But the time was rapidly drawing near when I was to begin my second series of bouts with John Barleycorn.When I was fourteen,my head filled with the tales of the old voyagers,my vision with tropic isles and far sea-rims,I was sailing a small centreboard skiff around San Francisco Bay and on the Oakland Estuary.Iwanted to go to sea.I wanted to get away from monotony and the commonplace.I was in the flower of my adolescence,a-thrill with romance and adventure,dreaming of wild life in the wild man-world.Little I guessed how all the warp and woof of that man-world was entangled with alcohol.
So,one day,as I hoisted sail on my skiff,I met Scotty.He was a husky youngster of seventeen,a runaway apprentice,he told me,from an English ship in Australia.He had just worked his way on another ship to San Francisco;and now he wanted to see about getting a berth on a whaler.Across the estuary,near where the whalers lay,was lying the sloop-yacht Idler.The caretaker was a harpooner who intended sailing next voyage on the whale ship Bonanza.Would I take him,Scotty,over in my skiff to call upon the harpooner?
Would I!Hadn't I heard the stories and rumours about the Idler?--the big sloop that had come up from the Sandwich Islands where it had been engaged in smuggling opium.And the harpooner who was caretaker!How often had I seen him and envied him his freedom.
He never had to leave the water.He slept aboard the Idler each night,while I had to go home upon the land to go to bed.The harpooner was only nineteen years old (and I have never had anything but his own word that he was a harpooner);but he had been too shining and glorious a personality for me ever to address as I paddled around the yacht at a wistful distance.Would I take Scotty,the runaway sailor,to visit the harpooner,on the opium-smuggler Idler?WOULD I!
The harpooner came on deck to answer our hail,and invited us aboard.I played the sailor and the man,fending off the skiff so that it would not mar the yacht's white paint,dropping the skiff astern on a long painter,and making the painter fast with two nonchalant half-hitches.
We went below.It was the first sea-interior I had ever seen.
The clothing on the wall smelled musty.But what of that?Was it not the sea-gear of men?--leather jackets lined with corduroy,blue coats of pilot cloth,sou'westers,sea-boots,oilskins.And everywhere was in evidence the economy of space--the narrow bunks,the swinging tables,the incredible lockers.There were the tell-tale compass,the sea-lamps in their gimbals,the blue-backed charts carelessly rolled and tucked away,the signal-flags in alphabetical order,and a mariner's dividers jammed into the woodwork to hold a calendar.At last I was living.Here I sat,inside my first ship,a smuggler,accepted as a comrade by a harpooner and a runaway English sailor who said his name was Scotty.
The first thing that the harpooner,aged nineteen,and the sailor,aged seventeen,did to show that they were men was to behave like men.The harpooner suggested the eminent desirableness of a drink,and Scotty searched his pockets for dimes and nickels.
Then the harpooner carried away a pink flask to be filled in some blind pig,for there were no licensed saloons in that locality.
We drank the cheap rotgut out of tumblers.Was I any the less strong,any the less valiant,than the harpooner and the sailor?
They were men.They proved it by the way they drank.Drink was the badge of manhood.So I drank with them,drink by drink,raw and straight,though the damned stuff couldn't compare with a stick of chewing taffy or a delectable "cannon-ball."I shuddered and swallowed my gorge with every drink,though I manfully hid all such symptoms.
Divers times we filled the flask that afternoon.All I had was twenty cents,but I put it up like a man,though with secret regret at the enormous store of candy it could have bought.The liquor mounted in the heads of all of us,and the talk of Scotty and the harpooner was upon running the Easting down,gales off the Horn and pamperos off the Plate,lower topsail breezes,southerly busters,North Pacific gales,and of smashed whaleboats in the Arctic ice.
"You can't swim in that ice water,"said the harpooner confidentially to me."You double up in a minute and go down.
When a whale smashes your boat,the thing to do is to get your belly across an oar,so that when the cold doubles you you'll float.""Sure,"I said,with a grateful nod and an air of certitude that I,too,would hunt whales and be in smashed boats in the Arctic Ocean.And,truly,I registered his advice as singularly valuable information,and filed it away in my brain,where it persists to this day.
But I couldn't talk--at first.Heavens!I was only fourteen,and had never been on the ocean in my life.I could only listen to the two sea-dogs,and show my manhood by drinking with them,fairly and squarely,drink and drink.
The liquor worked its will with me;the talk of Scotty and the harpooner poured through the pent space of the Idler's cabin and through my brain like great gusts of wide,free wind;and in imagination I lived my years to come and rocked over the wild,mad,glorious world on multitudinous adventures.