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Updated: July 6, 2025
The soldier was always in touch with his own social world, and he had leave sufficient to enable him to break the back of monotony. He drank, gambled, and orated; but his indulgences were little compared with the debauches of able-bodied seamen when, after months of sea-life, they reached port again. A ship in port at such a time was not a scene of evangelical habits.
He looked and looked again: he thought her exquisitely beautiful, and while he looked he could not help half fancying that he had seen that countenance before. Still where it had been he could not discover; he had seen so few ladies during his sea-life that he was convinced he should, before long, remember. Yet what puzzled him was, that he felt so very familiar with the countenance.
When one who loved mischief, thinking to produce a severe censure, asked Johnson, a few days afterwards, 'Well, Sir, what did your friend say to you, as an apology for being in such a situation? Johnson answered, 'Sir, he said all that a man SHOULD say: he said he was sorry for it. I again visited him on Monday. He took occasion to enlarge, as he often did, upon the wretchedness of a sea-life.
Few landsmen can imagine the depressing and self-humiliating effects of finding one's self, for the first time, at the beck of illiterate sea-tyrants, with no opportunity of exhibiting any trait about you, but your ignorance of every thing connected with the sea-life that you lead, and the duties you are constantly called upon to perform.
When we are told of some venturesome band daring the dangers of iceberg and darkness in penetrating to the secret haunts of Nature; when we learn that gallant seamen are guiding civilisation to the farthest corners of the earth, are doing deeds of heroism that stir our deepest feelings of reverence; when we know that our explorers and sailors laugh at peril and face death without fear; when we see numbers of our boys, from the prince who stands by the throne to the city outcast who begs at our door, prefer and seek sea-life rather than any other we acknowledge with pride that the power of our sea-king sires is dominant yet.
Malo, a prize to the "Vengeance," after one of the most desperate sea-fights on record. Her captain was killed; out of a crew of two hundred men, only twenty-six were found alive, most of them badly wounded. Visions of sea-life again lured Paine away from the shop-board. He shipped in another privateer, and this time actually served out the cruise.
The gale still continues, writes Captain Semmes, on the 11th March. Wind E.N.E. For four days now we have been rolling and tumbling about, with the wind roaring day and night through the rigging, and rest more or less disturbed by the motion of the ship. Sea-life is becoming more and more distasteful to me. The fact is, I am reaching an age when men long for quiet and repose.
But she made no explanation of her words, and Sara was too modest to ask what they meant. Morton came home so brisk and rosy it was good to see him, and regaled Molly for days with the accounts of his wonderful adventures. He seemed to have quite recovered from his longings for a sea-life, and was almost as much interested in certain scientific studies as Sara herself.
Unless Captain Hardy and Captain Blackwood and others to whom he confided his love potions were different from the hearty, unconventional seamen of the writer's early sea-life, a banquet of interesting epithets could have been left to us which might have shocked the severely decorous portion of a public who assume a monopoly of inherent grace but do not understand the delightful simple dialect of the old-time sailor-men.
And of course, having drunk my beer, Captain Nelson must now buy beer in turn. This led to more talking, and Johnny drifted out of the conversation to wait on other customers. The more beer Captain Nelson and I drank, the better we got acquainted. In me he found an appreciative listener, who, by virtue of book-reading, knew much about the sea-life he had lived.
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