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Updated: June 18, 2025
"Hang money! Now, I should think that you make as much of it in a month as I do in a year. You're a young man, and as far as I know ye, ye're a successful one. Life spreads out before you like a clean chart. I'm an old 'un my time is nearly up. I've lived what landsmen call a hard life, and now I'm slowly goin' home. Ay, Mr. Vellacott, goin' home!
Everybody went below, most people occupied themselves with arranging their possessions so as to be most comfortable during the voyage; Maurice, who had few possessions to arrange, took out that morning's Times, and sat down to read. The first two or three days of a voyage are generally nearly a blank to landsmen. Maurice was no exception to the rule.
"Not in the least," said Ruby with a laugh, and beginning to eat in a way that proved the truth of his words; "for the matter o' that, there's little smell and no motion just now." "Well, there isn't much," replied the smith, "but, woe's me! you'll get enough of it before long. All the new landsmen like you suffer horribly from sea-sickness when they first come off."
At half-past seven they left us, after a brief stay of four hours; and there was much trouble in getting so many unpractised landsmen into the boats, which were rolling and thumping alongside in the most thoughtless manner, there being considerable sea.
What's the proudest on 'em, when it comes to blow half a capful of wind? What's the boldest on 'em in a dark night, on a lee shore? Not one on 'em is worth that!" and he snapped his fingers to show his contempt for landsmen of every degree. "On course, Master Neil, dear, you'll be a seaman. With my will, the navy is the only calling your blessed mother's son should follow.
While these bloody landsmen," continued the old sailor, "plague and persecute each other, Master Raymond, what is that to us, we men of the sea, who have a creed and a belief of our own, and who never even think of hurting a woman or a child?
There was not one of them, even though he peered somewhat anxiously into the deep shadows by the roadside, who did not feel more of a man now that he was on shore; this, even with the prospect of danger ahead. They were essentially landsmen a thing which Stubbs had not understood. They looked upon the ship only as a prison. Now, with their feet on firm ground, they were a different lot of men.
However, he was not a man to be afraid, where there was really no appearance of danger; and the agreeable presages of future fortune supported his spirits, amidst the disagreeable nausea which commonly attends landsmen at sea, until he was set ashore upon the beach at Deal, which he entered in good health about seven o'clock in the morning.
However, at sea the mind takes little thought for the morrow, or even for the afternoon; and as we sat in the warm shade of the awning, looking out to the purple horizon in the east, or to the rocky and varied coast to the west, I felt, and if the countenance be not treacherous, all felt that it was good even for landsmen to be moving over waters uncrisped except by the active paddles, beneath a sky all radiant with light.
In the choking heat of the African night townsmen and corsairs wrestled in deadly conflict hand to hand and foot to foot; but these untrained landsmen stood but a poor chance against the picked fighting men of the Moslem galleys who had been inured to bloodshed from their earliest youth and trained by such a master in the art of war as Dragut.
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