“Couldn’t your parents read and write?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Then why didn’t they learn you themselves?”
“There were a good many of us, sir, and they were so put to it to raise enough to live on, and fight the Indians, they had no time for it.”
The mate was a noble-hearted man; all his sympathies were touched at seeing so fine a young man prevented from rising by an ignorance that was no fault of his own. He took two or three turns across the deck, and at length said,—
“I tell you what it is, youngster: I’ll say this much before your face or behind your back: you’re just the best behaved boy, the quickest to learn your duty, and the most willing to do it, that I ever saw, and I’ve been following the sea for nearly thirty years; and before I’ll see an American boy like you kept down by ignorance, I’ll do as I’d be done by—turn schoolmaster, and teach you myself.”
Mr. Brown was as good as his word. While the rest of the crew in their forenoon watch below were mending their clothes, telling long yarns, or playing cards, and when in port drinking and frolicking, Ben was learning to read and write, and putting his whole soul into it. He stuck to the vessel, and Mr. Brown stuck to him. When he shipped the next voyage as able seaman, he wrote his name in good fair hand.
They went to Charleston, South Carolina, to load with pitch, rice, and deer-skins, for Liverpool. The vessel was a long time completing her cargo, as it had to be picked up from the plantations. Ben improved the time to learn navigation. From Liverpool they went to Barbadoes. While lying there, the captain of the ship James Welch, of Boston, named after the principal owner, died. The mate taking charge of the ship, Ben, by Mr. Brown’s recommendation, obtained the first mate’s berth. He was now no longer Ben, but Mr. Rhines, and finally becoming master of the ship, continued in the employ of Mr. Welch as long as he followed the sea. He then married, built a house on the site of the old log camp, and surrounded it with fruit and shade trees, for, by travel and observation, he had acquired ideas of taste, beauty, and comfort, quite in advance of the times, or his neighbors. He then took his parents home to live with him, and made their last days happy.
Although he was compelled by necessity thus early to go to sea, he had a strong attachment to the soil, and would have devoted himself to its cultivation in middle life, had he not met with losses, which so much embarrassed him, that he was compelled to continue at sea to extricate himself.
Captain Rhines’s fine house, nice furniture, and curiosities which he brought home from time to time, excited no heart-burnings among his neighbors, because they knew he had earned them by hard work, and did not think himself better than others on account of that.