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I.
My name is James McHaggarty,
Son of Daniel, a seafaring man,
Born in the British Isles, but
Raised a proud Bostonian.
My mother fled to New England,
In hopes of living a better life;
My father never returned to us,
Tho' gossip spoke of a mistress in Fife.
My mother was staid and emotionally strong,
And raised me on her own;
And only when she took sick admitted
She could not continue alone.
To earn our keep for our small home,
I was apprenticed at age eleven;
And my master took me in the year
That my mother was called up to Heaven.
I spent three years as the printer's devil,
And at the end of my indenture
I said farewell to my surrogate father
In search of a grander adventure.
Altho' I have never met him, I
Know my father and I are alike:
I dreamt of going to sea as he did
Ever since I was just a tyke,
And when the binds of apprenticeship
Were removed from around me
I let my wand'ring spirit reign and
Longed for the sea to surround me.
So I went to port to search
With the money I had saved
For a simple trading ship on which
To make my sailor's name;
But in my boyhood naivety I was
Beguil'd by a tankard of ale—
The Royal Navy shanghaied me,
And before I awoke, we had set sail.
Begrudgingly I laboured
Under Captain Billings's rule,
For little pay and little comfort,
For harsh punishment and gruel;
I toiled at the rigging till he deposed
His cabin boy, in the only proper way:
Above the fo'c'sle he was executed,
The body left collapsed on the deck all that day.
Then I was called to the captain's quarters
And told I would take the dead boy's place.
I was carked by how easily from this world
Any person, so young, could be erased.
I served aboard the H.M.S. Mallory
For the better part of a year,
Till we reached port in France and
I could finally disappear;
There was no chance in Hell that Billings
Would find me among the bourgeoisie;
By the time he might have realised I was gone
I was in another windjammer—at sea.
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