In Ship and Prison: A Story of Five Years in the Continental Navy with Captain Samuel Tucker
9781613105702
213 pages
Library of Alexandria
Overview
I cannot remember the time when I did not love the sea, nor is that strange. I was born in sight of the ocean. My father, and, as for that matter, his father before him, was a sailor. My first recollections are of boats and oars, of vessels and ropes and sails. At fourteen I had made a trip to the Great Banks on a fishing smack and at sixteen my knowledge of the Atlantic coast reached from Newfoundland to Charleston. Tall for my age, strong and hardy from constant toil and exposure, and familiar with all sorts of sailing craft from a shallop to a ship, I counted myself an able-bodied seaman. I now had one ambition—to voyage to foreign ports. Suddenly, unexpectedly, the single cable which bound me to the homeland was severed. My mother—the only parent I can remember, for my father was lost at sea while I was still a babe—died. I left her in usual health for a voyage to Norfolk. On my return I found her dead and buried. In caring for a neighbor, who was sick with typhus fever, she fell a victim to the disease. A small cottage with its scanty furniture, a few dollars in the care of Squire Sabins, the village lawyer, and her dying message—these were my legacy. It was the message which changed the course of my life, and sent me away from my native town for years. It read: “My dear Boy:— But for you I should rejoice over what the doctor just told me—that I have but a few hours to live—for it means a reunion with your dear father, though a separation from you. It is but a change from the presence of one loved one to the presence of the other. Sixteen years I have been with you, fifteen years away from him. Now I go to be with him, and leave you to the care of Him who has promised to be with the fatherless. He will keep you in all your ways. Doubtless you know that there is no tie to keep you near home, and will carry out your long cherished wish of visiting other lands. You have my free consent. I was a sailor’s daughter and a sailor’s wife. I believe ‘it is as near to heaven by sea as by land,’ and have no objection, as you long have known, to a sailor son. I only suggest that you go to Marblehead and find Captain Samuel Tucker. He was a friend of your father, and will be your friend and adviser. Possibly he may be willing to give you a berth in his own ship; if not, he may be able to secure a place for you with some other captain as good and trustworthy as himself. This much I am sure he will be willing to do for you for your father’s sake. Never forget the great truths you have learned at my knee, and, living by them, you shall some day join your father and me in heaven. With my best love and a kiss, Your dying mother,
Elizabeth Dunn.” Squire Sabins, who had been appointed my guardian, though himself averse to the sea, offered no opposition to my plans, and a week later, with a new sailor’s kit and as fine an outfit as a lad of my age ever had, I left for Marblehead to look up Captain Tucker—a man whom I had never seen, but about whom I had heard from childhood, for, as the sole survivor of my father’s wreck on the coast of France, he had been the one to bring the tidings of that unfortunate event to my mother. I arrived at the village in the evening, and was left by the stage at Mason’s Inn, where I passed the night. Early the next morning, while I waited for the breakfast hour, I went out on the street for a stroll. Of almost the first person I met, an old fisherman on the way to his nets, I inquired for the residence of the man I was seeking. “Capt’n Samuel, I ’spose you mean, seein’ how thar ain’t but one Capt’n Tucker here,” he responded. “That big, gabled house, standin’ thar all by itself on Rowland Hill, not far from the bay shore, is whar he lives when to home. But he hain’t thar now. He sailed yisterday from Salem for Lisbon.”
