 | Inklings of adventure |  |
A
LOG IN THE ARCHIPELAGO.
The American frigate, in which I had cruised as the
ward-room guest for more than six months, had sailed
for winter quarters at Mahon, and my name was up at
the pier of Smyrna as a passenger in the first ship that
should leave the port, whatever her destination.
The flags of all nations flew at the crowded peaks of
the merchantmen lying off the Marina, and among them
lay two small twin brigs, loading with figs and opium
for my native town in America. They were owned by
an old schoolfellow of my own, one of the most distinguished
and hospitable of the Smyrniote merchants,
and, if nothing more adventurous turned up, he had
offered to land me from one of his craft at Malta or
Gibraltar.
Time wore on, and I had loitered up and down the
narrow street “in melancholy idleness” by day, and
smoked the narghile with those “merchant princes” by
night, till I knew every paving stone between the
beach and the bazaar, and had learnt the thrilling events
of the Greek persecution with the particularity of a historian.
My heart too, unsusceptible enough when
“packed for travel,” began to uncoil with absence of
adventure, and expose its sluggish pulses to the “Greek
fire,” still burning in those Asiatic eyes, and I felt sensibly,
that if, Telemachus-like, I did not soon throw
myself into the sea, I should yield, past praying for, to
the cup of some Smyrniote Circe. Darker eyes than
I was sitting on an opium-box in the counting-house
of my friend L—n, (the princely and hospitable merchant
spoken of above,) when enter a Yankee “skipper,”
whom I would have clapped on the shoulder for
a townsman if I had seen him on the top of the minaret
of the Mosque of Sultan Bajazet. His go-ashore black
coat and trowsers, worn only one month in twelve,
were of costly cloth, but of the fashion prevailing in the
days of his promotion to be second mate of a cod-fisher;
his hat was of the richest beaver, but getting brown
with the same paucity of wear, and exposure to the corroding
air of the ocean; and on his hands were stretched
(and they had well need to be elastic) a pair of
Woodstock gloves that might have descended to him
from Paul Jones “the pilot.” A bulge just over his
lowest rib gave token of the ship's chronometer, and,
in obedience to the new fashion of a guard, a fine chain
of the softest auburn hair—(doubtless his wife's, and,
I would have wagered my passage money, as pretty a
woman as he would seen in his v'yage,) a chain, I say,
braided of silken blond ringlets passed around his neck,
and drew its glossy line over his broad-breasted white
waistcoat—the dew drop on the lion's mane not more
entitled to be astonished.
A face of hard-weather, but with an expression of
care equal to the amount of his invoice, yet honest and
fearless as the truck of his mainmast; a round sailor's
back, that looked as if he would hoist up his deck if
you battered him beneath hatches against his will; and
teeth as white as his new foresail, completed the picture
of the master of the brig Metamora. Jolly old H—t, I
shall never feel the grip of an honester hand, nor return
one (as far as I can with the first you crippled at parting)
with a more kindly pressure! A fair wind on
your quarter, my old boy, wherever you may be trading!
“What sort of accommodations have you, Captain?”
I asked, as my friend introduced me.
“Why, none to speak of, sir! There's a starboard
berth that a'n't got much in it—a few boxes of figs, and
the new sprit-sail, and some of the mate's traps---but I
could stow away a little, perhaps, sir.”
“You sail to-morrow morning?”
“Off with the land-breeze, sir.”
I took leave of the kindest of friends, laid in a few
hasty stores, and was on board at midnight. The next
morning I awoke with the water rippling beside me,
and creeping on deck, I saw a line of foam stretching
behind us far up the gulf, and the ruins of the primitive
church of Smyrna, mingled with the turrets of a Turkish
castle, far away in the horizon.
The morning was cool and fresh, the sky of an oriental
purity, and the small low brig sped on like a nautilus.
The Captain stood by the binnacle looking off
to the westward with a glass, a tarpaulin hat over his
black locks, a pair of sail cloth pumps on his feet, nnd
trowsers and roundabout of an indefinable tarriness and
texture. He handed me the glass, and, obeying his
direction, saw, stealing from behind a point of land
shaped like a cat's back, the well known topsails of the
two frigates that had sailed before us.
We were off Vourla, and the Commodore had gone
to pay his respects to Sir Pulteney Malcolm, then lying
with his fleet in this little bay, and waiting, we supposed,
for orders to force the Dardanelles. The frigates
soon appeared on the bosom of the gulf, and heading
down, neared our larboard bow, and stood for the
Archipelago, The Metamora kept her way, but the
“United States,” the fleetest of our ships, soon left
us behind with a strengthening breeze, and, following
her with the glass till I could no longer distinguish the
cap of the officer of the deck, I breathed a blessing after
how the lessening in the distance of a ship in which
one has cruised in these southern seas, pulls on the
heartstrings.
I sat on deck most of the day, cracking pecan-nuts
with the Captain, and gossiping about school-days in
our native town, occasionally looking off over the hills
of Asia Minor, and trying to realize (the Ixion labor of
the imagination in travel) the history of which these
barren lands have been the scene. I know not whether
it is easy for a native of old countries to people these
desolated lands from the past, but for me, accustomed
to look on the face of the surrounding earth as mere
vegetation, unstoried and unassociated, it is with a constant
mental effort alone that I can be classic on classic
ground---find Plato in the desert wastes of the Academy,
or Priam among the Turk-stridden and prostrate
columns of Troy. In my recollections of Athens, the
Parthenon and the Theseion and the solemn and sublime
ruins by the Fount of Callirhoe stand forth prominent
enough; but when I was on the spot---a biped
to whom three meals a day, a washer-woman, and a
banker, were urgent necessities---I shame to confess
that I sat dangling my legs over the classic Pelasgicum,
not “fishing for philosophers with gold and figs,” but
musing on the mundane and proximate matters of daily
economy. I could see my six shirts hanging to dry,
close by the Temple of the Winds, and I knew my dinner
was cooking three doors from the crumbling capitals
of the Agora.
As the sun set over Ephesus, we neared the mouth
of the Gulf of Smyrna, and the Captain stood looking
over the leeward-bow rather earnestly.
“We shall have a snorter out of the nor'east,” he
said, taking hold of the tiller, and sending the helmsman
forward,---“I never was up this sea but once
any weather, let alone a Levanter.”
He followed up his soliloquy by jamming his tiller
hard a-port, and in ten minutes the little brig was running
her nose, as it seeemed to me, right upon an inhospitable
rock at the northern headland of the Gulf.
At the distance of a biscuit-toss from the shore, however
the rock was dropped to leeward, and a small passage
appeared, opening with a sharp curve into the
miniature but sheltered Bay of Fourgas. We dropped
anchor off a small hamlet of forty or fifty houses, and
lay beyond the reach of Levanters in a circular basin
that seemed shut in by a rim of granite from the sea.
The Captain's judgment of the weather was correct,
and, after the sun set, the wind rose gradually to a violence
which sent the spray high over the barriers of
our protected position. Congratulating ourselves that
we were on the right side of the granite wall, we got out
our jolly-boat on the following morning, and ran ashore
upon the beach half a mile from town, proposing to
climb first to the peak of the neighboring hill, and then
forage for a dinner in the village below.
We scrambled up the rocky mountain side, with
some loss of our private stock of wind, and considerable
increase from the nor'-easter, and getting under the
lee of a projecting shelf, sat looking over towards Lesbos,
and ruminating in silence---I, upon the old question,
“an Sappho publica fuerit,” and the Captain probably
on his wife at Cape Cod, and his pecan-nuts, figs,
and opium, in the emerald green brig below us. I
don't know why she should have been painted green,
by-the-by, (and I never thought to suggest that to the
Captain,) being named after an Indian chief, who was
as red as her copper bottom.
The sea toward Mitylene looked as wild as an eagle's
wing ruffling against the wind, and there was that
smoke in the sky as if the blast was igniting with its
with rain. The crazy looking vessels of
the Levant were scudding with mere rags of sails for
the Gulf; and while we sat on the rock, eight or ten
of those black and unsightly craft shot into the little
bay below us, and dropped anchor, blessing, no doubt,
every saint in the Greek calendar.
Having looked toward Lesbos an hour, and come to
the conclusion, that, admitting the worst with regard
to the private character of Sappho, it would have been
very pleasant to have known her; and the captain
having washed his feet in a slender tricklet oozing
from a cleft in the rock, we descended the hill on the
other side and stole a march on the rear to the town of
Fourgas. Four or five Greek women were picking up
olives in a grove lying half way down the hill, and on
our coming in sight, they made for us with such speed
that I feared the reverse of the Sabine rape—not yet
having seen a man on this desolate shore. They ran
well, but they resembled Atalanta in no other possible
particular. We should have taken them for the Furies,
but there were five. They wanted snuff and money,
—making signs easily for the first, but attempting amicably
to put their hands in our pockets when we refused
to comprehend the Greek for “give us a para.”
The captain pulled from his pocket an American dollar-note,
(payable at Nantucket,) and offered it to the
youngest of the women, who smelt at it and returned
it to him, evidently unacquainted with the Cape Cod
currency. On farther search he found a few of the
tinsel paras of the country, which he substituted for his
“dollar-bill,” a saving of ninety-nine cents to him, if
the bank has not broke when he arrives at Massachusetts.
Fourgas is surrounded by a very old wall, very
much battered. We passed under a high arch containing
marks of having once been closed with a heavy
that seemed less cleanly and civilized, penetrated to the
heart of the town in search of the barber's shop, cafe,
and kibaub shop—three conveniences usually united in
a single room and dispensed by a single Figaro in
Turkish and Greek towns of this description. The
word cafe is universal, and we needed only to pronounce
it to be led by a low door into a square apartment
of a ruinous old building, around which, upon a
kind of shelf, waist-high, sat as many of the inhabitants
of the town as could cross their legs conveniently.
As soon as we were discerned through the smoke by
the omnifarious proprietor of the establishment, two
of the worst-dressed customers were turned off the
shelf unceremoniously to make room for us, the fire
beneath the coffee-pot was raked open, and the agreeable
flavor of the spiced beverage of the East ascended
refreshingly to our nostrils. With his baggy trowsers
tucked up to his thigh, his silk shirt to his armpits, and
his smoke-dried but clean feet wandering at large in a
pair of red morocco slippers, our Turkish Ganymede
presented the small cups in their filagree holders, and
never was beverage more delicious or more welcome.
Thirsty with our ramble, and unaccustomed to such
small quantities as seem to satisfy the natives of the
East, the captain and myself soon became objects of
no small amusement to the wondering beards about us.
A large table-spoon holds rather more than a Turkish
coffee-cup, and one, or, at most, two of these, satisfies
the dryest clay in the Orient. To us, a dozen of them
was a bagatelle, and we soon exhausted the copper pot,
and intimated to the astonished cafidji that we should
want another. He looked at us a minute to see if we
were in earnest, and then laid his hand on his stomach,
and rolling up his eyes, made some remark to his other
customers which provoked a general laugh. It was
our last “lark” ashore for some time, however, and
our narghiles and kept him running with his fairy cups
for some time longer. One never gets enough of that
fragrant liquor.
The sun broke through the clouds as we sat on the
high bench, and, hastily paying our Turk, we hurried
to the sea-side. The wind seemed to have lulled, and
was blowing lightly off shore, and, impatient of loitering
on his voyage, the captain got up his anchor and
ran across the bay, and in half an hour was driving
through a sea that left not a dry plank on the deck of
the Metamora.
The other vessels at Fourgas had not stirred, and
the sky in the north-east looked to my eye very threatening.
It was the middle of the afternoon, and the
captain crowded sail and sped on like a sea-bird,
though I could see by his face when he looked in the
quarter of the wind, that he had acted more from impulse
than judgment in leaving his shelter. The heavy
sea kicked us on our course however, and the smart
little brig shot buoyantly over the crests of the waves as
she outran them, and it was difficult not to feel that the
bounding and obedient fabric beneath our feet was instinct
with self-confidence, and rode the waters like
their master.
I well knew that the passage of the Archipelago was
a difficult one in a storm even to an experienced pilot,
and with the advantage of daylight; and I could not
but remember with some anxiety that we were entering
upon it at nightfall, and with a wind strengthening
every moment, while the captain confessedly had made
the passage but once before, and then in a calm sea of
August. The skipper, however, walked his deck confidently,
though he began to manage his canvas with a
more wary care, and, before dark, we were scudding
under a single sail, and pitching onward with the heave
of the sea at a rate that, if we were to see Malta at all,
passed a large frigate lying-to, which we afterwards
found out was the Superbe, a French eighty-gun ship,
(wrecked a few hours after on the island of Andros.)
The two American frigates had run up by Mitylene and
were still behind us, and the fear of being run down in
the night, in our small craft, induced the captain to scud
on, though he would else have lain-to with the Frenchman,
and perhaps have shared his fate.
I staid on deck an hour or two after dark, and before
going below satisfied myself that we should owe it
to the merest chance if we escaped striking in the
night. The storm had become so furious that we ran
with bare poles before it, and though it set us pretty
fairly on our way, the course lay through a narrow
and most intricate channel, among small and rocky islands,
and we had nothing for it but to trust to a providential
drift.
The captain prepared himself for a night on deck,
lashed everything that was loose, and filled the two
jugs suspended in the cabin, which, as the sea had been
too violet for any hope from the cook, wore to sustain
us through the storm. We took a biscuit and a
glass of Hollands and water, holding on hard by the
berths lest we should be pitched through the skylight,
and as the captain tied up the dim lantern, I got a look
at his face, which would have told me, if I had not
known it before, that though resolute and unmoved, he
knew himself to be entering on the most imminent
hazard of his life.
The waves now broke over the brig at every heave,
and occasionally the descent of the solid mass of water
on the quarter-deck, seemed to drive her under like a
cork. My own situation was the worst on board, for
I was inactive. It required a seaman to keep the deck,
and as there was no standing in the cabin without great
effort, I disembarrassed myself of all that would impede
which I considered almost inevitable. Braced with
both hands and feet, I lay and watched the imbroglio
in the bottom of the cabin, my own dressing-case
among other things emptied of its contents and swimming
with some of my own clothes and the captain's,
and the water rushing down the companion-way with
every wave that broke over us. The last voice I heard
on deck was from the deep throat of the captain calling
his men aft to assist in lashing the helm, and then,
in the pauses of the gale, came the awful crash upon
deck, more like the descent of a falling house than a
body of water, and a swash through the scuppers immediately
after, seconded by the smaller sea below, in
which my coat and waistcoat were undergoing a rehearsal
of the tragedy outside.
At midnight the gale increased, and the seas that
descended on the brig shook her to the very keel. We
could feel her struck under by the shock, and reel and
quiver as she recovered and rose again; and, as if to
distract my attention, the little epitome of the tempest
going on in the bottom of the cabin grew more and
more serious. The unoccupied berths were packed
with boxes of figs and bags of nuts, which “brought
away” one after another, and rolled from side to side
with a violence which threatened to drive them through
the side of the vessel; my portmanteau broke its lashings
and shot heavily backward and forward with the
roll of the sea; and if I was not to be drowned like a
dog in a locked cabin, I feared, at least, I should have
my legs broken by the leap of a fig-box into my berth.
My situation was wholly uncomfortable, yet half ludicrous.
An hour after midnight the captain came down,
pale and exhausted, and with no small difficulty
managed to get a tumbler of grog.
“How does she head?” I asked.
“Side to wind, drifting five knots an hour.”
“Where are you?”
“God only knows. I expect her to strike every
minute.”
He quietly picked up the wick of the lamp as it tossed
to and fro, and watching the roll of the vessel, gained
the companion-way, and mounted to the deck. The
door was locked, and I was once more a prisoner and
alone.
An hour elapsed—the sea, it appeared to me,
strengthening in its heaves beneath us, and the wind
howling and hissing in the rigging like a hundred devils.
An awful surge then burst down upon the deck, racking
the brig in every seam: the hurried tread of feet
over head told me that they were cutting the lashings
of the helm; the seas succeeded each other quicker
and quicker, and, conjecturing from the shortness of
the pitch, that we were nearing a reef, I was half out
of my berth when the cabin door was wrenched open,
and a deluging sea washed down the companion way.
“On deck for your life!” screamed the hoarse voice
of the captain.
I sprange up through streaming water, barefoot and
bareheaded, but the pitch of the brig was so violent
that I dared not leave the ropes of the companion ladder,
and, almost blinded with the spray and wind, I
stood waiting for the stroke.
“Hard down!” cried the captain in a voice I shall
never forget, and as the rudder creaked with the strain,
the brig fell slightly off, and rising with a tremendous
surge, I saw the sky dimly relieved against the edge of
a ragged precipice, and in the next moment, as if with
the repulse of a catapult, we were flung back into the
trough of the sea by the retreating wave, and surged
heavily beyond the rock. The noise of the breakers,
and the rapid commands of the captain now drowned
the hiss of the wind, and in a few minutes we were
the long and regular heavings of the sea alone assuring
us that we were driving from the shore.
The wind was cold, and I was wet to the skin.
Every third sea broke over the brig and added to the
deluge in the cabin, and from the straining of the masts
I feared they would come down with every succeeding
shock. I crept once more below, and regained my
berth, where wet and aching in every joint, I awaited
fate or the daylight.
Morning broke, but no abatement of the storm. The
captain came below and informed me (what I had already
presumed) that we had run upon the southernmost
point of Negropont, and had been saved by a
miracle from shipwreck. The back wave had taken
us off, and with the next sea we had shot beyond it.
We were now running in the same narrow channel for
Cape Colonna, and were surrounded with dangers.
The skipper looked beaten out; his eyes were protruding
and strained, and his face seemed to me to have
emaciated in the night. He swallowed his grog, and
flung himself for half an hour into his berth, and then
went on deck again to relieve his mate, where tired of
my wretched berth, I soon followed him.
The deck was a scene of desolation. The bulwarks
were carried clean away, the jolly-boat swept off, and
the long-boat the only moveable thing remaining. The
men were holding on to the shrouds, haggard and
sleepy, clinging mechanically to their support as the
sea broke down upon them, and, silent at the helm,
stood the captain and the second mate keeping the brig
stern-on to the sea, and straining their eyes for land
through the thick spray before them.
The day crept on, and another night, and we passed
it like the last. The storm never slacked, and all
through the long hours the same succession went on,
the brig plunging and rising, struggling beneath the
herself again, till it seemed to me as if I had never
known any other motion. The captain came below
for his biscuit and grog and went up again without
speaking a word, the mates did the same with the same
silence, and at last the bracing and holding on to prevent
being flung from my berth became mechanical,
and I did it while I slept. Cold, wet, hungry and exhausted,
what a blessing from heaven were five minutes
of forgetfulness!
How the third night wore on I scarce remember.
The storm continued with unabated fury, and when
the dawn of the third morning broke upon us the captain
conjectured that we had drifted four hundred miles
before the wind. The crew were exhausted with
watching, the brig labored more and more heavily, and
the storm seemed eternal.
At noon of the third day the clouds broke up a little,
and the wind, though still violent, slacked somewhat
in its fury. The sun struggled down upon the
lashed and raging sea, and, taking our bearings, we
found ourselves about two hundred miles from Malta.
With great exertions, the cook contrived to get up a fire
in the binnacle and boil a little rice, and never gourmet
sucked the brain of a woodcock with the relish which
welcomed that dark mess of pottage.
It was still impossible to carry more than a hand's
breadth of sail, but we were now in open waters and
flew merrily before the driving sea. The pitching and
racking motion, and the occasional shipping of a heavy
wave, still forbade all thoughts or hopes of comfort,
but the dread of shipwreck troubled us no more, and I
passed the day in contriving how to stand long enough
on my legs to get my wet traps from my floating portmanteau,
and go into quarantine like a christian.
The following day, at noon, Malta became visible
from the top of an occasional mountain wave; and still
rapidly neared it, and I began to hope for the repose
of terra firma. The watch towers of the castellated
rock soon became distinct through the atmosphere of
spray, and at a distance of a mile, we took in sail and
waited for a pilot.
While tossing in the trough of the sea the following
half hour, the captain communicated to me some embarrassment
with respect to my landing which had not
occurred to me. It appeared that the agreement to
land me at Malta was not mentioned in his policy of
insurance, and the underwriters of course were not responsible
for any accident that might happen to the
brig after a variation from his original plan of passage.
This he would not have minded if he could have set
me ashore in a half hour, as he had anticipated, but his
small boat was lost in the storm, and it was now a question
whether the pilot-boat would take ashore a passenger
liable to quarantine. To run his brig into harbor
would be a great expense and positive loss of insurance,
and to get out the long-boat with his broken tackle
and exhausted crew was not to be thought of. I knew
very well that no passenger from a plague port (such
as Smyrna and Constantinople) was permitted to land
on any terms at Gibraltar, and if the pilot here should
refuse to take me off, the alternative was clear. I must
make a voyage against my will to America!
I was not in a very pleasant state of mind during the
delay which followed; for, though I had been three
years absent from my country and loved it well, I had
laid my plans for still two years of travel on this side
the Atlantic, and certain moneys for my “charges” lay
waiting my arrival at Malta. Among lesser reasons, I
had not a rag of clothes dry or clean, and was heartily
out of love with salt water and the smell of figs.
As if to aggravate my unhappiness, the sun broke
through a rift in the clouds and lit up the white and
—the only bright spot within the limits of the stormy
horizon. The mountain waves on which we were
tossing were tempestuous and black, the comfortless
and battered brig with her weary crew looked more
like a wreck than a sea-worthy merchantman, and no
pilot appearing, the captain looked anxiously sea-ward,
as if he grudged every minute of the strong wind rushing
by on his course.
A small speck at last appeared making towards us
from the shore, and, riding slowly over the tremendous
waves, a boat manned by four men came within hailing
distance. One moment as high as our topmast, and
another in the depths of the gulf a hundred feet below
us, it was like conversing from two buckets in a well.
“Do you want a pilot?” screamed the Maltese in
English, as the American flag blew out to the wind.
“No!” roared the captain, like a thunder-peal,
through his tin-trumpet.
The Maltese, without deigning another look, put up
his helm with a gesture of disappointment, and bore
away.
“Boat ahoy!” bellowed the captain.
“Ahoy! ahoy!” answered the pilot.
“Will you take a passenger ashore?”
“Where from?”
“Smyrna!”
“No—o—o—o!”
There was a sound of doom in the angry prolongation
of that detested monosyllable that sunk to the bottom
of my heart like lead.
“Clear away the mainsail,” cried the captain getting
round once more to the wind. “I knew how it
would be, sir,” he continued, to me, as I bit my lips in
the effort to be reconciled to an involuntary voyage of
four thousand miles; “it wasn't likely he'd put himself
to oblige you and me.”
I could not but own that it was an unreasonable expectation.
“Never mind, sir,” said the skipper, consolingly,
“plenty of salt fish in the locker, and I'll set you on
Long Wharf in no time!”
“Brig ahoy!” came a voice faintly across the waves.
The captain looked over his shoulder without losing
a cap-full of wind from his sail, and sent back the hail
impatiently.
The pilot was running rapidly down upon us, and
had come back to offer to tow me ashore in the brig's
jolly-boat for a large sum of money.
“We've lost our boat, and you're a bloody shark,”
answered the skipper, enraged at the attempt at extortion.
“Head your course!” he muttered gruffly to the
man at the helm, who had let the brig fall off that the
pilot might come up.
Irritated by this new and gratuitous disappointment,
I stamped on the deck in an ungovernable fit of rage,
and wished the brig at the devil.
The skipper looked at me a moment, and instead of
the angry answer I expected, an expression of kind
commiseration stole over his rough face. The next
moment he seized the helm and put the brig away from
the wind, and then making a trumpet of his two immense
hands, he once more hailed the returning pilot.
“I can't bear to see you take it so much to heart,
sir,” said the kind sailor, “and I'll do for you what I
wouldn't do for another man on the face o' the 'arth.
All hands there!”
The men came aft, and the captain in brief words
stated the case to them, and appealed to their sense of
kindness for a fellow-countryman, to undertake a task,
which, in the sea then running, and with their exhausted
strength, was not a service he could well demand
and wait off while the pilot towed me ashore and returned
with her.
“Ay, ay! sir,” was the immediate response from
every lip, and from the chief-mate to the black cabin-boy,
every man sprang cheerily to the lashings. It was
no momentary task, for the boat was as firmly set in
her place as the mainmast, and stowed compactly with
barrels of pork, extra rigging, and spars—in short, all
the furniture and provision of the voyage. In the
course of an hour, however, the tackle was rigged on
the fore and main yards, and with a desperate effort its
immense bulk was heaved over the side, and lay tossing
on the tempestous waters. I shook hands with
the men, who refused every remuneration beyond my
thanks, and, following the captain over the side, was
soon toiling heavily on the surging waters, thanking
Heaven for the generous sympathies of home and
country implanted in the human bosom. Those who
know the reluctance with which a merchant captain
lays-to even to pick up a man overboard in a fair wind,
and those who understand the meaning of a forfeited
insurance, will appreciate this instance of difficult generosity.
I shook the hard fist of the kind-hearted
skipper on the quarantine stairs, and watched his
heavy boat as she crept out of the little harbor with the
tears in my eyes. I shall travel far before I find again
a man I honor more heartily.
| Inklings of adventure | |