Memoirs by Charles Godfrey Leland Part 7

After our return to Philadelphia something of great importance to me began to be discussed. My cousin Samuel G.o.dfrey, who was a few years older than I, finding himself threatened with consumption, of which all his family died, resolved to go to Ma.r.s.eilles on a voyage, and persuaded my father to let me accompany him. At this time I had, as indeed for many years before, such a desire to visit Europe that I might almost have died of it. So it was at last determined that I should go with "Sam,"

and after all due preparations and packing, I bade farewell to mother and Henry and the dear little twin sisters, and youngest Emily, our pet, and went with my father to New York, where I was the guest for a few days of my cousin, Mrs. Caroline Wight, whom the reader may recall as the one who used to correct my French exercises in Dedham.

We were to sail in a packet or ship for Ma.r.s.eilles. My father saw me off. He was wont to say in after years, that as I stood on the deck at the last moment and looked affectionately at him, there was in my eyes an expression of innocence or goodness and gentleness which he never saw again. Which was, I am sure, very true; the great pity being that that look had not utterly disappeared years before. If it only _had_ vanished with boyhood, as it ought to have done, my father would have been spared much sorrow.

At this time I was a trifle over six feet two in height, and had then and for some time after so fair a red and white complexion, that the young ladies in Philadelphia four years later teased me by spreading the report that I used rouge and white paint! I was not as yet "filled out," but held myself straightly, and was fairly proportioned. I wore a cap _a l'etudiant_, very much over my left ear, and had very long, soft, straight, dark-brown hair; my dream and ideal being the German student. I was extremely shy of strangers, but when once acquainted soon became very friendly, and in most cases made a favourable impression. I was "neat and very clean-looking," as a lady described me, for the daily bath or sponge was universal in Philadelphia long ere it was even in England, and many a time when travelling soon after, I went without a meal in order to have my tub, when time did not permit of both. I was very sensitive, and my feelings were far too easily pained; on the other hand, I had no trace of the common New England youth's vulgar failing of nagging, teasing, or vexing others under colour of being "funny" or "cute." A very striking, and, all things considered, a remarkable characteristic was that I _hated_, as I still do, with all my soul, gossip about other people and their affairs; never read even a card not meant for my eyes, and detested curiosity, prying, and inquisitiveness as I did the devil. I owe a great development of this to a curious incident. It must have been about the time when I first went to college, that I met at Cape May a naval officer, who roomed with me in a cottage, a farm-house near a hotel, and whom I greatly admired as a man of the world and a model of good manners.

To him one day I communicated some gossip about somebody, when he abruptly cut me short, and when I would go on informed me that he never listened to such talk. This made a very deep impression on me, which never disappeared; nay, it grew with my growth and strengthened with my strength. Now the New England people, especially Bostonians, are inordinately given to knowing everything about everybody, and to "t.i.ttle- tattle," while the Southerners are comparatively free from it and very incurious. Two-thirds of the students at Princeton were of the first families in the South, and there my indifference to what did not personally concern one was regarded as a virtue. But there is a spot in this sun--that he who never cares a straw to know about the affairs of other people, will, not only if he live in Boston, but almost anywhere else--Old England not at all excepted--be forced, in spite of himself, and though he were as meek and lowly as man may be, into looking down on and feeling himself superior unto those people who _will_ read a letter not meant for their eyes, or eavesdrop, or talk in any way about anybody in a strain to which they would not have that person listen. Which reminds me that in after years I got some praise in the newspapers for the saying that a Yankee's idea of h.e.l.l was a place where he must mind his own business. It came about in this way. In a letter to Charles Astor Bristed I made this remark, and ill.u.s.trated it with a picture of Virgil taking a Yankee attired in a chimney-pot hat and long night-gown into the Inferno, over whose gate was written--

"Badate a vostri affari voi che intrate!"

(Mind your own business ye who enter here!)

One day soon after my arrival at Princeton, George Boker laid on the table by me a paper or picture with its face down. I took no notice of it. After a time he said, "Why don't you look at that picture?" I replied simply, "If you wanted me to see it you would have turned it face up." To which he remarked, "I put it there to see whether you would look at it. I thought you would not." George was a "deep, sagacious file,"

who studied men like books.

My cousin who accompanied me had as a boy "run away and gone to sea" cod- fishing on the Grand Banks. If I had gone with him it would have done me good. Another cousin, Benjamin Stimson, did the same; he is the S. often mentioned in Dana's "Two Years Before the Mast." Dana and Stimson were friends, and ran away together. It was quite the rule for all my Yankee cousins to do this, and they all benefited by it. In consequence of his nautical experience Sam was soon at home among all sailors, and not having my scruples as to knowing who was who or their affairs, soon knew everything that was going on. Our captain was a handsome, dissipated, and "loud" young man, with rather more sail than ballast, but good-natured and obliging.

"Come day, go day," we pa.s.sed the Gulf Stream and the Azores, and had long sunny calms, when we could not sail, and lay about on deck, warm and lazy, and saw the Azores, and so on, till we were near the Spanish coast.

One evening there clipped right under our lee a fisherman's smack. "I say, Leland, hail that fellow!" said the captain. So I called in Spanish, "Adonde venga usted?"

"Da Algesiras," was the reply, which thrilled out of my heart the thought that, like the squire in Chaucer--

"He had been at the siege of Algecir."

So I called, in parting, "Dios vaya con usted!"

Sam informed me that the manner in which I hailed the fisherman had made a great impression on the captain, who lauded me highly. It also made one on me, because it was the first time I ever spoke to a European _in Europe_!

Anon we were boarded by an old weather-beaten seadog of a Spanish pilot, unto whom I felt a great attraction; and greeting him in Malagan Spanish, such as I had learned from Manuel Gori, as _Hermano_! and offering him with ceremonious politeness a good cigar, I also drew his regards; all Spaniards, as I well knew, being extremely fond, beyond all men on earth, of intimacy with gentlemen. We were delayed for two days at Gibraltar. I may here remark, by the way, that this voyage of our ship is described in a book by Mrs. f.a.n.n.y Kemble Butler, ent.i.tled "A Year of Consolation Abroad." She was on board, but never spoke to a soul among the pa.s.sengers.

I was never acquainted with Mrs. Butler, as I easily might have been, for we had some very intimate friends in common; but as a boy I had been "frightened of her" by certain anecdotes as to her temper, and perhaps the influence lasted into later years. I have, however, heard her lecture. She was a very clever woman, and Mr. Henry James, in _Temple Bar_ for March, 1893, thus does justice to her conversational power:

"Her talk reflected a thousand vanished and present things; but there were those of her friends for whom its value was, almost before any other, doc.u.mentary. The generations move so fast and change so much, that Mrs. Kemble testified even more than she affected to do, which was much, to ancient manners and a close chapter of history. Her conversation swarmed with people and with criticism of people, with the ghosts of a dead society. She had, in two hemispheres, seen every one and known every one, had a.s.sisted at the social comedy of her age.

Her own habits and traditions were in themselves a survival of an era less democratic and more mannered. I have no room for enumerations, which, moreover, would be invidious; but the old London of her talk--the direction I liked is best to take--was, in particular, a gallery of portraits. She made Count d'Orsay familiar, she made Charles Greville present; I thought it wonderful that she could be anecdotic about Miss Edgeworth. She reanimated the old drawing-rooms, relighted the old lamps, retuned the old pianos. The finest comedy of all, perhaps, was that of her own generous whimsicalities. She was superbly willing to amuse, and on any terms; and her temper could do it as well as her wit. If either of these had failed, her eccentricities were always there. She had more 'habits' than most people have room in life for, and a theory that to a person of her disposition they were as necessary as the close meshes of a strait- waistcoat. If she had not lived by rule (on her showing) she would have lived infallibly by riot. Her rules and her riots, her reservations and her concessions, all her luxuriant theory and all her extravagant practice; her drollery, that mocked at her melancholy; her imagination, that mocked at her drollery; and her wonderful manners, all her own, that mocked a little at everything: these were part of the constant freshness which made those who loved her love her so much. 'If my servants can live with me a week, they can live with me for ever,' she often said; 'but the first week sometimes kills them.'

A domestic who had been long in her service quitted his foreign home the instant he heard of her death, and, travelling for thirty hours, arrived travel-stained and breathless, like a messenger in a romantic tale, just in time to drop a handful of flowers into her grave."

There came on board of our boat a fruit-dealer, and the old pilot, seeing that I was about to invest a _real_ in grapes, said, "Let me buy them for you"; which he did, obtaining half-a-peck of exquisite large grapes of a beautiful purple colour.

There was a middle-aged lady among the pa.s.sengers, of whom the least I can say was, that she had a great many little winning ways of making herself disagreeable. She imposed frightfully on me while on board, getting me to mark her trunks for her, and carry them into the hold, &c.

(the sailors disliked her so much that they refused to touch them), and then cut me dead when on sh.o.r.e. This ancient horror, seeing me with so many grapes, and learning the price, concluded that if a mere boy like me could get so many, she, a lady, could for four reals lay in a stock which would last for life, more or less. So she obtained a bushel-basket, expecting to get it heaped full; but what was her wrath at only getting for her silver half-dollar just enough to hide the bottom thereof! Great was her rage, but rage availed her nought. She did not call old pilots "Brother," or give them cigars, or talk Malagano politely. She was not even "half-Spanish," and therefore, as we used to say at college of certain unpopular people, was "a bad smoke."

We went on sh.o.r.e on Sunday, which in those days always made Gibraltar literally like a fancy ball. The first person whom I met was a pretty young lady in full, antique, rich Castilian costume, followed by a servant bearing her book of devotion. Seeing my gaze of admiration, she smiled, at which I bowed, and she returned the salute and went her way.

Such an event had never happened to me before in all my life. I accepted it philosophically as one of a new order of things into which I was destined to enter. Then I saw men from every part of Spain in quaint dresses, Castilians in cloaks, Andalusians in the jaunty _majo_ rig, Gallegos, Moors from the Barbary coast, many Greeks, old Jews in gabardines, Scotch Highland soldiers, and endless more--_concursus splendidus_--_non possum non mirari_.

I felt myself very happy and very much at home in all this. I strolled about the streets talking Spanish to everybody. Then I met with a smuggler, who asked me if I wanted to buy cigars. I did. In New York my uncle George had given me a box of five hundred excellent Havanas, and these had lasted me exactly twenty days. I had smoked the last twenty- five on the last day. So I went and bought at a low enough figure a box of the worst cigars I had ever met with. But youth can smoke anything--except deceit.

Entrance to the galleries was strictly forbidden in those days, but an incorruptible British sergeant, for an incorruptible dollar or two, showed us over them. There was, too, a remarkable man, a ship-chandler named Felipe, to whom I was introduced. Felipe spoke twenty-four languages. He boarded every ship and knew everybody. Gibraltar was then a vast head-quarters of social evils, or blessings, and Felipe, who was a perfect Hercules, mentioned incidentally that he had had a new _maja_, or _moza_, or _muger_, or _puta_, every night for twenty years! which was confirmed by common report. It was a firm principle with him to always _change_. This extraordinary fact made me reflect deeply on it as a _psychological_ phenomenon. This far surpa.s.sed anything I had ever heard at Princeton. Then this and that great English dignitary was pointed out to me--black eyes ogled me--everybody was polite, for I had a touch of the Spanish manner which I had observed in the ex-Capitan-General and others whom I had known in Philadelphia; and, in short, I saw more that was picturesque and congenial in that one day than I had ever beheld in all my life before. I had got into "my plate."

From Gibraltar our ship sailed on to Ma.r.s.eilles. The coasts were full of old ruins, which I sketched. We lay off Malaga for a day, but I could not go ash.o.r.e, much as I longed to. At Ma.r.s.eilles, Sam and the captain and I went to a very good hotel.

Now it had happened that on the voyage before a certain French lady--the captain said she was a Baroness--having fallen in love with the said captain, had secreted herself on board the vessel, greatly to his horror, and reappeared when out at sea. Therefore, as soon as we arrived at Ma.r.s.eilles, the injured husband came raging on board and tried to shoot the captain, which made a great _scandal_. And, moved by this example, the coloured cook of our vessel, who had a wife, shot the head-waiter on the same day, being also instigated by jealousy. Sam G.o.dfrey chaffed the captain for setting a bad moral example to the n.i.g.g.e.rs--which was all quite a change from Princeton. Life was beginning to be lively.

There had come over on the vessel with us, in the cabin, a droll character, an actor in a Philadelphia theatre, who had promptly found a lodging in a kind of maritime boarding-house. Getting into some difficulty, as he could not speak French he came in a great hurry to beg me to go with him to his _pension_ to act as interpreter, which I did. I found at once that it was a Spanish house, and the resort of smugglers.

The landlady was a very pretty black-eyed woman, who played the guitar, and sang Spanish songs, and brought out Spanish wine, and was marvellously polite to me, to my astonishment, not unmingled with innocent grat.i.tude.

There I was at home. At Princeton I had learned to play the guitar, and from Manuel Gori, who had during all his boyhood been familiar with low life and smugglers, I had learned many songs and some slang. And so, with a crowd of dark, fierce, astonished faces round me of men eagerly listening, I sang a smuggler's song--

"Yo que soy contrabandista, Y campo a me rispeto, A todos mi desafio, Quien me compra hilo negro?

Ay jaleo!

Muchachas jaleo!

Quien me compra hilo negro!"

Great was the amazement and thundering the applause from my auditors. Let the reader imagine a nun of fourteen years asked to sing, and bursting out with "Go it while you're young!" Then I sang the _Tragala_, which coincided with the political views of my friends. But my grand _coup_ was in reserve. I had learned from Borrow's "Gypsies in Spain" a long string of Gitano or Gypsy verses, such as--

"El eray guillabela, El eray obusno; Que avella romanella, No avella obusno!"

"Loud sang the _gorgio_ to his fair, And thus his ditty ran:-- 'Oh, may the Gypsy maiden come, And not the Gypsy man!'"

And yet again--

"Coruncho Lopez, gallant lad, A smuggling he would ride; So stole his father's ambling prad, And therefore to the galleys sad Coruncho now I guide."

This was a final _coup_. How the _diabolo_ I, such an innocent stranger youth, had ever learned Spanish _Gypsy_--the least knowledge of which in Spain implies unfathomable iniquity and fastness--was beyond all comprehension. So I departed full of honour amid thunders of applause.

From the first day our room was the resort of all the American ship-captains in Ma.r.s.eilles. We kept a kind of social hall or exchange, with wine and cigars on the side-table, all of which dropping in and out rather reminded me of Princeton. My friend the actor had pitched upon a young English Jew, who seemed to me to be a doubtful character. He sang very well, and was full of local news and gossip. He, too, was at home among us. One evening our captain told us how he every day smuggled ash.o.r.e fifty cigars in his hat. At hearing this, I saw a gleam in the eyes of the young man, which was a revelation to me. When he had gone, I said to the captain, "You had better not smuggle any cigars to-morrow.

That fellow is a spy of the police."

The next day Captain Jack on leaving his ship was accosted by the _douaniers_, who politely requested him to take off his hat. He refused, and was then told that he must go before the _prefet_. There the request was renewed. He complied; but "forewarned, forearmed"--there was nothing in it.

Captain Jack complimented me on my sagacity, and scolded the actor for making such friends. But he had unconsciously made me familiar with one compared to whom the spy was a trifle. I have already fully and very truthfully described this remarkable man in an article in _Temple Bar_, but his proper place is here. He was a little modest-looking Englishman, who seemed to me rather to look up to the fast young American captains as types or models of more daring beings. Sometimes he would tell a mildly- naughty tale as if it were a wild thing. He consulted with me as to going to Paris and hearing lectures at the University, his education having been neglected. He had, I was told, experienced a sad loss, having just lost his ship on the Guinea coast. One day I condoled with him, saying that I heard he had been ruined.

"Yes," replied the captain, "I have. Something like this: My mother once had a very pretty housemaid who disappeared. Some time after I met her magnificently dressed, and I said, 'Sally, where do you live now?' She replied, 'Please, sir, I don't live anywhere now; I've been _ruined_.'"

Sam explained to me that the captain had a keg of gold-dust and many diamonds, and having wrecked his vessel intentionally, was going to London to get a heavy insurance. He had been "ruined" to his very great advantage. Then Sam remarked--

"You don't know the captain. I tell you, Charley, that man is an old slaver or pirate. See how I'll draw him out."

'The next day Sam began to talk. He remarked that he had been to sea and had some money which he wished to invest. His health required a warm climate, such as the African coast. We would both, in fact, like to go into the Guinea business. [_Bozales_--"sacks of charcoal," I remarked in Spanish slaver-slang.] The captain smiled. He had apparently heard the expression before. He considered it. He had a great liking for me, and thought that a trip or two under the black flag would do me a great deal of good. So he noted down our address, and promised that as soon as he should get a ship we should hear from him.

After that the captain, regarding me as enlisted in the fraternity, and only waiting till 'twas "time for us to go," had no secrets from me. He was very glad that I knew Spanish and French, and explained that if I would learn Coromantee or Ebo, it would aid us immensely in getting cargoes. By the way, I became very well acquainted in after years with King George of Bonney, and can remember entertaining him with a story how a friend of mine once (in Cuba) bought thirty Ebos, and on entering the barrac.o.o.n the next morning, found them all hanging by the necks dead, like a row of possums in the Philadelphia market--they having, with magnificent pluck, and in glorious defiance of Buckra civilisation, resolved to go back to Africa. I have found other blacks who believed that all good darkies when they die go to Guinea, and one of these was very touching and strange. He had been brought as a slave-child to South Carolina, but was always haunted by the memory of a group of cocoa-palms by a place where the wild white surf of the ocean bounded up to the sh.o.r.e--a rock, sunshine, and sand. There he declared his soul would go.

He was a Voodoo, and a man of marvellous strange mind.

Day by day my commander gave me, as I honestly believe, without a shadow of exaggeration, all the terrific details of a slaver's life, and his strange experiences in buying slaves in the interior. Compared to the awful ma.s.sacres and cruelties inflicted by the blacks on one another, the white slave trade seemed to be philanthropic and humane. He had seen at the grand custom in Dahomey 2,500 men killed, and a pool made of their blood into which the king's wives threw themselves naked and wallowed.

"One day fifteen were to be tortured to death for witchcraft. I bought them all for an old dress-coat," said the captain. "I didn't want them, for my cargo was made up; it was only to save the poor devils' lives."

If a slaver could not get a full cargo, and met with a weaker vessel which was full, it was at once attacked and plundered. Sometimes there would be desperate resistance, with the aid of the slaves. "I have seen the scuppers run with blood," said the captain. And so on, with much more of the same sort, all of which has since been recorded in the "Journal of Captain Canot," from which latter book I really learned nothing new. I might add the "Life of Hobart Pacha," whom I met many times in London. A real old-fashioned slaver was fully a hundred times worse than an average pirate, because he _was_ the latter whenever he wished to rob, and in his business was the cause of far more suffering and death.

The captain was very fond of reading poetry, his favourite being Wordsworth. This formed quite a tie between us. He was always rather mild, quiet, and old-fashioned--in fact, m.u.f.fish. Once only did I see a spark from him which showed what was latent. Captain Jack was describing a most extraordinary run which we had made before a gale from Gibraltar to Cape de Creux, which was, indeed, true enough, he having a very fast vessel. But the _Guinea_ captain denied that such time had ever been made by any craft ever built. "And I have had to sail sometimes pretty fast in my time," he added with one sharp glance--no more--but, as Byron says of the look of Gulleyaz, 'twas like a short glimpse of h.e.l.l. Pretty fast! I should think so--now and then from an English cruiser, all sails wetted down, with the gallows in the background. But as I had been on board with Sam, the question was settled. We _had_ made a run which was beyond all precedent.

I fancy that the captain, if he escaped the halter or the wave, in after years settled down in some English coast-village, where he read Wordsworth, and attended church regularly, and was probably regarded as a gentle old duffer by the younger members of society. But take him for all in all, he was the mildest-mannered man that ever scuttled ship or cut a throat, and he always behaved to me like a perfect gentleman, and never uttered an improper word.