ateur, I hoisted sail and got
under way. Here was a man, looking on critically, I was sure, who knew
more in one second about boats and the water than I could ever know.
After an interval, in which I exceeded myself, he took the tiller and the
sheet. I sat on the little thwart amidships, open-mouthed, prepared to
learn what real sailing was. My mouth remained open, for I learned what
a real sailor was in a small boat. He couldn't trim the sheet to save
himself, he nearly capsized several times in squalls, and, once again, by
blunderingly jibing over; he didn't know what a centre-board was for, nor
did he know that in running a boat before the wind one must sit in the
middle instead of on the side; and finally, when we came back to the
wharf, he ran the skiff in full tilt, shattering her nose and carrying
away the mast-step. And yet he was a really truly sailor fresh from the
vasty deep.

Which points my moral. A man can sail in the forecastles of big ships
all his life and never know what real sailing is. From the time I was
twelve, I listened to the lure of the sea. When I was fifteen I was
captain and owner of an oyster-pirate sloop. By the time I was sixteen I
was sailing in scow-schooners, fishing salmon with the Greeks up the
Sacramento River, and serving as sailor on the Fish Patrol. And I was a
good sailor, too, though all my cruising had been on San Francisco Bay
and the rivers tributary to it. I had never been on the ocean in my
life.

Then, the month I was seventeen, I signed before the mast as an able
seaman on a three-top-mast schooner bound on a seven-months' cruise
across the Pacific and back again. As my shipmates promptly informed me,
I had had my nerve with me to sign on as able seaman. Yet behold, I
_was_ an able seaman. I had graduated from the right school. It took no
more than minutes to learn the names and uses of the few new ropes. It
was simple. I did not do things blindly. As a small-boat sailor I had
learned to reason out and know the _why_ of everything. It is true, I
had to learn how to steer by compass, which took maybe half a minute; but
when it came to steering "full-and-by" and "close-and-by," I could beat
the average of my shipmates, because that was the very way I had always
sailed. Inside fifteen minutes I could box the compass around and back
again. And there was little else to learn during that seven-months'
cruise, except fancy rope-sailorising, such as the mor