i6 I N A G U A 



A barred owl came from the land beyond and lit on our mast- 

 head and devoured a killdeer there. Otherwise nothing moved 

 except the translucent jellyfish that pulsed in the sea at the 

 waterline. If only the fog would lift- 

 When finally it raised, we beheld far ahead the gleam of the 

 great salt ocean and felt the roll of the long swells coming in 

 between the two capes with their twin lighthouses. 



In Hampton, Virginia, at the ocean's edge, we received a 

 deluge of mail, letters and telegrams from men and boys anxious 

 to go along. Word of the voyage had reached the ears of the 

 press and while we were beating through the muck of a No- 

 vember fog the newspapers of the land had told the story. From 

 far and wide, from the little ports along the coast, from the 

 valleys and hills of the blue Appalachians, from the mid-west 

 prairies came letters, typewritten, scrawled, beautifully penned 

 some of them— all asking one thing. Can we go, they said? Can 

 we go? We will work for nothing if you will only let us go— 

 we will scrub decks, anything to go with you. Such is the spell 

 of the Indies, of white sails and trim hulls. Some of these let- 

 ters were pathetic. The writers wished to go so badly. Henry 

 David Thoreau once wrote lines to the effect that most men 

 lead ''lives of quiet desperation." Quiet rebellion against all the 

 established things, against the monotony of city life, of farm 

 life, against the drudgery of doing the same thing every day. 

 Wordsworth expressed it differently. "The world," he wrote, 

 "is too much with us; late and soon, getting and spending, we lay 

 waste our powers,— little we see in Nature that is ours, we have 

 given our hearts away—" And so the letters came— can we go? 

 Of course they couldn't. We would have needed a steamer 

 to have taken them, even a fraction of them. But we felt sorry 

 for those that wrote, they were so bound to their desks and 

 plows and occupations. It seems that the thick fingers of organ- 

 ized living press heavily on the souls of men, for they long to 



