“I am an old man, as you can see,” he continued, “and I have been a
shipmaster the greater part of my life,--forty-three years in all. You
may not think it, but I am above eighty years of age.”
He did not look so old, and I hastened to say so.
“You must have left the sea a good many years ago, then, Captain
Littlepage?” I said.
“I should have been serviceable at least five or six years more,” he
answered. “My acquaintance with certain--my experience upon a certain
occasion, I might say, gave rise to prejudice. I do not mind telling you
that I chanced to learn of one of the greatest discoveries that man has
ever made.”
Now we were approaching dangerous ground, but a sudden sense of his
sufferings at the hands of the ignorant came to my help, and I asked to
hear more with all the deference I really felt. A swallow flew into
the schoolhouse at this moment as if a kingbird were after it, and beat
itself against the walls for a minute, and escaped again to the open
air; but Captain Littlepage took no notice whatever of the flurry.
“I had a valuable cargo of general merchandise from the London docks to
Fort Churchill, a station of the old company on Hudson's Bay,” said the
captain earnestly. “We were delayed in lading, and baffled by head winds
and a heavy tumbling sea all the way north-about and across. Then the
fog kept us off the coast; and when I made port at last, it was too late
to delay in those northern waters with such a vessel and such a crew as
I had. They cared for nothing, and idled me into a fit of sickness;
but my first mate was a good, excellent man, with no more idea of being
frozen in there until spring than I had, so we made what speed we could
to get clear of Hudson's Bay and off the coast. I owned an eighth of
the vessel, and he owned a sixteenth of her. She was a full-rigged ship,
called the Minerva, but she was getting old and leaky. I meant it should
be my last v'y'ge in her, and so it proved. She had been an excellent
vessel in her day. Of the cowards aboard her I can't say so much.”
“Then you were wrecked?” I asked, as he made a long pause.
“I wa'n't caught astern o' the lighter by any fault of mine,” said the
captain gloomily. “We left Fort Churchill and run out into the Bay with
a light pair o' heels; but I had been vexed to death with their red-tape
rigging at the company's office, and chilled with stayin' on deck an'
tryin' to hurry up things, and when we were well out o' sight o' land,
headin' for Hudson's Straits, I had a bad turn o' some sort o' fever,
and had to stay below. The days were getting short, and we made good
runs, all well on board but me, and the crew done their work by dint of
hard driving.”
I began to find this unexpected narrative a little dull. Captain
Littlepage spoke with a kind of slow correctness that lacked the
longshore high flavor to which I had grown used; but I listened
respectfully while he explained the winds having become contrary, and
talked on in a dreary sort of way about his voyage, the bad weather,
and the disadvantages he was under in the lightness of his ship, which
bounced about like a chip in a bucket, and would not answer the rudder
or properly respond to the most careful setting of sails.
“So there we were blowin' along anyways,” he complained; but looking at
me at this moment, and seeing that my thoughts were unkindly wandering,
he ceased to speak.
“It was a hard life at sea in those days, I am sure,” said I, with
redoubled interest.
“It was a dog's life,” said the poor old gentleman, quite reassured,
“but it made men of those who followed it. I see a change for the worse
even in our own town here; full of loafers now, small and poor as 'tis,
who once would have followed the sea, every lazy soul of 'em. There is
no occupation so fit for just that class o' men who never get beyond
the fo'cas'le. I view it, in addition, that a community narrows down and
grows dreadful ignorant when it is shut up to its own affairs, and gets
no knowledge of the outside world except from a cheap, unprincipled
newspaper. In the old days, a good part o' the best men here knew a
hundred ports and something of the way folks lived in them. They saw
the world for themselves, and like's not their wives and children saw it
with them. They may not have had the best of knowledge to carry with 'em
sight-seein', but they were some acquainted with foreign lands an' their
laws, an' could see outside the battle for town clerk here in Dunnet;
they got some sense o' proportion. Yes, they lived more dignified, and
their houses were better within an' without. Shipping's a terrible loss
to this part o' New England from a social point o' view, ma'am.”
“I have thought of that myself,” I returned, with my interest quite
awakened. “It accounts for the change in a great many things,--the sad
disappearance of sea-captains,--doesn't it?”
“A shipmaster was apt to get the habit of reading,” said my companion,
brightening still more, and taking on a most touching air of unreserve.
“A captain is not expected to be familiar with his crew, and for
company's sake in dull days and nights he turns to his book. Most of us
old shipmasters came to know 'most everything about something; one would
take to readin' on farming topics, and some were great on medicine,--but
Lord help their poor crews!--or some were all for history, and now and
then there'd be one like me that gave his time to the poets. I was well
acquainted with a shipmaster that was all for bees an' beekeepin'; and
if you met him in port and went aboard, he'd sit and talk a terrible
while about their havin' so much information, and the money that could
be made out of keepin' 'em. He was one of the smartest captains that
ever sailed the seas, but they used to call the Newcastle, a great
bark he commanded for many years, Tuttle's beehive. There was old Cap'n
Jameson: he had notions of Solomon's Temple, and made a very handsome
little model of the same, right from the Scripture measurements, same's
other sailors make little ships and design new tricks of rigging and all
that. No, there's nothing to take the place of shipping in a place like
ours. These bicycles offend me dreadfully; they don't afford no real
opportunities of experience such as a man gained on a voyage. No: when
folks left home in the old days they left it to some purpose, and when
they got home they stayed there and had some pride in it. There's no
large-minded way of thinking now: the worst have got to be best and rule
everything; we're all turned upside down and going back year by year.”
“Oh no, Captain Littlepage, I hope not,” said I, trying to soothe his
feelings.
There was a silence in the schoolhouse, but we could hear the noise of
the water on a beach below. It sounded like the strange warning wave
that gives notice of the turn of the tide. A late golden robin, with the
most joyful and eager of voices, was singing close by in a thicket of
wild roses.