The Bombay was, for those days, a good sized ship of about six hundred tons register, but she would seem a mere tender by the side of the marine monsters of the present time. Her crew included twelve men and two boys, with captain, two mates, carpenter, cook, and steward. The men had been, as usual, divided into two watches, and I had fallen into the mate’s, or port watch. “It was Hobson’s choice” in my case, as Mr. Bowker delicately remarked in informing me of my station. It was very evident that I was not, as yet, considered a very valuable acquisition to his force.
“Now look here, you Bob,” said the mate one fine afternoon when I was barely convalescent, “you’ve been playing seasick passenger about long enough. It’s time you began to be of some use on board and to earn your grub. I’m going to be doctor myself! Look up aloft there, my lad; do you see that royal yard?”
I looked up, as he bade me, at the royal masthead, where the yard seemed to me to be about five hundred feet above the deck where we stood.
“Yes sir, I see it.”
“Very well, now suppose you waltz up there and take a closer look at it! It’s going to be a very familiar road for you this voyage, and you had better make yourself acquainted with the way at once;” and he smiled at his wit, which I failed to appreciate just then.
The ship was on the wind, with all sail set and drawing well, and she was reasonably steady; but as I gazed aloft the mast was sweeping about in a very dazing manner, and the rigging away up there seemed to me about the size of a fishing line. Remember, I had never been aloft in my life! I hesitated.
“Well, Bob, I am waiting for you, but I shan’t wait very long, my son;” and he picked up a piece of rattling stuff, a cord about the thickness of one’s finger, and ostentatiously swayed it to and fro.
I saw that he meant business, and I started on the trip at once. I have been aloft, since that beautiful afternoon, many times in howling gales of wind to close-reef topsails. I have crawled out to storm furl a sail in a typhoon in the Straits of Sunda when the force of the wind pinned me to the yard and I felt that every moment might be my last. I went through that hell of fire in the old Richmond, astern of Farragut in the Hartford, when we passed Forts Jackson and St. Philip below New Orleans, but I am sure that I have never since experienced the abject fear I endured that day before I reached the Bombay’s royal yard!
But I stuck to it and I accomplished the task at last, and my first lesson in seamanship, and the severest one, was past. Perhaps some of my readers may think that I magnify the undertaking, but, as I have said, I was a country lad, and in those days boys did not have gymnasiums, as they have now, to prepare them for such tests.
“Very well done, Bob, for a first attempt,” said the mate laughingly, as I reached the deck and busied myself in getting my trousers pulled down my legs after my frantic struggle aloft; “but I thought you would have squeezed all the tar out of the royal backstay, you gripped it so savagely. Oh, you’ll make a sailor yet, lad, or I’ll know the reason why. Now go forward and turn the grindstone for the carpenter.”