The Life, Travels, and Literary Career of Bayard Taylor — John Shaqi
The Life, Travels, and Literary Career of Bayard TaylorConwell, Russell H.
General
The Life, Travels, and Literary Career of Bayard Taylor
Conwell, Russell H.
Taylor, Bayard, 1825-1878
compelled, by the terms of passage, to furnish their own provisions and
bedding, and the fact that the unexpected honesty and kindness of a
warehouse clerk prevented their starting off without enough food to last
through the voyage, is another proof that “fortune favors the brave.”
As there was one more adult passenger in the steerage than there were
berths, Bayard and his cousin Frank good-naturedly agreed to occupy one
together. To the writer, who has frequently crossed the treacherous
Atlantic, there seems to be no experience so inconceivably miserable
and sickening as a steerage passage in a sailing vessel must be to
the landsman. But when to the usual discomforts of dampness, darkness,
sea-sickness, and strange company, are added the cramps caused by being
packed with another passenger like a sandwich into a narrow box, and
the absence of fresh air, no tortures of the Inquisition would seem to
equal it. Bayard often referred to his first discouraging sensation of
sea-sickness. Coming, as it always does to the passenger, just as he is
taking his last sad look at the fading shores of his native country, it
is always a disheartening experience. Bayard shed tears as he began to
realize that he was actually afloat upon the wide ocean, and could not if
he would return to the land. He has since well said, that had he known
more of life, and the dangers of travel, his alarm and discouragement
would have been much greater than they were, and of longer duration.
Youth borrows no trouble; hence it is happy and victorious.
Of that voyage, and its sufferings, in the ship “Oxford,” beginning on
the first day of July, and ending at Liverpool on the twenty-ninth of the
same month, he made but brief mention; yet his experience in getting the
ship’s cook to boil their potatoes, in eating their meals of pilot-bread,
and in the company of their English, Scotch, Irish, and German
cabin-mates, was most charmingly told in his letters to the “Gazette”
and to the “Post,” as well as in “Views Afoot,” to which reference has
already been made. His German companion was not only a social advantage,
but furnished the adventurous youths with a pleasant opportunity to get
some of the German phrases, and to hear descriptions of the country they
were to visit. They were also favored by the captain’s permission to use
books from the cabin library, which contained several entertaining books
of travel and of fiction. The closing days of the voyage appear to have
been pleasant in some respects, for the beauty of the sea made a lasting
impression upon his mind, and might possibly have been still in his
memory when he wrote the lines in his “Poems of Home and Travel,” running
thus:—
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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