Essays of Travel | Page 4

there
is a free or common accent among English-speaking men who follow
the sea. They catch a twang in a New England Port; from a cockney
skipper, even a Scotsman sometimes learns to drop an h; a word of a
dialect is picked up from another band in the forecastle; until often the
result is undecipherable, and you have to ask for the man's place of
birth. So it was with Mr. Jones. I thought him a Scotsman who had
been long to sea; and yet he was from Wales, and had been most of his
life a blacksmith at an inland forge; a few years in America and half a
score of ocean voyages having sufficed to modify his speech into the
common pattern. By his own account he was both strong and skilful in
his trade. A few years back, he had been married and after a fashion a
rich man; now the wife was dead and the money gone. But his was the
nature that looks forward, and goes on from one year to another and
through all the extremities of fortune undismayed; and if the sky were
to fall to-morrow, I should look to see Jones, the day following,
perched on a step-ladder and getting things to rights. He was always
hovering round inventions like a bee over a flower, and lived in a
dream of patents. He had with him a patent medicine, for instance, the
composition of which he had bought years ago for five dollars from an

American pedlar, and sold the other day for a hundred pounds (I think
it was) to an English apothecary. It was called Golden Oil, cured all
maladies without exception; and I am bound to say that I partook of it
myself with good results. It is a character of the man that he was not
only perpetually dosing himself with Golden Oil, but wherever there
was a head aching or a finger cut, there would be Jones with his bottle.
If he had one taste more strongly than another, it was to study character.
Many an hour have we two walked upon the deck dissecting our
neighbours in a spirit that was too purely scientific to be called unkind;
whenever a quaint or human trait slipped out in conversation, you
might have seen Jones and me exchanging glances; and we could
hardly go to bed in comfort till we had exchanged notes and discussed
the day's experience. We were then like a couple of anglers comparing
a day's kill. But the fish we angled for were of a metaphysical species,
and we angled as often as not in one another's baskets. Once, in the
midst of a serious talk, each found there was a scrutinising eye upon
himself; I own I paused in embarrassment at this double detection; but
Jones, with a better civility, broke into a peal of unaffected laughter,
and declared, what was the truth, that there was a pair of us indeed.
EARLY IMPRESSIONS
We steamed out of the Clyde on Thursday night, and early on the
Friday forenoon we took in our last batch of emigrants at Lough Foyle,
in Ireland, and said farewell to Europe. The company was now
complete, and began to draw together, by inscrutable magnetisms, upon
the decks. There were Scots and Irish in plenty, a few English, a few
Americans, a good handful of Scandinavians, a German or two, and
one Russian; all now belonging for ten days to one small iron country
on the deep.
As I walked the deck and looked round upon my fellow-passengers,
thus curiously assorted from all northern Europe, I began for the first
time to understand the nature of emigration. Day by day throughout the
passage, and thenceforward across all the States, and on to the shores of
the Pacific, this knowledge grew more clear and melancholy.
Emigration, from a word of the most cheerful import, came to sound
most dismally in my ear. There is nothing more agreeable to picture
and nothing more pathetic to behold. The abstract idea, as conceived at
home, is hopeful and adventurous. A young man, you fancy, scorning

restraints and helpers, issues forth into life, that great battle, to fight for
his own hand. The most pleasant stories of ambition, of difficulties
overcome, and of ultimate success, are but as episodes to this great epic
of self- help. The epic is composed of individual heroisms; it stands to
them as the victorious war which subdued an empire stands to the
personal act of bravery which spiked a single cannon and was
adequately rewarded with a medal. For in emigration the young men
enter direct and by the shipload on their heritage of work; empty
continents swarm, as at the bo's'un's whistle, with industrious hands,
and whole new