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place to pick up the rudiments of the craft. In 1846, though, it was a craft still transmitted by long apprenticeship, and his duties in the bar would far more likely have involved sweeping, polishing, and carrying than mixing fancy drinks for customers.
    In any case he didn’t stick with it long: At seventeen or eighteen, as that same obituary states, “he went to Cuba as a sailor.” We don’t know what ship that was on, but soon enough he joined the Ann Smith of New Haven (William Henry Bowns, Captain) and, as he told the Sun in 1882, “sailed all around the world before the mast,” or if not all around the world, at least to California (as he told the New York Dramatic Mirror writer Alan Dale around the same time). Whatever his previous sailing experience, his berth there wouldn’t have been a soft one. Life before the mast was a deadly serious business, even for a lakeman like Thomas—“though an inlander . . . wild-ocean born,” as Melville put it in Moby Dick. Not that Thomas could complain, since “whatever your feelings may be, you must make a joke of everything at sea” (so Dana). And there would have been plenty for him to joke about. Even for a boy from Sackets Harbor, who presumably knew something of knife-sharp winds, ice-glassed decks, and waves that topped the masts, rounding the Horn in Antarctic winter, as he did in 1849, must’ve been an ordeal: When he wasn’t climbing aloft to the skyscraping top-gallants, a hundred feet and more above a pitching deck, or edging out to the ends of the yards to furl canvas stiff with ice while standing over nothing but the roiling South Atlantic, there was the constant scrubbing, scraping, and swabbing; the picking and the pounding; the stitching and the mending. And all for twelve dollars a month and rations that made prison food look wholesome.
    The drinks must’ve helped. Now, while the Royal Navy might have had its daily rum ration, this was by no means a universal practice in the American merchant marine. Whether out of moral concern or just plain Yankee thriftiness, most ships were dry (or, more properly, like Dana’s Alert , where “the temperance was all in the forecastle”—in other words, the officers could drink their Brandy-and-Water or Punch, while “Jack . . . can have nothing to wet his lips”). The Ann Smith , however, was no temperance ship. We know this because James Minor, one of the passengers on that trip around the Horn, kept a journal. A strict temperance man himself, Minor was dismayed to see his fellow passengers divide themselves into a “Temperance Party” and a “Rum Party.” The latter boozed and caroused the days and nights away with Bowns not only doing nothing to rein them in, but actually joining them. If only it stopped with the captain—“many of the Rum party,” Minor wrote, “have made themselves to [sic] free with the sailors by treating them, a poor policy to gain friends.” Things soon reached the point that the (dry) First Mate was duking it out with drunken sailors, and the cabin boy and the captain’s son were getting tanked with one of the passengers and pitching the poor ship’s dog overboard. Finally, Minor concluded that “Our Captain is devoid of Order + Sobriety.” (To be fair to Captain Bowns, there are other sources that recall him as a man of honor and talent.)
    Minor doesn’t implicate Thomas by name in any of this shipboard saturnalia. But whatever the extent of his bartending experience, one can certainly see it coming in handy on the Ann Smith . Herbert Asbury, in the biographical sketch he attached to his edition of Thomas’s book, has him hoping that he could use the captain’s “excellent grog” as a basis to “invent something which would relieve the sailor’s life of much of its hardship,” and the captain looking “with vigorous disapproval upon all attempts to improve the grog and drinking habits of the crew.” Stripped of its circumlocution, this sounds very much like