Derelict
the points about the mainsail and hawser were beyond reproach. “My own education as an able seaman,” he explained, “was gained from years of youthful study of dime-novel sea yarns by Ned Buntline, Sylvanus Cobb, jr., Billy Bowline, and other masters of the sea in libraries. I feel stronger in my piracy than in my seamanship. If there is a single verse, or, mayhap, one line of ‘Derelict’ that will hold, without leaking, anything of a specific gravity heavier than moonshine, it would surprise me. But it seems to, when it is adopted as a ‘real chantey’—and that’s the test, that it ‘seems.’”
Which is absolutely true—seeming is all that is necessary.
It is an amusing coincidence that R. L. S. made practically the same answer when some aspersions were cast upon the seamanship of his story.
“Of course,” he wrote in a letter to W. E. Henley, “my seamanship is jimmy. But I have known and sailed with seamen too, and lived and eaten with them; and I made my put-up shot in no great ignorance, but as a put-up thing has to be made, i. e., to be coherent and picturesque, and damn the expense. Are they fairly lively on the wires? Then, favor me with your tongues. Are they wooden, and dim, and no sport? Then it is I that am silent, otherwise not.”
337
