In Fact,
I Always Felt, When With Him, That I Was With No Common Man.
I Had A Positive Respect
For his powers of mind, and felt often
that if half the pains had been spent upon his education which
Are thrown away, yearly, in our colleges, he would have been
a man of great weight in society. Like most self-taught men,
he over-estimated the value of an education; and this, I often
told him, though I profited by it myself; for he always treated
me with respect, and often unnecessarily gave way to me, from an
over-estimate of my knowledge. For the intellectual capacities
of all the rest of the crew, captain and all, he had the most
sovereign contempt. He was a far better sailor, and probably
a better navigator, than the captain, and had more brains than
all the after part of the ship put together. The sailors said,
"Tom's got a head as long as the bowsprit," and if any one got
into an argument with him, they would call out - "Ah, Jack! you'd
better drop that, as you would a hot potato, for Tom will turn
you inside out before you know it."
I recollect his posing me once on the subject of the Corn Laws.
I was called to stand my watch, and, coming on deck, found him
there before me; and we began, as usual, to walk fore and aft,
in the waist. He talked about the Corn Laws; asked me my opinion
about them, which I gave him; and my reasons; my small stock of
which I set forth to the best advantage, supposing his knowledge
on the subject must be less than mine, if, indeed, he had
any at all. When I had got through, he took the liberty of
differing from me, and, to my surprise, brought arguments and
facts connected with the subject which were new to me, to which
I was entirely unable to reply. I confessed that I knew almost
nothing of the subject, and expressed my surprise at the extent
of his information. He said that, a number of years before,
while at a boarding-house in Liverpool, he had fallen in with
a pamphlet on the subject, and, as it contained calculations,
had read it very carefully, and had ever since wished to find
some one who could add to his stock of knowledge on the question.
Although it was many years since he had seen the book, and it was
a subject with which he had no previous acquaintance, yet he had
the chain of reasoning, founded upon principles of political
economy, perfect in his memory; and his facts, so far as I
could judge, were correct; at least, he stated them with great
precision. The principles of the steam engine, too, he was very
familiar with, having been several months on board of a steamboat,
and made himself master of its secrets. He knew every lunar star
in both hemispheres, and was a perfect master of his quadrant and
sextant.
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