Note by the Publisher

The manuscript from which this book is set is the carbon copy of a letter which the author wrote, during the weeks just following her return from the voyage recorded, to a distant friend with whom (as appears in the context) she had long had some piratical understandings. She mailed it in eight-page typewritten installments as they were produced. The book is identical with the letter except in the following particulars: (1) Many purely personal passages are omitted. (2) Much repetition due to the haste of first composition has been weeded out. (3) The name of the actual schooner and the names of some of the crew have been disguised. (4) The division into sections is an afterthought. (5) The end-papers consist of a document in code with which the author amused herself during one interval in the composition of the letter.

The narrative represents chiefly two obvious traits of its author. The first is a circumstantial [Pg vi]memory. (Her jottings made day by day throughout the voyage, four pages all told, served but to recall changes of weather and stages of progress.) The second is that same intense natural love of natural beauty which found its first public expression in The House Without Windows and Eepersip’s Life There (1927). In The House Without Windows this passion clothed itself in fantasy which incorporated here and there some details of actual experience. In this record of an actual experience, it clothes itself in a shimmering veil of fantasy, so transparent that the actuality of the basic experience is rather heightened than obscured.

The voyage was taken three months after the author’s thirteenth birthday. The book comes to publication a little before her fourteenth. It is, then, the spontaneous output of a very young writer who, as it happens, has never as yet had a day of formal schooling, and who learns her craft by that simplest of all processes, enjoying with abandon whatever comes into her life, reading with absorption whatever comes into her hands, and writing with demoniacal energy whatever comes into her head. To the publisher, it seems that this one exhibit justifies her [Pg vii]obvious contentment with the schooling which, for part of an ecstatic month, was got out of the Norman D., her rigging and sails and crosstrees, the men of her cabin and her forecastle; and out of the various magic of the waters beneath her keel.

The Voyage of the Norman D.

[Pg 3]

The Cottage in the Woods Lake Sunapee, New Hampshire July 23, 1927

Dear Alan:

Thank you a lot for your very mysterious letter from Honolulu. I wish I could have been with you. But the Congressmen and their families must have been a bore. I could have helped you concoct a regular mutiny, and, with me aboard, you may be sure it would have been done in a piratical way. I should have accosted the desperate-looking sailor and become acquainted with him. That would have been the first step.

Well, I feel tempted to sail full force into my own adventures, even if they are not so exciting and mysterious as your own. For the adventures that have befallen me since you set sail for Sulu are wilder and rasher than anything you ever heard me tell you before.

You know very well (better than anyone, I think) my profound devotion to pirates and things piratical. And you know, too, about the pirate tales [Pg 4]which I started a little while before you went away⁠—very bloody, exciting, villainous, profane stories, were they not? I had such a great many ideas for pirate stories (and more and more ideas kept showing their faces), I finally decided that my pirates would make a much greater showing if I blended all the short tales I had written, and a great many more that I had in my mind, into one moderately long story. No sooner said than I started to work.

I found, in the course of the very first few pages, that I was getting involved in considerable difficulties. There had to be ships, that was certain; but I found that I knew almost nothing about ships. So I laid the story aside a little while, turned to Webster, and buried my face in the dictionary. I looked up every nautical term that I could think of, whether I knew it or not. I looked up nautical words found in books I had read. I studied the list of nautical words and their meanings at the end of The Dauber. Then the sails bothered me. I needed to know something about sails, and about different kinds of rigs, and about the fastenings of the sails and the names of them all. So I turned to the word sail, and⁠—lo and behold! exactly what I wanted. Accompanying the word sail were two pictures, one of the schooner or fore-and-aft rig, and the other of the beautiful square-rig, each sail numbered and named below. I fell to work with great zeal, and [Pg 5] learned topsails, topgallants, royals, skysails, jibs, staysails, and all the rest of them; I can reel them off

now like second nature.

Rudimentary Nautics

Then I realized that I didn’t know much about rigging and ropes⁠—the uses, the names of them. I found just what I wanted under the word ship. It was a picture of a ship in diagram, showing all the principal ropes, spars, and yards. There were close to two hundred figures in all, but I settled right down to business and learned just about everything: lifts, braces, clews, stays, backstays, sheets, ratlines, tops, caps⁠—the whole works. I don’t know how many exciting hours I spent at my dictionary, digging into a perfect treasure-trove of nautical words. I never in my life before realized how many nautical terms there are. And I was getting very gay indeed. I was really learning something, and I was not slow to make use of my knowledge. I danced around the house, shouting out ship words and phrases which I had found in Treasure Island and other books, but which now had a new meaning for me. The first result was that my pirate story gradually began to improve a great deal. The second result was far more important.

I found myself going about to various people to find out still more about ships. But I based most upon the dictionary; I was sure that was correct, at any rate. I found myself getting crazy and crazier about [Pg 6]ships (whether pirate ships or not⁠—though of course they were preferable) and about the sea. I found that my own writing was getting me into a wild state. My own writing was making me want to sail. Now, if somebody else’s writing (the writing of somebody who had really sailed) had been making me crazy about it, I should not have been so surprised. But when I had never sailed, and knew nothing about ships except what I had learned from Webster’s Dictionary⁠—that seemed strange indeed. Whether from one source or another, something made me want to sail, and so badly that my blood fairly itched within me, and I went after the dictionary harder than ever, in case an opportunity should suddenly come up; for I wanted to be well prepared.

A Real Authority

This was the second result (or, at least, the beginning of it), and I presume it was making me a bit hard to live with. One day Mother took me over to see old Mr. Rasmussen. Mr. Rasmussen is the chief carpenter of the house they are putting up behind ours, and, so Mother had discovered some time before, he had been a sailor all his life. I had told her very savagely that I had determined to sail. Even a schooner “would do,” thought I, though of course a square-rigged ship would do better. Mother tried at first to dissuade me. She told me that the only schooners in existence now, as far as she knew, were the fishing schooners that came into Boston, and they [Pg 7] were so soaked with fish and fish oil that they were really quite unbearable. But I was not to be dissuaded so easily, though I did begin to wish that I had been alive in the days of the great old clipper ships, dashing across the Atlantic from England to America. I was furious with myself for living at a time when the beauty and stateliness and romance of sailing ships had dwindled down to a few stenching schooners in

Boston Harbor.

Well, then, I went over to see Mr. Rasmussen. You would love talking with him, Alan. He is full of tales of his old sailing days, and rattles them off even while he is sawing lumber or driving nails. And as for knowledge, why, ships are second nature to him. The sea is in every line of his face, too. He has a mass of wrinkles radiating from the corners of his eyes, from squinting in the sun and looking off into the dazzling sea. He is brawny, firmly muscled, and tattooed on the inside of his left forearm. He is delightfully disgusted with things on land. I remarked to him, as he was up on the scaffolding: “Well, that kind of rigging isn’t so much fun, is it?” He replied instantly: “No, too steady. Hasn’t got give enough.” (He said “gib.”) He has a quaint power of description, too. He tells about typhoons off the [Pg 8]China coast⁠—says “you would think a pack of demons was loose on the sea.” Mr. Rasmussen, by the way, has a forty-foot sloop of his own, and about every two weeks he goes off in it for the week-end,

going over to Block Island to fish. He has promised me that I shall go with him on one of those trips sometime.

But, to go on with the story, Mother said to him: “I’ve got a daughter here who’s gone crazy about boats. We thought you ought to know about all the sailing ships there are, and we wondered if you knew where there is a schooner or square-rigger that is working now.”

Says he: “Why, yes, indeed. There’s a nice little schooner come in New Haven now; she come in right ahead of me last Monday. She come down with lumber from Nova Scotia. Pretty boat, too⁠—all white. I think her name is Norman D.”

“Do you think there’s any chance we could go aboard of her, mate?” I asked. (I liked to pretend that he had been a shipmate of mine.)

“Go aboard of her? Oh my, yes⁠—they’d be tickled to death to have a chance to show somebody the boat. The crew are all home boys, and I guess they’re mighty lonely down here where they don’t know anyone.”

Topmasts against the Sky

He gave us full instructions as to how to get to the schooner, and we resolved to go the next day. I [Pg 9] stayed and had a little talk with the old sailor. He says: “I usually go out o’ port on Friday. Now, ’tain’t commonly supposed to be lucky to leave port on a Friday, but I don’t take no stock in superstition. I once sailed along of a captain that wouldn’t leave port on a Friday, even when there was good wind, good tide, good weather⁠—everything just right.”

Mate, you can believe that I hardly slept a wink all that night. I was going down to see a real schooner. I was going aboard of her. I should see the crew, and be friendly with them. I should climb up in the rigging, if allowed. (That was a secret hope of mine, and I was almost more excited about that than anything.) I would show the family, and the crew, too, that if I got a chance to go up in those ratlines, I would go!

We must have made quite a sight, the whole Follett family going down the street under royals and skysails, headed straight for the schooner Norman D. It seemed an infinitely long way, but we saw the masts of her as soon as we got out of the trolley car, and I know I was like a bucking wild horse all the way down Brewery Street. When I saw those noble topmasts against the blue sky ahead of me, I wanted[Pg 10] to run and get there; but Sabra was with us, and we couldn’t hurry. I ran a few steps, excitedly snapping my fingers; then I would buck and wait. So we proceeded down towards the old broken-down wharf. As we came nearer and nearer, though not yet near enough to see the white hull of her, the beautiful, stately topmasts and lower masts became clearer and clearer, and at last I could see the rope ladder⁠—the shrouds and ratlines that I might be going up in. And, at the idea of climbing into those spider webs, I was so thrilled that I was almost dizzy, and knew hardly anything.

We came up and up alongside her, till we were right beneath her bulwarks, and saw over us her stately bowsprit, with the jibboom and flying jibboom. I was thrilled to realize that I had already begun to recognize things. I recognized that small vertical spar projecting downward from the jibboom which is called the “dolphin striker.” This was one of the many things I had learned from that diagram under the word ship.

They were busy discharging her cargo of lumber; the deck load was making good progress. There were three carts on the wharf alongside her, on to which they were loading it. The captain was sitting on the edge of the deckhouse superintending the work, which was going on very briskly. We hailed him: “May we come aboard?”

[Pg 11]

Initiation

“Why, I gesso,” he replied. “What you want?”

“Oh, we’re just landlubbers who want to see your ship.”

“Well, come ahead,” he said.

So we scrambled over the lumber carts, the whole Follett family, still under full sail and laughing heartily. I was the first upon the bulwarks amidships, and I jumped down and landed with a thump upon the deck load. (Quite a long jump it seemed to me then, but before long I jumped from the bulwarks on to the empty deck without thinking anything of it.)

I spoke to the captain first of all, but very vaguely and dreamily, gazing about me⁠—fascinated, enraptured, all the time. I looked at the long, huge booms, with the sails frapped closely round them; at the great, splendid masts; at the many ropes descending over blocks and made fast on belaying pins along the side of the boat; at the double and triple sheet-blocks; and, above all, at the ratlines and shrouds, into which I longed to go up. The next minute I had jumped upon the spanker boom and crawled along to the very end, hanging slightly over the water, where I supported myself by one of the wire lifts.

“Oh,” said the captain, “I see you’re a girl as likes to climb around.”

[Pg 12]

And that was true: for really I liked to climb around even better than I dared admit at first. I climbed many times upon the top of the deckhouse and on to the spanker boom, I walked stealthily and cautiously along the bulwarks, I talked a bit with two of the sailors who were waiting for one of the carts before they began loading again; I laid my hand longingly upon the shrouds. But, though I had plenty of courage, and a lot left over, to climb, I had not quite the courage to ask permission, since I felt sure that I should not be allowed. At last, after I had explored around a bit, after I had taken hold of the vast, hand-worn spokes of the wheel, after I had examined the compass in the binnacle⁠—I went up to the captain and said: “I don’t suppose you would let me go up into the rigging, would you?”

“Sure!” he replied, “only stick to the ladder, see? Don’t go off the rope ladder⁠—and hold on tight.”

“Oh, don’t worry,” I answered. “I most likely shan’t get up very far.” And I ran to the starboard mizzen rigging.

From the Crosstrees

There Mother accosted me: “Oh, don’t go up there! You scare me to death.” I overlooked her entirely, and laid my hand upon the shrouds. Upon the shrouds! I felt a little thrill go through my hand. Next minute I was over the taffrail. “You don’t dare, do you?” she continued. “Watch me and [Pg 13] see,” I replied. Then I pulled up on to the ratlines. The emotions and sensations of that moment are indescribable. I was starting my career as a sailor. I was already in the rigging, and I hadn’t been on the ship for more than twenty minutes! And only yesterday, before that talk with my old sailor friend, it was a far-away dream, pretty nearly impossible to accomplish. Things had shaken about strangely. I was in the rigging! Up and up I went, hand over hand. I could have gone much faster without a quiver, but I was so taken by it that I went slowly. I felt the rigging sway beneath my weight. Fascinating! The shrouds were getting closer and closer together, and the ratlines, therefore, shorter and shorter. I was a few steps below the crosstrees, I never believed,

never in this world, that I should be able to go more than halfway up. Yet up I went, and the ratlines were so very short that I could just wedge my feet between them. Next moment I had reached out an arm, put it over the crosstrees, braced my foot on the iron futtock shrouds, and pulled myself up. There I was, sitting on the crosstrees, one foot braced upon the futtock shrouds, the other foot dangling in mid-air, sixty-five feet above the deck.

The deck down there looked about six inches long, and the busy crew about the size of ants, yet very clear and sharp. I had never dreamed of being so close to the truck. There was the slender tip of the [Pg 14]mizzen-mast hardly twenty feet above me. There I was, sitting on the crosstrees. I thought of many and curious things. It was here that Jim Hawkins had sat, in his terrified flight from Israel Hands. Here I was, and I could imagine an Israel, wounded, dirk in teeth, climbing after me. I stood up on the crosstrees, and, looking out to sea, I found that I could see very far and clearly. A few little harbor boats were cruising about. Yes, the deck was certainly not more than six inches long. But I found, to my intense delight, that I could look down upon it without a tremor. My head is built for height. I have a sailor heart, and a sailor head, thought I. Now, if only I were sure that I had a sailor stomach, everything would be perfect.

It is very alarming to get from the crosstrees on to the ratlines again. It is necessary to hang over space for a moment, until you can get your feet on the rigging. But it did not bother me. I lowered myself by the strength of my forearms, took the futtocks with my hands, and dropped my feet on to the ratlines. Then I came down, feeling, Alan, a good deal more like a real pirate than I had ever felt before.

The captain complimented me gravely, saying: “I couldn’t go up as far as that,” and telling me that I had a good head.

[Pg 15]

The Ancient Mariner

That was about the end of the first day’s climbing. Right now I forget whether I went up again or not, but the first time was the most thrilling, anyway. I talked for a while with two of the sailors; then the captain took us about the ship, showing us the galley, the fo’c’sle, the engine-room, the after cabin. The latter is a very ample, seemingly luxurious place: two moderately large rooms, one used for dining room, which has a massive table hooked up to the wall to prevent its rolling about; the rest of it divided into five small compartments, each containing a bunk. Of these the captain, mate, bo’s’n, and cook had four, and the other was a spare bunk. In the fo’c’sle there are bunks for four, but there were only three men there, then. On asking one of the men if that wasn’t quite a small crew to handle the schooner, they answered very definitely in the negative.

The captain is a most delightful old fellow, a true sea captain. He will talk for hours at a time. I think he can say as many words in an hour as another man in a day. He told us about various experiences of his in his many schooners⁠—storms, losing deck loads, and so on. He says: