From that day on I was kept constantly in practice in going aloft, and was soon given the main royal to loose and furl; so that in my watch on deck no other person was ever sent aloft for that purpose, and what had been but a few weeks before such a terrible task, became mere play to me.
Meanwhile we were making our southing all the time, and in due course we approached the equator. Here both Jim and I were subjected to the usual horse-play that in those days marked the event of “crossing the line,” a custom now almost obsolete.
Neptune, represented by one of the men, came on board over the bows rigged out in a wig of tow, with a long beard, carrying as a trident a pair of grains, a kind of four-pronged fish spear. He asked us neophytes if we would promise never to eat brown bread when we could get white, unless we liked it better; never to kiss the maid when we could kiss the mistress, unless she were the prettier, and a lot more of such nonsense. As we attempted to reply one of the attendants forced a brush dipped in tar and ashes into our mouths, and they ended up by pulling away the board on which we were seated, thus giving us a ducking in a large tub of salt water.
However, the mate would not permit the men to go too far with us; so we at last escaped from our tormentors, and from that time were forever “free of the line” and at liberty to exercise our ingenuity in torturing other greenhorns when we had the opportunity.
I have failed to mention that our only passenger was a young passed-midshipman going out to join the Brazil squadron. His name was Clemson, and he was a general favorite fore and aft. Some years later he was drowned while striving to rescue one of his brother officers at the time of the loss of the United States brig Somers, capsized in the Gulf of Mexico. A handsome monument was afterward erected to his memory in the grounds of the Naval Academy at Annapolis.
As the days slipped along I was steadily gaining in the knowledge of my profession. On fine days, when there was little wind, I was sent to the wheel and taught to steer; at odd times I learned the mystery of making short and long splices and the various knots and “bends.” From the drudgery of turning the winch I was gradually promoted to making spun yarn myself, as well as plain and French sennit and other stuffs used in such quantities on board ship. Sometimes I was set at work ripping up old sails with the sailmaker’s gang; again at cleaning out paint pots and brushes in the paint-room, and I was taught how to handle a brush and lay on paint evenly. A boy at sea thus really serves an apprenticeship at several trades, and a good sailor is, or should be, a seaman, a rigger, a sailmaker, and a painter; he is in reality a “Jack of all trades.”
Kept busily engaged in this way, it was not strange that the time slipped by so quickly, and it did not seem long when, on the fifty-eighth day from New York, we made the land on the starboard bow, which proved to be Pernambuco, and five days afterward we sighted the Sugar Loaf, which rises abruptly twelve hundred feet from the sea at the entrance to the bay of Rio de Janeiro, one of the finest and most picturesque harbors in the world.
As soon as our anchor was dropped in the lower bay, we were surrounded by a fleet of boats of curious construction filled with jabbering negroes and native Brazilians, but none were permitted to come on board until after we had been inspected by the customs officer. He was a very great man indeed, who came alongside in a barge, with a wooden awning over the stern, flying a large Brazilian flag. This boat was pulled by twelve coal-black Congo negroes, naked from the waist up, who rose to their feet at every stroke, and fell back on the thwarts with a kind of rhythmic grunt that they gave in unison.
The officer was a shriveled-up little Brazilian, looking like a cross between a chimpanzee and a parrot, with his wizened face and gorgeous uniform of green and yellow—the bilious colors of the Brazilian Empire. After satisfying all the formalities, we were permitted to have the natives on board, and they came with great bunches of bananas, bags of luscious oranges and fragrant pineapples, and other tropical fruits in bewildering variety, and at what seemed absurdly low prices.
Every one on board, fore and aft, invested in fruit, and we sat up late into the night to devour it, for it seemed that we could never be satisfied. Fifty years ago tropical fruits were not hawked about the streets of Boston as they are to-day, and I do not think that I had ever seen a banana before. So that after two months of salt-beef diet these delicacies were thoroughly appreciated.