elf useful at once, I tailed on to a rope that
some of the crew were hauling in; and the next thing I began to learn
was to coil a rope. There's only two ways to do it--a right one and a
wrong one. The right way is to coil it the way the sun goes round. And
then I learned that about the surest manner in which a young sailor can
get a knowledge of his trade is to watch how his shipmates set about
doing their work. He may be laughed at, grumbled at, or sworn at, but
at last he'll learn his duty, and that's something.

If I were to tell you all the wonderful things that have happened to me,
man and boy, as carpenter, bo'sun, third mate, second mate, and first
mate--I never had the luck to rise to be a skipper--I am afraid that you
wouldn't believe half the yarns I could spin for you. I've been in both
the Indies, and in both the Americas, and in our own Dutch Colony of
Java, and in China and Japan (where the Dutch used to have a mighty fine
factory) over and over again. I've been in action; and was wounded once
by a musket-ball, which passed right through the nape of my neck. I've
been a prisoner of war, and I was once nearly taken by a Sallee rover.
I've had to fight with the Dutch for the French, and with the French
against the Dutch, and with the Dutch for the English. I've had the
yellow fever over and over again. I've had my leg half bitten off by a
shark; and if anybody tells you that a shark won't eat niggers, tell
him, with my compliments, that he doesn't know what he's talking about,
for I saw a shark bite a nigger that had fallen overboard, right in two,
in the harbour of Havana. I don't say that the shark doesn't like white
flesh best. The black man, perhaps, he locks upon as mess beef, not
very prime; but the white man he considers as pork or veal, and the
nicer of the two. At all events he'll eat nigger if he's hungry, and a
shark's always hungry.

Perhaps the strangest thing that ever happened to me in the coarse of
all my voyages was in connection with a lot of swallows, and I'll wind
up my yarn with this one, first because it's short, and next because I
think it's got something that's pretty about it, and will please the
yunkers and the vrauws; and, old man-like, I always like to please
_them_. It was about thirty years ago, and in the middle of September,
that I signed articles at Liverpool as second mate of a brig bound to
Marseilles, Barcelona, in Spain, Gibraltar (_that_ belongs to the
Eng