Chapter 13 - Page 2

him walking alone in the waist, while
most of the men were dozing on the carronade-slides.

That night we scoured all the prairies of reading; dived into the
bosoms of authors, and tore out their hearts; and that night White-
Jacket learned more than he has ever done in any single night since.

The man was a marvel. He amazed me, as much as Coleridge did the
troopers among whom he enlisted. What could have induced such a
man to enter a man-of-war, all my sapience cannot fathom. And how
he managed to preserve his dignity, as he did, among such a
rabble rout was equally a mystery. For he was no sailor; as
ignorant of a ship, indeed, as a man from the sources of the
Niger. Yet the officers respected him; and the men were afraid of
him. This much was observable, however, that he faithfully
discharged whatever special duties devolved upon him; and was so
fortunate as never to render himself liable to a reprimand.
Doubtless, he took the same view of the thing that another of the
crew did; and had early resolved, so to conduct himself as never
to run the risk of the scourge. And this it must have been--added
to whatever incommunicable grief which might have been his--that
made this Nord such a wandering recluse, even among our man-of-
war mob. Nor could he have long swung his hammock on board, ere
he must have found that, to insure his exemption from that thing
which alone affrighted him, he must be content for the most part
to turn a man-hater, and socially expatriate himself from many
things, which might have rendered his situation more tolerable.
Still more, several events that took place must have horrified
him, at times, with the thought that, however he might isolate
and entomb himself, yet for all this, the improbability of his
being overtaken by what he most dreaded never advanced to the
infallibility of the impossible.

In my intercourse with Nord, he never made allusion to his past
career--a subject upon which most high-bred castaways in a man-
of-war are very diffuse; relating their adventures at the gaming-
table; the recklessness with which they have run through the
amplest fortunes in a single season; their alms-givings, and
gratuities to porters and poor relations; and above all, their
youthful indiscretions, and the broken-hearted ladies they have
left behind. No such tales had Nord to tell. Concerning the past,
he was barred and locked up like the specie vaults of the Bank of
England. For anything that dropped from him, none of us could be
sure that he had ever existed till now. Altogether, he was a
remarkable man.

My other friend, Williams, was a thorough-going Yankee from
Maine, who had been both a peddler and a pedagogue in his day. He
had all manner of