“And looks like piracy,” I added.

“Looks like blind hookey!” cried the captain.  “No, don’t you deceive yourself; neither your head nor mine is big enough to put a name on this business.”

CHAPTER XV.  THE CARGO OF THE “FLYING SCUD.”

In my early days I was a man, the most wedded to his idols of my generation.  I was a dweller under roofs:  the gull of that which we call civilisation; a superstitious votary of the plastic arts; a cit; and a prop of restaurants.  I had a comrade in those days, somewhat of an outsider, though he moved in the company of artists, and a man famous in our small world for gallantry, knee breeches, and dry and pregnant sayings.  He, looking on the long meals and waxing bellies of the French, whom I confess I somewhat imitated, branded me as “a cultivator of restaurant fat.”  And I believe he had his finger on the dangerous spot; I believe, if things had gone smooth with me, I should be now swollen like a prize-ox in body, and fallen in mind to a thing perhaps as low as many types of bourgeois—­the implicit or exclusive artist.  That was a home word of Pinkerton’s, deserving to be writ in letters of gold on the portico of every school of art:  “What I can’t see is why you should want to do nothing else.”  The dull man is made, not by the nature, but by the degree of his immersion in a single business.  And all the more if that be sedentary, uneventful, and ingloriously safe.  More than one half of him will then remain unexercised and undeveloped; the rest will be distended and deformed by over-nutrition, over-cerebration, and the heat of rooms.  And I have often marvelled at the impudence of gentlemen, who describe and pass judgment on the life of man, in almost perfect ignorance of all its necessary elements and natural careers.  Those who dwell in clubs and studios may paint excellent pictures or write enchanting novels.  There is one thing that they should not do:  they should pass no judgment on man’s destiny, for it is a thing with which they are unacquainted.  Their own life is an excrescence of the moment, doomed, in the vicissitude of history, to pass and disappear:  the eternal life of man, spent under sun and rain and in rude physical effort, lies upon one side, scarce changed since the beginning.

I would I could have carried along with me to Midway Island all the writers and the prating artists of my time.  Day after day of hope deferred, of heat, of unremitting toil; night after night of aching limbs, bruised hands, and a mind obscured with the grateful vacancy of physical fatigue:  the scene, the nature of my employment; the rugged speech and faces of my fellow-toilers, the glare of the day on deck, the stinking twilight in the bilge, the shrill myriads of the ocean-fowl:  above all, the sense of our immitigable isolation from the world and from the current epoch;—­keeping another time, some eras old; the new day heralded by no daily paper,