After leaving home, he had spent nearly twenty years sailing upon
all sorts of voyages, generally out of the ports of New York and
Boston. Twenty years of vice! Every sin that a sailor knows, he
had gone to the bottom of. Several times he had been hauled up in
the hospitals, and as often the great strength of his constitution
had brought him out again in health. Several times, too, from his
acknowledged capacity, he had been promoted to the office of chief
mate, and as often his conduct when in port, especially his
drunkenness, which neither fear nor ambition could induce him to
abandon, put him back into the forecastle. One night, when giving
me an account of his life, and lamenting the years of manhood he
had thrown away, ``There,'' said he, ``in the forecastle, at the
foot of those steps, a chest of old clothes, is the result of
twenty-two years of hard labor and exposure-- worked like a horse,
and treated like a dog.'' As he had grown older, he began to feel
the necessity of some provision for his later years, and came
gradually to the conviction that rum had been his worst enemy. One
night, in Havana, a young shipmate of his was brought aboard
drunk, with a dangerous gash in his head, and his money and new
clothes stripped from him.
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