My First Five Years at Sea

Excerpt:

My eye lashes were crusted as if I had been sleeping for some time.  I pried my eyelids open with my fingers and rubbed the gunk out of my eyes with the back of my hands trying to focus and struggling to take in my surroundings.  I was lying on filthy floor boards next to a greasy diesel engine upon which Ishmael was leaning.  There were cans of oil and fuel, some leaking, stacked in one corner and wood casks marked rum in another.  The room appeared to be pitching back and forth, but under my current condition I couldn’t be sure.  “Where am I?”  Ishmael looked a little surprised at my question as if I should know where I was.  “You’d be on the Revenge, the fastest schooner plying the waters from Penobscot Bay down to Caribbees.  She’s fast and maybe as fast as the old Arethusa captained by McCoy out of Gloucester, that is before she was sunk by the Coasties.”  I heard his words, but it wasn’t connecting, so I tried a different tack…”why am I here?” He laughed, “you’d be crimped!”  “Crimped?”  “Aye, you know, shanghaied.  Captain slipped you a Mickey Finn in your drink at the Monkey Tavern and you’d be out cold for the last two days.  But, now your back to the living and you’d be one of the crew, same as me and the others; some of us being shanghaied, most of us criminals, or running from something.”

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