A thousand deaths by Jack London

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