Sometimes the controls are off and in some moment of nostalgia he writes from the heart, baldly. One Dennis Captain writes to his owners, “Please to send someone to take over the ship when we reach San Francisco as I have been over three years without seeing home or family and cannot be away from them longer.” Sometimes when things were going especially badly the Captain’s remarks even broke into the “Remarks” column of the ship’s Log as in this entry by a famous Cape Captain on his fortieth day at sea in the Pacific: “Oh, for a cot in some vast wilderness where I shall never see a ship again. If ever one poor fellow has tired of anything it is I that is sick and tired of going to sea.” As you look over the yellowed pages that the Captains have left behind, you feel that they only were able to shake their haunting vision of home and family when they had the greatest reason to have overwhelming pride in their craft and the challenges they offered. Let them break a standing record for crossing a sea, or triumphantly outsail a superior vessel, or accurately guess a position in mid-ocean just “from the look of things”, or sail through tortuous straits where more timid men had said “can’t be done”, and the pride of honest achievement brought compensation for tiresome, lonesome hours away from home. Many of the Captains never realized their dream of retirement ashore, but many did, and with the money from their voyages they built their lovely homes along Main Street. Into them went some of the most exotic woods of the tropics, molded into fine panelling by ship’s carpenters who loved the feel of fine wood, and played their own kind of music upon it. And into the panelled rooms went the relics of their hundreds of thousands of miles at sea--teakwood stands and rosewood chairs, tables inlaid with mosaic and ivory, the finest of china and crystal, wallpapers from France and carpets from Belgium, and all the countless odds and ends of curiosities that have appealed to souvenir collectors of all times and generations. Often there were so many things that they spilled out of the house and into the attic where they reposed in the Captain’s sea chests that were kept standing “at the ready” just in case. Every house had such a surfeit of Oriental silks and embroidery that many a young girl, who wanted something really different to wear to a dance, preferred to buy a bolt of calico from the village dry goods store. But when all the curios and souvenirs had been distributed about the Captain’s home, the place of honor would still be saved upon the parlor wall for the oil painting of the Captain’s vessel as it was depicted by some far away artist as it entered the Port of Naples, or Calcutta, or Singapore. For the Captains could never divorce themselves entirely from the beautiful winged ships that had brought them safely home.