Lying here about Thanksgiving time I was musing on the mizzen mast, when I fell asleep, but my musing continued. The mizzen mast, once a live tree, seemed now to be a living person; it appeared to be soliloquizing, though now and then it seemed to be addressing an audience, and again it was whispering to me. I fancied it saying thus:—
“I was once a shoot which a fox could tread down; then a sapling. I grew on the side of a hill in the Aroostook region. The Indian names of my native lakes and rivers have been for so long a time disused that I cannot now distinguish between the Chern-quas-a-ban-to-cook, the Ah-mo-gen-ga-mook and “the far-winding Skoo-doo-wab-skook-sis.” Once these names were familiar to me. Now I wander with you who sail with us in the wilderness of ocean. You sympathize with me, perhaps, in my exile from the stillness of nature. You are tempted to fancy me contrasting my rough life with the silence in which I grew. Years passed over me and my kindred in the untrodden forest; what ornithology I might describe; what songs I might recite; tell what eagles visited my top; what rare plumage is remembered as having showed itself in my foliage. Squirrels gambolled on my limbs, woodpeckers ransacked my sides for their prey. Many a woodbine has climbed into me, lived its short life, and turned crimson under the first touch of frost.
One day men came beneath me with axes, measured my girth, looked up to my top. Great was my fall. I lay on the ground, my top was brought to a level with my root. I became a mere trunk, was borne to the shipyard, my foot set in the hold of this ship then new, and soon I was made ready for my vesture of canvas in place of buds and blossoms; I began a new life among the winds on the seas. Now I am sailing about the world; I have been many times round Cape Horn, am familiar with the lightnings off the River Plate, have compared the gales around the Cape of Good Hope with those of the Horn; know the latitudes where the trade winds begin and where they cease. I am a favorite resort of passengers in a sailing ship. I stand aloof from the main deck where work is all the time going on and there is much passing to and fro. The house,” (here it seemed to be addressing an audience) “which is the raised covering of the cabin, is there, extending perhaps one third the whole length of the ship, affording on its top a place for promenading. From me swings the spanker, a large fore and aft sail, helping the wind to balance the ship and much of the time throwing a shade; and there is almost always a current of air stirring beneath it. Under me and in the spanker’s shade the passengers spend a large part of every pleasant day reading, writing, conversing, enjoying the ocean scenes. Every pleasant evening is sure to gather them under me. My length runs down through the forward cabin where I am cased in. There the preacher or reader stands, with a congregation of about thirty. I am therefore a witness of a large part of a passenger’s experience at sea. His impressions and reflections, his reading, his writing, his conversation, his journal, may properly be dated under me.
It might be supposed” (here it seemed to relapse into soliloquy,) “that the shipbuilder had ideality playing about him when he placed me, a tree of the wood, in the most interesting position, to be a centre of social life, a shelter to meditative hours, identifying myself with the choicest moments of sea life, retaining a magnetism which memory is destined to feel in coming years. Such is my origin and early history, and such the associations, in memory, with the mast under which most of the impressions to be recorded here, no doubt, by one of our passengers will be received. If his readers (should he have any) shall be so happy as to find themselves under a mizzen mast at sea, let it shed the healing, healthful influence on them which seem to be descending on the sleeper under my shade.”
This last remark, seeming to be such a personal allusion to myself, had the effect to startle me, and I roused myself, surprised at having been asleep, and I looked up to the mizzen mast to see who was speaking. It was the mate who that moment was saying, “Set the crojick;”[1] whereupon four sailors came to the belaying-pins where my hammock swung and began to loosen the buntlines. I went below to prepare myself for the Thanksgiving dinner.
THANKSGIVING.
We kept Thanksgiving, it having been appointed before we sailed, so that we knew the day. We dined at four, instead of our usual hour (half past twelve), and so we were at table part of the time with those at home. Our dinner was:—1. Oyster soup; 2. Boiled salmon and scalloped oysters; 8. Roast fowl; 4. Huckleberry pudding; 5. Apple pies of dried apple. Now, should any one envy us, or should his mouth water at such a bill of fare, let him know that oysters and salmon from tin cans are not the same as those fresh from Faneuil-Hall Market.
SATURDAY DINNER.
We may be said to have had a Thanksgiving dinner once a week. But the principal dish was not fowl. Far from it. It was salt fish; but probably no better meal from this article of food is ever served on shore. With every desirable vegetable, and some sparkling champagne cider which a thoughtful friend had placed among our stores, we were rivals with Ruth when she sat beside the reapers of Boaz in the harvest field, and he reached her the parched corn “and she did eat and was sufficed and left.” For dessert we had at that meal “roly-poly,” which is thin flour paste spread with apple sauce, then rolled together and boiled; this with sweet sauce flavored with vanilla made us for the time imagine ourselves on shore. We entertained each other at these feasts with the choicest anecdotes, which our repasts disposed us to call to mind and to relish; for example, instances of Mr. Choate’s ingenuity, as, when defending a sea captain charged with cruelty to his crew, he undertook to show that so far from being cruel he was eminently considerate, so much so that instead of searching the law books to find out, as the witnesses alleged, what punishments were allowable and could be inflicted with impunity, he was only guarding himself against the excessive use of legitimate discipline; “he read the books with paternal yearnings; he was a mild but firm parent;” and instead of keeping his crew on vile trash, tasteless, sometime loathsome, “think, gentlemen of the jury, of applying such words to the nutritious lob scouse and the succulent dandy funk!” How could the jury help saying as they presently did, Not guilty?