He
was a wronged man, a man who had seen trouble, and that was enough for
me. As he mellowed into his plaintive history his tears dripped upon the
lantern in his lap, and I cried, too, from sympathy. He said he was the
son of an English nobleman - either an earl or an alderman, he could not
remember which, but believed was both; his father, the nobleman, loved
him, but his mother hated him from the cradle; and so while he was still
a little boy he was sent to 'one of them old, ancient colleges' - he
couldn't remember which; and by and by his father died and his mother
seized the property and 'shook' him as he phrased it. After his mother
shook him, members of the nobility with whom he was acquainted used
their influence to get him the position of 'loblolly-boy in a ship;' and
from that point my watchman threw off all trammels of date and locality
and branched out into a narrative that bristled all along with
incredible adventures; a narrative that was so reeking with bloodshed
and so crammed with hair-breadth escapes and the most engaging and
unconscious personal villainies, that I sat speechless, enjoying,
shuddering, wondering, worshipping.
It was a sore blight to find out afterwards that he was a low, vulgar,
ignorant, sentimental, half-witted humbug, an untraveled native of the
wilds of Illinois, who had absorbed wildcat literature and appropriated
its marvels, until in time he had woven odds and ends of the mess into
this yarn, and then gone on telling it to fledglings like me, until he
had come to believe it himself.
Chapter 6 A Cub-pilot's Experience
WHAT with lying on the rocks four days at Louisville, and some other
delays, the poor old 'Paul Jones' fooled away about two weeks in making
the voyage from Cincinnati to New Orleans. This gave me a chance to get
acquainted with one of the pilots, and he taught me how to steer the
boat, and thus made the fascination of river life more potent than ever
for me.
It also gave me a chance to get acquainted with a youth who had taken
deck passage - more's the pity; for he easily borrowed six dollars of me
on a promise to return to the boat and pay it back to me the day after
we should arrive. But he probably died or forgot, for he never came. It
was doubtless the former, since he had said his parents were wealthy,
and he only traveled deck passage because it was cooler.{footnote [1.
'Deck' Passage, i.e. steerage passage.]}
I soon discovered two things. One was that a vessel would not be likely
to sail for the mouth of the Amazon under ten or twelve years; and the
other was that the nine or ten dollars still left in my pocket would not
suffice for so imposing an exploration as I had planned, even if I could
afford to wait for a ship.
