The Captain takes a piece of thick rope and whips the sailor screaming at him that he will be his slave. His shirt is ripped off and he is tied with his arms out face down on the bulkhead. The Captain shouts his orders and the sailor is seized up. One of the common sailors shot off his mouth to the Captain just at the wrong time. The power of a Captain of the ship was made clear to the author in a brutal scene. Between the boring times were some vivid memories. The author helped to save the life of a kanakan friend by making sure he got medicines from the ship that another kanakan would not have been given. The kanakans were susceptible to illnesses common in the white population. These were people from the Sandwich Islands/Hawaii. As a sailor he mingled with the laboring class and became particularly attached to the kanakas. The author quickly learned the Spanish language and had many stories to tell of the people of California. The rush of the wind atop a running horse with the smell of the sea in the air was one of many invigorating images contained in the book. They had very many horses and they would ride them at a gallop and when they were tired stop and pick up fresh horses. The author rode everywhere he went in California. The coastline and the desert were the landscape of the author's travels. The Castilian dialect was cultivated as another sign of status.
At the bottom were the Indians who provided the labor for the white skinned descendants of the Spanish conquerors.
In Mexican California status was based on the color of your skin. The reader is given a trip to a foreign country as he reads about the author's travels. Once there they traveled up and down the coast from San Diego to San Francisco swapping trade goods for cattle hides. A long trip around Cape Horn brought them to California.
Many of his diary entries read "The same." The author's ship, The Pilgrim, was engaged in the hide trade. The moments of adventure and drama were interspersed between long periods of the boring, confined life of a sailor aboard ship. The life of a sailor was hard labor day and night. He decided to sign on as a jack tar sailor on a ship bound for California round the horn. The author was a student in Boston who developed problems with his eyes and could not pursue his studies. Instead it was a lively tale of travel and danger. This is an American classic that that I feared might be dull and monotonous. This is a true life adventure of two years of the life of an American sailor in the 1830's.
0 kommentar(er)
