THE WANDERLUST AND THE WAR
I've been torpedoed three times—three ships gone down under me, and I'm still here. Didn't mind it much—I can swim; besides, I'm pretty used to the sea—first shipped when I was thirteen. My father and mother had sent me to a manual training school. I didn't like it. I was always playing hookey and finally ran away.
I didn't care where I went just so long as it was on a ship. I knew it was the sea I wanted. Before I decided, I used to hang around the docks. I liked the smell of the water and the big talk of the old salts who had been around the world a dozen times. They didn't stay cooped up in any four walls studying geography—they went out and lived it.
I knew enough about sailing to ship as boatswain. I was big for my age, so they took me on. It was a sand sucker going down to the mouth of the Mississippi.
The skipper took a kind of a shine to me. He saw I wanted to study navigation so he lent me books and let me go into the chart house and work. Arithmetic was hard for me, and spelling, too, but I'd copy out words I didn't know and take them to him. I guess he saw I was in earnest.
As a result I got my rate as able-bodied seaman when I was fifteen. I was in New Orleans then, and I saw a chance to ship on one of the Standard Oil boats bound for Tampico.
I was crazy to go to Mexico. There was a "Mex" on the old ship and he was always talking about the sunshine and free fruit in his country. When I told him where I was bound for he wanted to come, too, but my new skipper couldn't see him. "Mex" drank too much fire water for the good of one man.