_ CHAPTER II. THE MAN FROM BLUE WATER
If, instead of advancing the theory that man sprang from a monkey, Darwin had elected to nominate the duck for that dubious honor, there is no doubt but that he would have pointed to the Peasley family, of Thomaston, Maine, as evidence of the correctness of his theory of evolution. The most casual student of natural history knows that the instant a duckling chips its shell it toddles straightway to the nearest water. The instant a male Peasley could cut his mother's apron strings, he, also, made for the nearest water, for the Peasleys had always been sailors, a statement which a perusal of the tombstones in Thomaston cemetery will amply justify. Indeed, a Peasley who had not acquired his master's ticket prior to his twenty-fifth birthday was one of two things--a disgrace to the family or a corpse. Consequently, since the traditions of his tribe were very strong in Matthew Peasley VI, it occasioned no comment in Thomaston when, having acquired a grammar school education, he answered the call of his destiny and fared forth to blue water and his first taste of dog's body and salt horse.
When he was fourteen years old and very large for his age, Matt commenced his apprenticeship in a codfisher on the Grand Banks, which, when all is said and done, constitutes the finest training school in the world for sailors. By the time he was seventeen he had made one voyage to Rio de Janeiro in a big square-rigger out of Portland; and so smart and capable an A.B. was he for his years that the Old Man took a shine to him. Confidentially he informed young Matt that if the latter would stay by the ship, in due course a billet as third mate should be the reward of his fealty. The Old Man didn't need a third mate any more than he needed a tail, but Matt Peasley looked like a comer to him and he wanted an excuse to encourage the boy by berthing him aft; also it sounds far better to be known as a third mate instead of a mate's bosun, which was, in reality, the position the Old Man had promised Matt. The latter promptly agreed to this program and the skipper loaned him his copy of Bowditch.
Upon his return from his first voyage as third mate Matt went up for his second mate's certificate and passed very handily. Naturally he expected prompt promotion, but the Old Man knew the value of experience in a second mate--also the value of years and physical weight; so he informed young Matt he was entirely too precocious and that to sail as second mate before he was nineteen might tend to swell his ego. Consequently Matt made a voyage to Liverpool and back as third mate before the Old Man promoted him.
For a year, Matt Peasley did nicely; then, in a gale off the Orinoco River, with the captain too ill to appear on deck, the first mate went by the board, leaving the command of the ship to young Matt. She was dismasted at the time, but the lad brought her into Rio on the stumps, thus attracting some little attention to himself from his owners, who paid his passage back to Portland by steamer and found a second mate's berth for him in one of their clipper ships bound round the Horn.
Of course Matt was too young to know they had their eyes on him for future skipper material and were sending him around Cape Horn for the invaluable experience he would encounter on such a voyage. All he realized was that he was going round the Horn, as became one of the House of Peasley, no member of which would ever regard him as a real sailor until he could point to a Cape Horn diploma as evidence that he had graduated from the school for amateurs.
Matt Peasley lacked two months of his twentieth birthday when he stepped onto a San Francisco dock, in his pocket a highly complimentary discharge as second mate from the master of the clipper ship--for Matt had elected to quit. In fact, he had to, for on the way round the mate had picked on him and called him Sonny and Mother's Darling Boy; and Matt, having, in the terminology of the forecastle, come aboard through the hawse pipes, knew himself for a man and a sailor, despite the paucity of whiskers on his big, square boyish chin.
Accordingly he had advised the mate to address him only in the line of duty, on which occasions he desired to be referred to as Mr. Peasley, and, the mate demurring from this program, the customary maritime fracas had ensued. Consequently, somebody had to quit on arrival at San Francisco; and since, Matt was the last to come, he was the first to go. On the strength of his two previous discharges he shipped as second mate on the bark Andrew Welch, for a voyage to Honolulu and back; then, his services as second mate being all in, he went before the inspectors for his first mate's ticket and was awarded an unlimited license.
Matt was now past twenty; and, though not fully filled out, he was big enough to be a chief kicker anywhere. Six feet three in his bare feet; two hundred pounds in the buff; lean, lithe and supple as a panther, the mere sight of his big lumpy shoulders would have been sufficient to have quelled an incipient mutiny. Nevertheless, graduate that he was of a hard, hard school, his face was that of an innocent, trusting, good-natured, immature boy, proclaiming him exactly what he knew his men called him--a big, over-grown kid. He hated himself for his glorious youth.
"You're pretty much of a child to have an unlimited ticket, my son," the supervising inspector informed him. "However, you've had the experience and your record is far above the average, so we're going to issue the license; but if you'll take a bit of advice from an old sailor you'll be content to go as second mate for a year or two more, until your jowls blacken up a bit and you get a trifle thicker in the middle."
With the impudence and irreverence of his tender years, however, Matt Peasley scorned this well-meant advice, notwithstanding the fact that he knew it to be sound, for by shipping as second mate and remaining in the same ship, sooner or later his chance would come. The first mate would quit, or be promoted or drowned, or get drunk; and then his shoes would be waiting for Matt tried and true, and the holder of a first mate's ticket.
However, there is an old saw to the effect that youth must be served, and young Matt desired a helping totally disproportionate to his years, if not to his experience; hence he elected to ignore the fact that shipmasters are wary of chief mates until they have first tried them out as second mates and learned their strength and their weaknesses. Being very human, Matt thought he should prove the exception to a fairly hard-and-fast rule.
He had slept one night on a covered dock and skipped three meals before it occurred to him that he had pursued the wrong tactics. He was too far from Thomaston, Maine, where the majority of sailors have gone to school with their captains. Back home there were a dozen masters who knew his people, who knew him and his proved ability; but out here on the Pacific Coast the skippers were nearly all Scandinavians, and Matt had to show them something besides his documents.
He had failed signally to procure a single opportunity to demonstrate his fitness for an executive position. After abandoning his plan to ship as chief mate he had sought a second mate's berth, but failing to find one, and with each idle day making deeper inroads into his scant savings, he had at length descended to the ignominy of considering a job as bosun. Even that was not forthcoming, and now his money was entirely dissipated.
Now, when a big overgrown kid finds himself penniless three thousand miles from a friend and minus three meals in succession, the fourth omission of the daily bread is not likely to pass without violent protest. Matt was still a growing boy, with a growing boy's appetite; consequently on the morning of his second day of fasting he came to the conclusion that, with so much of his life before him, a few months wasted would, after all, have no material bearing on his future; so he accepted a two months advance from a crimp and shipped aboard the American barkentine Retriever as a common A.B.--a most disgraceful action on the part of a boy, who, since eighteenth birthday, had been used to having old sailors touch their foretop to him and address him as "Mr. Peasley, sir." _