My father's study, as I entered it on an April morning in 1809, to learn his decision regarding a matter that was to determine the course of all my life, was dim and spacious and far removed from the bustle and clamor of the harbor-side. It was a large room paneled with dark wood. There were books along the walls, and paintings of ships, and over the fireplace there stood a beautiful model of a Burmese junk, carved by some brown artist on the bank of the Irawadi.
My father sat by the open window and looked out into the warm sunshine, which was swiftly driving the last snow from the hollows under the shrubbery.
Already crocuses were blossoming in the grass of the year before, which was still green in patches, and the bright sun and the blue sky made the study seem to me, entering, dark and sombre. It was characteristic of my father, I thought with a flash of fancy, to sit there and look out into a warm, gay world where springtime was quickening the blood and sunshine lay warm on the flowers; he always had lived in old Salem, and as he wrote his sermons, he always had looked out through study windows on a world of commerce bright with adventure. For my own part, I was of no mind to play the spectator in so stirring a drama.
With a smile he turned at my step. "So, my son, you wish to ship before the mast," he said, in a repressed voice and manner that seemed in keeping with the dim, quiet room. "Pray what do you know of the sea?"
I thought the question idle, for all my life I had lived where I could look from my window out on the harbor.
"Why, sir," I replied, "I know enough to realize that I want to follow the sea."
There was something in my father's eyes that I could not understand. He seemed to be dreaming, as if of voyages that he himself had made. Yet I knew he never had sailed blue water. "Well, why not?" he asked suddenly. "There was a time--"
I was too young to realize then what has come to me since: that my father's manner revealed a side of his nature that I never had known; that in his own heart was a love of adventure that he never had let me see. My sixteen years had given me a big, strong body, but no great insight, and I thought only of my own urgent desire of the moment.