Becoming America - An Exploration of American Literature from Precolonial to Post-Revolution, 2018a

BECOMING AMERICA
REVOLUTIONARY AND EARLY NATIONAL PERIOD LITERATURE
While Captain Delano was thus made the mark of all eager tongues, his one
eager glance took in all faces, with every other object about him.
Always upon rst boarding a large and populous ship at sea, especially a foreign
one, with a nondescript crew such as Lascars or Manilla men, the impression varies
in a peculiar way from that produced by rst entering a strange house with strange
inmates in a strange land. Both house and ship—the one by its walls and blinds,
the other by its high bulwarks like ramparts—hoard from view their interiors till
the last moment: but in the case of the ship there is this addition; that the living
spectacle it contains, upon its sudden and complete disclosure, has, in contrast
with the blank ocean which zones it, something of the eect of enchantment. The
ship seems unreal; these strange costumes, gestures, and faces, but a shadowy
tableau just emerged from the deep, which directly must receive back what it gave.
Perhaps it was some such inuence, as above is attempted to be described,
which, in Captain Delano’s mind, heightened whatever, upon a staid scrutiny, might
have seemed unusual; especially the conspicuous gures of four elderly grizzled
negroes, their heads like black, doddered willow tops, who, in venerable contrast
to the tumult below them, were couched, sphynx-like, one on the starboard cathead,
another on the larboard, and the remaining pair face to face on the opposite
bulwarks above the main-chains. They each had bits of unstranded old junk in
their hands, and, with a sort of stoical self-content, were picking the junk into
oakum, a small heap of which lay by their sides. They accompanied the task with a
continuous, low, monotonous, chant; droning and drilling away like so many grayheaded
bag-pipers playing a funeral march.
The quarter-deck rose into an ample elevated poop, upon the forward verge of
which, lifted, like the oakum-pickers, some eight feet above the general throng, sat
along in a row, separated by regular spaces, the cross-legged gures of six other
blacks; each with a rusty hatchet in his hand, which, with a bit of brick and a rag,
he was engaged like a scullion in scouring; while between each two was a small
stack of hatchets, their rusted edges turned forward awaiting a like operation.
Though occasionally the four oakum-pickers would briey address some person or
persons in the crowd below, yet the six hatchet-polishers neither spoke to others,
nor breathed a whisper among themselves, but sat intent upon their task, except at
intervals, when, with the peculiar love in negroes of uniting industry with pastime,
two and two they sideways clashed their hatchets together, like cymbals, with a
barbarous din. All six, unlike the generality, had the raw aspect of unsophisticated
Africans.
But that rst comprehensive glance which took in those ten gures, with
scores less conspicuous, rested but an instant upon them, as, impatient of the
hubbub of voices, the visitor turned in quest of whomsoever it might be that
commanded the ship.
But as if not unwilling to let nature make known her own case among his
suering charge, or else in despair of restraining it for the time, the Spanish
captain, a gentlemanly, reserved-looking, and rather young man to a stranger’s
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