We sailed in the propeller Ajax, in the middle of winter.  The almanac called it winter, distinctly enough, but the weather was a compromise between spring and summer.  Six days out of port, it became summer altogether.  We had some thirty passengers; among them a cheerful soul by the name of Williams, and three sea-worn old whaleship captains going down to join their vessels.  These latter played euchre in the smoking room day and night, drank astonishing quantities of raw whisky without being in the least affected by it, and were the happiest people I think I ever saw.  And then there was “the old Admiral—­” a retired whaleman.  He was a roaring, terrific combination of wind and lightning and thunder, and earnest, whole-souled profanity.  But nevertheless he was tender-hearted as a girl.  He was a raving, deafening, devastating typhoon, laying waste the cowering seas but with an unvexed refuge in the centre where all comers were safe and at rest.  Nobody could know the “Admiral” without liking him; and in a sudden and dire emergency I think no friend of his would know which to choose—­to be cursed by him or prayed for by a less efficient person.

His Title of “Admiral” was more strictly “official” than any ever worn by a naval officer before or since, perhaps—­for it was the voluntary offering of a whole nation, and came direct from the people themselves without any intermediate red tape—­the people of the Sandwich Islands.  It was a title that came to him freighted with affection, and honor, and appreciation of his unpretending merit.  And in testimony of the genuineness of the title it was publicly ordained that an exclusive flag should be devised for him and used solely to welcome his coming and wave him God-speed in his going.  From that time forth, whenever his ship was signaled in the offing, or he catted his anchor and stood out to sea, that ensign streamed from the royal halliards on the parliament house and the nation lifted their hats to it with spontaneous accord.

Yet he had never fired a gun or fought a battle in his life.  When I knew him on board the Ajax, he was seventy-two years old and had plowed the salt water sixty-one of them.  For sixteen years he had gone in and out of the harbor of Honolulu in command of a whaleship, and for sixteen more had been captain of a San Francisco and Sandwich Island passenger packet and had never had an accident or lost a vessel.  The simple natives knew him for a friend who never failed them, and regarded him as children regard a father.  It was a dangerous thing to oppress them when the roaring Admiral was around.

Two years before I knew the Admiral, he had retired from the sea on a competence, and had sworn a colossal nine-jointed oath that he would “never go within smelling distance of the salt water again as long as he lived.”  And he had conscientiously kept it.  That is to say, he considered he had kept it, and it would have been more than dangerous to suggest to him, even in the gentlest way, that making eleven long sea voyages, as a passenger, during the two years that had transpired since he “retired,” was only keeping the general spirit of it and not the strict letter.