“I arrived at New Bedford near the middle of the afternoon of the second day, very hot and dusty, for I had walked all the way through the broiling sun along the high-road; and I was very tired and hungry, too, for I had tasted no food since morning, having no more money to buy any with, and not liking to beg. So I wandered on through the town towards the place where the masts of ships were to be seen as I looked down the street,—feeling miserable enough, I can assure you.
“Up to this period of my life, I had never been ten miles from home, and had never seen a city, so of course everything was new to me. By this time, however, I had come to reflect seriously on my folly, and this, coupled with hunger and fatigue, so far banished curiosity from my mind that I was not in the least impressed by what I saw. In truth, I very heartily wished myself back on the farm; for if the labor there was not to my liking, it was at least not so hard as what I had performed these past two days, in walking along the dusty road,—and then I was, when on the farm, never without the means to satisfy my hunger.
“What I should have done at this critical stage, had not some one come to my assistance, I cannot imagine. I was afraid to ask any questions of the passers-by, for I did not really know what to ask them, or how to explain my situation; and, seeing that everybody was gaping at me with wonder and curiosity (and many of them were clearly laughing at my absurd appearance), I hurried on, not having the least idea of where I should go or what I should do.
“At length I saw a man with a very red face approaching on the opposite side of the street, and from his general appearance I guessed him to be a sailor; so, driven almost to desperation, I crossed over to him, looking, I am sure, the very picture of despair, and I thus accosted him: ‘If you please, sir, can you tell me where I can go and ship for a voyage?’
“‘A voyage!’ shouted he, in reply, ‘a voyage! A pretty looking fellow you for a voyage!’—which observation very much confused me. Then he asked me a great many questions, using a great many hard names, the meaning of which I did not at all understand, and the necessity for which I could not exactly see. I noticed that he called me ‘landlubber’ very frequently, but I had no idea whether he meant to compliment or abuse me, though it seemed more likely to me that it was the latter. After a while, however, he seemed to have grown tired of talking, or had exhausted all his strange words, for he turned short round and bade me follow him, which I did, with very much the feelings a culprit must have when he is going to prison.
“We went down a steep hill, and arrived presently at a low, dingy place, the only peculiar feature of which was that it smelled of tar and had a great many people lounging about in it. It was, as I soon found out, a ‘shipping office,’—that is, a place where sailors engage themselves for a voyage. No sooner had we entered than my conductor led me up to a tall desk, and then, addressing himself to a sharp-faced man on the other side of it, he said something which I did not clearly comprehend. Then I was told to sign a paper, which I did without even reading a word of it, and then the red-faced man cried out in a very loud and startling tone of voice, ‘Bill!’ when somebody at once rolled off a bench, and scrambled to his feet. This was evidently the ‘Bill’ alluded to.
“When Bill had got upon his feet, he surveyed me for an instant, as I thought, with a very needlessly firm expression of countenance, and then started towards the door, saying to me as he set off, ‘This way, you lubber.’ I followed after him with much the same feelings which I had before when I followed the man with the red face, until we came down to where the ships were, and then we descended a sort of ladder, or stairs, at the foot of which I stumbled into a boat, and had like to have gone overboard into the water. At this, the people in the boat set up a great laugh at my clumsiness,—just as if I had ever been in a boat before, and could help being clumsy. To make the matter worse, I sat down in the wrong place, where one of the men was to pull an oar; and when, after being told to ‘get out of that,’ with no end of hard names, I asked what bench I should sit on, they all laughed louder than before, which still further overwhelmed me with confusion. I did not then know that what I called a ‘bench,’ they called a ‘thwart,’ or more commonly ‘thawt.’
“At length, after much abuse and more laughter, I managed to get into the forward part of the boat, which was called, as I found out, ‘the bows,’ where there was barely room to coil myself up, and the boat being soon pushed off from the wharf, the oars were put out, and then I heard an order to ‘give way,’ and then the oars splashed in the water, and I felt the boat moving; and now, as I realized that I was in truth leaving my home and native land, perhaps to see them no more forever, my heart sank heavy in my breast; and it was as much as I could do to keep the tears from pouring out of my eyes, as we glided on over the harbor. Indeed, my eyes were so bedimmed that I scarcely saw anything at all until we came around under the stern of a ship, when I heard the order ‘lay in your oars.’ Then one of the men caught hold of the end of a rope, which was thrown from the ship; and, the boat being made fast, we all scrambled up the ship’s side; and then I was hustled along to a hole in the forward part of the deck (having what looked like a box turned upside down over it), through which, now utterly bewildered, I descended, by means of a ladder, to a dark, damp, mouldy place, which was filled with the foul smells of tar and bilge-water, and thick with tobacco-smoke. This, they told me, was the ‘fo’casle,’ that is, forecastle, where lived the ‘crew,’ of which I became now painfully conscious that I was one. If there had been the slightest chance, I should have run away; but running away from a ship is a very different thing from running away from a farm.
