a common sailor, doing forever
what others bade him?--painting other people's ships, pulling other
people's ropes, clinging at night on other people's yards to take in
other people's sails, facing tempests and squalls, reefs, lee shores,
and all the vicissitudes of the deep--for others! He laid down the brush
beside him, and in a somber reverie looked toward Apia. His eyes
scarcely took in the bigger buildings that were dotted here and there
round the circumference of the beach: the stone cathedral, the great
yellow warehouses of the Firm, the two hotels, the consulates, churches,
and stores. What attracted him, what held him in a sort of spell, were
the lesser roofs showing through the green of trees and gardens, the
tiny cottages on the outskirts of the town, or others still farther
back, scattered and solitary on the wooded hills. Was he, then, never to
possess a house of his own nor a yard of earth? Was the sea, the
accursed sea, to claim him till he died? What had he done, he asked
himself, that others drew all the prizes and left him but the
blanks--that they should stay ashore and prosper--that they should marry
and have children round them, while he drudged at sea alone? Those
traders, clerks, saloon-keepers, those mechanics, carpenters,
shipwrights, smiths, and stevedores, how he envied them! envied their
houses, their wives, their children, their gardens, their soft and
comfortable lives, everything that made them so different from himself;
he, the outcast, with no home but his musty bunk; they, the poorest,
kings beside him.

It was the sea, he said to himself--the sea, that took all and gave
nothing; the sea, mother of all injustice and misery; the sea, whose
service was to tie oneself to the devil's tail and whisk forever about
the world, sweating in doldrums, freezing in snow squalls, hanging on to
lashing yards, blinded, soaked, benumbed, the gale above, death below.
And yet even here there were some, no better indeed than he, who grasped
the meager prizes that even the sea itself could not withhold; prizes
that he could never hope to touch--the command of ships, the right to
tread the quarter-deck, the handle to one's name. How did they do it,
these favored ones of fortune? How did Hansen, that stinking Dutchman,
ever rise to be the master of the _Northern Light_?--and that swine
Bates, the mate, who already had the promise of a ship?--and Knight, the
second mate, a boy but twenty-two, yet whose foot was