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Updated: June 15, 2025
"In the year 1416 a certain Portuguese sea-captain, Gonsalvez Zarco by name, and servant of the famous Henry of Portugal, was cruising homeward in a leaky caravel from a baffled voyage in search of the Fortunate Islands.
These poor remains were carefully removed, placed in a box and interred in a neighboring cemetery, and the "woman in a sun-bonnet" was seen no more. Subsequent investigation into the history of the old house revealed the following facts. It had originally been occupied by a retired sea-captain and his only son, the latter a wild, reckless youth of evil character and confirmed bad habits.
Like many in his time, he seems to have been both a scientific geographer and a practical sea-captain. At one time he made charts and maps for his livelihood. Seized with the fever for discovery, he is said to have begged in vain from the sovereigns of Spain and Portugal for help in a voyage to the West. About the time of the great discovery of Columbus in 1492, John Cabot arrived in Bristol.
"From my earliest youth, when I used surreptitiously to remove the unsmoked ends of my father's cigars and break them up, and, in hiding, smoke them in an old clay pipe which I had presented to me by an ancient sea-captain of my acquaintance, I have been interested in tobacco in all forms, even including these self-same despised unsmoked ends; for they convey to my mind messages, sentiments, farces, comedies, and tragedies which to your minds would never become manifest through their agency."
This theory I base upon the result of the report from the last sea-captain I saw. I cannot understand why some of these captains did not take the carcass in tow. They all say that they tried, but that the body sank before they could come within half a mile. The truth is, probably, that they did not stir a foot from their course to examine the thing.
All my things have been sold; and he tells me that he has taken the advice of an old sea-captain and spent three thousand francs on a commercial outfit of European curiosities which will be sure to be in demand in the Indies. He has sent my trunks to Nantes, where a ship is loading for San Domingo. In five days, Eugenie, we must bid each other farewell perhaps forever, at least for years.
A very few hours sufficed to show the sea-captain to be a most capital electioneerer for a popular but not enlightened constituency.
"Valorous, yet prudent, furious in attack, far-seeing in preparation, he ranks as the first sea-captain of his time;" as the story of his life has unfolded itself in these pages we have seen what manner of man it was who terrified Europe, who made for himself a reputation which stands out clear and distinct among all the great men of which this century was so prolific.
But lo! the boy proves a young war-horse, neighing for battle, burning for gunpowder and guns, for bowie-knives and revolvers, and for every form and expression of physical force; he might make a splendid trapper, an energetic sea-captain, a bold, daring military man, but his whole boyhood is full of rebukes and disciplines for sins which are only the blind effort of the creature to express a nature which his parent does not and cannot understand.
He was a scholar, gentleman, and man of the world, and his portrait shows us a refined, high-bred face, suggesting a French marquis of the eighteenth century rather than the son of a New England sea-captain. A few years later, Mr.
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