Animals in Sea History POOR OLD HORSE

摘要

James H. Williams grew up in Rhode Island in the 1870s. His father, a sailor and a loving dad, died when James was only seven, but it was always clear that he had wanted his son to go to college. Yet James fell in love with the sea as a child, so his mother allowed him to apprentice to a merchant ship captain as soon as he could. Young James was aboard a ship in Barbados when that captain-his guardian-died, leaving the fourteen-year-old boy working aboard another ship far from home and among strangers. So began his decades as a merchant ship sailor and whaleman. Over time he established himself as a writer about life at sea, which included an important record of a ceremony involving a "poor old horse."