University of Virginia Library

31. CHAPTER XXXI.
Containing an account of Robin Day's successor in the Jumping
Jenny, and who he was.

When I recovered my wits, I found myself again in
the Jumping Jenny, lying sick and sore in a bunk, surrounded
by sailors, who were, however, attending to
their own affairs, without at all concerning themselves
with me. And thus, sick and sore, among the sailors in
the hold of the Jumping Jenny, I may say at once, to
shorten my story, I remained for several weeks, having
received such a hurt from the patriotic Hibernian
as required all the strength of a naturally sturdy
constitution to carry me through with life. And
this was doubtless fortunate, as it prevented my taking
a share, as otherwise I must have done, in those
other forays against the villages of my countrymen,
by which the British warfare in the Chesapeake continued
to be distinguished.

I received two or three visits from a surgeon belonging
to the fleet, who was a very humane personage,
and told me my wounds were not, as I apprehended,
of any very great account, considering my
youth and hardy constitution; and once, also, I was
visited by my friend the lieutenant, who asked me
how I fared, swore I was “a brave dog,” and vowed
he intended to recommend me to the admiral for
a commission, “in reward of my gallant behaviour

at the taking of the Irishman;” for, it seemed, he had
mistaken my sudden rush from his crew for an outpouring
of valour, an attack actually upon the bloody-minded
defender of the village. It was none of my
business to undeceive him in the matter, and I took
care not to do so. After this, I saw no more of him,
nor do I believe he ever more troubled his head about
me.

In the midst of this universal neglect, which
greatly lowered my opinion of my own importance,
as well as of the dignity and profit of volunteering
in his majesty's service, I perceived many manifestations
of good will in a quarter from which I never
should have expected it—namely, from boy Tom,
whom I have already called my representative, as
filling in the Jumping Jenny the same unhappy office
of football and slave of all work, once filled by
me. It soon appeared, that I had won his affections,
or—as he was too much such an insensate clod as I
had once been, to have any affections to win—that I
had made some sort of agreeable impression on his
instincts, by beating his tyrant, the detestable Duck.
Indeed, I remember, the first time he made his appearance
at my bedside, or the first time my returning
consciousness allowed me to observe him, and
hear him speak, that his first words to me, pronounced
with an accent of mingled eagerness and
encouragement, were—“I say, mister, when you
gits well, you'll give him a little more of it, won't
you?”—words which he repeated, or something to
the same effect, at every visitation, until I began to
understand the drift of them.

He was, to appearance, a boy of twelve or thirteen
years old; but allowing for the effects of
Skipper Duck's brutality, which I could well appreciate,
I had no doubt he was in reality three or four

years older. His figure was short and squat, but
somewhat robust, looking all the bigger, however,
for being bagged up in some of Skipper Duck's cast
garments. His visage was not in itself unhandsome,
having quite regular and rather delicate features;
but it was so begrimed with dirt and smoke,
and set in such a mop of hair, that seemed never to
have known scissors or comb, and there was withal
an expression in it of a spirit so mulish and savage
and stupid, that no one would have thought of
calling it otherwise than ugly. Such a spirit was
indicated also by his conversation, which was full
of oaths and ignorance, and by his behaviour, which
to all, saving perhaps myself, on board the Jumping
Jenny, was full of perverseness, obstinacy, and enmity.
He seemed, indeed, a son of Ishmael among
them; all men's hands—and, I may add, feet—were
against him; he was a butt upon whom all seemed
to take a malicious pleasure in venting sarcasms and
buffets, which he requited with abuses, and, where
he durst, with blows. All swore, boy Tom possessed
the spirit of a devil—“a dumb devil,” as
Tom Gunner called it;—but, I believe they had
beaten it into him.

The attentions of this little wretch, who played
the part of a rude nurse, while I lay sick, and
brought me daily my physic and food, together with
the striking similarity betwixt his condition as it
was, and mine as it had been, begot in me a species
of interest, which increased from day to day, and
was still further augmented by a suspicion that came
over me, I could not tell how, that there was more
than a resemblance—that there was some kind of
connection between his fate and mine. I employed
a portion of the leisure, of which I had more than
enough, while on my back, in speculating on the

peculiarities of his character, and the causes which
had moulded it into what it was.

And first, it appeared to me that boy Tom had
not been always the mulish, ignorant creature he
now was, but that—unlike me, in whom brutal
treatment had prevented the natural growth of
mind—he was one in whom mind, after a certain
stage of development, had been driven back, or
thrust out, by hard usage; yet not so completely but
that some relics and fragments of it might be seen
still lingering behind. Thus, with all his stupidity,
there might be occasionally detected in him gleams
of sense, the sparkles of a fire that had not been
wholly extinguished; and, amid all the coarseness
and profanity of his conversation, I was sometimes
struck with expressions that I fancied could have
been caught only among educated and refined people,
such as he never could have met on board the
Jumping Jenny. His spirit too—for, certainly, he
was a spunky little dog, as his continual, though unavailing,
resistance to the tyranny of all on board
proved—could never, according to my doctrine,
derived from my own experience, have existed, had
he been accustomed to such treatment from his
earliest days. Besides, it was quite evident he could
not have been in Skipper Duck's hands longer than
from the period of my deliverance. This had happened
between five and six years ago; and as Boy
Tom was now at least fifteen years old, it followed
that at least ten years of his existence must have
been passed in other—and, doubtless, better hands
than those of Skipper Duck.

The more I speculated upon these things, the
greater became my interest in the boy, whose rude,
but kindly, attentions grew more frequent day by
day; until, at last, it was quite evident he took

pleasure in being with me, giving me the benefit of
all the time he had to spare, as well as a great deal
that he had not. The more I saw of him, the stronger
grew my suspicion as to that connection between
our interests of which I have spoken before; and
several times I was seized with—I cannot say, an
absolute persuasion—but a feeling that I had seen
him before, though where or when my puzzled memory
could not say. And, one day, this impression
became so strong, that I could not resist questioning
him on the subject, for the purpose of satisfying my
curiosity; and truly, the result was surprising
enough. I asked him, “what was his name.”

“Tom,” said he, “Boy Tom.”

“But your other name?” demanded I; “your
father's name?”

Tom scratched his head with a stupid stare;
“The Cappin's a father over me,” said he—“Cappin
Duck, dang his buttons.”

“But your own father,” quoth I; “you certainly
had a father; what was his name?”

“Never had no father,” said Tom resolutely—
“had only a papa.”

There was something in the use of the word
“papa” (not to speak of the confusion of ideas.)
that struck me; but judge my more than astonishment,
when, asking “what was that papa's name,”
the boy answered, without the slightest hesitation,
“Dr. Howard.”

I started up from my bunk, sick and feeble as I
was, and looked almost with terror upon the lad;
who, as if quite unconscious of having said any thing
at all surprising, continued to inform me that his
papa “lived all the way off in Jersey,”—as if that
were at the other end of the earth. His father my
patron, Dr. Howard? himself my little schoolmate

Tommy, who had been drowned, as all the world
knew, or supposed, five years before? The idea was
too amazing for belief; but it had conjured up a
thousand sleeping memories, and as I looked into
the little wretch's face, I could now perceive points
of resemblance, not before noticed, which staggered
me from my incredulity. “You Tommy Howard!”
I exclaimed, with a faltering voice; to which
the poor oaf, taking the ejaculation for an inquiry,
answered bluffly—“No—Boy Tom, I tells you;
papa's name was Doctor Howard; but mine's Boy
Tom.”

“If Dr. Howard is your papa, you then must be
Tommy Howard,” I said. “Yet it cannot be. Tommy
was drowned; every body said so; they found
his clothes on the shore.”

Then looking again upon the urchin, who, not
comprehending my remarks, or the drift of them,
began to stir about as if he had already discharged
the subject of conversation from his thoughts, I
cried, as a new thought struck me—“If you are
Tommy Howard, you must know me:—I am your
old friend Robin Day!”

Boy Tom stared at me with a face of great simplicity:—“Never
know'd no sich feller,” said he.

“What! not Robin Day, that fished you out of
the river, when you hit him with an oyster-shell?
Robin Day, that you taught his letters to?—that
used to play with you in the garden all day long?”

“'Twar'n't no sich feller as Robin Day,” said
Tom, very resolutely; “'twas little Sy Tough.—
Ay, dang my buttons!” he continued as the gleam
of recollection shot over his murky mind, “Sy
was sich a feller for eatin' and drinkin!' Know'd
Sy Tough well enough; but never know'd no Robin
Day.”

The reader will remember that Sy Tough was my
nickname at school; and he may judge how much of
satisfaction, mingled with pain, I felt at hearing it
thus pronounced by the poor boy;—satisfaction, because,
to my mind, it afforded the clearest proof of
the identity of Boy Tom and the lost Tommy
Howard, and pain, because it was only with grief I
could look upon my old playmate and friend, the
child of my benefactor, thus degraded in intellect
and manners—a wreck of what he had been, a
nonentity compared with what he might, and ought
to have been.

But he was my patron's son, Tommy Howard,
there was no doubt of that! I could see it in his
visage, I could hear it in his voice, I could trace it
in his broken and confused recollections. Five
years of slavery in the hands of such a man as
Skipper Duck, were enough to make even the bright
little Tommy what he was—to rob him of every
faculty of mind, and every acquisition of manners,
feeling and knowledge: the only wonder was that
he should have retained any thing, that he should
have recollected any thing, that he should not have
been wholly brutalized.

But little Tommy Howard had been drowned—
had not the whole village said so? had not every
one settled even the particulars of his death? I
conned the circumstances over in my mind. It was
true, every one believed little Tommy had been
drowned; but that did not prove he had been. All
that was actually known of the catastrophe was,
that Tommy, with some twenty or thirty other
urchins, had gone one evening into the river to
swim, amusing themselves as usual among the shipping—or,
to be more correct, the shalloping—

moored about the wharves, and anchored in the
river; that he was missed, when his companions left
the water to dress, and only then, when some one
remarked an unclaimed bundle of clothes, which
were found to be his; that he was supposed to have
been drowned, because that was the easiest and most
natural way of accounting for his disappearance.
The river had been dragged for his body, though
without success. That made nothing, at the time,
against the belief in his unhappy end; but it was
now every thing in favour of my own conclusions.
Had his body been indeed found, the circumstances
of Boy Tom calling himself the son of Dr. Howard,
and remembering the name of Sy Tough, would
have been merely wonderful; as it had not been
found, it was, with these, another proof of his existence,
and of his being one and the same person
with Boy Tom.

It remained now to account for his sudden disappearance,
and his falling into the hands of Skipper
Duck; and here, although I received no assistance
whatever from him, his memory being on this point
as on most others, quite extinguished, I was at no
great loss to frame a plausible solution of the difficulty.
It will be remembered that Skipper Duck
had expiated his wrongs to me by a severe punishment—by
fine and imprisonment—not to speak of
the keel-hauling and banishment from our town for
ever; which visitations of justice were directly to be
traced to my patron, Dr. Howard, to bring him to
justice; and nothing could be more natural than that he
should seize any opportunity that fell in his power
of revenging himself upon the doctor, the cause of
his misfortunes. I, who knew the Skipper so well,
felt that the cutting of the doctor's throat itself

would not have been an enormity too great for him,
had it not been for the cowardice of his nature; the
only quality that kept him from the commission of
the greatest crimes. Upon revolving the matter in
my mind, viewing it in every way, I became convinced
that, at the time of the catastrophe, Skipper
Duck must have been with his vessel in the river,
—and, doubtless, in disguise, as was necessary to
his safety—that little Tommy had, by some means,
fallen into his hands—perhaps, by swimming to, and
clambering into his vessel; which kind of visitations
it was a common thing for the boys to make to the
vessels anchored in the river—that the Skipper had
recognised him as the son of his enemy and persecutor,
(as he, most probably, considered the doctor,)
and, upon an impulse of revenge, immediately concealed
and carried him away, to wreak upon his
innocent body the revenge he owed the parent.
And such an act was not the less probable, that it
gained him a slave to fill the office from which I had
been removed. Then, by changing the scene of
his operations from the New Jersey to the Chesapeake
waters, it was as easy to retain possession of
his prize as to escape the consequences of his crime.

Such was the way in which I explained the
marvel of poor Tommy's existence and debasement;
and such was, as it afterwards appeared, the true
explanation.

It may be supposed, with such a belief upon my
mind, that I did not cease my efforts to awake the
memory of the boy to the other facts and circumstances
of his former life, to heap together still further
(though I required no more convincing) proofs
of his identity. But here my ingenuity and perseverance
were alike unrewarded: he knew nothing,

he remembered nothing, save that his “papa's”
name was Dr. Howard, who lived “all the way off
in Jersey,” and that he once had a playmate, Sy
Tough, whose head he had laid open with an oyster
shell, who had fished him, in return, from the bottom
of the river, and who was “sich a feller for eatin'
and drinkin'!”—as, no doubt, I was, when first
translated from the house of famine to the fleshpots
of my patron's kitchen, and the apples and oranges
of little Tommy's storehouse in the garret. His
sister, his playmates, old Pedro the cook—every
thing else was forgotten—even the skill he had
imparted to me in reading, was gone:—I found, in
making the experiment, he scarce knew one letter
from another. In short, he was such a ruin, such a
wreck of what he had been, so stupid of mind and
callous of feeling, that it pained me to the heart to
look at him, and, especially, to pursue the investigations,
which only the more glaringly revealed his
deficiencies. But I had one cheering hope:—once
again in the hands of his father, I doubted not of his
speedy regeneration: the hand that had rescued an
alien from barbarism, would be still more powerful
to rescue the benighted son.

This discovery, by which I was greatly excited,
did what physic and my own desires had hitherto
failed to do; it put me immediately upon my legs;
and I crawled upon the deck to look up my friend
the lieutenant, and the villanous Duck, for the purpose
of representing to the former the singular case
of little Tommy, and charging the latter with kidnapping
him; besides, I hoped to procure the lad's
liberty, and have him sent back to his parent. But
neither the lieutenant nor the skipper were to be
found: the commander had gone off, with a single

boat's crew, taking Duck along with him, upon an
expedition, which proved very unfortunate, the
lieutenant losing his life, and all his crew, including
the skipper, being either destroyed or taken prisoners.
This we learned in the evening, when
another officer, an old midshipman, came on board
the Jumping Jenny, and read his orders to assume
the command of the Jumping Jenny.

To this officer, though somewhat daunted by his
looks, which were glum and ferocious, I did not long
defer carrying my story; though I must say, its reception,
as well as my own, was not very encouraging
or flattering. I had not well opened my mouth
when he unlocked his own to pour a volley of abuse,
his wrath being caused, it seemed, by my audacity
in speaking to him without having been first invited
to do so; and he ended the explosion, by demanding
“who the h— I was?” to which I replied, I was
“a volunteer in his Majesty's service.”

“Volunteer be d—d,” quoth he, sending for the
ship's list, which he looked over for my name,
though, I believe, without finding it: upon which he
fell into a great passion, and swore I was a prisoner
of war and nothing better, until Mr. Gunner came
to my assistance, and bore witness I had volunteered
my services to him, that they had been accepted by
the late lieutenant, and, finally, that, as a volunteer I
had won my wounds, fighting bravely on shore at
the storming of Havre de Grace.

The commander then, with another oath, asked
me what I wanted; upon which I told him poor
Tommy's story, or, rather, as much as he would
hear, which was little enough: he d—d Tommy's
eyes, as well as mine; and upon my preferring an
humble request, that he would give the former his

freedom, to return to his bereaved parent, he asked
me whether I was “a volunteer horse, or volunteer
jackass?” told me to mind my own business, and
then uncivilly dismissed me from his presence—that
is, he picked up a handspike, and threw it at my
head, as I was hastily, to avoid his wrath, descending
to my quarters.