Complete Works

explorer could have been more lonely.  I did not know a single soul of all these millions that all around me peopled the mysterious distances of the streets.  I cannot say I was free from a little youthful awe, but at that age one’s feelings are simple.  I was elated.  I was pursuing a clear aim, I was carrying out a deliberate plan of making out of myself, in the first place, a seaman worthy of the service, good enough to work by the side of the men with whom I was to live; and in the second place, I had to justify my existence to myself, to redeem a tacit moral pledge.  Both these aims were to be attained by the same effort.  How simple seemed the problem of life then, on that hazy day of early September in the year 1878, when I entered London for the first time.
    From that point of view — Youth and a straightforward scheme of conduct — it was certainly a year of grace.  All the help I had to get in touch with the world I was invading was a piece of paper not much bigger than the palm of my hand — in which I held it — torn out of a larger plan of London for the greater facility of reference.  It had been the object of careful study for some days past.  The fact that I could take a conveyance at the station never occurred to my mind, no, not even when I got out into the street, and stood, taking my anxious bearings, in the midst, so to speak, of twenty thousand hansoms.  A strange absence of mind or unconscious conviction that one cannot approach an important moment of one’s life by means of a hired carriage?  Yes, it would have been a preposterous proceeding.  And indeed I was to make an Australian voyage and encircle the globe before ever entering a London hansom.
    Another document, a cutting from a newspaper, containing the address of an obscure shipping agent, was in my pocket.  And I needed not to take it out.  That address was as if graven deep in my brain.  I muttered its words to myself as I walked on, navigating the sea of London by the chart concealed in the palm of my hand; for I had vowed to myself not to inquire my way from anyone.  Youth is the time of rash pledges.  Had I taken a wrong turning I would have been lost; and if faithful to my pledge I might have remained lost for days, for weeks, have left perhaps my bones to be discovered bleaching in some blind alley of the Whitechapel district, as it had happened to lonely travellers lost in the bush.  But I walked on to my destination without hesitation or mistake, showing there, for the first time, some of that faculty to absorb and make my own the imaged topography of a chart, which in later years was to help me in regions of intricate navigation to keep the ships entrusted to me off the ground.  The place I was bound to was not easy to find.  It was one of those courts hidden away from the charted and navigable streets, lost among the thick growth of houses like a dark pool in the depths of a forest, approached by an inconspicuous archway as if by secret path; a Dickensian nook of London, that wonder city, the growth of which bears no sign of intelligent design, but many traces of freakishly sombre phantasy the Great Master knew so well how to bring out by the magic of his understanding love.  And the office I entered was Dickensian too.  The dust of the Waterloo year lay on the panes and frames of its windows; early Georgian grime clung to its sombre wainscoting.
    It was one o’clock in the afternoon, but the day was gloomy.  By the light of a single gas-jet depending from the smoked ceiling I saw an elderly man, in a long coat of black broadcloth.  He had a grey beard, a big nose, thick lips, and heavy shoulders.  His curly white hair and the general character of his head recalled vaguely a burly apostle in the barocco style of Italian art.  Standing up at a tall, shabby, slanting desk, his silver-rimmed spectacles pushed up high on his forehead, he was eating a mutton-chop, which had been just brought to him from some Dickensian eating-house round the corner.
    Without ceasing to eat he turned to me his florid, barocco apostle’s face with an expression of inquiry.
    I produced elaborately a series of vocal sounds which must have borne sufficient resemblance to the phonetics of English speech, for his face broke into a smile of comprehension almost at once. — ”Oh, it’s you who wrote a letter to me the other day from Lowestoft about getting a ship.”
    I had written to him from Lowestoft.  I can’t