Chapter 7

'CAPTAINS COURAGEOUS'

From Yokohama to Montreal is a long day's journey, and the forepart is
uninviting. In three voyages out of five, the North Pacific, too big to
lie altogether idle, too idle to get hands about the business of a
storm, sulks and smokes like a chimney; the passengers fresh from Japan
heat wither in the chill, and a clammy dew distils from the rigging.
That gray monotony of sea is not at all homelike, being as yet new and
not used to the procession of keels. It holds a very few pictures and
the best of its stories--those relating to seal-poaching among the
Kuriles and the Russian rookeries--are not exactly fit for publication.
There is a man in Yokohama who in a previous life burned galleons with
Drake. He is a gentleman adventurer of the largest and most
resourceful--by instinct a carver of kingdoms, a ruler of men on the
high seas, and an inveterate gambler against Death. Because he supplies
nothing more than sealskins to the wholesale dealers at home, the fame
of his deeds, his brilliant fights, his more brilliant escapes, and his
most brilliant strategy will be lost among sixty-ton schooners, or told
only in the mouths of drunken seamen whom none believe. Now there sits
a great spirit under the palm trees of the Navigator Group, a thousand
leagues to the south, and he, crowned with roses and laurels, strings
together the pearls of those parts. When he has done with this down
there perhaps he will turn to the Smoky Seas and the Wonderful
Adventures of Captain--. Then there will be a tale to listen to.

But the first touch of dry land makes the sea and all upon it unreal.
Five minutes after the traveller is on the C.P.R, train at Vancouver
there is no romance of blue water, but another kind--the life of the
train into which he comes to grow as into life aboard ship. A week on
wheels turns a man into a part of the machine. He knows when the train
will stop to water, wait for news of the trestle ahead, drop the
dining-car, slip into a siding to let the West-bound mail go by, or yell
through the thick night for an engine to help push up the bank. The
snort, the snap and whine of the air-brakes have a meaning for him, and
he learns to distinguish between noises--between the rattle of a
loose lamp and the ugly rattle of small stones on a scarped
embankment--between the 'Hoot! toot!' that scares wandering cows from
the line, and the dry roar of the engine at the distance-signal. In
England the railway came late into a settled country fenced round with
the terrors of the law, and it has remained ever since just a little
outside daily life--a thing to be respected. Here it strolls along, with
its hands in its pockets and a straw in its mouth, on the heels of the
rough-hewn trail or log