PRENTICE MULFORD: Autobiographical Works (Life by Land and Sea, The Californian's Return & More). Prentice Mulford Mulford

about all he did bring home. He talked a great deal of gold and brought specimens, but not in sufficient quantity to pay all outstanding bills. The next of the returned was a long, gaunt, yellow case of Chagres fever. He brought only gloom. Along in 1853–54 came a few of the more fortunate who had made a “raise.” Two returned and paid up their creditors in full who had been by creditors given over. But few came to remain. They “staid around” home a few weeks, turned up their noses at the small prices asked for drinks, cigars, and stews, treated everybody, grew restless and were off again. Relatives of the not returned beset them with inquiries which they found it difficult to answer, because there was an idea prevalent in the village that a man in California ought to make money, and why didn’t he?

      Up to 1860 a “returned Californian” was an object of curiosity and of some importance if he brought any money with him, or rather as long as the money he brought with him lasted. But “the war” wiped them out in this respect. The California fortune of that time was a mere pimple compared with the fortunes made by the war. A generation now exists to whom the whole Argonaut exodus is but an indifferent story.

      Sometimes on visiting my native village I stand before one of those old-fashioned houses, from whose front door thirty-four years ago there went forth for the last time the young Argonaut on his way to the ship. There is more than one such house in the village. The door is double, the knocker is still upon it, the window-panes are small, the front gate is the same and up to the door the same stones lie upon the walk. But within all are strangers. The father and mother are past anxious inquiry of their son. The sisters are married and live or have died elsewhere. A new generation is all about. They never heard of him. The great event of that period, the sailing of that ship for California, is sometimes recalled by a few—a few rapidly diminishing. His name is all but forgotten. Some have a dim remembrance of him. In his time he was an important young man in the village. He set the fashion in collars and the newest style of plugs. Oh, fame, how fleeting! What is a generation? A puff. A few old maids recollect him. What a pity, what a shame that we do all fade as a leaf!

      What a sad place; what a living grave is this for him to return to! Where would he find the most familiar names? In the cemetery. Who would he feel most like? Like “Rip Van Winkle.” Who are these bright and blooming lasses passing by? They are her grown-up children—she with whom he sat up that last Sunday night in the old-fashioned front parlor on the old-fashioned sofa. Where is she? That is she, that stout, middle-aged woman across the street. Is she thinking of him? No; she is thinking whether there shall be cabbage or turnips for dinner. Who is that codgery-looking man going up the street. That is the man she didn’t wait for and married. Should the Argonaut return home if he could? No. Let him stay where he is and dream on of her as she was, bright, gay, lively, blooming, and possibly romantic. The dream is solid happiness compared with the reality.

      The recollections treated in this chapter are to me as a commencement and an ending of the shadows of a series of coming events.

CHAPTER II.

      GOING TO SEA.

       Table of Contents

       Eight years later I shipped “before the mast” on the A 1 first-class clipper Wizard bound from New York to San Francisco.

      When I made up my mind to become a sailor, I had tried several of this world’s calling’s and seemed to find none suitable. I had asked counsel of several elderly gentlemen in my native village as to the best way of securing all things needful during my sojourn in this world. They said many wise and good things. They looked wise and good. But really the wordy help they offered was unsatisfactory. So I cut the knot myself and said I would be a sailor. I explained to my male and female friends that I felt myself destined for a maritime career. I needed more excitement than could be got out of a shore humdrum life. The sea was the place for enterprising youthful Americans. The American merchant marine needed American officers and sailors. All heard me and agreed. No doubt it was the best thing. And I talked on and they agreed with all my arguments. How people will agree with you when it’s all one to them what you do! I was eighteen and in most respects a fool, including this— that I did not know it.

      The Wizard, on which I shipped with five other boys from my native town, was a first-class clipper. She was a fine thing to look at from a distance, either as she lay at anchor, the tracery of her spars and rigging in relief against the sky, or speeding along under studding-sails rigged out on both sides. But once on board and inside her symmetrical lines, things were not so beautiful. Those white, cloud-like sails tore men’s fingers as, hard and heavy with ice or snow, the sailors tried to furl them. Those graceful tapering yards, supporting the studding-sails, strained and half-crushed men’s backs when lowered and toted about the deck. There were wooden belaying-pins, iron marline-spikes and other miscellaneous things to fling at men’s heads by those in authority. Those cobweb-like ropes had hard, thick ends lying coiled on deck to lash men’s bodies.

      We, the six boys, were obliged to leave our native heaths because there wasn’t room for us on them to earn our bread and clothes. We were not clearly aware of this at the time, though an unspoken sentiment prevailed there, as it does in most of the older settled States, that the young man must move away to “seek his fortune.” Ten years previous we should have entered the whaling service. But the whale fishery had utterly failed. Once it was the outlet for nearly all the brawn and muscle of our island.

      The Captain of the Wizard was from our native town. Therefore myself and the five other boys had shipped under him, expecting special favors. A mistake. Never sail under a Captain who knows your folks at home. You have no business to expect favoritism; he has no business to grant it.

      I was the last of the six young lubbers to leave the town for New York. On the morning of my departure the mothers, sisters, and other female relatives of the five who had gone before-discovered many other things which they deemed necessary for the urchins to carry on the voyage. So they bore down on me with them, and I bade most of these good people an earthly farewell, loaded down, in addition to my own traps, with an assorted cargo of cakes, sweetmeats, bed quilts, Bibles, tracts, and one copy of “Young’s Night Thoughts” for the boys.

      I ate my last dinner as a free man at a Broadway restaurant, and then I went to the wharf where the ship lay. Already the tug was alongside, preparatory to hauling her out in the stream. I went up the plank and over the side. A gentleman in authority asked me, as I stepped on deck, if I belonged to the ship. I said I did. “Take off those togs, then, put on your working duds and turn to, then,” he remarked. The togs went off. I put on my canvas pants and flannel shirt, the garb of sea servitude. Henceforth I was a slave. The ship just then was not a Sunday-school nor a Society for Ethical Culture. It was a howling pandemonium of oaths and orders. Fully one-third of the able seamen had not recovered from their closing-out shore spree, and had tumbled into their berths or were sprawled on deck drunk. Cargo in cases, bales, boxes, and barrels was still rattled over the bulwarks and into the hold. Everybody seemed to be swearing—first, each one on his own, private account, and secondly, all in one general chorus for mutual purposes. Many people seemed in command. I couldn’t distinguish the officers of the ship from the stevedores. Still officers continued to turn up everywhere, and each officer ordered me to some particular and separate duty.

      The world looked pretty black to me then. I wished there was some way out of it. On shore the period between the foremast hand and the position of Captain was only the duration of a thought. Here it was an eternity. Day dreams are short, real experience is long. But all this is often in youth a difficult matter to realize.

      There came along a short, stout man with a deeper voice and more sonorous oath than anybody else. This was the fourth and last mate. It was a relief to find at last the end of the mates and to know the exact number of men legitimately entitled to swear at me. This gentleman for a season concentrated himself entirely on me. He ordered me with a broom and scraper into the ship’s pig-pen, which he argued needed cleaning. This was my first well-defined maritime duty. It was a lower round of the ladder than I had anticipated. It seemed in its nature an occupation more bucolic than nautical. I would have preferred, also, that compliance with the order had not been exacted