rudiments of learning.
Take my advice and study. It's not too late to begin. Nonsense!
difficult! everything worth doing is difficult! There's pleasure in
overcoming difficulties. Come, you have begun to teach me seamanship--
to knot and splice--to reef and steer. I'll teach you to read, and then
the way is open to you to teach yourself whatever you like. Navigation!
certainly. Why, you would have been master of a vessel by this time if
you had known that." In the interval of Newman's remarks I was making
excuses for my ignorance; but he would listen to none of them, and I
promised, old as I was, to put myself under his instruction, and to
endeavour to be as apt a pupil to him as he was to me.

As I have said, I never saw anyone learn so rapidly as he did everything
which came in his way. Before six weeks had passed, there was very
little remaining for me to teach him. Every knot and splice he mastered
in a week or so, and could make them as neatly as I did. I don't think
he had ever before been up a ship's mast; but from the first day he was
constantly aloft, examining the rigging, and seeing where all the ropes
led to. I had shown him how to reef and furl sails, and the very first
squall we had, he was among the foremost aloft to lay-out on the yard.
His hands went as readily as those of the oldest seaman into the
tar-bucket; and so, though when he came aboard they were fair and soft,
they soon became as brown and hard as any of ours. With the theory of
seamanship he was already well acquainted--such as the way by which the
wind acts on the sails, the resistance offered by the water on the hull,
and so on; so that, when any manoeuvre was performed, he at once knew
the reason of it. It is not too much to say that before we crossed the
line he was as good a seaman, in many respects, as most of the hands on
board; and certainly he would have made a better officer than any of us
forward.

We were bound round Cape Horn, and Captain Carr intended to try his
fortune on the borders of the Antarctic ice-fields, in the neighbourhood
of New Zealand and the coast of Japan, among the East India Islands; and
those wide-spreading groups, among which are found the Friendly Islands,
the Navigators, the Feejees, the New Hebrides, the Loyalty Islands, and
New Caledonia, and known under the general name of Polynesia. Perhaps
other places might be visited, so that we had a pretty wide range over
which our voyage was likely