I shall never forget my child-astonishment when I first encountered one of these strange beings.  He was a runaway English sailor.  I was a lad of twelve, with a decked-over, fourteen-foot, centre-board skiff which I had taught myself to sail.  I sat at his feet as at the feet of a god, while he discoursed of strange lands and peoples, deeds of violence, and hair-raising gales at sea.  Then, one day, I took him for a sail.  With all the trepidation of the veriest little amateur, I hoisted sail and got under way.  Here was a man, looking on critically, I was sure, who knew more in one second about boats and the water than I could ever know.  After an interval, in which I exceeded myself, he took the tiller and the sheet.  I sat on the little thwart amidships, open-mouthed, prepared to learn what real sailing was.  My mouth remained open, for I learned what a real sailor was in a small boat.  He couldn’t trim the sheet to save himself, he nearly capsized several times in squalls, and, once again, by blunderingly jibing over; he didn’t know what a centre-board was for, nor did he know that in running a boat before the wind one must sit in the middle instead of on the side; and finally, when we came back to the wharf, he ran the skiff in full tilt, shattering her nose and carrying away the mast-step.  And yet he was a really truly sailor fresh from the vasty deep.

Which points my moral.  A man can sail in the forecastles of big ships all his life and never know what real sailing is.  From the time I was twelve, I listened to the lure of the sea.  When I was fifteen I was captain and owner of an oyster-pirate sloop.  By the time I was sixteen I was sailing in scow-schooners, fishing salmon with the Greeks up the Sacramento River, and serving as sailor on the Fish Patrol.  And I was a good sailor, too, though all my cruising had been on San Francisco Bay and the rivers tributary to it.  I had never been on the ocean in my life.

Then, the month I was seventeen, I signed before the mast as an able seaman on a three-top-mast schooner bound on a seven-months’ cruise across the Pacific and back again.  As my shipmates promptly informed me, I had had my nerve with me to sign on as able seaman.  Yet behold, I was an able seaman.  I had graduated from the right school.  It took no more than minutes to learn the names and uses of the few new ropes.  It was simple.  I did not do things blindly.  As a small-boat sailor I had learned to reason out and know the why of everything.  It is true, I had to learn how to steer by compass, which took maybe half a minute; but when it came to steering “full-and-by” and “close-and-by,” I could beat the average of my shipmates, because that was the very way I had always sailed.  Inside fifteen minutes I could box the compass around and back again.  And there was little else to learn during that seven-months’ cruise, except fancy rope-sailorising, such as the more complicated lanyard knots and the making of various kinds of sennit and rope-mats.  The point of all of which is that it is by means of small-boat sailing that the real sailor is best schooled.