“All that, and maybe more, too; though, by your leave, commodore, we’ll drop the last title. I’m proud enough to call myself a Yankee, but my back is apt to get up when I hear an Englishman use the word. We are yet friends, and it may be well enough to continue so until some good comes of it to one or other of the parties.”
“I ask your pardon, Mr. Poke, and will not offend again. Have you circumnavigated the globe?”
Captain Poke snapped his fingers, in pure contempt of the simplicity of the question.
“Has the moon ever sailed round the ’arth! Look here, a moment, commodore”—he took from his pocket an apple, of which he had been munching half a-dozen during the walk, and held it up to view—“draw your lines which way you will on this sphere; crosswise or lengthwise, up or down, zigzag or parpendic’lar, and you will not find more traverses than I’ve worked about the old ball!”
“By land as well as by sea?”
“Why, as to the land, I’ve had my share of that, too; for it has been my hard fortune to run upon it, when a softer bed would have given a more quiet nap. This is just the present difficulty with me, for I am now tacking about among these Frenchmen in order to get afloat again, like an alligator floundering in the mud. I lost my schooner on the northeast coast of Russia—somewhere hereabouts,” pointing to the precise spot on the apple; “we were up there trading in skins-and finding no means of reaching home by the road I’d come, and smelling salt water down hereaway, I’ve been shaping my course westward for the last eighteen months, steering as near as might be directly athwart Europe and Asia; and here I am at last within two days’ run of Havre, which is, if I can get good Yankee planks beneath me once more, within some eighteen or twenty days’ run of home.”
“You allow me, then, to call the planks Yankee?”
“Call ’em what you please, commodore; though I should prefar to call ’em the ‘Debby and Dolly of Stunin’tun,’ to anything else, for that was the name of the craft I lost. Well, the best of us are but frail, and the longest-winded man is no dolphin to swim with his head under water!”
“Pray, Mr. Poke, permit me to ask where you learned to speak the English language with so much purity?”
“Stunin’tun—I never had a mouthful of schooling but what I got at home. It’s all homespun. I make no boast of scholarship; but as for navigating, or for finding my way about the ’arth, I’ll turn my back on no man, unless it be to leave him behind. Now we have people with us that think a great deal of their geometry and astronomies, but I hold to no such slender threads. My way is, when there is occasion to go anywhere, to settle it well in my mind as to the place, and then to make as straight a wake as natur’ will allow, taking little account of charts, which are as apt to put you wrong as right; and when they do get you into a scrape it’s a smasher! Depend on yourself and human natur’, is my rule; though I admit there is some accommodation in a compass, particularly in cold weather.”