The Old Man, having related to the Little People how
the Young Man went to Sea, now proceeds to tell
what the Young Man did there.
[Illustration]
The two days which the old man and his young friends had passed together
had so completely broken down all restraint between them, that the
children almost felt as if they had known the old man all their lives.
It was therefore quite natural, that, when they went down next day, they
should feel inclined to give him a surprise. So they concerted a plan of
sneaking quietly around the house that they might come upon him
suddenly, for they saw him working in his garden, hoeing up the weeds.
"Now let's astonish him," said William.
"That's a jolly idea," said Fred, while Alice said nothing at all, but
was as pleased as she could be.
The little party crawled noiselessly along the fence, through the open
gate, and sprang upon the Captain with a yell, like a parcel of wild
Indians; and sure enough they did surprise him, for he jumped behind his
hoe, as if preparing to defend himself against an attack of enemies.
"Heyday, my hearties!" exclaimed the Captain, when he saw who was there.
"Ain't you ashamed of yourselves to scare the old man that way?" and he
joined the laugh that the children raised at his own expense,--enjoying
it as much as they did.
"That's a trick of William's, I'll be bound," said he; "but no matter,
I'll forgive you; and I'm right glad you've come, too, for it's precious
hot, and I'm tired hoeing up the weeds; so now, let us get out of the
sun, into the crow's nest."
"The crow's nest!" cried William. "What's that?"
"Why, the arbor, to be sure," said the Captain. "Don't you like the
name?"
"Of course I do," answered William. "It's such a cunning name."
It was but a few steps to the "crow's nest," and the happy party once
seated, the Captain was ready in an instant to pick up the thread where
he had broken it short off when they had parted in the golden evening of
the day before, and then to spin on the yarn.
"And now, my lively trickster and genius of the quill," said he to
William, "how is it about writing down the story? What does your father
say?"
"O," answered William, "I've written down almost every word of what you
said, and papa has examined it, and says he likes it. There it is";--and
he pulled a roll of paper from his pocket and handed it to the Captain.
The old man took it from William's hand, looking all the while much
gratified; and after pulling out a pair of curious-looking,
old-fashioned spectacles from a curious-looking, old-fashioned
red-morocco case, which was much the worse for wear, he fixed them on
his nose very carefully, and then, after unfolding the sheets of paper,
he glanced knowingly over them.
"That's good," said he; "that's ship-shape, and as it ought to be. Why,
lad, you're a regular genius, and sure to turn out a second Scott, or
Cooper, or some such writing chap."
"I am glad you like it, Captain Hardy," said William, pleased that he
had pleased his friend.
"Like it!" exclaimed the Captain. "Like it!! that's just _what_ I do;
and now, since I'm to be made famous in this way, I'll be more careful
with my speech. And no bad spelling either," ran on the Captain, while
he kept turning back the leaves, "as there would have been if you had
put it down just as I spoke it. But never mind that now; take back the
papers, lad, and keep them safe; we'll go on now, if we can only find
where the yarn was broken yesterday. Do any of you remember?"
"I do," said William, laughing. "You had just got out into the great
ocean, and were frightened half to death."
"O yes, that's it," went on the Captain,--"frightened half to death;
that's sure enough, and no mistake; and so would you have been, my lad,
if you had been in my place. But I don't think I'll tell you anything
more about my miserable life on board that ship. Hadn't we better skip
that?"
"O no, no!" cried the children all together, "don't skip anything."
"Well, then," said the obliging Captain, glad enough to see how much his
young friends were interested, "if you _will_ know what sort of a
miserable time young sailors have of it, I'll tell you; and let me tell
you, too, there's many a one of them has just as bad a time as I had.
"In the first place, you see, they gave me such wretched food to eat,
all out of a rusty old tin plate, and I was all the time so sick from
the motion of the vessel as we went tossing up and down on the rough
sea, and from the tobacco-smoke of the forecastle, and all the other bad
smells, that I could hardly eat a mouthful, so that I was half ready to
die of starvation; and, as if this was not misery enough, the sailors
were all the time, when in the forecastle, quarrelling like so many wild
beasts in a cage; and as two of them had pistols, and all of them had
knives, I was every minute in dread lest they should take it into their
heads to murder each other, and kill me by mistake. So, I can tell you,
being a young sailor-boy isn't what it's cracked up to be."
"O, wasn't it dreadful!" said Alice, "to be sick all the time, and
nobody there to take care of you."
"Well, I wasn't so sick, maybe, after all," answered the Captain,
smiling,--"only _sea-sick_, you know; and then, for the credit of the
ship, I'll say that, if you had nice plum-pudding every day for dinner,
you would think it horrid stuff if you were sea-sick."
"But don't people die when they are sea-sick?" inquired Alice.
"Not often, child," answered the Captain, playfully; "but they feel all
the time as if they were going to, and when they don't feel that way,
they feel as if they'd like to.
"However, I was miserable enough in more ways than one; for to these
troubles was added a great distress of mind, caused by the sport the
sailors made of me, and also by remorse of conscience for having run
away from home, and thus got myself into this great scrape. Then, to
make the matter worse,--as if it was not bad enough already,--a violent
storm set upon us in the dark night. You could never imagine how the
ship rolled about over the waves. Sometimes they swept clear across the
ship, as if threatening our lives; and all the time the creaking of the
masts, the roaring of the wind through the rigging, and the lashing of
the seas, filled my ears with such awful sounds that I was in the
greatest terror, and I thought that every moment would certainly be my
last. Then, as if still further to add to my fears, one of the sailors
told me, right in the midst of the storm, that we were bound for the
Northern seas, to catch whales and seals. So now, what little scrap of
courage I had left took instant flight, and I fell at once to praying
(which I am ashamed to say I had never in my life done before), fully
satisfied as I was that, if this course did not save me, nothing would.
In truth, I believe I should actually have died of fright had not the
storm come soon to an end; and indeed it was many days before I got over
thinking that I should, in one way or another, have a speedy passage
into the next world, and therefore I did not much concern myself with
where we were going in this. Hence I grew to be very unpopular with the
people in the ship, and learned next to nothing. I was always in
somebody's way, was always getting hold of the wrong rope, and was in
truth all the time doing mischief rather than good. So I was set down as
a hopeless idiot, and was considered proper game for everybody. The
sailors tormented me in every possible way.
"One day (knowing how green I was) they set to talking about fixing up a
table in the forecastle, and one of them said, 'What a fine thing it
would be if the mate (who turned out to be the red-faced man I had met
in the street, and who took me to the shipping-office) would only let us
have the keelson.' So this being agreed to in a very serious manner
(which I hadn't wit enough to see was all put on), I was sent to carry
their petition. Seeing the mate on the quarter-deck, I approached, and
in a very respectful manner thus addressed him: 'If you please, sir, I
come to ask if you will let us have the keelson for a table?' Whereupon
the mate turned fiercely upon me, and, to my great astonishment, roared
out at the very top of his voice, 'What! what's that you say? Say that
again, will you?' So I repeated the question as he had told me
to,--feeling all the while as if I should like the deck to open and
swallow me up. I had scarcely finished before I perceived that the mate
was growing more and more angry; if, indeed, anything could possibly
exceed the passion he was in already. His face was many shades redder
than it was before,--and, indeed, it was so very red that it looked as
if it might shine in the dark. His hat fell off, as it seemed to me, in
consequence of his stiff red hair rising up on end, and he raised his
voice so loud that it sounded more like the howl of a wild beast than
anything I could compare it to. 'You lubber!' he shouted. 'You villain!'
he shrieked; 'you, you!'--and here it seemed as if he was choking with
hard words which he couldn't get rid of,--'you come here to play tricks
on me! You try to fool me! I'll teach you!'--and, seizing hold of the
first thing he could lay his hands on (I did not stop to see what it
was, but wheeled about greatly terrified), he let fly at me with such
violence that I am sure I must have been finished off for certain had I
not quickly dodged my head. When I returned to the forecastle, the
sailors had a great laugh at me, and they called me ever afterwards
'Jack Keelson.' The keelson, you must know, is a great mass of wood
down in the very bottom of the ship, running the whole length of it; but
how should I have learned that?
"At another time I was told to go and 'grease the saddle.' Not knowing
that this was a block of wood spiked to the mainmast to support the main
boom, and thinking this a trick too, I refused to go, and came again
near getting my head broken by the red-faced mate. I did not believe
there was anything like a 'saddle' in the ship.
"And thus the sailors continued to worry me. Once, when I was very weak
with sea-sickness and wanted to keep down a dinner which I had just
eaten, they insisted upon it, that, if I would only put into my mouth a
piece of fat pork, and _keep it there_, my dinner would stay in its
place. The sailors were right enough, for as soon as my dinner began to
start up, of course away went the fat pork out ahead of it.
"But by and by I came to my senses, and, upon discovering that the bad
usage I received was partly my own fault, I stopped lamenting over my
unhappy condition, and began to show more spirit. Would you believe it?
I had actually been in the vessel five days before I had curiosity
enough to inquire her name. They told me that it was called the
_Blackbird_; but what ever possessed anybody to give it such a
ridiculous name I never could imagine. If they had called it Black Duck,
or Black Diver, there would have been some sense in it, for the ship was
driving head foremost into the water pretty much all the time. But I
found out that the vessel was not exactly a ship after all, but a sort
of half schooner, half brig,--what they call a brigantine, having two
masts, a mainmast and a foremast. On the former there was a sail running
fore and aft, just like the sail of the little yacht _Alice_, and on
the latter there was a foresail, a foretop-sail, a foretop-gallant-sail,
and a fore-royal-sail,--all of course square sails, that is, running
across the vessel, and fastened to what are called yards. The vessel was
painted jet-black on the outside, but inside the bulwarks the color was
a dirty sort of green.
"Such, as nearly I can remember, was the brigantine _Blackbird_, three
hundred and forty-two tons register. Brigantine is, however, too large a
word; so when we pay the _Blackbird_ the compliment of mentioning her,
we will call her a ship.
"Having picked up the name of the ship, I was tempted to pursue my
inquiries further, and it was not long before I had got quite a
respectable stock of seaman's knowledge, and hence I grew in favor. I
learned to distinguish between a 'halyard,' which is rope for pulling
the yards up and letting them down, from a 'brace,' which is used to
pull them around so as to 'trim the sails,' and a 'sheet,' which is a
rope for keeping the sails in their proper places. I found out that what
I called a floor the sailors called a 'deck'; a kitchen they called a
'galley'; a pot, a 'copper'; a pulley was a 'block'; a post was a
'stancheon'; to fall down was to 'heel over'; to climb up was to 'go
aloft'; and to walk straight, and keep one's balance when the ship was
pitching over the waves, was to 'get your sea legs on.' I found out,
too, that everything behind you was 'abaft,' and everything ahead was
'forwards,' or for'ad as the sailors say; that a large rope was a
'hawser,' and that every other rope was a 'line'; to make anything
temporarily secure was to 'belay' it; to make one thing fast to another
was to 'bend it on'; and when two things were close together, they were
'chock-a-block.' I learned, also, that the right-hand side of the vessel
was the 'starboard' side, while the left-hand side was the 'port' or
'larboard' side; that the lever which moves the rudder that steers the
ship was called the 'helm,' and that to steer the ship was to take 'a
trick at the wheel'; that to 'put the helm up' was to turn it in the
direction from which the wind was coming (windward), and to 'put the
helm down' was to turn it in the direction the wind was going (leeward).
I found out still further, that a ship has a 'waist,' like a woman, a
'forefoot,' like a beast, besides 'bull's eyes' (which are small holes
with glass in them to admit light), and 'cat-heads,' and 'monkey-rails,'
and 'cross-trees,' as well as 'saddles' and 'bridles' and 'harness,' and
many other things which I thought I should never hear anything more of
after I left the farm. I might go on and tell you a great many more
things that I learned, but I should only tire your patience without
doing any good. I only want to show you how John Hardy began his marine
education.
"When it was discovered how much I had improved, they proposed
immediately to turn it to their own account; for I was at once sent to
take 'a trick at the wheel,' from which I came away, after two hours'
hard work, with my hands dreadfully blistered, and my legs bruised, and
with the recollection of much abusive language from the red-faced mate,
who could never see anything right in what I did. I gave him, however,
some good reason this time to abuse me, and I was glad of it afterwards,
though I was badly enough scared at the time. I steered the ship so
badly that a wave which I ought to have avoided by a skilful turn of the
wheel, came breaking in right over the quarter-deck, wetting the mate
from head to foot. He thought I did it on purpose (which you may be sure
I did not do). Again his face grew red enough to shine of a dark night,
and his mind invented hard words faster than his tongue would let them
out of his ugly throat.
"I tell you all this, that you may have some idea of what a ship is, and
how sailors live, and what they have to do. You can easily see that they
have no easy time of it, and, let me tell you, there isn't a bit of
romance about it, except the stories that are cut out of whole cloth to
make books and songs of. However, I never could have much sympathy for
my shipmates in the _Blackbird_; for if they did treat me a little
better when they found that I could do something, especially when I
could take a trick at the wheel, I still continued to look upon them as
little better than a set of pirates, and I felt satisfied that, if they
were not born to be hanged, they would certainly drown."
"I don't think I'll be a sailor," said Fred.
"Nor I either," said William. "But, Captain," continued the cunning
fellow, "if a sailor's life is so miserable, what do you go to sea so
much for?"
"Well, now, my lad," replied the Captain, evidently at first a little
puzzled, "that's a question that would require more time to explain than
we have to devote to it to-day. Besides" (he was fully recovered now),
"you know that going to sea in the cabin is as different from going to
sea in the forecastle as you are from a Yahoo Indian. But never mind
that, I must get on with my story, or it will never come to an end. I've
hardly begun it yet."