While There, However Useful And Active You May Be,
You Are But A Mongrel, - And Sort Of Afterguard And "Ship's
Cousin."
You are immediately under the eye of the officers, cannot dance, sing,
play, smoke, make a noise, or growl,
(I.e. complain,) or take any
other sailor's pleasure; and you live with the steward, who is usually
a go-between; and the crew never feel as though you were one of them.
But if you live in the forecastle, you are "as independent as a
wood-sawyer's clerk," (nautice',) and are a sailor. You hear sailor's
talk, learn their ways, their peculiarities of feeling as well as
speaking and acting; and moreover pick up a great deal of curious
and useful information in seamanship, ship's customs, foreign countries,
etc., from their long yarns and equally long disputes. No man can be
a sailor, or know what sailors are, unless he has lived in the forecastle
with them - turned in and out with them, eaten of their dish and drank
of their cup. After I had been a week there, nothing would have tempted
me to go back to my old berth, and never afterwards, even in the worst
of weather, when in a close and leaking forecastle off Cape Horn,
did I for a moment wish myself in the steerage. Another thing which
you learn better in the forecastle than you can anywhere else, is,
to make and mend clothes, and this is indispensable to sailors.
A large part of their watches below they spend at this work, and here
I learned that art which stood me in so good stead afterwards.
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