I used to row about a good deal, when I had money enough to hire a boat—good boats were ten cents an hour—or when I thought I could depend upon the good nature of Al Soule, who had boats to let. I could not swim a stroke. It is not unusual for men who have much to do with the water to neglect to learn to swim. For a sailor, what use is it?—they ask. He is apt to be weighed down with sea boots and heavy clothes, and the weather is usually such when a man falls overboard that it is impossible to pick him up anyway. Mind you, these are not my own ideas I am giving. A whaleman needs to know how to swim, if he would save his life, and not depend too nearly upon others. It is a good thing for a boy to know, even if he is not going whaling. I would have a boy learn as soon as he can walk—or a girl either. It is the source of a great deal of pleasure.
It happened that the father of my best friend had a boat, a thirty-five-foot sloop. Naturally enough I was asked to go sailing in it whenever Jimmy went. Jimmy Appleby was the boy’s name. The sloop was rather old-fashioned, even for those days, and our going out in her was not all play. John Appleby found us of some help even when we were only ten, and we learned quickly to help in hoisting sail, and to tend sheets, and to reef, and to steer, and to do the other little odd jobs in connection with sailing a boat. I have gone out on the footropes of the bowsprit many a time when I was not turned twelve, and it had come on to blow, and she was plunging into a head sea—she pitched fearfully, with her shallow body, and a head sea just about stopped her—and I have been trying to stow the jib—not to furl it, just to tie it down any way—and holding on for my life, and have been plunged to my neck in one sea after another as she dived into them. That sloop was the champion high diver. I do not think that that experience ever imbued me with the desire to learn to swim. I was concerned only with holding on and getting my job done as soon as possible.
I have no clear recollection of my usual standing at school, except that I have the impression that I was apt to be in hot water from one cause or another. I must have done reasonably well in my studies, for I graduated from the Grammar School before my fifteenth birthday, but my active interests were not there. The memories that surge up and clamor to be let loose are those of the water-front, the wharves, the ships, the harbor, and the bay.
CHAPTER II
One morning toward the end of June in the year 1872 I was on the wharf at the foot of Hamilton Street, where I was most apt to be. My father and a gang of ship carpenters were busy at the bottom of a ship that was hove down there, and they were working on float stages along her side. I have forgotten the name of the ship. It was yet early, for in those days carpenters went to work at seven and stopped at six or thereabouts, and no man that I ever knew of the old class of artisans would leave his hammer in the air, but he would work a few minutes more, if that was necessary to finish what he was at, and they were a contented, happy lot—superior men, as a rule.
The merry sound of the mauls was not merry to my ears, for I was restless and discontented, I remember, although there was nothing that should have made me so. But I was just through school, and although my father and my mother had said nothing about my getting to work, and my father had done nothing about it—fathers were apt to do something about it in those days, getting their sons apprenticed to whatever trade seemed good to them, without much regard to the preference of the sons—although my father had done nothing about it, I say, I knew that I was expected to get to work with no more delay than was reasonable. Both my father and my mother were wise people, and they wanted me to have time and opportunity to look about me and decide for myself what I preferred to do, for my decision would involve my whole life, very probably, and greatly affect my happiness. When I had decided, I knew that I could depend upon my father to help me to the best of his ability; and that would be considerable, for my father was a man of some influence in his way, and especially in his trade. He had already helped my older brother Tom, who had chosen my father’s trade, a choice which greatly pleased my father at the time. Tom was at his ship carpentering then on one of the stages with the men, and he had served three years of his apprenticeship. My younger brother, Joshua, was already planning to go into the same trade, but my father was rather lukewarm about it. He did not say why, but I can guess now that he was beginning to see that it was a trade that was doomed to extinction.
Joshua had two years more at school, and before the two years were up he had changed his mind. He became a machinist, and went into structural steel work, and then into building steel ships. In 1917 both of my brothers were busy: Tom, at sixty-three, turning out wooden ships at Bath as fast as he could get the timber and men to put them together, and Joshua, at fifty-seven, turning out steel ships with a tremendous clatter in a sort of gigantic boiler-works. I could not stand Josh’s shipyard, while I enjoyed being in Tom’s. I enjoyed it better than Tom enjoyed having me there, for they were very busy, but the men were all old men and they could not be driven beyond a certain pace; but they came to the yard at four o’clock of a summer morning.
On that morning in June, 1872, I was making my choice, although I was not aware of it, but knew only that I felt discontented and uneasy and rather wanted to fight somebody. If Jimmy Appleby had been there I should probably have fought him—we fought often, without rancor, and without a decision—and the whole course of my life would have been changed. But Jimmy’s father had put him to work, and he was not there, and there was nothing for me to do but to wander about the wharf, watching the men swinging their mauls; and I could not see much of that, except at the bow and the stern, for the vessel was hove down over the wharf, and her hull hid them. From the other side of the dock I should have had a fine view, but I saw it so often that I did not care much for it, and I suppose I did not think of it, being taken up with my restless state of mind, which impelled me to and fro. It sent me to the end of the wharf, where I stood upon the stringpiece and looked down into the water just below. It was of an unhealthy, greenish cast, not like the green of the sea. It looked filthy, but I saw an immense school of little fish nosing around the piles of the wharf.
A whaler was at one of the Fairhaven wharves, and a number of other boats were scattered along the water-front, most of them small. I was about to look farther down toward the ferry slip and railroad station, but there lay a whaler in the stream, all ready to start; probably waiting for some of her crew, or for her captain to get his papers at the Custom House. I knew the vessel. It was the Clearchus. She had been fitting for some time, at the wharf next above the one I was on, and I had watched the caulkers, the carpenters and the riggers busy at her, each in their turn. The desire must have been conceived and born and got well grown without my being aware of it until that minute, but I knew it then. I looked at her lying there on the water that was ruffled under a southwest breeze, some great pennant flying at her masthead—I suppose it had her name on it, or the name of her owners, for I know it was white with a blue border and some blue letters in the centre—and there was not wind enough to keep it out straight enough for me to read the letters, but it would roll up and fall nearly straight down, and then unroll lazily and whip out to its length for just an instant, and drop and roll up again before I could make out a single one. She must have been waiting for her crew, for I saw only two men aboard of her, and they were doing nothing, but leaned upon the rail, which was at the height of their shoulders.
I had among my most treasured possessions two little books, in paper-covered boards, “The Eventful History of the Mutiny of the Bounty” and “Lives and Voyages of Early Navigators, with a History of the Bucaniers.” They could not be called new books even then, in 1872, for they were published by the Harpers in 1832 and 1833. They are beside me at this moment, the paper-covered boards torn and stained, and the pages dirty and much thumbed. Some of that thumbing had already been done, for I had found the tales of adventure in the books absorbingly interesting. No doubt I was thinking, as I gazed at the Clearchus over the smiling waters of the harbor, of that huge black savage of the Patagones who came capering and singing down to the shore to greet Magellan, his face painted red and yellow; or of Otaheite and its middle-aged queen—if that is what she was—a chiefess separated from her husband, and languishing for Wallis. Although of course I knew better, I always thought of those coasts and seas as they were in the times of Magellan and Wallis. I had an intense desire to visit them. But I have no clear recollection of what I was thinking of. I must have given a thought to Jimmy Appleby. I know that I stayed there, wandering impatiently to and fro, or standing at the stringpiece watching the Clearchus, waiting for twelve o’clock and praying that her captain might have trouble in filling his crew at the last minute.