having thus met only with rebuff and disaster in the places where it seemed to me i had most reason to expect welcome and encouragement, i turned for comfort to those who, like my forbears, went down to the sea in ships. along south street, where the sky shows through a tangle of rigging, and long bowsprits threaten to poke out windows across the way, i forgot my defeats and even, for a time, my purpose, as i revelled in my long-delayed heritage of the sea.
it was the ships from distant ports that fascinated me most. my uncle nicholas—a sailor who was more than half a poet—had been in the foreign trade. i remembered him dimly as a big brown-faced man who had told me of far lands and shipwrecks, and rocked me to sleep to the words and tune of an old hymn, of which i could still repeat the stanza beginning,
“the storm that wrecks the winter sky.”
his vessel with all on board had disappeared somewhere in the dark waters below cape 16horn more than twenty years before. i had inherited half of his name and a number of precious trinkets brought home during his early days of seafaring—also, it was supposed, something of his tastes and disposition. in a manner i was his heir, and the tall-masted, black-hulled barks that came in from the orient—to be pushed as quietly into place at the dock as if they had but just been towed across the east river from brooklyn—these, it seemed to me, were his ships, hence, my ships that were coming in, at last.
i found in them treasures of joy unspeakable. those from around the horn seemed to bring me direct messages from the lost sailor. i felt that had he lived he would have believed in my dreams and helped me to make them reality. at times i even went so far as to imagine that his ship had not gone down at all, but had sailed away to some fair harbor of the south, whence he had not cared to return.
it thrilled me even to touch one of those weather-beaten hulls. the humblest and most unwashed seaman wrought a spell upon me as he made a pretense of polishing a bit of brass or of mopping up the afterdeck. he had braved fierce storms. he had spent long nights spinning yarns in the forecastle. perhaps he had been wrecked and had drifted for weeks in an open boat. it might be that he had been driven by storms into those gloomy seas 17of the south—even to the very edge of my antarctic world!
when they would let me i went on board, to fall over things and ask questions. my knowledge of shipping was about what could be expected of one whose life had been spent on the prairies of the west, with now and then a fleeting glimpse of a mississippi river steamer. i suppose they wondered how i could be so interested in a subject, concerning which i displayed such a distressing lack of knowledge. they were willing to enlighten me, however, for considerations of tobacco or money, and daily i made new bosom friends—some of them, i suspect, as unholy a lot of sea-rovers as ever found reward at the end of a yard-arm.
i did not seek technical instruction. what i yearned for was their personal experiences, and these they painted for me in colorings of the sea and sky, and in such measure as the supplies were forthcoming. almost to a man they readily remembered my uncle nicholas, but as they differed widely concerning his stature, complexion and general attributes, i was prone to believe at last that they would have recalled him quite as willingly under any other name; and indeed i found this to be true when i made the experiment, finally, of giving his name as hopkins, or pierce, or samelson, instead of the real one, which had been lovejoy.
18i gathered courage presently to interview the officers, but these i found rather less entertaining, perhaps because they were more truthful. only one of them recalled my uncle nicholas, a kindly first mate, and i suspect that even this effort resulted from a desire to please rather than from any real mental process or strict regard for verities.
i suppose i annoyed them, too, for i threw out a hint now and then which suggested my becoming a part of their ship’s company, though in what capacity or for what purpose neither i nor they could possibly imagine. as for my antarctic scheme, i presently avoided mentioning it, or, at most, referred to it but timidly. indeed, i demeaned myself so far at times as to recall it in jest as the wild fancy of some mythical third party whose reasoning and mentality were properly matters of ridicule and contempt.
for i had discovered early in the game that the conception of a warm country at the south pole appealed as little to the seaman as to the scientist. the sailors whom i had subsidized most liberally regarded me with suspicion and unconsciously touched their foreheads at the suggestion, while the kindly first officer, who had been willing to remember my uncle, promptly forgot him again and walked away.
i passed my days at length in wandering rather 19silently about the docks and shipping offices, seeking to invest my slender means in some venture or adventure of the sea that would take me into many ports and perhaps yield me a modest income besides. i consulted a clairvoyant among other things, a greasy person on twenty-third street, who took me into a dim, dingy room and told me that i was contemplating something-or-other and that somebody-or-other would have something-or-other to do with it. this was good as far as it went. i was, in fact, contemplating most of the time. i was ready for anything—to explore, to filibuster, to seek for hidden treasure—to go anywhere and to do anything that would make me fairly and legitimately a part and parcel with the sea. i read one morning of a daring voyager who in a small boat had set out to sail around the world alone. i would have given all that i possessed to have gone with him, and for a few moments i think i even contemplated a similar undertaking. but as i did not then know a gaff from a flying-jib, and realizing that my voyage would probably be completed with suddenness and violence somewhere in the neighborhood of sandy hook, i resisted the impulse. as for my antarctic dream, its realization seemed even farther away than when as a boy i had first conceived it, some fifteen years before.
