The Voyage of the Hoppergrass | Page 2

to call a man "Captain" if he had ever risen as high as mate. The Captain was a short, red-faced man, with such bowed legs that you could have pushed a barrel, end-ways, right between them. Ed Mason thought that the Captain's legs were bowed like that because he had been made to sit for hours astride a barrel. Ed believed that this was a favorite form of punishment on board ship,--especially in the navy.
I had a different idea about the Captain's legs. It was my belief that they were what sailors call "sea-legs." I had often read, in stories about the ocean, of people who were very sick and unhappy until the got their "sea-legs." After that, as near as I could make out, they could balance themselves better as they walked the deck, and they didn't mind the rolling of the ship. It seemed resonable that a man who had followed the sea for forty years, like the Captain, would get "sea-legs" for good and all. But we never dared to ask the Captain about it.
"Hey! Clarence!" he shouted again. "What's the matter with yer? Think we want to stand here all day?"
The others of us, waiting on the wharf, were Ed Mason, Jimmy Toppan, and myself. My name was Sam Edwards. (It still IS Sam Edwards, of course, except that some people call me Samuel now).
"You boys provide the grub," the Captain had said, "an' I'll find the boat for a week's cruise."
We were more than willing to agree to that, and we got our families to agree to it. In fact we got them so much interested in it that they fitted us out with a plentiful supply. I had a basket which contained, among other things, a whole boiled ham,--one of those hams that are all brown on the outside, covered with cracker-crumbs and sugar, with cloves stuck in here and there. It makes me hungry to think of them. Jimmy's grandmother had provided all kinds of food, including a lot of her celebrated sugar-gingerbread, and a water-melon. Jimmy was carrying the water-melon now, by means of a shawl-strap. Ed Mason brought up the rear of our procession, as we came down the wharf, with a wheel-barrow full of the rest of our food,--coffee, and bacon, crackers, pork, eggs, butter, condensed milk (horrid stuff!) and two or threee loaves of fresh bread. Oh, and I forgot threee dozen mince turnovers, brought by Ed Mason.
The Captain snorted a little over the fresh bread and some of the other things.
"If you'd ever had to live for months at a time on salt-hoss an' hard tack, the same's I've done, you wouldn't bring soft bread on a boat. It spiles in no time."
That did not seem to me a good argument, for if the Captain didn't like to live on these things, why should he want us to bring them? But I could see that Jimmy Toppan--who liked everything done sailor-fashion--was rather fascinated by the idea of eating nothing but ship's food. Ed Mason and I, however, had read the books by Clark Russell, and we didn't want to eat biscuits full of weevils, bad meat, and all the other unpleasant things they gave to sailors. We agreed that salt horse, or fresh horse, either, did not strike our fancy. Anyhow, we ate up the soft bread the first day so we did not have to worry about it afterwards. We counted on getting fish and clams for chowders, and probably some lobsters at Duck Island.
By this time, Clarence was coming ashore in the tender. He did not sit facing the stern, and pull with the oars as any ordinary person would have done. Instead, he faced the bow, and used the oars to push with. He had seen the Captain doing this, and, like Jimmy, it was his aim to be as much of a sailor as possible. Why the Captain did it, I cannot say, unless it was for the reason that sailors often seem to enjoy doing things in an odd and awkward fashion, so as to puzzle landsmen. Neither of them made very good progress by it, and Clarence wabbled the boat, and caught crabs every other stroke.
At last he got alongside the wharf, and we put some of our things in the boat, and rowed out to the "Hoppergrass." It took two trips to carry everything, for we had bags of clothes, as well as rubber boots and oil-skins. Ed Mason and Clarence, between them, managed to let the water-melon slip out of the straps, so it fell into the river and went bobbing down stream with the tide. The Captain and I, who were still in the tender, went after it.
Did you ever try to fish a big water-melon out of a