when supper is done, to see Joseph Whidden."
The lamps were lighted when we left the house, and long beams from the windows fell on the walk and on the road. We went down the street side by side, my father absently swinging his cane, I wondering if it were not beneath the dignity of a young man about to go to sea that his parent should accompany him on such an errand.
Just as we reached the corner, a man who had come up the street a little distance behind us turned in at our own front gate, and my father, seeing me look back when the gate slammed, smiled and said, "I'll venture a guess, Bennie-my-lad, that some one named Roger is calling at our house this evening."
Afterwards—long, long afterwards—I remembered the incident.
When my father let the knocker fall against Captain Whidden's great front door, my heart, it seemed to me, echoed the sound and then danced away at a lively pace. A servant, whom I watched coming from somewhere behind the stairs, admitted us to the quiet hall; then another door opened silently, a brighter light shone out upon us, and a big, grave man appeared. He welcomed us with a few thoughtful words and, by a motion of his hand, sent us before him into the room where he had been sitting.
"And so," said Captain Whidden, when we had explained our errand, "I am to have this young man aboard my ship."
"If you will, sir," I cried eagerly, yet anxiously, too, for he did not seem nearly so well pleased as I had expected.
"Yes, Ben, you may come with us to Canton; but as your father says, you must fill your own boots and stand on your own two feet. And will you, friend Lathrop,"—he turned to my father—"hazard a venture on the voyage?"
My father smiled. "I think, Joe," he said, "that I've placed a considerable venture in your hands already."
Captain Whidden nodded. "So you have, so you have. I'll watch it as best I can, too, though of course I'll see little of the boy. Let him go now. I'll talk with you a while if I may."
My father glanced at me, and I got up.
Captain Whidden rose, too. "Come down in the morning," he said. "You can sign with us at the Websters' counting-house.—And good-bye, Ben," he added, extending his hand.
"Good-bye? You don't mean—that I'm not to go with you?"
He smiled. "It'll be a long time, Ben, before you and I meet again on quite such terms as these."
Then I saw what he meant, and shook his hand and walked away without looking back. Nor did I ever learn what he and my father talked about after I left them there together.
CHAPTER II
BILL HAYDEN
More than two-score years and ten have come and gone since that day when I, Benjamin Lathrop, put out from Salem harbor, a green hand on the ship Island Princess, and in them I have achieved, I think I can say with due modesty, a position of some importance in my own world. But although innumerable activities have crowded to the full each intervening year, neither the aspirations of youth nor the successes of maturity nor the dignities of later life have effaced from my memory the picture of myself, a boy on the deck of the Island Princess in April, 1809.
I thought myself very grand as the wind whipped my pantaloons against my ankles and flapped the ribbons of the sailor hat that I had pulled snugly down; and I imagined myself the hero of a thousand stirring adventures in the South Seas, which I should relate when I came back an able seaman at the very least. Never was sun so bright; never were seas so blue; never was ship so smart as the Island Princess.
On her black hull a nicely laid band of white ran sheer from stem to stern; her bows swelled to meet the seas in a gentle curve that hinted the swift lines of our clippers of more recent years. From mainmast heel to truck, from ensign halyard to tip of flying jib-boom, her well-proportioned masts and spars and taut rigging stood up so trimly in one splendidly coördinating structure, that the veriest lubber must have acknowledged her the finest handiwork of man.
It was like a play to watch the men sitting here and there on deck, or talking idly around the forecastle, while Captain Whidden and the chief mate conferred together aft. I was so much taken with it all that I had no eyes for my own people who were there to see me off, until straight out from the crowded wharf there came a young man whom I knew well. His gray eyes, firm lips, square chin, and broad shoulders had been familiar to me ever since I could remember.
As he was rowed briskly to the ship, I waved to him and called out, "O
Roger—ahoy!"
I thought, when he glanced up from the boat, that his gray eyes twinkled and that there was the flutter of a smile on his well-formed lips; but he looked at me and through me and seemed not to see me, and it came over me all at once that from the cabin to the forecastle was many, many times the length of the ship.
With a quick survey of the deck, as if to see who had spoken, yet seeming not to see me at all, Roger, who had lived all his life within a cable's length of the house where I was born, who had taught me to box the compass before I learned my ABC's, whose interest in my own sister had partly mystified, partly amused her younger brother—that very Roger climbed aboard the Island Princess and went on into the cabin without word or sign of recognition.
It was not the first time, of course, that I had realized what my chosen apprenticeship involved; but the incident brought it home to me more clearly than ever before. No longer was I to be known as the son of Thomas Lathrop. In my idle dreams I had been the hero of a thousand imaginary adventures; instead, in the strange experiences I am about to relate, I was to be only the ship's "boy"—the youngest and least important member of that little isolated community banded together for a journey to the other side of the world. But I was to see things happen such as most men have never dreamed of; and now, after fifty years, when the others are dead and gone, I may write the story.
When I saw that my father, who had watched Roger Hamlin with twinkling eyes ignore my greeting, was chuckling in great amusement, I bit my lip. What if Roger was supercargo, I thought: he needn't feel so big.
Now on the wharf there was a flutter of activity and a stir of color; now a louder hum of voices drifted across the intervening water. Captain Whidden lifted his hand in farewell to his invalid wife, who had come in her carriage to see him sail. The mate went forward on the forecastle and the second mate took his position in the waist.
"Now then, Mr. Thomas," Captain Whidden called in a deep voice, "is all clear forward?"
"All clear, sir," the mate replied; and then, with all eyes upon him, he took charge, as was the custom, and proceeded to work the ship.
While the men paid out the riding cable and tripped it, and hove in the slack of the other, I stood, carried away—foolish boy!—by the thought that here at last I was a seaman among seamen, until at my ear the second mate cried sharply, "Lay forward, there, and lend a hand to cat the anchor."
The sails flapped loose overhead; orders boomed back and forth; there was running and racing and hauling and swarming up the rigging; and from the windlass came the chanteyman's solo with its thunderous chorus:—
"Pull one and all!
Hoy! Hoy! Cheery men.
On this catfall!
Hoy! Hoy! Cheery men.
Answer the call!
Hoy! Hoy! Cheery men.
Hoy! Haulee!
Hoy! Hoy!!!
Oh, cheery men!"
As the second anchor rose to the pull of the creaking windlass, we sheeted home the topsails, topgallantsails and royals and hoisted them up, braced head-yards aback and after-yards full for the port tack, hoisted the jib and put over the helm. Thus the Island Princess fell off by