Page:Twenty years before the mast - Charles Erskine, 1896.djvu/323

 Boston outer bay for six days, in a nor’east snowstorm, and then weighed anchor and put to sea.

This ship, Carrol, was one of the old-timers, being sixty odd years old. She was built for strength, and had great breadth of beam and a bow as broad as the  stern of an old Dutch galiot. She was also a very dry ship and "laid to like a duck in a gale of wind." Our captain was a perfect fac-similie of old Father Neptune,  and treated Jack before the mast as though he was his  own son. The ship Charles Carrol was, as all ships should be, a floating sailors’ home. Our crew were a good set of sailors, and nearly all Bostonians. We were thirty-two days on our passage from Boston Bay to the  Balize, where we took steam and were towed up the river  to New Orleans. Soon after the ship had been made fast alongside the levee, the captain told us to make our  home aboard while the ship remained in port. While here, we heard the glad news that cotton was king,  freights high, and that nearly every ship was taken up,  and men very scarce.

The day after our arrival the crew formed themselves into two gangs and obtained employment at screwing  cotton by the day. We accepted the captain’s offer to make the ship our home, and slept in the forecastle and  ate our grub at the French market. As the lighter, freighted with cotton, came alongside the ship in which  we were at work, we hoisted it on board and dumped it  into the ship’s hold, then stowed it in tiers so snugly it  would have been impossible to have found space enough  left over to hold a copy of The Boston Herald. With the aid of a set of jack-screws and a ditty, we would