The Captains are nearly all gone now. Little trace of the ship-yards remains, and even the wharves from which the Indiamen sailed have rotted, and been replaced by the lumber and coal wharves of to-day; but all through the countryside you come on touches of the shipping days, and of the East, as startling as a sudden fragrance of sandalwood in some old cabinet. At one house I know there is a collection of butterflies and moths of the Far East, with two cream-colored Atlas moths eight inches from tip to tip. At another there is a set of rice-paper paintings of the orders of the Japanese nobility and gentry, with full insignia of state robes, which ought to be in a museum; and the parlor of a third neighbor, the gracious widow of a sea-captain, has, besides carved teak furniture and Chinese embroideries, a set of carved ivory chessmen fit for a palace. The king and queen stand over eight inches high. The castles are true elephant-and-castles, and the pawns are tiny mounted and turbaned warriors, brandishing scimitars. The figures stand on carved open-work balls-within-balls, four deep—“Laborious Orient ivory, sphere in sphere”—as delicate as frost-work. This set was bought in Shanghai, when the foreign compound still had its guard of soldiers, and the Chinese thronged the doorways to stare at the “white devils.”
The great gold-figured lacquer cabinet, the pride of one of our statelier houses, was brought from China a hundred years ago, by a young Captain Jameson, who was coming home for his wedding. He sailed again with his bride immediately after the marriage, and their ship never was heard of. The cabinet was sold, and then sold again, till it finally reached the setting which fits it so well.
You find lacquered Indian teapoys, Eastern porcelains, shells and corals from all round the world far out in scattered farmhouses; and farm-hands are still summoned to meals by a blast on a conch-shell, a queer note, not unlike the belling of an elk.
Beside the actual china and embroideries and carvings, something of the character bred in the seafaring days has spread, like nourishing silt, through our countryside. The Captains were grave, quiet men. They had power of command, and keenness in emergency. Contact with many people of many nations quickened their perceptions and gave them charming manners; but more than this, there was something large-minded and tranquil about them. All their lives they had to deal with an element stronger than themselves. The next day’s work could never be planned or calculated on, and something of the detached quality which comes from dealing with the sea, a long and simple perspective towards human affairs, became part of them.
An expression of married life, so beautiful that I can never forget it, came from the lips of the widow of one of our sea-captains, a little old lady, now over eighty, who lives alone in a tiny brick cottage (where she has accomplished the almost unique feat of making English ivy flourish in our sub-arctic climate). She wears a wonderful cap, and fills her house with quilts and cushions of silk patch-work which would make a kaleidoscope blink. I had an errand to her about a poorer neighbor, one Thanksgiving time. Her house is an outlying one, and I remember how the farm lights, scattered all about our river hills, shone in the soft autumn evening.
Her bright warm kitchen was coziness itself, with a shiny stove, full to the brim with red coals, and a big lamp. She sat with her cat on her knee, sewing on an orange and green cushion, made in queer little puffs, and she jumped up, dropping thimble, and spectacles, in her warm-hearted welcome. After my errand, we fell into talk, about “Cap’n,” and their long voyaging together. That was when the Captains as a matter of course took their wives, and often their children, with them, keeping a cow on board for the family’s use, and sometimes chickens and pigs. Many babies who grew to be sturdy citizens were born on the high seas in those days.
She told about long peaceful days, slipping through the Trades, and about gales, but mostly about china and pottery, for this was their hobby, almost their passion. They took inconvenient journeys of great length to see new potteries, and hoped at last to see all the sea-board china factories, in East and West. She showed me her treasures, pretty bits of Sevres, majolica, Doulton, and Wedgewood, all standing together, and among them an alabaster model of the leaning tower of Pisa (Pysa, she called it). At last, with a lowered voice, she spoke of the worst danger they had ever been through, a typhoon in the Bay of Bengal. The ship lay dismasted, and the waves broke over her helplessness. She was lifted up and dashed down like a log, and every soul on board expected only to perish.
“Cap’n come downstairs to our cabin:
“Oh, Mary,” he says, “if only you was to home! I could die easy if only you was to home!”
“I be to home!” I says. “If I had the wings of a dove, I wouldn’t be anywheres but where I be!”