Captain Mugford | Page 9

"Come here, boys; if I'm not out in my calculation, these boys will do
to sail any craft on land or water! Well, my hearties, we are often to be
shipmates, so let's be friends to start with. I don't know your different
names, boys, only that three of you are sons of my old and respected
friend and owner--that's good enough--and you all look as if you hated
lies and kept above-board."
"These," said Mr Clare, laying his hands on Harry's and Alfred's
shoulders, "are Higginsons!"
"Higginsons? Fancy I knew your father, young gentlemen--an honest
man, and a kind man, and a true man, and a brave man, if he was John
Higginson; and brother of David Higginson, under whom I once served,
and a better sailor never stepped. As he died unmarried, I take you to be
John Higginson's sons. And if all you boys act as honest as you look,
you need not care for shipwrecks of any kind--love or money, lands or
goods, by land or by water."
Well, we thought the Captain a brick. So he was. So he proved.
We passed all the morning on the wreck. Each one of its details was a
new delight. The Captain talked about the brig as if she were a human
being in misfortune. An old invalid, he said--a veteran old salt laid up
in a sailor's snug harbour; laid up and pensioned for the remainder of
life, where it was able to overlook, by the side and in the very spray of

its well-loved brine, the billows it had often gloried in.
We went below to the Captain's cabin and stateroom. There everything
bore the marks of a sea habitation, and when hearing the dash of the
waves on the shore and listening to the Captain's talk, I could not help
fancying myself on a voyage. Not a nook or hole of that vessel but we
explored, and numberless questions had each one of us to ask. Mr Clare
seemed as much pleased and interested as we were. When at play,
indeed, he was as heartily a boy as any of us.
Great was our astonishment--Mr Clare, however, was prepared for it--
upon going between decks, where the cargo had once been stored, to
find ourselves in a schoolroom--a long, low schoolroom. Thick glass
windows, only about eighteen inches square, had been set in on each
side, and protected with dead-lights to fasten tight in case a heavy surf
should dash up so high, and the entire hold--where on many and many
long voyages there had been stored, in darkness, spices, coffee, sugar,
and perhaps gold and jewels--was now transformed to a schoolroom.
There was a long table and there were globes and maps, shelves of
books, and a blackboard. That schoolroom had, I am sure, none of the
dulness and repulsiveness of other schoolrooms to us. No; it rather
seemed a delightful place--an Arabian Nights' sort of study, with a
romantic salty influence pervading it to comfort us at our tasks. We
could take hold there of geography and history. Mathematics in a
vessel's hold, what was it but a foreshadowing of navigation? We felt
no hostility to Latin and Greek, for we were but reading of foreign
lands and strange people across the ocean in old times, the occurrences
of which were but storm-cast hulks like our old brig.
So low was our roof, the deck, that the crown of Walter's cap touched it,
and Mr Clare had to bend his neck when he moved about. The square,
dwarf windows looked out on nothing but jagged rocks and rolling blue
waves.
Away forward and aft our schoolroom was dark, and the distance
between decks so narrowed that we could only explore those extremes
of the hold by going on hands and knees--with the chance, too, of

starting some big rat, an old grey navigator, perhaps, who, believing
firmly in "Don't give up the ship!" could not get over his surprise at
seeing his once rolling and well-stored residence now stationary, and
furnishing no better victuals than book-leaves, chalk, and sometimes
the crumbs of a boy's lunch. I imagined the crew of old rats assembling
beneath the globes at night, when a moon streamed through the small
windows; and the captain, a surly grey fellow, with long whiskers and
brown, broken grinders, taking his place on a Greek lexicon, and then
the speeches of inquiry and indignation shrilly uttered in the mass
meeting. "Long tails!"--would commence some orator with a fierce
squeak--"long tails, long tails, I say! what in the name of all that's
marine does this mean? Cheese and spices! how things are changed.
Will this craft never sail, and our parents waiting for us in the New
World over the sea! Where is our `life