In the Salem of his time, however, Hawthorne perceived little more than a melancholy process of decay, and a dusky background for romances of a century more remote. It would seem as if he found no compelling charm in the thickly clustered memories that linked the port with its former greatness on the sea. Some of the old shipmasters were in the Custom House service with him and he wrote of them as derelicts “who after being tost on every sea and standing sturdily against life’s tempestuous blast had finally drifted into this quiet nook where with little to disturb them except the periodical terrors of a Presidential election, they one and all acquired a new lease of life.”
They were simple, brave, elemental men, hiding no tortuous problems of conscience, very easy to analyze and catalogue, and perhaps not apt, for this reason, to make a strong appeal to the genius of the author of “The Scarlet Letter.”
Custom House document with signature of Nathaniel Hawthorne as surveyor
Page from the illustrated log of the Eolus. Her captain drew such pictures as these of the ships he sighted at sea
“They spent a good deal of time asleep in their accustomed corners,” he also wrote of them, “with their chairs tilted back against the wall; awaking, however, once or twice in a forenoon to bore one another with the several thousandth repetition of old sea stories and mouldy jokes that had grown to be passwords and counter-signs among them.”
One of the sea journals or logs of Captain Nathaniel Hathorne,[2] father of the author, possesses a literary interest in that its title page was lettered by the son when a lad of sixteen. With many an ornamental flourish the inscription runs:
Nathaniel Hathorne’s
Book—1820—Salem.
A Journal of a Passage from Bengall to America
In the Ship America of
Salem, 1798.
This is almost the only volume of salty flavored narrative to which Nathaniel Hawthorne may be said to have contributed, although he was moved to pay this tribute to his stout-hearted forebears: