Plot
A mother parrot in a cage is teaching her three children to say, "Polly want a cracker." The first two kids, Patrick and Patricia, manage after some effort, but Peter boldly refuses. Pointing at a framed photo of his dad, he states, "I don't want a cracker! I wanna be a sailor, like me pop." His mother immediately begins deriding her husband, telling Peter that right after he and his siblings were born, their dad left for Hawaii ("No, Maw, it was Catalina," Dad, as she remembers him, reminds her). She tells her son, "I used to burn a little light in the window" (it was actually a searchlight), hoping for his dad's return, but he never came back.
Nonetheless, Peter stubbornly stomps off to become a sailor. He bumps into a barrel, from which he builds a ship with a red pajama for a sail and a skull-and-crossbones label from a poison bottle for a Jolly Roger flag. He joins forces with an annoyingly loquacious duck (whom he silences by clamping his beak shut with a clothespin), and the two set sail on the lake—Peter as captain, the duck as deck-swab. They eventually run into trouble in a thunderstorm (which the duck revels in, being more accustomed to water) and end up overboard. Peter calls out for his "Momma", who comes running, but the duck has already saved him. Despite it all, Peter still wants to be a sailor, causing his mother to faint. [4]
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