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Mark Twain > Life On The Mississippi > Chapter 5

Life On The Mississippi

Chapter 5


                        I Want to be a Cub-pilot

MONTHS afterward the hope within me struggled to a reluctant death,
and I found myself without an ambition. But I was ashamed to go home.
I was in Cincinnati, and I set to work to map out a new career.
I had been reading about the recent exploration of the river Amazon
by an expedition sent out by our government. It was said that
the expedition, owing to difficulties, had not thoroughly explored a part
of the country lying about the head-waters, some four thousand miles
from the mouth of the river. It was only about fifteen hundred miles
from Cincinnati to New Orleans, where I could doubtless get a ship.
I had thirty dollars left; I would go and complete the exploration
of the Amazon. This was all the thought I gave to the subject.
I never was great in matters of detail. I packed my valise, and took
passage on an ancient tub called the 'Paul Jones,' for New Orleans.
For the sum of sixteen dollars I had the scarred and tarnished splendors
of 'her' main saloon principally to myself, for she was not a creature to
attract the eye of wiser travelers.

When we presently got under way and went poking down the broad Ohio,
I became a new being, and the subject of my own admiration.
I was a traveler! A word never had tasted so good in my mouth before.
I had an exultant sense of being bound for mysterious lands and distant
climes which I never have felt in so uplifting a degree since.
I was in such a glorified condition that all ignoble feelings departed
out of me, and I was able to look down and pity the untraveled
with a compassion that had hardly a trace of contempt in it.
Still, when we stopped at villages and wood-yards, I could not help
lolling carelessly upon the railings of the boiler deck to enjoy
the envy of the country boys on the bank. If they did not seem
to discover me, I presently sneezed to attract their attention,
or moved to a position where they could not help seeing me.
And as soon as I knew they saw me I gaped and stretched, and gave other
signs of being mightily bored with traveling.

I kept my hat off all the time, and stayed where the wind
and the sun could strike me, because I wanted to get
the bronzed and weather-beaten look of an old traveler.
Before the second day was half gone I experienced a joy
which filled me with the purest gratitude; for I saw that
the skin had begun to blister and peel off my face and neck.
I wished that the boys and girls at home could see me now.

We reached Louisville in time--at least the neighborhood of it.
We stuck hard and fast on the rocks in the middle of the river,
and lay there four days. I was now beginning to feel a strong
sense of being a part of the boat's family, a sort of infant
son to the captain and younger brother to the officers.
There is no estimating the pride I took in this grandeur,
or the affection that began to swell and grow in me for
those people. I could not know how the lordly steamboatman
scorns that sort of presumption in a mere landsman.
I particularly longed to acquire the least trifle of notice
from the big stormy mate, and I was on the alert for an
opportunity to do him a service to that end. It came at last.
The riotous powwow of setting a spar was going on down on
the forecastle, and I went down there and stood around in the way--
or mostly skipping out of it--till the mate suddenly roared
a general order for somebody to bring him a capstan bar.
I sprang to his side and said: 'Tell me where it is--
I'll fetch it!'

If a rag-picker had offered to do a diplomatic service for the Emperor
of Russia, the monarch could not have been more astounded than the mate was.
He even stopped swearing. He stood and stared down at me.
It took him ten seconds to scrape his disjointed remains together again.
Then he said impressively: 'Well, if this don't beat hell!'
and turned to his work with the air of a man who had been confronted
with a problem too abstruse for solution.

I crept away, and courted solitude for the rest of the day.
I did not go to dinner; I stayed away from supper until everybody else
had finished. I did not feel so much like a member of the boat's
family now as before. However, my spirits returned, in installments,
as we pursued our way down the river. I was sorry I hated the mate so,
because it was not in (young) human nature not to admire him.
He was huge and muscular, his face was bearded and whiskered all over;
he had a red woman and a blue woman tattooed on his right arm,--
one on each side of a blue anchor with a red rope to it;
and in the matter of profanity he was sublime. When he was getting
out cargo at a landing, I was always where I could see and hear.
He felt all the majesty of his great position, and made the world
feel it, too. When he gave even the simplest order, he discharged
it like a blast of lightning, and sent a long, reverberating peal
of profanity thundering after it. I could not help contrasting
the way in which the average landsman would give an order,
with the mate's way of doing it. If the landsman should wish
the gang-plank moved a foot farther forward, he would probably say:
'James, or William, one of you push that plank forward, please;' but put
the mate in his place and he would roar out: 'Here, now, start that
gang-plank for'ard! Lively, now! WHAT're you about! Snatch it!
SNATCH it! There! there! Aft again! aft again! don't you hear me.
Dash it to dash! are you going to SLEEP over it! 'VAST heaving.
'Vast heaving, I tell you! Going to heave it clear astern?
WHERE're you going with that barrel! FOR'ARD with it 'fore I make
you swallow it, you dash-dash-dash-DASHED split between a tired
mud-turtle and a crippled hearse-horse!'

I wished I could talk like that.

When the soreness of my adventure with the mate had somewhat worn off,
I began timidly to make up to the humblest official connected
with the boat--the night watchman. He snubbed my advances
at first, but I presently ventured to offer him a new chalk pipe;
and that softened him. So he allowed me to sit with him by the big
bell on the hurricane deck, and in time he melted into conversation.
He could not well have helped it, I hung with such homage on his
words and so plainly showed that I felt honored by his notice.
He told me the names of dim capes and shadowy islands as we glided
by them in the solemnity of the night, under the winking stars,
and by and by got to talking about himself. He seemed
over-sentimental for a man whose salary was six dollars a week--
or rather he might have seemed so to an older person than I. But
I drank in his words hungrily, and with a faith that might
have moved mountains if it had been applied judiciously.
What was it to me that he was soiled and seedy and fragrant with gin.
What was it to me that his grammar was bad, his construction worse,
and his profanity so void of art that it was an element of weakness
rather than strength in his conversation? 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.

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