I was in Cincinnati, and I set to work to map out a new career.
I had been reading about the recent exploration of the river Amazonby an expedition sent out by our government. It was said thatthe expedition, owing to difficulties, had not thoroughly explored a partof the country lying about the head-waters, some four thousand milesfrom the mouth of the river. It was only about fifteen hundred milesfrom Cincinnati to New Orleans, where I could doubtless get a ship.
I had thirty dollars left; I would go and complete the explorationof the Amazon. This was all the thought I gave to the subject.
I never was great in matters of detail. I packed my valise, and tookpassage on an ancient tub called the 'Paul Jones,' for New Orleans.
For the sum of sixteen dollars I had the scarred and tarnished splendorsof 'her' main saloon principally to myself, for she was not a creature toattract the eye of wiser travelers.
When we presently got under way and went poking down the broad Ohio,I became a new being, and the subject of my own admiration.
I was a traveler! A word never had tasted so good in my mouth before.
I had an exultant sense of being bound for mysterious lands and distantclimes which I never have felt in so uplifting a degree since.
I was in such a glorified condition that all ignoble feelings departedout of me, and I was able to look down and pity the untraveledwith a compassion that had hardly a trace of contempt in it.
Still, when we stopped at villages and wood-yards, I could not helplolling carelessly upon the railings of the boiler deck to enjoythe envy of the country boys on the bank. If they did not seemto discover me, I presently sneezed to attract their attention,or moved to a position where they could not help seeing me.
And as soon as I knew they saw me I gaped and stretched, and gave othersigns of being mightily bored with traveling.
I kept my hat off all the time, and stayed where the windand the sun could strike me, because I wanted to getthe bronzed and weather-beaten look of an old traveler.
Before the second day was half gone I experienced a joywhich filled me with the purest gratitude; for I saw thatthe skin had begun to blister and peel off my face and neck.
I wished that the boys and girls at home could see me now.
We reached Louisville in time--at least the neighborhood of it.
We stuck hard and fast on the rocks in the middle of the river,and lay there four days. I was now beginning to feel a strongsense of being a part of the boat's family, a sort of infantson to the captain and younger brother to the officers.
There is no estimating the pride I took in this grandeur,or the affection that began to swell and grow in me forthose people. I could not know how the lordly steamboatmanscorns that sort of presumption in a mere landsman.
I particularly longed to acquire the least trifle of noticefrom the big stormy mate, and I was on the alert for anopportunity to do him a service to that end. It came at last.
The riotous powwow of setting a spar was going on down onthe forecastle, and I went down there and stood around in the way--or mostly skipping out of it--till the mate suddenly roareda general order for somebody to bring him a capstan bar.
I sprang to his side and said: 'Tell me where it is--I'll fetch it!'
If a rag-picker had offered to do a diplomatic service for the Emperorof Russia, the monarch could not have been more astounded than the mate was.
He even stopped swearing. He stood and stared down at me.
It took him ten seconds to scrape his disjointed remains together again.
Then he said impressively: 'Well, if this don't beat hell!'
and turned to his work with the air of a man who had been confrontedwith a problem too abstruse for solution.
I crept away, and courted solitude for the rest of the day.
I did not go to dinner; I stayed away from supper until everybody elsehad finished. I did not feel so much like a member of the boat'sfamily now as before. However, my spirits returned, in installments,as we pursued our way down the river. I was sorry I hated the mate so,because it was not in (young) human nature not to admire him.
He was huge and muscular, his face was bearded and whiskered all over;he had a red woman and a blue woman tattooed on his right arm,--one on each side of a blue anchor with a red rope to it;and in the matter of profanity he was sublime. When he was gettingout cargo at a landing, I was always where I could see and hear.
He felt all the majesty of his great position, and made the worldfeel it, too. When he gave even the simplest order, he dischargedit like a blast of lightning, and sent a long, reverberating pealof profanity thundering after it. I could not help contrastingthe way in which the average landsman would give an order,with the mate's way of doing it. If the landsman should wishthe gang-plank moved a foot farther forward, he would probably say:
'James, or William, one of you push that plank forward, please;' but putthe mate in his place and he would roar out: 'Here, now, start thatgang-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 makeyou swallow it, you dash-dash-dash-DASHED split between a tiredmud-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 connectedwith the boat--the night watchman. He snubbed my advancesat 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 bigbell on the hurricane deck, and in time he melted into conversation.
He could not well have helped it, I hung with such homage on hiswords and so plainly showed that I felt honored by his notice.
He told me the names of dim capes and shadowy islands as we glidedby them in the solemnity of the night, under the winking stars,and by and by got to talking about himself. He seemedover-sentimental for a man whose salary was six dollars a week--or rather he might have seemed so to an older person than I. ButI drank in his words hungrily, and with a faith that mighthave 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 weaknessrather 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 drippedupon the lantern in his lap, and I cried, too, from sympathy.
He said he was the son of an English nobleman--either an earlor an alderman, he could not remember which, but believed was both;his father, the nobleman, loved him, but his mother hated himfrom the cradle; and so while he was still a little boy he was sentto 'one of them old, ancient colleges'--he couldn't remember which;and by and by his father died and his mother seized the propertyand 'shook' him as he phrased it. After his mother shook him,members of the nobility with whom he was acquainted used theirinfluence to get him the position of 'loblolly-boy in a ship;'
and from that point my watchman threw off all trammels of dateand locality and branched out into a narrative that bristled allalong with incredible adventures; a narrative that was so reekingwith bloodshed and so crammed with hair-breadth escapes and the mostengaging and unconscious personal villainies, that I sat speechless,enjoying, shuddering, wondering, worshipping.
It was a sore blight to find out afterwards that he wasa low, vulgar, ignorant, sentimental, half-witted humbug,an untraveled native of the wilds of Illinois, who hadabsorbed wildcat literature and appropriated its marvels,until in time he had woven odds and ends of the mess intothis yarn, and then gone on telling it to fledglings like me,until he had come to believe it himself.
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