“Tut!” I exclaimed impatiently. “Do you seriously wish me to believe, Polson, that you are such an utter fool that you are unable to discriminate between right and wrong? With one breath you give me to understand that you would have no conscientious objection to permitting a man to murder me; and with the next you intimate that having, as I understand it, blindly pledged yourself to obey all Wilde’s orders—whatever their nature may be—your conscience will not permit you to break your pledge! Let me tell you, man, that such a pledge as that is in nowise binding, and the law will hold you blameless if you choose to break it.”
“Ay—yes—the law!” retorted the boatswain, spitting over the rail, the more strongly to mark his contempt of that system which was once tersely denounced as being “a hass”. “I don’t take no account of the law, Mr Troubridge. Mr Wilde have showed us that the law ain’t justice. It have been made by rich men to grind down the poor, and keep ’em down; and there ain’t goin’ to be no law in this here new country what we’re goin’ to make. Everybody’s goin’ to be just as good as everybody else, and is goin’ to do just what he jolly well likes.”
“Just so!” I said. “I have heard that yarn before, and if I knew of a country where such a state of things existed I would take precious good care to steer clear of it. Can’t you picture to yourself the joy of living in a place where, if a stronger man than you happened to take a fancy to your clothes, or your house, or anything else that belonged to you, he could compel you to give them up, and nobody would interfere to say him nay. That is the kind of thing that is to be expected in a country where there are no laws, and where everybody is at liberty to do ‘just what he jolly well likes’. I am astonished to hear you talking such utter tomfoolery; I set you down as having more common sense!”
The poor man stared at me in silence, agape with perplexity.
“Well, I’ll be jiggered!” he exclaimed at last, thumping the hencoop with his fist in his bewilderment; “what’s a man to do? Here’s that chap Wilde—a man of eddication, mind ye, Mr Troubridge—comes along and spins us a yarn of how we poor sailormen are ill-treated and kep’ down, overworked and underpaid by rich owners; and of how the law won’t do nothin’ for us; and he shows us a plan how we can live in peace and happiness and enj’yment all the rest of our lives; and then you turns up and knocks the whole bag o’ tricks into a cocked hat! Which of ye is right? If you’re right, I stays as I am all my life, a poor, miserable shellback, endin’ my days by sellin’ matches in the streets, when I’m too old and too stiff wi’ the rheumatics to go to sea any longer. That bein’ the case, I’ll give Mr Wilde’s plan a trial for a spell; right or wrong.”
“Very well,” said I, “go your own way, if you will; but you will most certainly regret it some day when it is too late to retrace your steps. And let me tell you this, Polson, you are attributing your position and its accompanying hardships to the wrong cause altogether. The true state of the case is that you are an ignorant and unintelligent man through lack of education. Did you ever go to school?”
“No, never, Mr Troubridge,” answered my companion. “What little I knows I larned myself. My father, who was supposed to be a wharfinger, was too fond of the drink ever to be able to hold a job, the consekence bein’ that my poor mother had to keep things goin’ by takin’ in washin’; and, since there was seven of us young ’uns, it took her all her time to find us in grub and clo’es. She hadn’t no money to spare for eddication. Consekence was I didn’t have none. And when I was ’bout ’leven year old things got to such a pitch at home that I cut and run, goin’ to sea as cabin-boy in a Geordie to start with, and gradually workin’ my way up to bein’ a bosun, as I am now.”
“Ah!” said I. “Well, you have done a good deal better, Polson, than many others in like circumstances. But—and this is my point—if your father, instead of stupefying his brains with drink, had been a sober, steady, hard-working man, and had done his duty by you to the extent of sending you to school, you would have gained a vast amount of valuable knowledge. You would have cultivated your intellect; you would have learned to discriminate between right and wrong; you would have been able to reason, and to perceive that certain causes invariably produce certain effects. You would have discovered that knowledge is power, and that the more knowledge a man possesses the higher he is able to rise in the world. Instead of stopping at being a boatswain, you would have risen to be, first a mate, and then a master—and possibly an owner some day, as other men have done. Now, put that in your pipe and smoke it!”
And I jumped up and went below to fetch my sextant up on deck; for by this time it was drawing well on toward noon.
As the day wore on, the wind fell lighter, until by sunset the ship scarcely had steerage-way; consequently it was not until the next morning that we found ourselves off the island of Amsterdam, past which we drifted so slowly that, had there been anyone on the island, they would have had ample time to make their presence known. But we saw no one, nor anything in the least resembling a signal. After skirting the western side of the island to its northern extremity, I gave the order to bring the ship to the wind, and gave the officer of the watch a compass course of east-south-east for Cape Otway. I was not going to yield to Wilde at the first demand; and not at all, if I could possibly help it; although my talk with the boatswain was of anything but an encouraging character. There was still the carpenter, however; and I thought I would sound him as to his views on this visionary scheme of Wilde’s, the very first step toward the realisation of which involved an act of piracy. But when I came to talk to him I soon found that he was even worse to deal with than the boatswain; for although perhaps not quite so ignorant as the latter, he was still ignorant enough to be convinced by the specious arguments of the Socialist, to readily accept the doctrine of perfect equality between all men, and—like most of those whose labour is of an arduous character, and whose life is one of almost constant hardship and privation—to be dazzled by the alluring prospect of being able to live out the rest of his days on an island where—according to Wilde—Nature would do all the work, and man would only need to stretch forth his hand to gather in her bounties.