We are having the first premonition of port. The sailors are employed washing the white paint with potash in the way of spring cleaning. Every rope in the standing rigging is to be tarred and the ship is to be painted inside and outside, so that when she enters port she will look as new as when she left home. You may wonder how a vessel can be painted outside at sea. Here in the Pacific there are days when the weather and the swell of the sea allow staging to be lashed to the side, stern, and bows, and men move safely from point to point with brushes.
THROWING MANUSCRIPTS OVERBOARD.
When first I began to throw writings overboard I was careful to tear them into small pieces, supposing that they might be picked up. I soon learned that this was useless. The captain seeing me do it told me that he would be willing to throw any writing into the sea fearless of its being found and read. In a very little while the water would reduce it to pulp, the incessant motion would destroy it, and even if it did not, the chance of its being picked up or washed ashore would be many millions to one of its ever coming into anybody’s hand. Among the countless things which we had seen afloat we never saw at sea a piece of writing. After this I took some old manuscripts on deck and threw them overboard, leaf by leaf. A sermon which one of the children at home had written for me in pencil from dictation I had copied in ink and the original was now useless. Mother Cary’s chickens flew down upon the pages as they one after another settled on the water, and finally a large albatross came, lighted on the water, watched the leaves as they floated along and tried to eat one. We little imagined, that rainy afternoon as we sat on the piazza at Milton, that the leaves which one who may read this held in her hand would pass under the eye of a Cape Horn albatross on the Pacific Ocean.
BURNING TAR BARRELS.
When the sailors have used up a barrel of tar, they have sport in putting kerosene in the barrel, lighting it, and dropping it to leeward. It blazes, vehemently, and while we sail away from it we cannot persuade ourselves that it is not moving rapidly from us. The swell of the sea causes it to disappear now and then, rising up occasionally very far astern. Some on shore have thought that this might be a false light to vessels. Sailors are too well accustomed to the practice to be deceived by it; but apart from this, in mid ocean there is no danger of mistaking it for a light house.—Having spoken of dropping the barrel to leeward rather than to windward where it might be blown against the ship, I am reminded of a prudential maxim at sea: Never throw anything overboard to windward but 1. Ashes; 2. Hot water.
TEN THOUSAND MILES FROM HOME.
We have sailed over ten thousand miles, and have five thousand more to sail before we come to “Frisco.” It seems strange to think of arriving there by land in ten days from home, while we have been from Oct. 26th to Jan. 12th, seventy-eight days, on our way. If we were in haste to reach our port this difference of speed would try our patience. As it is we are grateful; it seems painful to be whirled along in ten days, night and day, instead of coming at our leisure unmindful of time, willing to be where we are, indefinitely, except that we sympathize with the captain’s desire to make a short voyage, and feeling willing also to shorten this part of our way knowing that we shall have sufficient experience of the sea by the time that we have belted the globe.
A SAILOR AT HIS MEAL.
Seeing a sailor go to the galley with his tin pan, receive his allowance from the cook, take it out on deck, seat himself on a spar, I was reminded of his limited supply of table cutlery. But in the first place he has no table. He holds his pan in his hand, lays his biscuit on the spar, his drink along side of it, takes his piece of potato, turnip, cabbage with his finger, serves his bone in the same way, and if the piece of meat which has fallen to his lot needs to be divided he feels for his sheath knife which he carries all the time in its sheath behind him, holds the meat with one hand and makes the sheath knife play the part both of knife and fork. He wipes his fingers on his pants. Artificial and useless do many things appear at sea, as, for example, forks, napkins, and, of course, napkin rings, doilies, sugar bowls, slop bowls, saucers, ladles, dessert spoons; in short the things absolutely indispensable at a sailor’s meal could be counted on the fingers of one hand, omitting the thumb and little finger. Yet there are frequently young men in a crew who have been used to the numberless luxuries of life. I had a talk yesterday with the son of a minister; early in the voyage his fine face attracted me. He has eleven brothers and sisters at home. He had a desire to see the world; was weary of the shop, of the few associates in a country village. This is his first long voyage. He makes light of privations and dangers; says that almost all the things which he used to have on the table at home would now seem superfluities. He would need experience to make them necessary. He would feel toward some of them, no doubt, as a sailor did in a boarding house who spit on the floor, which the waiter perceiving kept pushing a spittoon nearer to him; till at last the sailor annoyed by it said, “If you keep pushing that thing so near to me I shall be in danger of spitting in it.”