mizzen-topmast and found that it must strike somewhere near the
fore-rigging on the port side. Even as I did this, the radiance
vanished. The driving clouds of the breaking gale were
alternately thickening and thinning before the face of the moon,
but never exposing the face of the moon. And when the clouds were
at their thinnest, it was a very dim radiance that the moon was
able to make. I watched and waited. The next time the clouds
thinned I looked for’ard, and there was the shadow of the topmast,
long and attenuated, wavering and lurching on the deck and against
the rigging.
This was my first ghost. Once again have I seen a ghost. It
proved to be a Newfoundland dog, and I don’t know which of us was
the more frightened, for I hit that Newfoundland a full right-arm
swing to the jaw. Regarding the Bricklayer’s ghost, I will say
that I never mentioned it to a soul on board. Also, I will say
that in all my life I never went through more torment and mental
suffering than on that lonely night-watch on the Sophie
Sutherland.
(TO THE EDITOR.–This is not a fiction. It is a true page out of
my life.)
A CLASSIC OF THE SEA
Introduction to “Two Years before the Mast.”
Once in a hundred years is a book written that lives not alone for
its own century but which becomes a document for the future
centuries. Such a book is Dana’s. When Marryat’s and Cooper’s
sea novels are gone to dust, stimulating and joyful as they have
been to generations of men, still will remain “Two Years Before
the Mast.”
Paradoxical as it may seem, Dana’s book is the classic of the sea,
not because there was anything extraordinary about Dana, but for
the precise contrary reason that he was just an ordinary, normal
man, clear-seeing, hard-headed, controlled, fitted with adequate
education to go about the work. He brought a trained mind to put
down with untroubled vision what he saw of a certain phase of
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work-a-day life. There was nothing brilliant nor fly-away about
him. He was not a genius. His heart never rode his head. He was
neither overlorded by sentiment nor hag-ridden by imagination.
Otherwise he might have been guilty of the beautiful exaggerations
in Melville’s “Typee” or the imaginative orgies in the latter’s
“Moby Dick.” It was Dana’s cool poise that saved him from being
spread-eagled and flogged when two of his mates were so treated;
it was his lack of abandon that prevented him from taking up
permanently with the sea, that prevented him from seeing more than
one poetical spot, and more than one romantic spot on all the
coast of Old California. Yet these apparent defects were his
strength. They enabled him magnificently to write, and for all
time, the picture of the sea-life of his time.
Written close to the middle of the last century, such has been the
revolution worked in man’s method of trafficking with the sea,
that the life and conditions described in Dana’s book have passed
utterly away. Gone are the crack clippers, the driving captains,
the hard-bitten but efficient foremast hands. Remain only
crawling cargo tanks, dirty tramps, greyhound liners, and a
sombre, sordid type of sailing ship. The only records broken to-
day by sailing vessels are those for slowness. They are no longer
built for speed, nor are they manned before the mast by as sturdy
a sailor stock, nor aft the mast are they officered by sail-
carrying captains and driving mates.
Speed is left to the liners, who run the silk, and tea, and
spices. Admiralty courts, boards of trade, and underwriters frown
upon driving and sail-carrying. No more are the free-and-easy,
dare-devil days, when fortunes were made in fast runs and lucky
ventures, not alone for owners, but for captains as well. Nothing
is ventured now. The risks of swift passages cannot be abided.
Freights are calculated to the last least fraction of per cent.
The captains do no speculating, no bargain-making for the owners.
The latter attend to all this, and by wire and cable rake the
ports of the seven seas in quest of cargoes, and through their
agents make all business arrangements.
It has been learned that small crews only, and large carriers
only, can return a decent interest on the investment. The
inevitable corollary is that speed and spirit are at a discount.
There is no discussion of the fact that in the sailing merchant
marine the seamen, as a class, have sadly deteriorated. Men no
longer sell farms to go to sea. But the time of which Dana writes
was the heyday of fortune-making and adventure on the sea–with
the full connotation of hardship and peril always attendant.
It was Dana’s fortune, for the sake of the picture, that the
Pilgrim was an average ship, with an average crew and officers,
and managed with average discipline. Even the HAZING that took
place after the California coast was reached, was of the average
sort. The Pilgrim savoured not in any way of a hell-ship. The
captain, while not the sweetest-natured man in the world, was only
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an average down-east driver, neither brilliant nor slovenly in his
seamanship, neither cruel nor sentimental in the treatment of his
men. While, on the one hand, there were no extra liberty days, no
delicacies added to the meagre forecastle fare, nor grog or hot
coffee on double watches, on the other hand the crew were not
chronically crippled by the continual play of knuckle-dusters and
belaying pins. Once, and once only, were men flogged or ironed–a
very fair average for the year 1834, for at that time flogging on
board merchant vessels was already well on the decline.
The difference between the sea-life then and now can be no better
epitomised than in Dana’s description of the dress of the sailor
of his day:
“The trousers tight around the hips, and thence hanging long and
loose around the feet, a superabundance of checked shirt, a low-
crowned, well-varnished black hat, worn on the back of the head,
with half a fathom of black ribbon hanging over the left eye, and
a peculiar tie to the black silk neckerchief.”
Though Dana sailed from Boston only three-quarters of a century
ago, much that is at present obsolete was then in full sway. For
instance, the old word LARBOARD was still in use. He was a member
of the LARBOARD watch. The vessel was on the LARBOARD tack. It
was only the other day, because of its similarity in sound to
starboard, that LARBOARD was changed to PORT. Try to imagine “All
larboard bowlines on deck!” being shouted down into the forecastle
of a present day ship. Yet that was the call used on the Pilgrim
to fetch Dana and the rest of his watch on deck.
The chronometer, which is merely the least imperfect time-piece
man has devised, makes possible the surest and easiest method by
far of ascertaining longitude. Yet the Pilgrim sailed in a day
when the chronometer was just coming into general use. So little
was it depended upon that the Pilgrim carried only one, and that
one, going wrong at the outset, was never used again. A navigator
of the present would be aghast if asked to voyage for two years,
from Boston, around the Horn to California, and back again,
without a chronometer. In those days such a proceeding was a
matter of course, for those were the days when dead reckoning was
indeed something to reckon on, when running down the latitude was
a common way of finding a place, and when lunar observations were
direly necessary. It may be fairly asserted that very few
merchant officers of to-day ever make a lunar observation, and
that a large percentage are unable to do it.
“Sept. 22nd., upon coming on deck at seven bells in the morning we
found the other watch aloft throwing water upon the sails, and
looking astern we saw a small, clipper-built brig with a black
hull heading directly after us. We went to work immediately, and
put all the canvas upon the brig which we could get upon her,
rigging out oars for studding-sail yards; and contined wetting
down the sails by buckets of water whipped up to the mast-head . .
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. She was armed, and full of men, and showed no colours.”
The foregoing sounds like a paragraph from “Midshipman Easy” or
the “Water Witch,” rather than a paragraph from the soberest,
faithfullest, and most literal chronicle of the sea ever written.
And yet the chase by a pirate occurred, on board the brig Pilgrim,
on September 22nd, 1834–something like only two generations ago.
Dana was the thorough-going type of man, not overbalanced and
erratic, without quirk or quibble of temperament. He was
efficient, but not brilliant. His was a general all-round