‘James, or William, one of you push that plank forward, please;’ but put
the mate in his place and he would roar out: ‘Here, now, start that
gang-plank for’ard! Lively, now! WHAT’re you about! Snatch it!
SNATCH it! There! there! Aft again! aft again! don’t you hear me.
Dash it to dash! are you going to SLEEP over it! ‘VAST heaving.
‘Vast heaving, I tell you! Going to heave it clear astern?
WHERE’re you going with that barrel! FOR’ARD with it ‘fore I make
you swallow it, you dash-dash-dash-DASHED split between a tired
mud-turtle and a crippled hearse-horse!’
I wished I could talk like that.
When the soreness of my adventure with the mate had somewhat worn off,
I began timidly to make up to the humblest official connected
with the boat–the night watchman. He snubbed my advances
at first, but I presently ventured to offer him a new chalk pipe;
and that softened him. So he allowed me to sit with him by the big
bell on the hurricane deck, and in time he melted into conversation.
He could not well have helped it, I hung with such homage on his
words and so plainly showed that I felt honored by his notice.
He told me the names of dim capes and shadowy islands as we glided
by them in the solemnity of the night, under the winking stars,
and by and by got to talking about himself. He seemed
over-sentimental for a man whose salary was six dollars a week–
or rather he might have seemed so to an older person than I. But
I drank in his words hungrily, and with a faith that might
have moved mountains if it had been applied judiciously.
What was it to me that he was soiled and seedy and fragrant with gin?
What was it to me that his grammar was bad, his construction worse,
and his profanity so void of art that it was an element of weakness
rather than strength in his conversation? He was a wronged man,
a man who had seen trouble, and that was enough for me.
As he mellowed into his plaintive history his tears dripped
upon the lantern in his lap, and I cried, too, from sympathy.
He said he was the son of an English nobleman–either an earl
or an alderman, he could not remember which, but believed was both;
his father, the nobleman, loved him, but his mother hated him
from the cradle; and so while he was still a little boy he was sent
to ‘one of them old, ancient colleges’–he couldn’t remember which;
and by and by his father died and his mother seized the property
and ‘shook’ him as he phrased it. After his mother shook him,
members of the nobility with whom he was acquainted used their
influence to get him the position of ‘loblolly-boy in a ship;’
and from that point my watchman threw off all trammels of date
and locality and branched out into a narrative that bristled all
along with incredible adventures; a narrative that was so reeking
with bloodshed and so crammed with hair-breadth escapes and the most
engaging and unconscious personal villainies, that I sat speechless,
enjoying, shuddering, wondering, worshipping.
It was a sore blight to find out afterwards that he was
a low, vulgar, ignorant, sentimental, half-witted humbug,
an untraveled native of the wilds of Illinois, who had
absorbed wildcat literature and appropriated its marvels,
until in time he had woven odds and ends of the mess into
this yarn, and then gone on telling it to fledglings like me,
until he had come to believe it himself.
Chapter 6
A Cub-pilot’s Experience
WHAT with lying on the rocks four days at Louisville, and some
other delays, the poor old ‘Paul Jones’ fooled away about two
weeks in making the voyage from Cincinnati to New Orleans.
This gave me a chance to get acquainted with one of the pilots,
and he taught me how to steer the boat, and thus made the fascination
of river life more potent than ever for me.
It also gave me a chance to get acquainted with a youth who had taken
deck passage–more’s the pity; for he easily borrowed six dollars of me