His stout faith in his ship was matched only by Humphrey’s unwavering confidence. Others might have said that this maiden voyage of his first command was a heart-breaking one, for many of his men were untrained seamen, grumbling at their narrow quarters and heavy labor, while the art of handling the new vessel was, in itself, not easy to acquire. The weather was boisterous and the winds fitful, but the West Wind did not betray the two good friends who had brought her into being. The storms lent her wings so that, at last, anxiety and discontent gave way entirely to pride in the speed that she was making. There was a certain grizzled old sailor, however, who openly discredited all claims of the ship’s prowess, and who even refused to believe the evidence of the day’s reckoning.
“Twenty-three days is the best she will do,” he vowed over and over again. “I will stake a year’s pay on it that she can’t make an hour less.”
Yet, on the nineteenth day of their passage, a warm, gusty afternoon of early May, when the far horizon swam in haze, it was he who came himself to the captain and broke through all etiquette to report, round-eyed with amazement—
“There’s land been sighted, sir, and I don’t understand it at all. It—it looks like Gibraltar!”
So she came through the gates of the Mediterranean, a gentle breeze behind her, “sails all filled and asleep” as the seamen said, a swift slender hull under a cloud of snowy canvas. She pushed into the straits where had plied back and forth the daring Phœnician craft, the Roman galleys and the high-pooped ships of Venice and of Spain, but she was no lesser vessel than any one of them, for she was the first of the Yankee clipper ships!
I have never seen those North African cities, Tangier and Tunis and the rest, and I have no doubt that to-day they are very little like what Humphrey Reynolds saw. But his stories have come down to me so clear and vivid, that I almost feel that I have known those very places with their white houses, their tropical green, the confusion and chatter of foreign tongues in the narrow streets, the hushed silence of the wide, walled gardens. For long months the American warships would lie off these ports, keeping a watchful eye upon the doings of the dusky potentates and arch-pirates who ruled them. The officers and men would go ashore to stare at the strange sights and to bargain for souvenirs among the street vendors, seemingly oblivious of the scowling, hostile faces about them.
It was in Tripoli on a day when Captain Reynolds was walking from one dark cupboard of a shop to another, looking for some fitting gift to take home to Miranda, that he was suddenly startled by the sight of a pale face among all those dusky ones. It was not white, but yellow, and belonged to an old Chinaman, as dried up and withered as a mummy, who had somehow wandered, a rare thing in those days, to this African city and kept a little shop there among the Moors, Arabs and Berbers of Tripoli. His wares were different from the others and very new indeed to Humphrey’s eyes, for just such carvings and silks did not often find their way to America. The old man invited the officer to come inside where more articles stood upon the narrow shelves and where Humphrey had almost decided upon the purchase of a beautifully carved ivory box for Miranda when he spied, in a niche opposite the tiny window, such a thing as he had never seen before.
A little pine tree was growing in a pot, a real, living one, and a miniature of just such a tree, bent and twisted by the sea winds, that grew upon the hill above the Susquehanna at home. The art of stunting and pruning these tiny trees, developed in Japan perhaps, but known to some Chinese, was quite unheard of in the Western world so that Humphrey could scarcely believe his eyes when they told him it was green and growing and evidently kin to the giant ones in America.
“Miranda must have that,” was his instant decision; “she will find that I can manage to bring home the gold snuffbox and something more besides.”
His determined effort to buy the tree, however, had a strange effect. At the first the old shopkeeper merely met all his offers with a determined shake of the head, but, as Humphrey insisted, he became more and more excited and at last, wringing his hands, burst into a torrent of jabbering explanation. Captain Reynolds had cruised along these shores long enough to have learned a little of the mixed dialect of French, Spanish and Moorish words by which foreigners and natives contrived to understand one another, so that he was able to gather from the Chinaman’s flood of talk that the pine tree was the most precious of his possessions, that he had carried it himself all the way from Pekin, that it was a hundred years old and that he felt certain the spirits of his ancestors loved to cluster about its twisted little branches. What had caused his banishment from his own land Humphrey could not make out, but he did gain some inkling of how the withered old man felt as he looked back upon some frail, small hut on the shore of one of China’s muddy yellow rivers, upon some bit of land that he and his ancestors had tilled patiently for unnumbered generations, upon a tiny garden where the tree had grown. No, it was quite plain that he would not sell it!