“O, yes, sir, a great many times.”
“Well, I’m Ben Rhines, what there is left of him. Is your mother living? and what family did your father leave?”
“My mother is living in Salem. Father left three children, two girls and myself; he also took a nephew to bring up after his father died.”
“Did he leave property?”
“No, sir. He owned a large part of the Roanoke, and there was no insurance on her. My mother was left poor; father wasn’t a man to lay up money.”
“No, he had too large a heart. I’m glad of it. I’ve got enough for both, thank God! I thought I’d got enough to take me well through, and shouldn’t try to make any more,—but I will. I’ll just give my mind to making money. I’ll make lots of it. I’ll go to sea again. I’ve got a glorious use for money now. But how came you in an English ship? Among all the friends your father had, and the hundreds whom, to my certain knowledge, he helped into business, was there not one who thought enough of his obligations to do for his son?”
“Yes, sir. After father was lost, mother kept a boarding-house for masters and mates of vessels, and many of his former friends boarded with her, and set up our girls in a dry goods store. My cousin went into a grocery store. I was the youngest. When I left school I went on board a ship, belonging to a friend of father’s, as a cabin boy. He put me right along. I am only twenty-one last July, the fourteenth. The ship was sold in Liverpool; and by the captain’s good word, I got a mate’s berth in an English ship, knowing if I got across to Halifax, I could easily get home from there. The ship sprung a leak: the crew and second mate took the boats, nautical instruments, and nearly all the provisions, and left. They didn’t like the captain; he was a hard man, and there had been quarrelling all the voyage. Finally they put on their jackets (they might have kept the ship free), and told him they had as many friends in hell as he had, and left. They offered to take me with them; but I thought it my duty to stick by the captain and the ship.”
“But how came the cook, the seaman, and the boy to stick by you. Why didn’t they join the strongest party?”
“The black was a slave in Jamaica. The captain took a liking to him, bought him when he was nineteen, and gave him his liberty. He wouldn’t leave the captain. The sailor was a townie and shipmate of mine in the other ship; the boy belongs in Salem, the son of one of our neighbors, and was also with me in the other ship, and a better boy never stepped on a vessel’s deck. We three stuck together. Captain Rhines, is there any way I can get a letter to my mother, to inform her of my safety, and also of the boy’s? She knows I was on my passage in the Madras to Halifax, and that it is time for the ship to arrive there, and if the crew are picked up or get ashore they will report us as lost.”