Burns was arrested suddenly, on a false pretence, coming home at nightfall from his day's work, and hurried into custody, among strange men, in a strange place, and suddenly, whether claimed rightfully or claimed wrongfully, he saw he was claimed as a slave, and his condition burst upon him in a flood of terror. This was at night. You saw him, sir, the next day, and you remember the state he was then in. You remember his stupefied and terrified condition. You remember his hesitation, his timid glance about the room, even when looking in the mild face of justice. How little your kind words reassured him.
That is the same hand which wrote Two Years Before the Mast—the touch of Defoe, with Defoe's direct simplicity of method and power of getting the effect he wanted by the simplest means; the last word in art, in all arts. Dana was incapable of rhetorical extravagance or of insincerity of any kind. His Two Years Before the Mast is as much a classic in England as at home. One proof of it is the number of pirated editions, before there was an international copyright law. He wrote to me once: "I hear there is a cheap English edition of the book which has had, because of its cheapness, a great circulation. Published, I think, in Hull. Could you send me a copy as a curiosity?" I sent it; a little fat volume with a red cloth cover, much gilt, very closely printed, and sold at a shilling, long before the days of cheap books. It had sold by scores of thousands. It is a book always in print, in one edition or another. Copyright profited Dana no more in America than in England, or not for a long time. Bryant, to whom Dana's father sent the manuscript, hawked it about from one publisher to another in vain, till finally he sold it outright to Harpers for two hundred and fifty dollars, copyright and all. In my copy, with the imprint of James R. Osgood & Co., Boston, is a Preface dated 1869, in which Dana says: "After twenty-eight years the copyright of this book has reverted to me"; and so he presents the first "author's edition" to the public. My copy was a gift from Dana; it is among the treasures I possess and care for most, with this inscription in Dana's clear, quiet handwriting:
My dear Smalley,—Will you accept this volume from me and believe me ever truly yours,
RICH'D H. DANA, JR.
Boston, Feb. 17, 1876.
My real acquaintance with Dana had begun ten years before, when, in June or July, 1866, we crossed the Atlantic together in what was then the crack ship of the Cunard line, the China, the first screw that carried the Cunard flag, capable of fourteen knots. The Cunarders then sailed from Boston, touched at Halifax, and thence steamed to Queenstown direct, and so on to Liverpool. Halifax was an experience; it took us, with all the Cunard seamanship, and there was none better, four hours to get alongside the pier, the currents running I know not how many miles an hour.
The China belonged to the old school; of all new schools the Cunard people, now foremost in everything, had at that time an abhorrence. The saloon aft and tapering to a point, racks over the table filled with table glass, long benches for seats, cabins crowded and dimly lighted with one smoking and smelling oil lamp in a triangular glass case between two cabins; sanitary arrangements unspeakable. I, on my first Atlantic voyage, thought it all the height of luxury; and so it was, for that time. The modern comforts and splendours of sea life date from 1889 with the White Star Teutonic, launched in that year, first of the "floating palaces." The China made her way from Halifax to Queenstown through a continuous fog at undiminished speed. The captain, for an exception among the Cunard captains of those days, regarded a passenger as a human being, and not merely as a parcel to be safely carried from port to port and dumped safely on the wharf, intermediate sufferings of no account. He would answer a question. I asked him, with the audacity of a novice, whether it was safe to steam day and night through a fog at full speed.
"Safe, good God, no."
"Then why do you do it?"