The day of the launching came, then the stepping of the giant masts, the completing of the rigging and the bending of the new sails.
“The West Wind will be ready for sea in two weeks now,” Humphrey said, one morning at breakfast to Miranda Reynolds—she was my great-grandmother and I was named for her. They had been married only a month and this would be his first cruise since their wedding. She drew her breath quickly, she had not known it was to be so soon.
“People say,” she began hesitatingly, “old sailors and longshoremen and even the Naval officers that have been here, say that the West Wind will never stand a storm.”
“They are the kind of men,” Humphrey scoffed, “who would be sailing vessels of the model of the Ark, did not people like Jonathan Adams have the courage, sometimes, to build something new. No, the West Wind is going to teach all the shipmasters something they never knew before, when once she sets sail. And we expect to clear for Gibraltar in less than a month. Why, Miranda, you’re not crying?”
“No,” declared Miranda, choking bravely, for tears have no place in a sea captain’s household. She even managed to muster a watery smile. “I wonder what you will leave behind you in foreign parts this time, your gold snuffbox, perhaps.”
It was a longstanding joke that young Captain Reynolds was so careless of his possessions that he never came home from a voyage without having lost or mislaid by the way everything he had. But the gold snuffbox had survived several cruises, since it was the most valuable thing he owned. It had been presented to him by the citizens of his town when he had come home from sea some years ago, after, so he expressed, “a miserable Algerine pirate lay alongside him and insisted on being taken.”
It is probably only a short paragraph in your history book and possibly a very dull one that tells you how, a little more than a hundred years ago, the seas swarmed with pirates whose home ports were the North African cities of Algiers, Tripoli and Tunis. The great nations of Europe and, with them, the young United States, used to buy safety from these lawless Barbary States by sending them gifts and tribute. But when, finally, the Pasha of Tripoli sent word to our President that his last gift was not large enough and that more must be sent, the answer was a fleet of American warships and the bombardment of the astonished monarch’s seaports. There were many spirited encounters during that little war, many feats of daring seamanship of which history has lost sight among the greater events that have followed. But for years after the struggle was over, the United States Navy still policed that foreign sea with such thoroughness that the pirate craft that dared venture from port were bold and desperate indeed.
It was thither that the West Wind was to sail, with dispatches for the Commodore of the Mediterranean Fleet. At last the ship was ready, a rare and beautiful sight with her slim hull, her rows of guns and her towering reach of silvery new canvas.
She sailed with the early tide, at daybreak of a mid-April morning, a ghostly fairy-like thing, slipping away in the gray light and the mist of dawn. Miranda stood on the dock to watch her go, with Jonathan beside her staring fixedly after his winged dream, flying at last beyond the seas.
“There will be tales to tell when she comes back,” he said at last, “and I look for her to cut down the sailing time by three, four, five days, perhaps. She has borne away the hearts of both of us but she is a good ship and she will bring them back again.”