UNDER SAIL
UNDER SAIL
I
It was at the time of New England's success and prosperity on the sea that young Captain Bradley took the ship Viking on her maiden voyage. In those days the building and sending forth of a ship was a community enterprise. One sharp November morning, the seaport that had seen her keel laid down the previous winter, had watched her rise on the stocks through the long days of summer, and had launched her successfully in the early fall, turned out to bid the Viking good-bye and Godspeed. Her crew was made up of home boys; Captain Bradley himself had been born and reared in the town. He had started out before the mast at the age of fifteen; now, at twenty-four, he had set his foot on the top rung of the nautical ladder. The town was proud of him. It was proud of all its boys; but especially of one who had shown such steadiness and ability as young Frank Bradley, the old man Jabez Bradley's son.
Perhaps Captain Bradley was a little proud of his own achievement. He could look back over a clean, hard record. In his nine years of seafaring he had not spared himself. Obey, work, learn, develop judgment and decision, be able to handle any job or meet any emergency; these principles had ruled his life, the sine qua non of old-fashioned seamanship. The reward had come unexpectedly. Captain Marshall, the leading shipowner of the town, whose fortune and influence lay behind the building of the Viking, had offered him the ship that summer as she stood on the stocks.
"I've had my eye on you for a long time, Frank" the old man had told him "I knew your father before you, and you're a chip off the same block. I guess you're just the man for my new ship"
But young Bradley had already received too many hard knocks, had learned too thoroughly how to discipline himself, to be unduly puffed up over success that came in the course of a deserved advancement. His real pride, from that moment, was in his ship. She was the finest square-rigger that had ever been launched in the town, a ship of eighteen hundred tons, crossing three skysail yards. Her lines were those of the moderate or commercial clipper. As he looked up from the quarter-deck at her lofty spars that November morning, while they waited for the tide—at the maze of freshly tarred rigging and new manila running gear, at the brightly varnished yards, at the furled sails that stretched from yardarm to yardarm like caps of snow—a thrill of genuine sentiment coursed through his blood. His ship—and he loved her already. Soon those white sails would be set to the breeze, soon those strong, slender masts would sway against the sky, bearing aloft their press of flattened canvas, soon those new ropes would snap and sing, settling into a taut network from deck to truck and from masthead to masthead, whose every strand would have its use and meaning. Soon the ship would surge beneath him—his to control, to guide, to learn, to play upon, as an organist brings out the tone and volume of his instrument. His trust, too, and his future; at moments like this responsibility weighed with crushing force. The greater the chance, the greater the danger; the greater the success, the greater the failure if things went wrong.
"I won't fail her!" he cried in a rush of emotion "We're going on together, the Viking and I. By God, I'll sail her as long as she stays afloat. She shall be my first and last command"
Suddenly he thought of the face that would be appearing every few minutes, on this morning of his departure, at the southern window of a house in town. He could see the house plainly, a high brick mansion facing the bay. "It will be only a year" he had told her the previous evening "Then I'll be back, dear, and we can be married, and you can go to sea with me. No more of this sailing and staying at home alone; it's a miserable business"
She had looked up at him bravely. "Yes, Frank, I know. But come back safely. Think what might happen in a year!" It was the cry of the sailor-woman. She had learned it from her mother—and from her father, who had been lost at sea with all hands on one voyage when his family had remained at home.