I
My first recollection of life is one that my mother insisted I could not possibly have, because I was only eighteen months old at the time. Yet there it is in my mind: a room where I have been left in the care of a relative while my parents are taking a trip. I see a little old lady, black-clad, in a curtained room; I know where the bed is located, and the oilstove on which the cooking is done, and the thrills of exploring a new place. Be sure that children know far more than we give them credit for; I hear fond parents praising their precious darlings, and I wince, noting how the darlings are drinking in every word. Always in my childhood I would think: “How silly these grownups are! And how easy to outwit!”
I was a toddler when one day my mother told me not to throw a piece of rag into a drain. “Paper dissolves, but rag doesn’t.” I treasured up this wisdom and, visiting my Aunt Florence, remarked with great impressiveness, “It is all right to throw paper into the drain, because it dissolves, but you mustn’t throw rags in, because they don’t dissolve.” Wonder, mingled with amusement, appeared on the face of my sweet and gentle relative. My first taste of glory.
Baltimore, Maryland, was the place, and I remember boardinghouse and lodginghouse rooms. We never had but one room at a time, and I slept on a sofa or crossways at the foot of my parents’ bed; a custom that caused me no discomfort that I can recall. One adventure recurred; the gaslight would be turned on in the middle of the night, and I would start up, rubbing my eyes, and join in the exciting chase for bedbugs. They came out in the dark and scurried into hiding when they saw the light; so they must be mashed quickly. For thrills like this, wealthy grown-up children travel to the heart of Africa on costly safaris. The more bugs we killed, the fewer there were to bite us the rest of the night, which I suppose is the argument of the lion hunters also. Next morning, the landlady would come, and corpses in the washbasin or impaled on pins would be exhibited to her; the bed would be taken to pieces and “corrosive sublimate” rubbed into the cracks with a chicken feather.
My position in life was a singular one, and only in later years did I understand it. When I went to call on my father’s mother, a black-clad, frail little lady, there might be only cold bread and dried herring for Sunday-night supper, but it would be served with exquisite courtesy and overseen by a great oil painting of my grandfather in naval uniform—with that same predatory beak that I have carried through life and have handed on to my son. Grandfather Sinclair had been a captain in the United States Navy and so had his father before him, and ancestors far back had commanded in the British Navy. The family had lived in Virginia, and there had been slaves and estates. But the slaves had been set free, and the homestead burned, and the head of the family drowned at sea in the last year of the Civil War. His descendants, four sons and two daughters, lived in embarrassing poverty, but with the consciousness, at every moment of their lives, that they were persons of great consequence and dignity.
II
Being interested in the future rather than the past, I always considered ancestors a bore. All I knew about mine were a few anecdotes my mother told me. Then my friend Albert Mordell, who was writing a paper for a historical magazine, came upon my great-grandfather. He wrote me: “The life of your ancestors is a history of the American navy.” It amused him to discover that a notorious “red” had such respectable forefathers, and he had a manuscript called The Fighting Sinclairs, which may someday be published. Meanwhile, since every biography is required to have ancestors, I quote a summary that Mr. Mordell kindly supplied. Those not interested in ancestors are permitted to skip.
Commodore Arthur Sinclair, the great-grandfather of Upton, fought in the first American naval battle after the Revolution, he being a midshipman on the Constellation, when it fought the Insurgente, in 1798. He was also in the latter part of the war with Tripoli. He was on the Argus in the first cruise of the War of 1812, and captured many prizes. He fought in the leading battle of Lake Ontario under Commander Chauncey. The battle was between the Pike, on which he was captain, and the Wolf. He also a little later had command of the entire squadron on the upper lakes. He commanded the Congress in its cruise to South America in 1818, carrying the commissioners to investigate conditions, and on its cruise was born the Monroe Doctrine, for the commissioner’s report led to the promulgation of the Doctrine. He also founded a naval school at Norfolk. When he died in 1831, the flags of all the ships were ordered at half-mast, and mourning was ordered worn by the officers for thirty days. He was an intimate friend of practically all the naval heroes in the War of 1812.
He had three sons, Arthur, George T., and Dr. William B., all of whom became officers in the old navy and resigned in 1861 to join the Confederacy. Arthur, who is Upton’s grandfather, was with Perry in Japan in the early fifties. He also commanded a ship in the late fifties—the Vandalia—and was compelled to destroy a village of cannibals on an island in the Pacific.
His brother, George T., was in the famous voyage of the Potomac around the world in the early thirties, which went to attack a town in the Malay Islands for some ravages upon an American ship. He also was with Commander Elliott, the Lake Erie hero, on the Constitution in the Mediterranean. He was in the famous Wilkes exploring expedition around 1840, when they discovered the Antarctic continent; and, like the rest of the officers, he had trouble with Wilkes, whom they had court-martialed. He also served in the African Squadron hunting slavers in the early fifties, and later in the home squadron in the Wabash under Commander Paulding. It was on this ship that the famous filibuster, William Walker, who made himself dictator of Nicaragua, surrendered to Paulding.