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He stood, in imagination, upon the deck of a sailing-ship an emigrant ship. The year was eighteen hundred and sixty-four, a year when very few were tempted to try their fortunes in a country torn by civil war. With him were his daughter and his son-in-law, and they were come to bid the latter farewell.
There it was, quite clear. By this means I learned a lot about myself. One vexed point, however, I never did succeed in clearing up. Was this island situated in the far South Pacific or the far South Atlantic? I do not know enough of sailing-ship tracks to be certain whether the brig Negociator would sail for the Friendly Islands via Cape Horn or via the Cape of Good Hope.
Before sailing from Marseilles, young Risler wrote Sidonie a farewell letter, at once laughable and touching, wherein, mingling the most technical details with the most heartrending adieux, the unhappy engineer declared that he was about to set sail, with a broken heart, on the transport Sahib, "a sailing-ship and steamship combined, with engines of fifteen-hundred-horse power," as if he hoped that so considerable a capacity would make an impression on his ungrateful betrothed, and cause her ceaseless remorse.
I cannot pretend to portray or exactly reproduce the scene of a sailor's political or any other controversy for that matter; I can only hope to convey some idea of it; and the rest must be left to the imagination of the reader. Some twenty years ago a group of sailing-ship masters was seated at a table under a verandah outside a Russian snap-shop.
Now, I've heard more than enough of mad things done in the world but this. . . . If I didn't know you, Jukes, I would think you were in liquor. Steer four points off. . . . And what afterwards? Steer four points over the other way, I suppose, to make the course good. What put it into your head that I would start to tack a steamer as if she were a sailing-ship?"
For it was only a queer, old-fashioned light gold locket. In tiny diamonds they were real diamonds, but Polly did not know that were set the words "Rule Britannia," and below the words was a funny little enamel picture of a sailing-ship. Not the sort of thing she would care to wear, excepting just to please Manfred. "You can put that on the chain I gave you," he said. "It looks nice and patriotic.
For this year both plans were adopted. There were two practice-ships, one of which was to remain between Narragansett and Gardiner's Bay, in Long Island. I was ordered as first lieutenant of the other, which was to go to Europe. The advisability of this step for a sailing-ship was on this occasion doubly questioned, for the Alabama had already begun her career.
The boy had made a treaty on his own account. Railroads, he explained gravely, interested him as little as lumber, real estate, or mining. What his soul yearned after was control of his father's newly purchased sailing-ship. If that could be promised him within what he conceived to be a reasonable time, he, for his part, guaranteed diligence and sobriety at college for four or five years.
In the sailing-ship, on the contrary, the striking feature is the difference between it and the more modern vessel; the points of resemblance, though existing and easy to find, are not so obvious, and therefore are less heeded.
Perhaps it would not be too much to say that the modern school of wooden sailing-ship designers began with Phineas Pett, who was one of a family that served England well for nearly two hundred years.
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