After leaving home, he had spent nearly twenty years, sailing upon
all sorts of voyages, generally out of the ports of New York and
Boston. Twenty years of vice! Every sin that a sailor knows, he had
gone to the bottom of. Several times he had been hauled up in the
hospitals, and as often, the great strength of his constitution had
brought him out again in health. Several times, too, from his known
capacity, he had been promoted to the office of chief mate, and as
often, his conduct when in port, especially his drunkenness, which
neither fear nor ambition could induce him to abandon, put him back
into the forecastle. One night, when giving me an account of his life,
and lamenting the years of manhood he had thrown away, he said that
there, in the forecastle, at the foot of the steps- a chest of old
clothes- was the result of twenty-two years of hard labor and
exposure- worked like a horse, and treated like a dog. As he grew
older, he began to feel the necessity of some provision for his
later years, and came gradually to the conviction that rum had been
his worst enemy. One night, in Havana, a young shipmate of his was
brought aboard drunk, with a dangerous gash in his head, and his money
and new clothes stripped from him.
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