Cappy Ricks | Page 3

of engaging new skippers or discharging old ones
Mr. Skinner had to be very careful. Cappy always declared that any
clerk can negotiate successfully a charter at the going rates in a stiff
market, but skippers are, in the final analysis, the Genii of the
Dividends. And Cappy knew skippers. He could get more loyalty out of
them with a mere pat on the back and a kindly word than could Mr.
Skinner, with all his threats, nagging and driving, yet he was an
employer who demanded a full measure of service, and never permitted
sentiment to plead for an incompetent. And his ships were his pets; in
his affections they occupied a position but one degree removed from
that occupied by his only child, in consequence of which he was
mighty particular who hung up his master's ticket in the cabin of a Blue
Star ship. Some idea of the scrupulous care with which he examined all
applicants for a skipper's berth may be gleaned from the fact that any
man discharged from a Blue Star ship stood as much chance of
obtaining a berth with one of Cappy Ricks' competitors as a celluloid
dog chasing an asbestos cat through Hades.
The reader will readily appreciate, therefore, the apprehensions which
assailed Cappy Ricks when the Blue Star Navigation Company
discovered it had on its payroll one Matthew Peasley, a Nobody from
Nowhere, who not only had the insufferable impudence to apply for a
job skippering the finest windjammer in the fleet, but when rebuffed in
no uncertain terms, refused to withdraw his application, and defied his
owners to fire him. Such a preposterous state of affairs borders so
closely on the realm of fancy as to require explanation; hence, for the
nonce let us leave Cappy Ricks and Mr. Skinner to their sordid task of
squeezing dividends out of the Blue Star Navigation Company and turn
the searchlight of inquiry upon the amazing Matthew.
CHAPTER II
THE MAN FROM BLUE WATER
If, instead of advancing the theory that man sprang from a monkey,
Darwin had elected to nominate the duck for that dubious honor, there

is no doubt but that he would have pointed to the Peasley family, of
Thomaston, Maine, as evidence of the correctness of his theory of
evolution. The most casual student of natural history knows that the
instant a duckling chips its shell it toddles straightway to the nearest
water. The instant a male Peasley could cut his mother's apron strings,
he, also, made for the nearest water, for the Peasleys had always been
sailors, a statement which a perusal of the tombstones in Thomaston
cemetery will amply justify. Indeed, a Peasley who had not acquired
his master's ticket prior to his twenty-fifth birthday was one of two
things--a disgrace to the family or a corpse. Consequently, since the
traditions of his tribe were very strong in Matthew Peasley VI, it
occasioned no comment in Thomaston when, having acquired a
grammar school education, he answered the call of his destiny and
fared forth to blue water and his first taste of dog's body and salt horse.
When he was fourteen years old and very large for his age, Matt
commenced his apprenticeship in a codfisher on the Grand Banks,
which, when all is said and done, constitutes the finest training school
in the world for sailors. By the time he was seventeen he had made one
voyage to Rio de Janeiro in a big square-rigger out of Portland; and so
smart and capable an A.B. was he for his years that the Old Man took a
shine to him. Confidentially he informed young Matt that if the latter
would stay by the ship, in due course a billet as third mate should be
the reward of his fealty. The Old Man didn't need a third mate any
more than he needed a tail, but Matt Peasley looked like a comer to him
and he wanted an excuse to encourage the boy by berthing him aft; also
it sounds far better to be known as a third mate instead of a mate's
bosun, which was, in reality, the position the Old Man had promised
Matt. The latter promptly agreed to this program and the skipper loaned
him his copy of Bowditch.
Upon his return from his first voyage as third mate Matt went up for his
second mate's certificate and passed very handily. Naturally he
expected prompt promotion, but the Old Man knew the value of
experience in a second mate--also the value of years and physical
weight; so he informed young Matt he was entirely too precocious and
that to sail as second mate before he was nineteen might tend to swell

his ego. Consequently Matt made a voyage to Liverpool and back as
third mate before