It’s curious how the whole thing happened. Thomas Jefferson wandered up
to Portland at the time we were fitting out a ship for a whaling cruise.
We saw him imitating a banjo for a lot of kids down on the wharf, and
the minute our eyes lit on him--Tucker’s and mine--we liked him. It
isn’t necessary to go into the details of what happened after that. Just
a week later, when Thomas Jefferson and I were shaking hands for the
last time, a queer sort of look came into his eyes, and he said:
“Bobby, you’re the first man I ever knew that makes me feel like crying
when you leave me.”
He said it just like one of the kids he’d tickled half to death on the
wharf. There was a little jerking in his throat, and there came into his
face a look so gentle that it made me think of a girl.
“Why don’t you come along on this cruise with me?” I said.
Thomas Jefferson gave a sudden start, and a queer expression came into
his eyes, as if he saw something out on the sea that had startled him.
Then he laughed. You could hear that laugh of Thomas Jefferson’s three
blocks away, and sunshine in winter couldn’t bring more cheer than the
sound of it. He looked at me for a moment, and then said:
“Bobby, I’ll go!”
It wasn’t forty-eight hours before Thomas Jefferson had a first mortgage
on every soul aboard the “Sleeping Sealer,” from the cap’n to the oiler
down in the engine-room. He was able, all right, but you couldn’t have
made an able seaman out of him in a hundred years. For all that, he did
the work of three men. The first thing you heard when you woke up in the
morning was his whistle, and the last thing you heard at night was his
laugh or his song. He did everything, from cooking to telling us why
Germany couldn’t lick England, and how the United States could clean up
the map of the earth if Congress would spend less money on job-making
bureaus and a little more on war-ships.
Then we discovered what was in the old alligator-skin valise he carried.
It was books. Half the time he didn’t have to read to us, but just
talked off the stuff he’d learned by heart. We got to know a lot before
the trip was half begun, just by associating with Thomas Jefferson
Brown--or Thomas Jefferson, as he was then.
We spent three months up about the Spicer Islands, and then came down
toward Southampton Land. Thomas Jefferson was the happiest man aboard
until we caught sight of a coast, and then the change began. After that
he’d get restless whenever land hove in sight.
Six weeks later we came down into Roes Welcome Sound, planning to get
out through Hudson Strait before winter set in. The fact that we were
almost homeward bound didn’t seem to affect Thomas Jefferson. I saw the
beginning of the end when he said to me one day:
“Bobby, I’ve never seen this northern country. It’s a big, glorious
country, and I’d like to go ashore.”
There wasn’t any use arguing with him. The cap’n tried it, we all tried
it, and at last Thomas Jefferson prepared to take his leave of us at
Point Fullerton, just eight hundred miles north of civilization, where
there’s an Eskimo village and a police station of the Royal Northwest
Mounted. He came to me the day before we were going to take him ashore,
and said:
“Bobby, why don’t you come along? Let’s chum it, old man, and see what
happens.”
When he went ashore, the next day, I went with him, and we each took
three months’ supply of grub and our pay. From that hour there began the
big change--the change which turned Thomas Jefferson back into Thomas
Jefferson Brown, and which it took a girl to finish.
It came first in his eyes, and then in his laugh. After that he seemed
to grow an inch or two taller, and he lost that careless, shiftless way
which comes of what he called the _wanderlust_ bug. There wasn’t so
much laughter in his eyes, but something better had taken its place--a
deeper, grayer, more thoughtful look, and he didn’t play those queer
things with his mouth any more.
The police at Point Fullerton hardly had a glimpse of him as the
big, sunny, loose-jointed giant, Thomas Jefferson. He had become a
bronze-bearded god, with the strength of five men in his splendid
shoulders, and a port to his head that made you think of a piece of
sculpture.
“You can’t be anything but a _man_ up here, Bobby,” he said one day, and
I knew what he meant. “It’s not the air, it’s not the cold, and it’s not
the fight you make to keep life in your body,” he added, “but it’s
God! That’s what it is, Bobby. There’s not a sound or a sight up here,
outside of that little cabin, that’s human. It’s all God--there’s
nothing else--and it makes you think!”