University of Virginia Library

1. CHAPTER I.
The Neptunian origin of Robin Day; with an account of his early
friends, Mother Moll and Skipper Duck, and his preferment to
a fat office.

Sylla, the Roman dictator, is, as far as I know,
the only great man on record who attributed his
advancement to good luck; all other great men being
modestly content to refer their successes in life to
their own merits; insisting, with the philosophers,
that there is not, in reality, any such thing as luck
at all, good, bad, or indifferent, but that every man's
fortune, whether happy or evil, is referable to his
own agency, the direct result of his own wise or
foolish actions. Such may be the fact, for aught I can
say, (it is a comfortable doctrinef or the fortunate,)
and I do not pretend to controvert it; but of one
thing I am very certain, namely, that whether there
be bad luck in the world or not, there is an abundance
of those unhappy personages who are commonly
considered its victims—that is to say, unlucky

dogs; of which race I was undoubtedly born
a member.

My introduction into the world was of itself sufficient
to establish my claim to pre-eminence in misfortune;
for, from all I was ever able to learn, instead
of making my appearance in the usual way, I came
ashore, one stormy night in September, in the year
1796, upon the coast of New Jersey, washed up by
the sea, like a king-crab; with this advantage, however,
that I had for my shell, or cradle, the battered
hull of a Yankee schooner, which, if it did not keep
me as dry and snug as was desirable, preserved me,
at least, from being swallowed up by the raging billows.
In other words, I was cast ashore in a wreck
—“name unknown,” as the gazettes say, from which
I was taken, a puny little bantling of some twelve
or fifteen months old, half famished and half drowned,
the only living creature, save two ducks that were
soaking in a coop, and a broken-backed cat in the
forecastle, that escaped.

The particulars of this eventful catastrophe, there
were many good reasons why I, though so much
interested in knowing them, should never succeed
in making myself perfectly acquainted with. The
scene of disaster was in the neighborhood of Barnegat,
a place famous in the annals of shipwreck; and
the vessel, there was little doubt, contained a rich
freight of rum and sugar, and other West Indian
products, which it was manifestly nobody's business
to know how to account for. Besides, it was thought
not improbable that the wreck of this particular
schooner was owing less to the fury of the storm
than to the instrumentality of the people of the coast
—land pirates, as they have been called from time
immemorial—who were often accused in past days,
as sometimes in the present, of setting up false beacons,

to decoy unsuspecting mariners to their ruin.
I have even heard it said, there was a rumor at the
time that the crew of the unfortunate vessel (whose
disappearance could not be otherwise accounted for,)
had met with foul play from the wreckers; which, if
true, was a better reason than all for their keeping
a veil of obscurity over the whole affair. But this
rumor after all, had no better foundation than surmise,
and a disposition on the part of malicious people
to explain the disappearance of the crew, which
was undoubtedly a very remarkable feature in the
shipwreck, in the most unfavorable way. It was
more charitable to suppose they had been suddenly
washed from the deck by some furious billow, which
had carried away every thing above board; and that
I owed my preservation to being left nestling in the
highest berth in the cabin, whence I was plucked by
my robber preservers.

Another reason why the particulars were never
known, was that no one interested ever made inquiry.
No agent or emissary of owner or underwriter,
as far as I could learn, ever visited the spot
to investigate the circumstances attending the wreck,
or attempt the recovery of the property lost: which,
I suppose, was because the news of the disaster never
travelled more than a dozen miles from the scene,
and then only among people, who, whatever cause
they might have to report the worst of it among
themselves, had too much interest in the preservation
of coast privileges—the uninterrupted enjoyment
of flotsam and jetsam—to invite the interference
of strangers and law officers. As for myself,
I think the reader will allow, I was entirely too
young to trouble myself in the matter; or, indeed, to
know any thing about it. Who were my parents,
or whether I had any, were questions which, as they

concerned nobody, so nobody cared to inquire. But,
I believe, it was generally thought among those
who had the first charge of me, I must have been
the son of the ship's cook, as I had an inordinate
love of good eating, with a judgment in dainties,
which could only be expected from one who had
been indulged in the fat of the caboose; besides showing,
when I grew a year or two older, an extraordinary
tact in roasting crabs and fiddlers, oysters
and sand-eels, and such other stray edibles as I could
lay my hands on.

My earliest recollections go back to some such
scenes; and I have a vague remembrance that I lived
a life of famine in a miserable hut by the sea-side,
with an old beldam, who used to wear a sailor's tarpaulin
hat and pea-jacket, and was, as I have been
since informed, a very Semiramis among land-pirates,
and had not only been engaged in robbing, but had
been the actual cause of, more wrecks than any man
on the coast. She had a wretched little starveling
pony, whose legs she used to tie together of nights,
and, having hung a lantern to his side, send him
stumbling along the beach; in which operation, the
motion of the lantern rocking up and down, had the
appearance, to persons on the sea, of a light from a
vessel sailing along the coast; and thus was undoubtedly
sometimes the cause of the observers driving
on shore, before they dreamed they were nigh
it. Of this circumstance I have the better recollection
as I myself was frequently sent out, especially
in bitter stormy nights, when such stratagems were
most practised, to keep the said pony to his duty, by
whipping him up and down the sands; an employment
in which if I at any time failed, by dropping
asleep from cold or fatigue, or sneaking away under
a sandhill, to shelter me from the winds, I was sure

to be rewarded with such a drubbing as kept me in
memory of my fault for a week after. I am pretty
confident, indeed, it was with an eye to my future
usefulness in this line of employment, that old
Mother Moll, (for by that name they called her,)
after helping herself to such other valuables in the
wreck (which she was one of the first to enter) as
she could lay hands on, deigned in like manner to
add unlucky me to her share of plunder, and carry
me to her hovel; where, first under the name of
Sammy September—a title given me by the wreckers,
in memory, I suppose, of the month of shipwreck,
and, next, under that of Robin Rusty, which
became, at last, the more frequent appellation—I
had the satisfaction to be cuffed about from morning
till night, and from one year's end to the other, until
rescued by a change of fate from her intolerable
clutches.

She had the greater need of some such assistant,
as the only other being over whom she had any control,
a reprobate son, called Isaac, or Ikey, was now
grown a huge, hulking hobbledehoy of fourteen, was
waxing day by day more restiff and intolerant of
authority, and betraying every evidence of a manly
inclination, sooner or later, to give her the slip, and
set up in the world for himself. He was, assuredly,
a most graceless and abandoned young scoundrel—a
worthy son of such a parent; and I have a recollection
of his communicating to me one day, which he
did with much apparent satisfaction, his expectation,
in about one year more, of being able to trounce, or,
as he expressed it, to “lick,” his mother; an idea,
which, I must confess, was infinitely agreeable to my
infant fancies, as it associated the prospect of my
being able, in course of time, to do the same thing
myself, and thereby requite some of the million afflictions

which Mother Moll was in the daily practice
of dispensing on my own cheeks and shoulders. I
had this addition, however, to the conception, and
the pleasure of it, in my own case; inasmuch as I
hoped that the day which should see me able to settle
accounts with Mistress Moll, would find me in a
condition to award the same justice to her son Ikey;
for I know not which used me most cruelly, from
whom I received the greatest number of daily drubbings,
or which of them I most heartily detested.

It was to the excess of severity of this she-barbarian
and her savage son that I finally, at the age of
about seven years, owed my escape from their hands;
for their cruelty being observed by others of the
wreckers, excited a kind of indignation and pity
even among them; and one of them, a fellow named
Day, though better known under the nickname of
Duck, which he himself commonly accepted and acknowledged,
the skipper and owner of a shallop, the
Jumping Jenny, in which he carried wood, oysters,
fish, and sundry other articles of merchandise, including
at times, the plunder of the wreckers, to
New York and other places, interfered one day in
my favour; and, having tried more amicable means
in vain, seized me and carried me off by force. It
is true, that he afterwards, in a fit of generosity, sent
the old beldam a cask of rum, which he had, in the
beginning, offered as the price of my ransom, and
which she was now glad to receive as a compensation
in full for her loss.

It was for this reason, I suppose, that my humane
deliverer ever after chose to regard me as his property,
an item of his goods and chattels, bought at
what he always assured me was a price infinitely
above my value, a moveable which nobody could
doubt his right to do with whatever he pleased.

Having settled this point to his satisfaction—and,
perhaps, also, to mine, for I never dreamed of disputing
it—he proceeded to deport himself accordingly:
and the end was, that, before I had been a
month in his employ, I was convinced that the servitude
I had endured under Mother Moll, infernal
though it might be called, was a kind of paradise,
compared with the purgatory of bondage to which
I was now reduced by my generous and tender
skipper.

The first thing the tyrant did, after getting me on
board, was to appoint me to the honorable office of
ship's cook; an appointment which I doubtless owed
in part to the talents I had already displayed in that
line, while living with Mother Moll, though more
perhaps to my being the only person of the whole
crew—or rather of the ship's company, for crew
there was none, there being, besides the captain,
only one other man on board, and he called himself
the mate—who could be spared for such a duty.
Nor should I have been in less danger of the appointment,
had my talents been inferior, or my years
even fewer; the only qualifications for the office
being that I should be old and strong enough to
hold up the end of a frying-pan, and of sufficient experience
to know, as Captain Duck said, a potatoe
from a pig's foot. The appetite of my noble captain
being extremely artless and unsophisticated,
never aspired beyond the two simple dishes of a boil
and a fry, as he was used to call them; and the preparation
of these was always the same, no matter
what might be the variation in the materials, which
were only determined by the contents of the larder.
If a boil were ordered, all my duty consisted in
tumbling into the pot, along with a sufficiency of
water, a specimen of every eatable on board, fish,

fowl, and flesh, salt and fresh, beans, peas, pumpkins
and potatoes, clams, oysters, onions, and what not,
and boiling away at a furious rate, until the signal
was given for serving up, by the skipper roaring to
me, “dinner! you son of a cook's jackass!” If a
fry, the operation was equally simple, as nothing
was to be done but to throw the same articles into
the pan, with a pound or two of slush, and keep up
the fire until the mate, in his turn, gave the signal
by suddenly whisking the pan out of my hands, and
as suddenly kicking me over into the lee scuppers.

When I was first made acquainted with the office
to which my skipper's generosity assigned me, I
must confess, my youthful spirits danced with joy;
for having been fairly starved under Mother Moll's
ministry, nothing could be more agreeable to my
desires than a post which assured me, ex officio, of
a full dinner every day. But on this occasion, as
on a great many others that have befallen me, I
reckoned entirely without my host; being soon
forced to the disagreeable discovery that my duty,
as understood by Captain Duck, was to cook dinners,
and not to eat them. My captain was indeed a
brute, and a much worse one than old Mother Moll;
who, though savage enough, had her seasons—few
they were and far between—of good humour. His
apparent humanity in snatching me from the dragoness,
was, at bottom, the same feeling that induced
the latter to take me from the wreck; that is, he
had occasion for my services; or perhaps he was
humane at the moment; for all persons are capable
of pitying distresses not inflicted by themselves, but
by other persons. But be that as it may, it is certain
that such touches of human feeling never visited
his breast again; and that during the whole term of
five years or more, that I remained in his power,

there was no tyranny or cruelty that a despot could
exercise at the expense of his most helpless slave,
which he did not make me suffer. One would have
thought that my destitute condition, a miserable little
vagabond child without a single kinsman or friend
I could call my own, would have sometimes
awakened his sensibilities, and procured me better
treatment: but I am rather inclined to think my destitution
only made him give a greater loose to his
ferocity, since there was no one left to call him to
account.

As a temper of such unmitigated barbarity is, fortunately,
so uncommon in the world that some will
feel disposed to doubt its existence, it is incumbent on
me to explain the secret of his character, which was
reduced to that extreme pitch of brutality only, I
believe, by indulgence in strong liquors. The fellow,
in short, was a sot, and had been all his life; not indeed
that he ever appeared to the world in a state of
positive intoxication; for that was a point no liquor
could bring him to; but, as he was always drinking,
so his potations kept him constantly in a condition
of sullen fury, like that of the Malay who is smoking
opium for a muck, and may, one knows not how
soon, burst out into a frenzy of rage and murder.

In this frame of mind, it may be supposed, he
would as often have vented his anger upon the mate
as upon me; and this I have no doubt he would have
done, had not this useful officer, who was his cousin,
been a great two-fisted fellow, who made no difficulty
of knocking him down and drubbing him into
his senses, when the wind lay in that direction; by
which means it happened that the skipper was forced,
in spite of himself, to confine his operations entirely
to me.

The particulars of his cruel usage I have no

desire to enter upon; but their effects were such,
that at the beginning of my thirteenth year, which
was the last of my bondage, I was a wretched little
stunted thing, to appearance not more than nine
years old, a picture of raggedness, emaciation and
misery, a creature with no more knowledge, intelligence,
or spirit than a ferryman's horse, or a sick
ape; which latter animal, I have often been told, I
much more resembled at that time than a human
child. In fact, the brutality of my skipper had
made me almost an idiot: it had killed my spirit, and
stupefied my mind; and such was the gross darkness
in which I had been suffered to grow up, that I
was ignorant even of the existence of the Great Being,
the refuge of the orphan, and the avenger of his
wrongs. I had never even heard his name, except
in the execrations, with which my tormentor coupled
it a thousand times a day.