTER XXXII

CHAPTER XXXIII

CHAPTER XXXIV

CHAPTER XXXV

CHAPTER XXXVI

LANCING A WHALE

NOTE

I wish to acknowledge my indebtedness to Mr. Clifford W. Ashley for his kindness in reading the proof of this book and in making various corrections and suggestions.

W. J. H.

CHAPTER I

I am nearing the evening of life. Many people think of me, I know, as a man who has attained to as much as one can reasonably hope for in this life—if they think of me at all. It is not so much, after all. The things I have aimed for and missed seem, at times, much more important than those I have had. But I put this thought by. Youth expects a good deal; and when one is young—and for a long time after; indeed, until a man is old—he finds hope at the bottom of the cup, enough of it to drown the taste of the bitter draught he has taken. I have evolved the theory that a man is old only when, the cup drained, there is no hope left in it. Thank God, I have not yet reached that point.

But I am inclined to reminiscence, and it scares me somewhat, for proneness to reminiscence is a symptom of age. I know that well, and garrulity is its sister. I am going to give my inclination to reminiscence play in writing of an experience of my youth. It may help to prevent me from boring my friends, and if you find this narrative becoming tedious, nothing is easier than to put the book down.

I was born in New Bedford, on Mill Street, in 1857. My father was Timothy Taycox, a ship carpenter, and a good one; a great whacking man, with a pleasant face and the neck of a bull. My mother was—well, she was my mother. I remember her always as kind and loving, and, indeed, so was my father; but my mother—well, I cannot seem to get beyond that—she was my mother. I must have tried her greatly and often, but she never failed me, and I worshipped her, so far as it is in a boy who is healthy and strong and a roamer by nature. I had two brothers, one older and one younger than myself. I might make a history of my relations with my brothers, especially the older, who used to pick upon me shamefully as long as I was unable to hold my own, but that is none of my purpose.

My first school was on North Street. My recollections of that school are vivid, and interesting—to me; but I suppose the school was not unlike other schools of its size and character. It was a small school, with about twenty-five scholars. The afternoon session was over at four o’clock, and then I set my face to the wharves, as the needle to the pole, except in the shortest days of winter. It was often warm for long periods during the winter. Two or three of us, kindred spirits, went together, sometimes running all the way, sometimes merely wandering, but always bringing up at about the same place. That was generally at the foot of Hamilton Street. Hamilton Street is a little street not much more than a hundred feet long, offset from the foot of William Street. It leads down very steeply from Water Street to a wharf, and its very name brings up before my mind a picture of a pair of heavy horses breasting the hill vigorously, dragging a low truck loaded with barrels of oil, and stirring up with their feet the powdery black dust of the street.

These low trucks were very generally used in New Bedford. The body was hung below the axles, and cleared the ground by perhaps eight inches. They had no sides, and the barrels of oil were rolled up on them and stood on end, and with the continual shaking and rattling about they wore deep grooves into the flooring of the truck. It was a new truck which was not grooved in rings fore and aft of the great beam which served for an axle.

The basements of the buildings on that steep hill were shipping offices, or the offices of oil merchants, or the agents of ships. Indeed, you could hardly go into an office from Water Street to the water-front without seeing sea-chests stacked along the walls, with the name of some ship painted on the front of each chest. Not all of the offices of owners or agents of whalers were within this area, but they were not far from it. Wing’s outfitting store, where I suppose all the business connected with their ships was done, was on Union Street, about a block above Water.

At that time and for some years after there was no railroad along the water-front, and nothing to impede the long line of trucks and small boys wending to and fro. About where the railroad is now there was usually a row of oil barrels on their sides, looking fresh and black and greasy. Gaugers were apt to be busy about them. And just beyond, on the throat of the wharf, were two structures like pens, enclosures fenced in with old ships’ sheathing which showed plainly the nail holes, the white efflorescence and the greenish stain which proclaimed the fact that they had sailed thousands of miles of salt ocean with the copper next them. These pens were on either side of the entrance to the wharf, and between them was a lane, deep in powdery black dust, and just about wide enough for a truck. Over the tops of the fences of sheathing could be seen seaweed bleached white with age, and flourishing green land weeds, nodding and waving in the wind. Under the seaweed, I was told, were barrels of oil which their owner had packed away there some years before. He was waiting for a rise in price. The barrels may be there yet, but if they are they must be nearly empty. The oil will have leaked out.

I describe these things, naturally enough, as the picture of them forms in my mind; and that is as they appeared in the summer. For I just about lived along the wharves and on the water during the summers. I remember very clearly the five old hulks which lay in the dock at the foot of Union Street. One of them was the bark Phenix. I cannot now recall the names of the others. All of them were stripped of everything down to their masts. Not a yard nor a topmast was left, nor anything removable without breaking them up. As I recall their condition, even the copper was gone from their sides, as far as I could see. They looked battered but mighty, and they filled me with sadness. I never ventured on board of them, but I examined them minutely and repeatedly from the wharves on either side, and I knew every patch and stain. I have sat by the hour atop of a pile to which hawsers were made fast, and I have sailed in imagination through storm and through sunny seas in those old ships, and have had all kinds of hair-raising adventures.

It was a rare occasion when any one of the wharves—at any rate the three or four wharves from Union Street north—had no ships lying beside it. There were usually two or three beside each wharf, and sometimes more; discharging or fitting or being repaired. My father was always at work upon some ship, on a staging in the dock alongside. I never tired of watching him at work, and would sit for hours on the stringpiece just above him or on the wharf opposite, while he removed from the side or the bottom of the vessel “hove-down” ribs which had begun to rot, and put others in their places; or renewed the planking on the bottom.

“Heaving down” for repairs was a common occurrence. A tackle was fastened to the mast and to a special heaving-pile on the wharf. There were several of these heaving-piles on each wharf, each firmly anchored by great masses of rock. I have seen scores of ships hauled down. The sails were always unbent—stripped—from the yards almost the first thing after a ship came in, but the yards were often in place on a vessel when she was hove down. They were braced well around, of course, or she could not have been hove over very far before her main yard would touch the wharf. Then they heaved on the tackle, and the vessel was heaved over upon her bilge, exposing the bottom on one side. I have often seen a vessel’s keel entirely exposed in this way. The exposed side of the bottom was as easily got at in this position as if she had been in dry dock; perhaps rather more easily. The carpenters worked from float stages alongside, and the ship was let up little by little as they worked up from the keel. First the copper was ripped off, then the sheathing, and then the planking, and then the ribs taken out, if any of them needed to be replaced. I have seen the bare bones of many a ship exposed in this way, and it would be possible to rebuild a ship completely, first one side and then the other, without taking her out of the water. I have no doubt that it has been done.

As long as I was pretty small I was fairly well contented to sit on the stringpiece, with the sun on my back, and watch my father; or to sit on one of the low, smooth, round-butted mooring-piles—always called “spiles” in New Bedford—and gaze out over the harbor. It was a beautiful harbor. It is a beautiful harbor now; but there seems to me to be something lacking, and less of that atmosphere of peace and serenity which I loved. Although there are still a few of the old square-riggers left there are many days and weeks together when not one of them is at the wharves, and I have not seen a vessel hove down in many years. It is no longer to be expected that, as one turns into Hamilton Street, there will appear the once familiar tracery of masts and yards hanging like a net before his eyes; not a forest of masts, perhaps, but enough of them to warm his heart. Some of the yards had sails hanging from them and flapping gently in the breeze, and on some the sails were neatly furled, but most of them were bare. A jobbing wagon would be driven upon the wharf in a whirl of the black dust, and would discharge its load of sailors, many of them natives of one of the Western Islands, or of Brava, some very black, as I recall them, with great hoops of thin gold in their ears; and their dunnage, some of it in sea-chests, but much done up in shapeless bundles in a gay colored cloth or in a sheet. They were fine, upstanding men, talking and laughing among themselves, and the familiar way in which they handled the lances and harpoons and the other boat-gear excited my envy. They had come from the home of such gentry in South Water Street, a part of the town known as Fayal. Fayal—the South Water Street Fayal—had an unsavory reputation.

These men and the white sailors who came with them were bound for the vessel with sails on her yards, for she was about ready to set out on a voyage of two or three or four years. In those days voyages averaged between three and four years in length. There was always great confusion, as it seemed to me: piles of boxes and barrels and casks, a mate or two shouting orders, sweating men getting the things aboard, some lengths of chain cable, coils of new rope which creaked as they were handled, and innumerable odds and ends. I watched and wondered until, at last, the tug came alongside, lines were cast off, and the vessel was taken out into the stream to anchor there overnight. The crew were kept busy there, stowing things, but even then there was apt to be a great litter on the decks when she was finally taken in tow by the tug. The tug cast her off somewhere below Sow and Pigs—somewhere between Sow and Pigs and Block Island—and, with a farewell blast of her whistle, turned about and came home again. But I did not witness that ceremony until I was fifteen.

When the ship had hauled out into the stream I would sit on my favorite pile and gaze out at her and at the harbor. She usually anchored in the channel near Palmer’s Island, almost in line with Fort Phœnix on the Fairhaven side. I sat on my pile and gazed at her, looking trim and seaworthy—as she was in fact—and envied the black boys with the thin gold hoops in their ears, and dreamed dreams, as I suppose all boys do, even the most matter-of-fact of them. Those dreams of mine were to come true. Instead of the whitewashed walls of Fort Phœnix and the whitewashed lighthouse on Palmer’s Island, I saw a heaving ocean under a sunny sky, and off upon the surface of that ocean I saw feathery clouds of vapor slowly rise, like the drooping white ostrich plume on Ann McKim’s hat; and the feathery shafts of vapor drifted off and vanished, and from the masthead floated down to me the melodious cry, “Bl-o-ows!” And I roused with a start, and there was nothing before my eyes but the low whitewashed brick wall of Fort Phœnix and the whitewashed lighthouse on Palmer’s Island, and the smiling surface of the harbor, and the ship waiting there.

I used to row about a good deal, when I had money enough to hire a boat—good boats were ten cents an hour—or when I thought I could depend upon the good nature of Al Soule, who had boats to let. I could not swim a stroke. It is not unusual for men who have much to do with the water to neglect to learn to swim. For a sailor, what use is it?—they ask. He is apt to be weighed down with sea boots and heavy clothes, and the weather is usually such when a man falls overboard that it is impossible to pick him up anyway. Mind you, these are not my own ideas I am giving. A whaleman needs to know how to swim, if he would save his life, and not depend too nearly upon others. It is a good thing for a boy to know, even if he is not going whaling. I would have a boy learn as soon as he can walk—or a girl either. It is the source of a great deal of pleasure.

It happened that the father of my best friend had a boat, a thirty-five-foot sloop. Naturally enough I was asked to go sailing in it whenever Jimmy went. Jimmy Appleby was the boy’s name. The sloop was rather old-fashioned, even for those days, and our going out in her was not all play. John Appleby found us of some help even when we were only ten, and we learned quickly to help in hoisting sail, and to tend sheets, and to reef, and to steer, and to do the other little odd jobs in connection with sailing a boat. I have gone out on the footropes of the bowsprit many a time when I was not turned twelve, and it had come on to blow, and she was plunging into a head sea—she pitched fearfully, with her shallow body, and a head sea just about stopped her—and I have been trying to stow the jib—not to furl it, just to tie it down any way—and holding on for my life, and have been plunged to my neck in one sea after another as she dived into them. That sloop was the champion high diver. I do not think that that experience ever imbued me with the desire to learn to swim. I was concerned only with holding on and getting my job done as soon as possible.

I have no clear recollection of my usual standing at school, except that I have the impression that I was apt to be in hot water from one cause or another. I must have done reasonably well in my studies, for I graduated from the Grammar School before my fifteenth birthday, but my active interests were not there. The memories that surge up and clamor to be let loose are those of the water-front, the wharves, the ships, the harbor, and the bay.

CHAPTER II

One morning toward the end of June in the year 1872 I was on the wharf at the foot of Hamilton Street, where I was most apt to be. My father and a gang of ship carpenters were busy at the bottom of a ship that was hove down there, and they were working on float stages along her side. I have forgotten the name of the ship. It was yet early, for in those days carpenters went to work at seven and stopped at six or thereabouts, and no man that I ever knew of the old class of artisans would leave his hammer in the air, but he would work a few minutes more, if that was necessary to finish what he was at, and they were a contented, happy lot—superior men, as a rule.

The merry sound of the mauls was not merry to my ears, for I was restless and discontented, I remember, although there was nothing that should have made me so. But I was just through school, and although my father and my mother had said nothing about my getting to work, and my father had done nothing about it—fathers were apt to do something about it in those days, getting their sons apprenticed to whatever trade seemed good to them, without much regard to the preference of the sons—although my father had done nothing about it, I say, I knew that I was expected to get to work with no more delay than was reasonable. Both my father and my mother were wise people, and they wanted me to have time and opportunity to look about me and decide for myself what I preferred to do, for my decision would involve my whole life, very probably, and greatly affect my happiness. When I had decided, I knew that I could depend upon my father to help me to the best of his ability; and that would be considerable, for my father was a man of some influence in his way, and especially in his trade. He had already helped my older brother Tom, who had chosen my father’s trade, a choice which greatly pleased my father at the time. Tom was at his ship carpentering then on one of the stages with the men, and he had served three years of his apprenticeship. My younger brother, Joshua, was already planning to go into the same trade, but my father was rather lukewarm about it. He did not say why, but I can guess now that he was beginning to see that it was a trade that was doomed to extinction.

Joshua had two years more at school, and before the two years were up he had changed his mind. He became a machinist, and went into structural steel work, and then into building steel ships. In 1917 both of my brothers were busy: Tom, at sixty-three, turning out wooden ships at Bath as fast as he could get the timber and men to put them together, and Joshua, at fifty-seven, turning out steel ships with a tremendous clatter in a sort of gigantic boiler-works. I could not stand Josh’s shipyard, while I enjoyed being in Tom’s. I enjoyed it better than Tom enjoyed having me there, for they were very busy, but the men were all old men and they could not be driven beyond a certain pace; but they came to the yard at four o’clock of a summer morning.

On that morning in June, 1872, I was making my choice, although I was not aware of it, but knew only that I felt discontented and uneasy and rather wanted to fight somebody. If Jimmy Appleby had been there I should probably have fought him—we fought often, without rancor, and without a decision—and the whole course of my life would have been changed. But Jimmy’s father had put him to work, and he was not there, and there was nothing for me to do but to wander about the wharf, watching the men swinging their mauls; and I could not see much of that, except at the bow and the stern, for the vessel was hove down over the wharf, and her hull hid them. From the other side of the dock I should have had a fine view, but I saw it so often that I did not care much for it, and I suppose I did not think of it, being taken up with my restless state of mind, which impelled me to and fro. It sent me to the end of the wharf, where I stood upon the stringpiece and looked down into the water just below. It was of an unhealthy, greenish cast, not like the green of the sea. It looked filthy, but I saw an immense school of little fish nosing around the piles of the wharf.

A whaler was at one of the Fairhaven wharves, and a number of other boats were scattered along the water-front, most of them small. I was about to look farther down toward the ferry slip and railroad station, but there lay a whaler in the stream, all ready to start; probably waiting for some of her crew, or for her captain to get his papers at the Custom House. I knew the vessel. It was the Clearchus. She had been fitting for some time, at the wharf next above the one I was on, and I had watched the caulkers, the carpenters and the riggers busy at her, each in their turn. The desire must have been conceived and born and got well grown without my being aware of it until that minute, but I knew it then. I looked at her lying there on the water that was ruffled under a southwest breeze, some great pennant flying at her masthead—I suppose it had her name on it, or the name of her owners, for I know it was white with a blue border and some blue letters in the centre—and there was not wind enough to keep it out straight enough for me to read the letters, but it would roll up and fall nearly straight down, and then unroll lazily and whip out to its length for just an instant, and drop and roll up again before I could make out a single one. She must have been waiting for her crew, for I saw only two men aboard of her, and they were doing nothing, but leaned upon the rail, which was at the height of their shoulders.

I had among my most treasured possessions two little books, in paper-covered boards, “The Eventful History of the Mutiny of the Bounty” and “Lives and Voyages of Early Navigators, with a History of the Bucaniers.” They could not be called new books even then, in 1872, for they were published by the Harpers in 1832 and 1833. They are beside me at this moment, the paper-covered boards torn and stained, and the pages dirty and much thumbed. Some of that thumbing had already been done, for I had found the tales of adventure in the books absorbingly interesting. No doubt I was thinking, as I gazed at the Clearchus over the smiling waters of the harbor, of that huge black savage of the Patagones who came capering and singing down to the shore to greet Magellan, his face painted red and yellow; or of Otaheite and its middle-aged queen—if that is what she was—a chiefess separated from her husband, and languishing for Wallis. Although of course I knew better, I always thought of those coasts and seas as they were in the times of Magellan and Wallis. I had an intense desire to visit them. But I have no clear recollection of what I was thinking of. I must have given a thought to Jimmy Appleby. I know that I stayed there, wandering impatiently to and fro, or standing at the stringpiece watching the Clearchus, waiting for twelve o’clock and praying that her captain might have trouble in filling his crew at the last minute.

FITTING OUT

The Vineyard boat went curving out in a wide sweep, another came in; a tugboat pursued its leisurely way across the harbor, and I held my breath in fear lest it should be bound for the Clearchus—with her crew of two; a lightship began to warp into the next dock above, preparatory to heaving down for repairs; the Custom House boat started out with an inspector to meet a ship that had been sighted down the bay; two catboats started from Al Soule’s for the same purpose; riggers and stevedores were busy on a whaleship in the dock next below, getting her spars up and bending on sails; the leisurely activities of New Bedford Harbor of nearly fifty years ago went on; the sun was warm and the wind light, and the smell of tar and sperm oil was heavy on the air, but in the lee of the hill the oil smell overpowered everything else. I liked that sickish smell of crude sperm oil. I like it yet. With that smell in my nostrils I have but to close my eyes and I see the warm, sunny harbor, some whaler lying in the stream ready to sail, the fluorescent green of the water in the dock—its peculiar color due to a mixture of oil and sewage—some other whaler lying at the wharf with her sails hanging limp from her yards, perhaps a vessel hove down at the other side of the wharf, and I heard the sound of mallets and the laughter and the talk of men on the still air.

Fifty years ago I was actually hearing these things, waiting impatiently for twelve o’clock. But I waited, for I wanted to speak to my father alone. At last I heard the bell in the Stone Church tower sound noon, but the sound of the mauls did not stop at once, but one after another; then a few strokes of a single beetle, and I heard it laid down. The men had already begun to come up. My father was the last, and I watched him with some pride, a big, brawny, smiling man. I wished I were big and brawny and smiling, like him. And he saw me standing there, and smiled more than ever, a personal smile and tender in a way.

He put his hand on my shoulder. “Well, Timmie,” he said. “You here yet? I thought you would have gone home long ago. Dinner ’ll be waiting. What is it, boy? Walk along with me and tell me. I can see it ’s something bothering you.”

My brother Tom had started walking with us, but we were too slow for him, and he had run ahead. It was Big Tim and Little Tim. My father was always known as Big Tim.

I did not know how to begin, so I said nothing, but I struggled.

My father saw the struggle. He smiled again. “Out with it, Timmie,” he said.

I raised my eyes slowly, and I am afraid that tears were in them.

“I want to go whaling, father,” I blurted out.

His smile faded swiftly. “Do you?” he said. “Do you? I hoped it would n’t be that. It begins to look—or it has been looking for some time as if the whaling business would die out. It won’t be a good business for some time, if it does n’t go from bad to worse. Have you thought of that, Timmie?”

I shook my head. “I want to go whaling,” I said again.

He laughed, and then he sighed. “It ’s a bad business for your mother and me,” he said, “to have our boy starting out on a voyage at fifteen for three or four years. But if you will you will, and I ’d better see about getting you a berth.” He turned and looked at the ship in the dock below. “There ’s a vessel the riggers should be through with soon. She should sail in a couple o’ weeks or thereabouts. I might get you in there. What do you say, Timmie?”

“Where is she going, father?”

“Well,” he answered slowly, “it ’s always hard to tell where a whaler ’s going. Wherever whales promise. But we braced and strengthened her for Ar’tic work. She ’s a good vessel now, Timmie, and thoroughly braced. I think likely she ’ll round the Horn, and make the Ar’tic next season. If she has luck in the South Seas she may hang over there another winter, and not try the Ar’tic until the next year. But the Ar’tic ’s where she ’s going sooner or later.”

“I don’t want to go to the Ar’tic, father. Where ’s the Clearchus going?”

My father looked around in surprise.

“The Clearchus!” he exclaimed. “Why she ’s in the stream. Her crew ’ll be aboard in an hour or two. Cap’n Nelson expects to sail to-day.”

“But where ’s she going?”

“Going sperm whaling, Hatteras, South Atlantic, Indian Ocean, probably, and South Seas. I don’t know, and I don’t suppose Cap’n Nelson knows. She is n’t going to the Ar’tic, that ’s sure.”

“If her crew is n’t aboard pretty soon,” I objected, “she can’t sail to-day.”

“Well, no,” my father said, “probably won’t. Could of course, if he wanted to, but ’t is n’t likely. Might go below and anchor, but what are you up to, Timmie? Going on the Clearchus?” And my father smiled as he asked the question, as though it were absurd.

“I ’d like to, father,” I said. “I want to go on a ship that ’s going sperm whaling in the warm oceans; to the South Seas. I—I ’ve always wanted to see the South Seas.”

My father smiled again. “ ‘Always’ is a long word, Timmie. How long does it stand for? And as for seeing an ocean—why, one ocean ’s much like another—except the Ar’tic. You might think you were out on the bay with Jimmie. And a couple of hours’ notice is n’t much for your mother and me, is it, now?—going off for three or four years?”

“No-o, I suppose not. But I did n’t know what I wanted until I saw the Clearchus out there. I know now. And I ’ll come back, father. Of course I hate to leave you and mother—”

My father laughed at that.

“Yes,” he said, “you seem to. But never mind, Timmie, I know how you feel. Perhaps it ’s just as well. We shan’t have the month of dreading it, and it ’ll be over before we know it. I ’ll do the best I can for you, but I can’t promise. Nelson may be having trouble of some kind. I ’ll just drop in at the Custom House on the chance of finding him there, and if he is n’t we ’ll run over to Wing’s to see what they can tell us. But you must n’t fret if it can’t be done.”

I almost danced with joy, and I promised not to fret. I knew that I should not fret at a thing that could not be done. I have never done that. I do the most and the best that I can, and am quite cheerful over the outcome. I was always the same; and what better can a man do than his best, and accept the result with a cheerful heart? But if we had made no attempt to find the captain I should have fretted at having left something undone and possibly lost a chance that I might have had.

We had been walking slowly up William Street as we talked, and it was abreast of Eggers’s little gunshop—where I had been used to go for my supply of fishlines and hooks—that my father virtually gave his consent and told me not to fret. The steep, short slope of Johnnycake Hill was just at our left—the Bourne Whaling Museum is now at the top of it—and the Custom House was but a few steps away, on the upper corner of the next street. I broke away and ran, looking back at my father with an ecstatic smile.

My father laughed again. “Hold on, Timmie,” he called. “Where ’you going?”

“Custom House,” I called back. “Cap’n Nelson might get away.”

So I ran, leaving my father laughing, and I waited impatiently for a few seconds beside one of the huge Doric columns supporting the roof of the portico of that ancient pile of granite. It always seemed to me as old as the Pyramids. The Post-office then occupied the first floor, but there was nobody passing either in or out at that time, and my father joined me beside the Doric column. I remember that the broad stone steps seemed not a whit too solid and strong for his massive frame as he came up.

He said nothing, but chuckled as he and I entered together that empty, echoing room, and made for the stairs. It was—and is yet, I suppose—a curved staircase of stone, and never failed to excite my wonder that it stood and performed its function, for the granite steps were without visible means of support at their outer ends. I always mounted it with trepidation, half expecting that it would give way beneath me and precipitate me into the echoing abyss below. The stone steps were somewhat worn by the feet of many captains, and my own feet had contributed.

We entered, and saw a long mahogany counter surmounted by a glass fence, behind which a man was writing, standing at the counter. He had a long, pointed beard, sprinkled with gray. He seemed to be alone in that spacious room. He was the Deputy Collector.

We started along beside the counter, which seemed endless, and my father was just opening the gate when suddenly we heard the sound of voices, as if a door had been opened. The voices stopped, and a man stumped toward us vigorously. I should say now that he was a youngish man, but then I thought him very old. He was about forty, with a close-clipped brown beard growing nearly up to his eyes, which were gray and piercing, looking out from between half-closed lids. Those eyes gave the impression of being at a great distance, and there was a spark of light in them so that they always made me think of a lighthouse with its cone of light. Even now I never see a lighthouse at a distance of three or four miles that I do not think of Captain Nelson’s eyes.

“Hello, Tim,” he said, with no apparent intention of stopping.

But my father blocked the gateway. He was a good head taller than Captain Nelson.

“I ’d like to have a word with you, Cap’n, if you have time. I won’t keep you long. Don’t you want a boy?”

“A boy? One of your boys? This the one?” He took me by the arm and made me face him. I was smiling nervously. “You want to go whaling?”

“Yes, sir,” I said as steadily as I could. “That is, I want to go if you ’re going to the South Seas.”

Captain Nelson laughed. “No Ar’tic in yours, eh? What you want to go to the South Seas for? We don’t lie ’round under palm trees and eat breadfruit and watch the surf breaking on coral sands, like the pictures in your geography books. What ’you been getting hold of?”

I squirmed and got very red, and stammered and said nothing.

Captain Nelson laughed again, and gave me a little shake and let me go.

“Well, Tim, no need to ask about any of your boys. You recommend him, I suppose?”

“I do, Cap’n. I ’m sorry he ’s taken with whaling, and that ’s the truth; and it ’s rather sudden, for he ’s only told me within the last half-hour, and his mother and I will hate to have him go off for three or four years. But if that ’s what he wants I ’d better help than try to hinder him.”

Captain Nelson nodded. “May be five years, Tim. No knowing.” He turned suddenly to me. “What ’s your name?”

“Tim, sir.”

“Well, little Tim, I guess we can find room for you. May not get the crew in time to sail to-night. Probably won’t. But you ’d better be on hand and keep an eye out for us. Bright and early in the morning, anyway.”

He nodded again, got his clearance papers, and stumped out. I stared stupidly after him.

My father sighed. “Well, Timmie, that was soon done. We ’ll be late for dinner. Come along.”

And I said nothing, but pegged along beside him down the echoing stone stairs, my elation rapidly oozing out at my finger-tips. I was beginning to think of the other side of it—his side and my mother’s—and to be more than half sorry for my haste; but what is done is done. Boys—and girls too—are thoughtlessly cruel, fortunately for them and the world.

I could not eat much dinner, but went off to my room to pack a few things, among them my two precious books. It was not a large bundle that I tied up. My father must have told my mother as soon as I had gone, for she came up to my room as I was tying up my bundle. She had been crying, and tears were yet in her eyes, but she smiled divinely as she stood in my doorway.

“Well, Timmie, darling,” she said gently, “so you ’re going to leave us. Four years is a long, long time to look forward to without you. I had hope that you would choose something else. But if you had to choose this it ’s better to have it soon over, and not to have a month of dreading it. And I ’ll say nothing but God bless you and God keep you, my precious!” She sat on the bed. “Come here, darling boy, and let me have one hug and a kiss to remember.”

So I went, and I threw my arms around her neck, and I hid my face. We stayed so for a long time, she rocking back and forth, hugging me hard, and whispering to me.

CHAPTER III

The Clearchus did not get off that day, and at six o’clock my father and I walked home together, my heart like lead. The evening passed somehow. We all went up to bed at nine, as we always did, while the bell on the Stone Church was ringing the curfew; but we might as well have stayed up for two or three hours longer, for I could not sleep, and I am sure that my mother could not. It had begun to rain, a dreary drizzle, before I finally fell asleep.

I was awakened to find my mother standing in my doorway. She was smiling, but she looked as if she had not slept well. It was already after six. I jumped up, slid into my clothes hastily, and joined the family at breakfast, but I could scarcely eat. I was glad when my father pushed back his plate and got up. I said good-bye simply enough to my brothers, and they said good-bye to me, but they did not get up. They did not even stop eating. My mother came to the door with us. Tears stood in her eyes, but she smiled as she gave me a long, close hug. I returned her hug and her kiss, but I was very near to tears and I could not speak, so I bolted out at the door into the rain after my father, and I waved my hand to her. That was another picture that I carried locked in my breast of my mother standing at the open door, in the dreary drizzle, looking after me and smiling. Mothers have a good deal to bear. I wonder that they stand it.

We did not get off until after ten o’clock. I was the first to see it—I mean the job wagon with its load of men and bundles. It was being driven on to the next wharf below—Central Wharf it was, although I did not know the wharves infallibly by name then. I called to my father, took up my bundle, and walked, rather slowly, I am afraid, around the head of the dock. The afternoon before I should have run. My father caught up with me at the head of the wharf.

The wagon was unloading about halfway down the wharf when we got there, and the men were taking out their bundles. Those bundles were of all sizes and all colors, but all were shapeless, a few in neat canvas bags, several in pillow-cases, and the others in gay flame-colored cloths, red and orange and a peculiar blue, but the predominating color was some shade of magenta. It is curious how fond those Western Islanders are of magenta. The men were grouping themselves, squatting on their bundles in the drizzle, or sitting on the rounded tops of the mooring-piles or on the stringpiece, or standing. I noticed only three of them: a great, gaunt, very black man, with thin hoops of gold in his ears, who stood impassively, his arms folded across his breast, and gazed at nothing and did not speak; a smaller man, also intensely black and with similar gold hoops in his ears, who sat atop of a pile and smiled and poured a steady stream of talk that I could not understand up to the first, and the gaunt man smiled now and then, showing a set of teeth that were sharp and of a dazzling whiteness; and a very old man, who I suppose was originally a white man, with fingers permanently bent, like talons, and very wrinkled face that looked like leather in texture and in color. He was sitting on the stringpiece, his neat canvas bag between his knees, and looking up at the two black men; and occasionally there would flit over his face a humorous smile, leaving the look of humor there. On the whole it was a quiet crowd, and merry enough, considering the weather. A man, who I found afterwards was the second mate, moved slowly around among the groups and finally stood still, holding converse with none and gazing out over the harbor.

The old man cast his humorous eye up at my father.

“Lovely morning,” he said.

My father laughed. “If you take it so,” he said, “it ’s better. After all, what does the weather matter to an old sailorman like you?”

“Not a bit. I never let it make any difference to me. But the talk of these lads,” he said, waving a weatherbeaten hand, with its talon-fingers, at the two black men, “always makes me want to laugh. It sounds like monkey talk.”

“Don’t you understand it?”

He shook his head. “Not me. I never learned Portagee. I should die laughin’ if I tried. They had none in the navy in my day.”

My father was interested. “Have you been in the navy? I should have said merchant vessels, but I did n’t think of the navy.”

The old man nodded. “Oh, aye,” he said. “It was the navy until the war was over, and I was too old for that, and then the merchant service for a couple o’ years, and then whalin’. Whalin’ ’s easier. They don’t drive a vessel so. You were n’t goin’ on this ship?”

My father smiled, and laid his great arm across my shoulders.

“No, I ’m not going, but—”

“The boy?” the old man interrupted. “Is he so? Well, can I be sort of lookin’ after him? I ’d take him under my wing with pleasure, perhaps teach him a thing or two, and try to keep him out o’ trouble.”

My father was pleased, and accepted the old sailor’s offer; and he told him of his own experience in the navy, and they swapped yarns for half an hour. The old man had been a boatswain in the navy. He was only fifty-eight, he said. I don’t wonder he put it that way. The second mate had moved, and I looked up and saw the Helen Augusta, our largest tugboat, just about to make a landing at the end of the wharf.

I seized my father’s arm in a panic.

He smiled. There was something infinitely protective in my father’s smile.

“I ’m going down with you, Timmie, and come back in the tug. It ’s too wet to work, luckily, so it won’t make any difference to me, and I guess Cap’n Nelson ’ll let me go. Unless,” he added, looking at me suddenly, “you ’d rather not have me. Perhaps you ’d rather say good-bye here. If you would I ’d understand it.”

I shook my head, and clung fast to his arm. I could not have spoken to save my life. The old sailor, my new friend, was rolling along beside us, his canvas bag over his shoulder and sticking out a foot or two fore and aft. He glanced at me and smiled, and we all trooped aboard the tug on to her upper deck, and the men filed down the ladder to a place where it was dry and warm.

We were about to follow them when we were hailed from the pilot house. We obeyed the beckoning finger, and in the pilot house we found Captain Nelson and the captain of the tugboat, a silent, sour-faced man whose name I cannot now remember, although it was then very familiar to me. Another man was leaning on the windowsill, his head outside, and one hand grasping a spoke of the wheel. He shouted some orders, pulled the bell, and we backed for a minute against a stern hawser. Then he pulled the bell once, and the chug of the engine stopped; before the water had stopped its swirling past the side he pulled the bell again, the engine chugged once more, and the bows turned faster toward the harbor. I was looking out at the wharves through a glass covered with little fine drops of mist, and I saw one of the men on the wharf lift the bight of heavy line over the top of the mooring-pile and drop it into the water as we began to go ahead. The man at the wheel pulled the jingle bell, and the engine chugged faster, and I could hear little familiar noises from the engine, as though it had settled down for a day’s work.

I was still looking out through the misty glass at the rapidly receding wharves, with the vessel that the riggers were not through with, the other that my father was working on hauled down, the stagings floating in the dock beside her; the lightship in the process of being hove down; the pens of sheathing and the rows of oil barrels; the tops of the wharves themselves, every foot of which I knew intimately. I wondered when I should next set foot on those familiar wharves; the picture blurred a little, and it was not the rain. But I was not quite fifteen, and I was going away on a voyage of four or five years. At fifteen, four or five years might as well be four or five æons. Our turning had cut off my view of the wharves, and we had straightened out for the Clearchus, and the rain was coming dead ahead.

We were drawing alongside the Clearchus, and we made fast and the crew went over the side stolidly, although some of them seemed merry enough, and my old sailor took the whole thing as a joke. Then Captain Nelson went, and my father and I. By the time I had got on the deck of the ship the captain had gone aft and was talking with the mate.

I had never happened to be on the Clearchus before, and neither had I been on any whaler just starting on a voyage. Her deck was well cluttered with all sorts of stuff, which there had been no time to stow below, and no men to do it. Some of it was covered roughly with tarpaulins to keep it from the wet, and it was shoved into corners or littered the alleyways between the great brick try-works and the bulwarks. The deck itself—where it showed at all—was covered with a film of moisture, and seemed to have sweated just oil enough to make it very slippery.

The deck of an old whaler is full of odd structures. On almost all old whaleships there were two small deckhouses aft, one on either side, with the wheel and the cabin skylight between them; and on many ships this space was roofed over, giving the steersman protection in bad weather. This was the case on the Clearchus; and there was another structure just forward of this after house. This “gallows,” as it is called, was no more than a roof covering the booby-hatch—which led to the steerage; where the boat-steerers slept—supported on posts at the corners, the posts inclined sharply inward at the angle of the standing rigging. On the top of this roof were three spare whale-boats, bottom up. There was a third structure—merely a roof—just aft of the foremast, over the try-works. The galley was in the starboard side of the after house, which may strike some as a very queer place for it, but it was always so on a whaler. It was necessarily very small, taking up less than half of that side. The cabin stairs, or companion, were in the port side of the after house.

We took refuge under the gallows over the booby-hatch, from which point we had as clear a view of the deck as it was possible to have anywhere except from the scuppers. The deck was anything but clear, and the man at the wheel saw the great butts of the masts, the try-works, and other things of a more temporary nature, but little of the deck, and of the sea before the ship and of the sky above nothing at all. There was no need for him to see either. He had an unobstructed view of the compass.

The tug took us about twenty-five miles, but it seemed an unbearably short journey on that dull, rainy morning. The silence was broken only by the soft noise of the sea, and of the ship going through it, and by the creak and groan of the hawser on the bitts and of the yards in the slings as she rose and fell gently; and by the sound of the water dripping from the yards and rigging upon the deck, and now and then a voice. Altogether it was a silent, gray, dismal journey. Coils of rope hung from the belaying pins near me, and they swung regularly with the motion of the ship. I wished that they would stop. They did not, of course, except for a moment, regularly; then they began again.

The time was coming soon when the tug would cast off, and my father must go back. We got beyond Devil’s Bridge, with the Vineyard looming indistinctly, but scarcely visible, on our weather beam. The tug whistled, and Captain Nelson came to us.

“Well, Tim,” he said, “I guess you ’ll have to get ready. It ’s too rough for the tug to come alongside, but I ’ll send you over in a boat. She ’s dropping us now.”

My father said he was sorry to be so much trouble; and Captain Nelson said it was no matter, that it would be good practice for the crew. Then he looked at me, and put his hand on my shoulder.

“Timmie,” he said gently, “you have n’t signed yet, and if you want to go back with your father I ’ll send you.”

I shook my head furiously. “No, thank you, sir,” I said. “I ’ll sail with you—if you want me—if you ’ll take me.”

How could I back out then? I should have been a laughing-stock for years, and I should never have a better chance. But I did want to go back with my father.

Captain Nelson smiled. “I ’ll take you, and you ’ll get over your homesickness when we get a sight of the sun. It ’s a dismal day to start off.”

They cast off the hawser, and backed the main topsail, and the vessel lay there with the seas beating upon her while the tug came up abeam, and lay rolling. And they came and cast loose the very boat we were standing under, and the men tailed on to the falls, and the boat was lowered until it was level with the rail; and two of the crew tumbled in to look after the falls, and my father gave me one hug, and I clung to him for a moment.

“Good-bye, Timmie,” he whispered. “I ’ll give your love to your mother. Be a good boy, and do a little more than is expected of you. Be ready to do a man’s work when you are able, and let us be proud of you when you come home.”

The men began to slack away on the falls. I watched the men slide down the falls as the boat touched the water, my father among them; and the falls were unhooked quickly, two men holding her off from the side of the ship. Then they shoved off, the five long oars took the water, and they rowed to the tug, the whaleboat rising to the seas as lightly as a cork. And they drew alongside the tug, but did not stop, and my father stepped out upon the broad rail of the tug and down upon her deck, and turned to wave to me.

As the boat came back the tug started, with long blasts of her whistle as a message of farewell to us. My father still stood in the gangway, close to her house, and waved to me. I watched her as long as I could see her; a mite—a speck tossing on the heaving sea.

CHAPTER IV

By the next morning the skies had cleared, and there was bright sun, with a light breeze from the southwest. It had begun to clear soon after midnight, and the stars had come out one by one, with drifts of ragged scud flying over. I had not seen it, but I was sleeping soundly, after some miserable hours, for I was a very homesick boy. Mother and father—even brothers—and home never seemed so dear or so far away, and I seemed to be cut off from them completely. I had no pangs of seasickness, either then or later, for which I suppose I should be thankful; but I did not give that matter a single thought, as far as I can remember. I suppose my mind was too thoroughly taken up with its own wretchedness to worry about a possible wretchedness of body. And a full realization of my wretched and miserable state came upon me the instant I was fully awake, with a distinct stab at my heart. A few tears trickled from my eyes, and my heart was like lead until I stepped out upon deck and saw the sun and a quiet sea, misty about the horizon, and the bark making her way through it under easy sail, rolling a very little, lazily, and the men, barefooted, scrubbing the decks as clean as might be of their coating of oil with the water standing upon it in little separate drops, like dew. I know the deck had a queer, greasy, frosty look, and fairly large drops had gathered and stood up, little smooth hills, about two or three inches apart. The water from the hose and the men with their swabs made these hills disappear like magic, together with the frosty look of the deck. Tarpaulins in irregular heaps still covered piles of stuff here and there on the deck, which the men avoided as well as they could.

One of the men swabbing the deck was my old friend the old navy man, whose name I found was Peter Bottom. The two very black men with gold hoops in their ears were there too, the tall one as silent and dignified as ever, but working well, and the shorter one gay and garrulous, but seldom evoking from the other as much as a smile. What these men’s real names were I never knew, and it does not matter what they were. The tall one always went by the name of Tony, and the shorter one by the name of Man’el.

Peter Bottom looked up at me, and smiled and winked, and worked nearer with his swab. There was a quarterdeck on the old Clearchus, and a break in the deck with one low step up to the part covered by the after house. I was standing on that step and leaning against the house, for I did not want to get into the water that was flowing so freely. When Peter had worked near enough, he told me in low tones that if I would hunt him up later he would impart some information that might be useful and the beginning of my education.

The men were busy nearly all day getting the decks reasonably clear, and the stuff stowed below, and it was not until late in the afternoon that I found Peter Bottom standing by the windlass, gazing out to the eastward. The wind was light, as it had been all day, and it looked very quiet and peaceful out there, with a grayish haze all along the horizon. The water toward the west, on the weather side, was too bright to look at with comfort. There was still a very slight heave of the sea left from the night before. Many of the crew were standing about, or sitting on the forecastle, but they were not saying much.

Peter looked up as I approached. He had a sort of permanent smile on his face, a pleasant, humorous expression of perpetual amusement. This deepened to a personal smile when he saw me.

“Here you are, my lad,” he said. “I was just thinking about you, and that I ’d have to go after you if I could contrive a way. Now to begin at the beginning, what might your name be?”

“Tim,” I answered; “Tim Taycox.”