Robert also kept close to the man in the broad-checked jacket and narrow pants — the one who was referred to on the ship as “the American.” Robert questioned him endlessly about things in the United States. To some inquiries he received an answer; others were ignored. The man said that the American President had forbidden him to tell all he knew about the country. He had held such posts over there that he was in possession of important secrets concerning the country’s government, and if he divulged them to outsiders he would never be allowed to enter the republic again. Robert wondered about this statement.
So far he knew only that the American’s name was Fredrik Mattsson. And now he thought of another man with the same first name — Fredrik of Kvarntorpet, who had made the famous America journey to Gothenburg and had afterwards disappeared. Robert thought that the stranger on board might be Fredrik Thron — it was rumored that he had gone to sea. Robert confided his suspicions to Jonas Petter, who had known the Kvarntorpet boy while he was growing up. Jonas Petter looked carefully over his fellow passenger when unobserved, and finally said that this man could be Fredrik Thron, the escaped farmhand. He was about the same height, and his face was similar. But he hadn’t seen the rascal in twenty years, and a person can change much from youth to manhood. He could not say for sure. Now, the American had said that his home parish was in Blekinge, and that might prove that he came from Småland, for Fredrik Thron lied at all times, except when he told the truth in momentary forgetfulness. But at such moments he always used to blush, he was so ashamed of it, said Jonas Petter.
Robert recalled that he had read somewhere about a President of North America — George Washington — who always told the truth and even confessed that he had cut down an apple tree; they now celebrated that day in the United States.
He decided to try to find out the truth about Fredrik Mattsson, the American.
After one week at sea, Robert was convinced that his place was on land. Nearly every chore of a seaman was dangerous. The farm service on land was hard, but it was never dangerous. How could the ship’s officers make the seamen climb up there in the mast-tops? The seamen worked their regular watches and were free in between, but real peace they never had; neither day nor night could they rest completely. One who served as seaman on board a ship was no more free than a farmhand. The farmhand must look after the horses night and day, Sundays and weekdays, without letup. And the seamen must lie there in their bunks in the forecastle, as closely packed as salted herrings. He and Arvid had had better quarters in the stable room in Nybacken, even though there was an abundance of bedbugs there.
A farmhand must eat salt herring all the time, but a seaman must eat rancid pork at every meal. And the seamen must live here year in and year out, imprisoned inside the rail; they couldn’t take a step outside — only forty steps lengthwise, and eight sidewise.
A farmhand on land had more freedom than a seaman at sea.
There were also moments when the farmhand Robert Nilsson from Korpamoen was filled by other thoughts than those of the dangerous, chained life on three-fourths of the earth’s surface, the sea: “. . but he who learns to understand why the water takes so much space shall therein see a proof of the Creator’s omnipotence and kindness.” For hours on end he would stand and gaze toward the mast-tops. Up there — in dizzy heights above the deck — the forest pines stretched their heads: those widely traveled trees, those debarked stems of the large, prolific family of evergreens. These pines had lost their branches and crowns, and instead had been decked in clothes of sail. Dressed in these, they rose here at sea higher and more proudly than ever in the forest. From their fenced-in wood lot they had been let out on the world ocean, there to sail for life. But for each fir cut for a mast, one hundred remained rooted, sentenced for all time to the drab and dreary life at home. There they stood — fifty, sixty years — then they were cut down for rafters or used as timbers in a house, byre, or barn. Then there they lay, in their deep disgrace for a hundred years or more, growing hairy with moss and green with mold, brown-spotted from cow dung, hollow and filled with cockroach nests. Slowly, very slowly, they would rot down in the unromantic stable wall, and when the old building at last had served its time and was torn down, they would be thrown away with odds and ends on the woodpile, to end their lives in the fire — to succumb at last under a peasant pot in which potatoes for the pigs were boiling.
Such is the fate of pine trees which remain at home.
But the chosen mast trees fly the sails which carry ships across the oceans. They help people emigrate from continent to continent, in search of new homes. Their graceful heads carry the winged sails, they are the wingbones of the sailing ships. They may be broken in their youth by storm and shipwreck, or they may sink with their ships in old age, but they will never end in smoke and ashes under a pot filled with potatoes for swine. And when the ship goes down, the masts follow her to the bottom of the sea and proudly lay themselves to rest in the roomiest, deepest grave in the world.
Such is the fate of seagoing pines.
One hundred remain rooted while one is let free to sail on the sea that covers three-quarters of the earth.
And for each farmhand who emigrates across the sea to the New World, hundreds remain at home. There they sit, in their dark stable rooms in the Old World, and gaze through the small fly-specked windows during dreary Sunday afternoons, rooted in their home communities, in their service, until one day they die an ignominious death in bed in a corner of some moss-grown cottage, or as a pauper in the home of some charitable soul.
Such is the lot of home-staying farmhands.
XVII. “. . THE SHIP WAS COVERED WITH WAVES. .”
On the North Sea the emigrants encountered their first rough weather.
It began to blow in the evening — at midnight the captain judged the wind to be the ninth grade, according to Beaufort’s Scale. The Charlotta’s topsails were now bottom-reeved, and in the log the first mate wrote: “Storm.”
Robert:
He awakened. Something heavy had rolled on him — his brother’s body.
He had gone to sleep as usual in his bunk next to Karl Oskar. He had already had time to dream. His dream had been about a word, “dead sea.”
He had stood on the afterdeck at dusk when one of the seamen had said, they were almost in a dead sea. It had sounded horrible — as if they were sailing over a sea where they were to die. The sailmaker had told him what it meant: waves that were remnants of an old storm — after-waves, so to speak. They were the ghosts of the sea, threatening billows that came from some place where a ship shortly before had gone down. They came with a message from the drowned ones — the dead ones told about their shipwreck.
Someone had said: Dead sea is a foreboding of storm; the wind has shifted to northwest.
Round the ship rose steep, high knolls — white-topped — swelling like rising bread in the oven. Suddenly a wave had broken over the deck where Robert stood, soaking his trousers to above the knees. He had become frightened, and had wanted to run away, when he heard one of the seamen — a young boy of his own age — laughing at him and his wet pants. Then Robert had pretended that it didn’t matter, and had remained there.