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You shall find to-day, in any one of the seaport cities or towns of New England, widows and daughters of sea-captains, living, or rather seeming to live, upon the most beggarly incomes, but still keeping up a certain pathetic sham of appearance of being at ease.
There were marine instruments enough in that room to supply a dozen sea-captains, but if the entire lot had been loan'd me, I never could have ascertained the ship's position without asking somebody who knew it. The partition separating me from the ward-room was built after the completion of the ship, and had a way of creaking like a thousand or more squeaky boots in simultaneous action.
In the epoch which most of us can remember pretty vividly for it came to an abrupt end less than five years ago when people were anxious to prove that everything important in human history had been done by "Teutons," there was a great effort to show that Columbus was not really the first European discoverer of America; that that honour belonged properly to certain Scandinavian sea-captains who at some time in the tenth or eleventh centuries paid a presumably piratical visit to the coast of Greenland.
On the other hand, plain Dutch sea-captains, grim beggars of the sea, and the like, denizens of a free commonwealth and of the boundless ocean-men who are at home on blue water, and who have burned gunpowder against those prodigious slave-rowed galleys of Spain together with their new allies, the dauntless mariners of England who at this very moment are "singeing the King of Spain's beard," as it had never been singed before are not so much awestruck with the famous preparations for invasion as was perhaps to be expected.
Bob sometimes told serious and correct stories about sea-captains, pilots, boatswains, mates, able seamen, and other curious fauna of the marine world; but these were directly addressed to his father and Mrs. Loveday, Anne being included at the clinching-point by a glance only.
Some sea-captains are excellent, kind-hearted men, and make the unavoidably hard duties of their crew as easy as it is possible; but others and very many we fear are terrible salt-water tyrants.
Here were pompous merchants, in white wigs and laced velvet; the bronzed faces of sea-captains; the foreign garb and air of Spanish creoles; and the disdainful port of natives of Old England; all contrasted with the rough aspect of one or two hack settlers, negotiating sales of timber, from forests where axe had never sounded.
Wealthy sea-captains frequently loaded fine three-masted schooners here for various trading expeditions to all parts of the world; the fishers for mackerel, cod and herring were making three hundred and fifty dollars a day in season, and thousands of dollars' worth of supplies were annually purchased here.
In my intervals of leisure from other duties, I followed the strange ship till she was quite a little speck in the distance. I could not but be struck with the manner of the two sea-captains during their brief interview.
But the sunlight of royal favour no longer illumined his path. In the annals of English history the name of John Cabot is never found again. The son Sebastian survived to continue a life of maritime adventure, to be counted one of the great sea-captains of the day, and to enjoy an honourable old age. In the year 1512 we hear of him in the service of Ferdinand of Spain.
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