I am nearing the evening of life. Many people think of me, I know, as a man who has attained to as much as one can reasonably hope for in this life—if they think of me at all. It is not so much, after all. The things I have aimed for and missed seem, at times, much more important than those I have had. But I put this thought by. Youth expects a good deal; and when one is young—and for a long time after; indeed, until a man is old—he finds hope at the bottom of the cup, enough of it to drown the taste of the bitter draught he has taken. I have evolved the theory that a man is old only when, the cup drained, there is no hope left in it. Thank God, I have not yet reached that point.

But I am inclined to reminiscence, and it scares me somewhat, for proneness to reminiscence is a symptom of age. I know that well, and garrulity is its sister. I am going to give my inclination to reminiscence play in writing of an experience of my youth. It may help to prevent me from boring my friends, and if you find this narrative becoming tedious, nothing is easier than to put the book down.

I was born in New Bedford, on Mill Street, in 1857. My father was Timothy Taycox, a ship carpenter, and a good one; a great whacking man, with a pleasant face and the neck of a bull. My mother was—well, she was my mother. I remember her always as kind and loving, and, indeed, so was my father; but my mother—well, I cannot seem to get beyond that—she was my mother. I must have tried her greatly and often, but she never failed me, and I worshipped her, so far as it is in a boy who is healthy and strong and a roamer by nature. I had two brothers, one older and one younger than myself. I might make a history of my relations with my brothers, especially the older, who used to pick upon me shamefully as long as I was unable to hold my own, but that is none of my purpose.

My first school was on North Street. My recollections of that school are vivid, and interesting—to me; but I suppose the school was not unlike other schools of its size and character. It was a small school, with about twenty-five scholars. The afternoon session was over at four o’clock, and then I set my face to the wharves, as the needle to the pole, except in the shortest days of winter. It was often warm for long periods during the winter. Two or three of us, kindred spirits, went together, sometimes running all the way, sometimes merely wandering, but always bringing up at about the same place. That was generally at the foot of Hamilton Street. Hamilton Street is a little street not much more than a hundred feet long, offset from the foot of William Street. It leads down very steeply from Water Street to a wharf, and its very name brings up before my mind a picture of a pair of heavy horses breasting the hill vigorously, dragging a low truck loaded with barrels of oil, and stirring up with their feet the powdery black dust of the street.

These low trucks were very generally used in New Bedford. The body was hung below the axles, and cleared the ground by perhaps eight inches. They had no sides, and the barrels of oil were rolled up on them and stood on end, and with the continual shaking and rattling about they wore deep grooves into the flooring of the truck. It was a new truck which was not grooved in rings fore and aft of the great beam which served for an axle.

The basements of the buildings on that steep hill were shipping offices, or the offices of oil merchants, or the agents of ships. Indeed, you could hardly go into an office from Water Street to the water-front without seeing sea-chests stacked along the walls, with the name of some ship painted on the front of each chest. Not all of the offices of owners or agents of whalers were within this area, but they were not far from it. Wing’s outfitting store, where I suppose all the business connected with their ships was done, was on Union Street, about a block above Water.

At that time and for some years after there was no railroad along the water-front, and nothing to impede the long line of trucks and small boys wending to and fro. About where the railroad is now there was usually a row of oil barrels on their sides, looking fresh and black and greasy. Gaugers were apt to be busy about them. And just beyond, on the throat of the wharf, were two structures like pens, enclosures fenced in with old ships’ sheathing which showed plainly the nail holes, the white efflorescence and the greenish stain which proclaimed the fact that they had sailed thousands of miles of salt ocean with the copper next them. These pens were on either side of the entrance to the wharf, and between them was a lane, deep in powdery black dust, and just about wide enough for a truck. Over the tops of the fences of sheathing could be seen seaweed bleached white with age, and flourishing green land weeds, nodding and waving in the wind. Under the seaweed, I was told, were barrels of oil which their owner had packed away there some years before. He was waiting for a rise in price. The barrels may be there yet, but if they are they must be nearly empty. The oil will have leaked out.

I describe these things, naturally enough, as the picture of them forms in my mind; and that is as they appeared in the summer. For I just about lived along the wharves and on the water during the summers. I remember very clearly the five old hulks which lay in the dock at the foot of Union Street. One of them was the bark Phenix. I cannot now recall the names of the others. All of them were stripped of every­thing down to their masts. Not a yard nor a topmast was left, nor anything removable without breaking them up. As I recall their condition, even the copper was gone from their sides, as far as I could see. They looked battered but mighty, and they filled me with sadness. I never ventured on board of them, but I examined them minutely and repeatedly from the wharves on either side, and I knew every patch and stain. I have sat by the hour atop of a pile to which hawsers were made fast, and I have sailed in imagination through storm and through sunny seas in those old ships, and have had all kinds of hair-raising adventures.

It was a rare occasion when any one of the wharves—at any rate the three or four wharves from Union Street north—had no ships lying beside it. There were usually two or three beside each wharf, and sometimes more; discharging or fitting or being repaired. My father was always at work upon some ship, on a staging in the dock alongside. I never tired of watching him at work, and would sit for hours on the stringpiece just above him or on the wharf opposite, while he removed from the side or the bottom of the vessel “hove-down” ribs which had begun to rot, and put others in their places; or renewed the planking on the bottom.

“Heaving down” for repairs was a common occurrence. A tackle was fastened to the mast and to a special heaving-pile on the wharf. There were several of these heaving-piles on each wharf, each firmly anchored by great masses of rock. I have seen scores of ships hauled down. The sails were always unbent—stripped—from the yards almost the first thing after a ship came in, but the yards were often in place on a vessel when she was hove down. They were braced well around, of course, or she could not have been hove over very far before her main yard would touch the wharf. Then they heaved on the tackle, and the vessel was heaved over upon her bilge, exposing the bottom on one side. I have often seen a vessel’s keel entirely exposed in this way. The exposed side of the bottom was as easily got at in this position as if she had been in dry dock; perhaps rather more easily. The carpenters worked from float stages alongside, and the ship was let up little by little as they worked up from the keel. First the copper was ripped off, then the sheathing, and then the planking, and then the ribs taken out, if any of them needed to be replaced. I have seen the bare bones of many a ship exposed in this way, and it would be possible to rebuild a ship completely, first one side and then the other, without taking her out of the water. I have no doubt that it has been done.

As long as I was pretty small I was fairly well contented to sit on the stringpiece, with the sun on my back, and watch my father; or to sit on one of the low, smooth, round-butted mooring-piles—always called “spiles” in New Bedford—and gaze out over the harbor. It was a beautiful harbor. It is a beautiful harbor now; but there seems to me to be something lacking, and less of that atmosphere of peace and serenity which I loved. Although there are still a few of the old square-riggers left there are many days and weeks together when not one of them is at the wharves, and I have not seen a vessel hove down in many years. It is no longer to be expected that, as one turns into Hamilton Street, there will appear the once familiar tracery of masts and yards hanging like a net before his eyes; not a forest of masts, perhaps, but enough of them to warm his heart. Some of the yards had sails hanging from them and flapping gently in the breeze, and on some the sails were neatly furled, but most of them were bare. A jobbing wagon would be driven upon the wharf in a whirl of the black dust, and would discharge its load of sailors, many of them natives of one of the Western Islands, or of Brava, some very black, as I recall them, with great hoops of thin gold in their ears; and their dunnage, some of it in sea-chests, but much done up in shapeless bundles in a gay colored cloth or in a sheet. They were fine, upstanding men, talking and laughing among themselves, and the familiar way in which they handled the lances and harpoons and the other boat-gear excited my envy. They had come from the home of such gentry in South Water Street, a part of the town known as Fayal. Fayal—the South Water Street Fayal—had an unsavory reputation.

These men and the white sailors who came with them were bound for the vessel with sails on her yards, for she was about ready to set out on a voyage of two or three or four years. In those days voyages averaged between three and four years in length. There was always great confusion, as it seemed to me: piles of boxes and barrels and casks, a mate or two shouting orders, sweating men getting the things aboard, some lengths of chain cable, coils of new rope which creaked as they were handled, and innumerable odds and ends. I watched and wondered until, at last, the tug came alongside, lines were cast off, and the vessel was taken out into the stream to anchor there overnight. The crew were kept busy there, stowing things, but even then there was apt to be a great litter on the decks when she was finally taken in tow by the tug. The tug cast her off somewhere below Sow and Pigs—somewhere between Sow and Pigs and Block Island—and, with a farewell blast of her whistle, turned about and came home again. But I did not witness that ceremony until I was fifteen.

When the ship had hauled out into the stream I would sit on my favorite pile and gaze out at her and at the harbor. She usually anchored in the channel near Palmer’s Island, almost in line with Fort Phoenix on the Fairhaven side. I sat on my pile and gazed at her, looking trim and seaworthy—as she was in fact—and envied the black boys with the thin gold hoops in their ears, and dreamed dreams, as I suppose all boys do, even the most matter-of-fact of them. Those dreams of mine were to come true. Instead of the whitewashed walls of Fort Phoenix and the whitewashed lighthouse on Palmer’s Island, I saw a heaving ocean under a sunny sky, and off upon the surface of that ocean I saw feathery clouds of vapor slowly rise, like the drooping white ostrich plume on Ann McKim’s hat; and the feathery shafts of vapor drifted off and vanished, and from the masthead floated down to me the melodious cry, “Bl-o-ows!” And I roused with a start, and there was nothing before my eyes but the low whitewashed brick wall of Fort Phoenix and the whitewashed lighthouse on Palmer’s Island, and the smiling surface of the harbor, and the ship waiting there.

I used to row about a good deal, when I had money enough to hire a boat—good boats were ten cents an hour—or when I thought I could depend upon the good nature of Al Soule, who had boats to let. I could not swim a stroke. It is not unusual for men who have much to do with the water to neglect to learn to swim. For a sailor, what use is it?—they ask. He is apt to be weighed down with sea boots and heavy clothes, and the weather is usually such when a man falls overboard that it is impossible to pick him up anyway. Mind you, these are not my own ideas I am giving. A whaleman needs to know how to swim, if he would save his life, and not depend too nearly upon others. It is a good thing for a boy to know, even if he is not going whaling. I would have a boy learn as soon as he can walk—or a girl either. It is the source of a great deal of pleasure.

It happened that the father of my best friend had a boat, a thirty-five-foot sloop. Naturally enough I was asked to go sailing in it whenever Jimmy went. Jimmy Appleby was the boy’s name. The sloop was rather old-fashioned, even for those days, and our going out in her was not all play. John Appleby found us of some help even when we were only ten, and we learned quickly to help in hoisting sail, and to tend sheets, and to reef, and to steer, and to do the other little odd jobs in connection with sailing a boat. I have gone out on the footropes of the bowsprit many a time when I was not turned twelve, and it had come on to blow, and she was plunging into a head sea—she pitched fearfully, with her shallow body, and a head sea just about stopped her—and I have been trying to stow the jib—not to furl it, just to tie it down any way—and holding on for my life, and have been plunged to my neck in one sea after another as she dived into them. That sloop was the champion high diver. I do not think that that experience ever imbued me with the desire to learn to swim. I was concerned only with holding on and getting my job done as soon as possible.

I have no clear recollection of my usual standing at school, except that I have the impression that I was apt to be in hot water from one cause or another. I must have done reasonably well in my studies, for I graduated from the Grammar School before my fifteenth birthday, but my active interests were not there. The memories that surge up and clamor to be let loose are those of the water-front, the wharves, the ships, the harbor, and the bay.