The Voyage of the Hoppergrass | Page 2

but as yet he had not found any way of
changing it. Captain Bannister was a retired seaman, but I do not know
whether he had ever been a full-fledged captain of a ship. In our town it
was often the custom 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,