A new condition

El protagonista es rescatado por un ballenero que se dirige a Japón, intenta hacer que lo vuelvan a tierra, y presencia la crueldad del capitán. Del clásico de Jack London, The Sea-Wolf.

¿Qué es un cabin-boy? Te lo explicamos más abajo.

 

Tired as I was,—exhausted, in fact,—I was prevented from sleeping by the pain in my knee.  It was all I could do to keep from groaning aloud.  At home I should undoubtedly have given vent to my anguish; but this new and elemental environment seemed to call for a savage repression.  Like the savage, the attitude of these men was stoical in great things, childish in little things.  I remember, later in the voyage, seeing Kerfoot, another of the hunters, lose a finger by having it smashed to a jelly; and he did not even murmur or change the expression on his face.  Yet I have seen the same man, time and again, fly into the most outrageous passion over a trifle.

He was doing it now, vociferating, bellowing, waving his arms, and cursing like a fiend, and all because of a disagreement with another hunter as to whether a seal pup knew instinctively how to swim.  He held that it did, that it could swim the moment it was born.  The other hunter, Latimer, a lean, Yankee-looking fellow with shrewd, narrow-slitted eyes, held otherwise, held that the seal pup was born on the land for no other reason than that it could not swim, that its mother was compelled to teach it to swim as birds were compelled to teach their nestlings how to fly.

For the most part, the remaining four hunters leaned on the table or lay in their bunks and left the discussion to the two antagonists.  But they were supremely interested, for every little while they ardently took sides, and sometimes all were talking at once, till their voices surged back and forth in waves of sound like mimic thunder-rolls in the confined space.  Childish and immaterial as the topic was, the quality of their reasoning was still more childish and immaterial.  In truth, there was very little reasoning or none at all.  Their method was one of assertion, assumption, and denunciation.  They proved that a seal pup could swim or not swim at birth by stating the proposition very bellicosely and then following it up with an attack on the opposing man’s judgment, common sense, nationality, or past history.  Rebuttal was precisely similar.  I have related this in order to show the mental calibre of the men with whom I was thrown in contact.  Intellectually they were children, inhabiting the physical forms of men.

And they smoked, incessantly smoked, using a coarse, cheap, and offensive-smelling tobacco.  The air was thick and murky with the smoke of it; and this, combined with the violent movement of the ship as she struggled through the storm, would surely have made me sea-sick had I been a victim to that malady.  As it was, it made me quite squeamish, though this nausea might have been due to the pain of my leg and exhaustion.

As I lay there thinking, I naturally dwelt upon myself and my situation.  It was unparalleled, undreamed-of, that I, Humphrey Van Weyden, a scholar and a dilettante, if you please, in things artistic and literary, should be lying here on a Bering Sea seal-hunting schooner.  Cabin-boy!  I had never done any hard manual labour, or scullion labour, in my life.  I had lived a placid, uneventful, sedentary existence all my days—the life of a scholar and a recluse on an assured and comfortable income.  Violent life and athletic sports had never appealed to me.  I had always been a book-worm; so my sisters and father had called me during my childhood.  I had gone camping but once in my life, and then I left the party almost at its start and returned to the comforts and conveniences of a roof.  And here I was, with dreary and endless vistas before me of table-setting, potato-peeling, and dish-washing.  And I was not strong.  The doctors had always said that I had a remarkable constitution, but I had never developed it or my body through exercise.  My muscles were small and soft, like a woman’s, or so the doctors had said time and again in the course of their attempts to persuade me to go in for physical-culture fads.  But I had preferred to use my head rather than my body; and here I was, in no fit condition for the rough life in prospect… (Paragraphs from The Sea Wolf, Jack London, chapter 4.)

 

Cabin boy

Para saber

Cabin boys (grumetes) tenían entre 14 y 16 años y ayudaban al cocinero en la cocina del barco y llevaban comida desde la cocina a la proa donde los marineros ordinarios comían. Debían correr de un lado del barco al otro llevando mensajes y tenían que familiarizarse con las velas, líneas y sogas y sus usos durante todo tipo de clima. Tenían que acomodar el cordaje cuando las velas debían ser orientadas. También hacían guardia o actuaban de timonel con buen tiempo.

El sucesor moderno al cabin boy sería el steward’s assistant.

 

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¿Algo interesante para leer? La Taberna de Jack London. Heinold's First and Last Chance, el lugar a donde el autor solía ir de niño a charlar con los marineros y capitanes de barcos que salían a recorrer el mundo, que todavía existe.