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who had risen as high as captain’s coxswain and was now whittling a stick as he sat on a bollard waiting for the captain to return to his boat. Still, a whole five years later, George could bring to mind the way the sailor had spat a great tobacco gob into the sea that rippled about the piles of the pier before calling him a bloody young idiot.
    â€œDod dog it, don’t do it,” he’d barked. “Get that crazy notion out of your head! It would be better to hang than turn into a sailor. Study your books, learn a trade, and grow up to be a useful man!” Then, when George had insisted, the coxswain had advised him to go in for the merchant trade and steer clear of the navy. “Look at me,” he’d declared, prodding a gnarled, tarstained finger at his shirtfront. “I’ve been in the navy all me life, and what good has it done me? They don’t teach you nothing better than how to haul ropes, holystone decks, and pull an oar in a boat—they turn you into a confounded dog, to run to a whistle and cringe at a blow. Join the crew of a merchant ship, young man, and learn to be a proper seaman!”
    Which was exactly what Wiki had done, George mused now. At the time he would have been perfectly happy to take the old coxswain’s advice and go along on the whaler with his comrade, but his interfering grandfather had yet again taken a hand. Though finally convinced that George was quite determined to go to sea come hell or high water, he utterly refused to contemplate his grandson going in anything less than a navy ship. He’d made sure that George was set on the right path to becoming an officer by organizing his commission as a midshipman. Both power and wealth were necessary—only the sons of lofty individuals like great navy captains, important merchants, and U.S. senators being eligible—but George’s grandfather was both rich and influential.
    George, himself, had not been at all grateful, since he’d swiftly found that a junior midshipman’s existence was a dog’s life indeed. His job was to keep an eye on the men, report on their behavior, and make sure they obeyed orders, so that in effect he was nothing better than a kind of constable’s informer, regarded with utter contempt by the men. Still worse were the officers who handed down those orders, most being tyrants who considered their midshipmen nothing better than menials, completely at their bidding no matter how capricious the whim. However, with grit, determination, and unflagging enthusiasm, he had somehow survived his seagoing apprenticeship—all three years, ten months, fourteen days, and sixteen hours of it.
    Then he had reported to the Gosport Navy Yard for eight months of instruction in the technical and theoretical aspects of seafaring. George had lived in a boardinghouse in Norfolk and had relished every moment—though, as he remembered it, the dread prospect of the grueling examination to come had cast a bit of a blight on his enjoyment. This had been held in Baltimore before an examining board of senior officers, and he had come through it with flying colors. Not only was he rated as a passed midshipman, but he topped his class—and, because of that, he had been given the command of the dear Swallow. He owed that to Captain Wilkes—not that it made him like the fellow any better—because the commander of the expedition had determined that the smaller ships should be given to recent graduates, reckoning that they, unlike the older officers, had not had the time to forget what they had learned.
    It was ironic, however, that he should command a small brig when all his experience had been on great men-of-war and particularly so that it should be a brig with a forecastle—or so he freely confessed to himself. On the big fighting ships the seamen slung their hammocks between the great cannon, either on the main deck or the gun deck, which was one tier below,