“O yes, that’s it,” went on the Captain,—“frightened half to death; that’s sure enough, and no mistake; and so would you have been, my lad, if you had been in my place. But I don’t think I’ll tell you anything more about my miserable life on board that ship. Hadn’t we better skip that?”
“O no, no!” cried the children all together, “don’t skip anything.”
“Well, then,” said the obliging Captain, glad enough to see how much his young friends were interested, “if you will know what sort of a miserable time young sailors have of it, I’ll tell you; and let me tell you, too, there’s many a one of them has just as bad a time as I had.
“In the first place, you see, they gave me such wretched food to eat, all out of a rusty old tin plate, and I was all the time so sick from the motion of the vessel as we went tossing up and down on the rough sea, and from the tobacco-smoke of the forecastle, and all the other bad smells, that I could hardly eat a mouthful, so that I was half ready to die of starvation; and, as if this was not misery enough, the sailors were all the time, when in the forecastle, quarrelling like so many wild beasts in a cage; and as two of them had pistols, and all of them had knives, I was every minute in dread lest they should take it into their heads to murder each other, and kill me by mistake. So, I can tell you, being a young sailor-boy isn’t what it’s cracked up to be.”
“O, wasn’t it dreadful!” said Alice, “to be sick all the time, and nobody there to take care of you.”
“Well, I wasn’t so sick, maybe, after all,” answered the Captain, smiling,—“only sea-sick, you know; and then, for the credit of the ship, I’ll say that, if you had nice plum-pudding every day for dinner, you would think it horrid stuff if you were sea-sick.”
“But don’t people die when they are sea-sick?” inquired Alice.
“Not often, child,” answered the Captain, playfully; “but they feel all the time as if they were going to, and when they don’t feel that way, they feel as if they’d like to.
“However, I was miserable enough in more ways than one; for to these troubles was added a great distress of mind, caused by the sport the sailors made of me, and also by remorse of conscience for having run away from home, and thus got myself into this great scrape. Then, to make the matter worse,—as if it was not bad enough already,—a violent storm set upon us in the dark night. You could never imagine how the ship rolled about over the waves. Sometimes they swept clear across the ship, as if threatening our lives; and all the time the creaking of the masts, the roaring of the wind through the rigging, and the lashing of the seas, filled my ears with such awful sounds that I was in the greatest terror, and I thought that every moment would certainly be my last. Then, as if still further to add to my fears, one of the sailors told me, right in the midst of the storm, that we were bound for the Northern seas, to catch whales and seals. So now, what little scrap of courage I had left took instant flight, and I fell at once to praying (which I am ashamed to say I had never in my life done before), fully satisfied as I was that, if this course did not save me, nothing would. In truth, I believe I should actually have died of fright had not the storm come soon to an end; and indeed it was many days before I got over thinking that I should, in one way or another, have a speedy passage into the next world, and therefore I did not much concern myself with where we were going in this. Hence I grew to be very unpopular with the people in the ship, and learned next to nothing. I was always in somebody’s way, was always getting hold of the wrong rope, and was in truth all the time doing mischief rather than good. So I was set down as a hopeless idiot, and was considered proper game for everybody. The sailors tormented me in every possible way.
“One day (knowing how green I was) they set to talking about fixing up a table in the forecastle, and one of them said, ‘What a fine thing it would be if the mate (who turned out to be the red-faced man I had met in the street, and who took me to the shipping-office) would only let us have the keelson.’ So this being agreed to in a very serious manner (which I hadn’t wit enough to see was all put on), I was sent to carry their petition. Seeing the mate on the quarter-deck, I approached, and in a very respectful manner thus addressed him: ‘If you please, sir, I come to ask if you will let us have the keelson for a table?’ Whereupon the mate turned fiercely upon me, and, to my great astonishment, roared out at the very top of his voice, ‘What! what’s that you say? Say that again, will you?’ So I repeated the question as he had told me to,—feeling all the while as if I should like the deck to open and swallow me up. I had scarcely finished before I perceived that the mate was growing more and more angry; if, indeed, anything could possibly exceed the passion he was in already. His face was many shades redder than it was before,—and, indeed, it was so very red that it looked as if it might shine in the dark. His hat fell off, as it seemed to me, in consequence of his stiff red hair rising up on end, and he raised his voice so loud that it sounded more like the howl of a wild beast than anything I could compare it to. ‘You lubber!’ he shouted. ‘You villain!’ he shrieked; ‘you, you!’—and here it seemed as if he was choking with hard words which he couldn’t get rid of,—‘you come here to play tricks on me! You try to fool me! I’ll teach you!’—and, seizing hold of the first thing he could lay his hands on (I did not stop to see what it was, but wheeled about greatly terrified), he let fly at me with such violence that I am sure I must have been finished off for certain had I not quickly dodged my head. When I returned to the forecastle, the sailors had a great laugh at me, and they called me ever afterwards ‘Jack Keelson.’ The keelson, you must know, is a great mass of wood down in the very bottom of the ship, running the whole length of it; but how should I have learned that?