“_You pull for the shore, boys, Praying to Heaven
above, But I’ll go down in the angry deep, With the
ship I love._” 247
THE CRADLE OF THE DEEP
[Illustration]
1
“I spit a curve in the wind”
“She ain’t any water rat, ma’am! She’s a girl flower, she is, with the
tropic heavens fer a hothouse, and the scoldin’ of the storm fer her
when she’s bad. An’ she knows all that we sailormen know—all the
good—’cause no one of us ever let her hear nothin’ else.”
It was Old John Henry, one of our sailors, defending me to the wife of
an American Consul in an Australian port. She had asked him, as he stood
on watch at the gangway, what kind of a “water rat” was the Captain’s
daughter, living such a rough life among rough men on a schooner. And
John Henry, feeling he must uphold the dignity of the Captain’s daughter
and the genteelness of sailormen, had replied with all the sea poetry he
could command.
“But how awful for a girl to be raised on a ship with nothing but men,”
persisted the woman unconvinced. She hadn’t seen me but she had heard
the talk of the waterfront and she knew I must be rough, and coarse and
low—just awful—raised without the softening feminine influence.
“Awful, hell!” snorted John Henry. “She ain’t no damn fool like most
women; her Old Man uses a rope’s end on her stern often enough to keep
the foolishness outen her head.”
I was taking it easy, rolled up in the canvas of the mizzen sail which
was furled on the mizzen boom. If I hadn’t been afraid of women I would
have come down to see how different she was from me because I couldn’t
understand why any one should think it strange that I lived on a ship
with no woman to care for me. Hadn’t she gone to sea when she was a
little girl? I supposed every girl went to sea when she was young for I
knew nothing but the sea and strange island ports.
The smell of rotting copra, putrid pearl oysters drying, sandalwood in
little bundles piled high on our deck, the fumes from a cargo of guano,
and sacks of ivory nuts—these things, the places they came from and the
people who brought them to us were the commonplaces of my life. The
legends of the sea told me by the sailors on our ship were my fairy
tales; the freak storms, the bewildering doldrums in the tropics, and
the companionship of old shellback sailors, the foundation of my
experience.
My father’s ship, the _Minnie A. Caine_, was a four-masted, windjammer
rigged schooner, engaged in the copra and sandalwood trade between the
islands of the South Seas and Australia. I couldn’t remember when I
wasn’t on a ship. Born in Berkeley, California—known in the maritime
world as “the sea Captain’s bedroom”—I was the eleventh child in our
family. Four of my brothers and sisters had died in two years. They
called me the lick of the pan because I was last and not much of me. No
one expected me to grow up, but Father said:
“This is the last one and I’m going to save it. I’ll take it away from
the land and let the sea make it the pick of the puppies.” So he took me
when I was less than a year old and I lived on shipboard until I was
seventeen, and if the sea didn’t make me the pick of the puppies, at
least it made me the huskiest.
Father brought me up with no creed except fear and respect for the gods
that brew the storms and calms.
As to God Himself, I can say only that in my early life He and I were on
most intimate terms. I had not half the fear of Him that I had of
Father. I felt much closer to Him because I could discuss many things
with Him that I wouldn’t have dared mention to Father. He was my friend,
confidant, and counselor and I always felt that He approved of
everything I did, and if I felt He disapproved I would argue until I
convinced Him—in my own mind! Our arguments and discussions took place
at the masthead far above the deck where no one could hear our private
conversations.
Many a time I climbed to the crosstrees of the foremast and had it out
with Him. If things had gone well with me I thanked Him—as for
instance, if I managed to steal an extra hunk of brown sugar from the
storeroom for my oatmeal, without being caught, I thought He was a good
sport and told Him so. But I gave Him hell if He let us get caught in a
sudden storm that ripped our sails or if we were becalmed in the deadly
doldrums.
Father was very different—much more concrete, harder to twist around my
finger—more to be feared than God, in my estimation. I could say
anything to God—praise Him, gossip with Him or tell Him to go to the
devil, and I did. But in all my years on the ship I heard few ever tell
Father to go to the devil and none ever did it twice!
It was from my father that I inherited my love of the sea, the
understanding of it, and the courage to face it. The sea was his life
and he never wanted any other. How could a boy, born on an old clipper
ship lying in far-off Geelong Bay, Australia, expect to do anything but
follow the sea, and, if the Wanderlust ruled his blood, certainly he
came by it naturally.
My grandfather, Louis Lazzarrevich, was a Montenegrin land owner and my
grandmother a beautiful girl of Turkish blood whom Louis Lazzarrevich
had married in spite of the Montenegrin hatred of the Turks. Life in
Montenegro with a Turkish wife was not so pleasant. Consequently, after
the birth of their first child, the young couple, to get away, planned a
trip around the world in a sailing ship. In Geelong Bay, Australia,
where the ship had put in, my father was born. My grandmother was so ill
that her husband took her ashore and told the captain of the clipper
ship that they would stay in Australia, and he could pick them up on his
return voyage in two years.
Within a week of the time of their landing, my grandfather was
accidentally drowned in Geelong Bay. That left my grandmother stranded
with two children, my father and his older sister.
Shortly after my grandfather’s death, my grandmother met a fascinating
German pearl-trader, Captain Wagner. Beautiful women were scarce in
Australia in those days, and there has always been a certain affinity
between beautiful women and pearls. Moreover Turkish women are
fatalistic. So it was not long before the pearl-trader married my
grandmother, but, once married, he absolutely refused to have his
honeymoon cluttered up with his predecessor’s children. As to my
grandmother, new love and the pearls outweighed old love and her
children—and as I have said before, Turkish women are fatalistic.
So she and her pearl-trader sailed away to the South Seas, and the good
Jesuit Fathers took in the unwanted children.
For the first ten years of his life my father endured the confinement,
the strict discipline and the soul loneliness of the Jesuit Orphan
Asylum, and then the Wanderlust in his blood took hold. Fearing the good
Fathers might not understand, and not wishing to hurt their feelings by
telling them what he thought of their orphanage, he departed quietly one
night without saying good-bye. A few days later when he left Australia
on a trading schooner plying between Melbourne and China, that same
modesty and diffidence kept him from letting the captain or the crew
know he was on board until, when they were out at sea, hunger forced his
confession. They whipped him and put him to work, but they couldn’t turn
back or stop the ship on his account so he got to China.
Then followed eight years’ work on traders in the Far East before the
boy, now eighteen, sailed into San Francisco Bay, deckhand on a
full-rigged English clipper.
San Francisco at that time was only a sheltered harbor with a dock about
a block long!
One day a young girl wandered down to the wharf to watch the ships come
in. On the clipper ship she saw a handsome, dark-haired young man
holystoning the deck. He spoke to her. She had never seen any one like
him before. He told her stories of the sea, stories of trading and
escapes from sea thieves off the China coasts. She was so fascinated by
his tales that she stole away every day to meet him. The girl was
Emmaline Trask Lowell, the fourteen year old daughter of Dr. Butler
Lowell, once of Boston, but then of more liberal-minded San Francisco.
The Lowells were a very respectable family in Massachusetts. Young
Doctor Butler Lowell had relatives enough to keep any young doctor
comfortably occupied,—he was a cousin, though twice removed, of James
Russell Lowell—but when he began to preach that “consumption was
catching” and people with the dry cough should be put off by themselves,
all the sisters and the cousins and the aunts turned against him. I
guess there were too many in Massachusetts in that day rather proud of
their dry cough as an added subject of conversation!
When the neighbors turn against a doctor there is only one thing for the
doctor to do, and Dr. Butler Lowell did it. His move landed him in San
Francisco.
Although Dr. Lowell had radical medical ideas his other notions were
quite in accord with his family tradition. Which perhaps was the reason
that Emmaline Lowell didn’t tell her parents of the deckhand she had
fallen in love with. Instead she eloped with her sailor to Niles,
California. They kept their marriage a secret and a month later my
father sailed for Samoa to be gone for a year. When he returned he found
a baby son—my oldest brother.
My mother hated the sea. It took my father away from her sometimes for
months, sometimes for two or three years. She never went with him, for
the babies came along too fast—I was the eleventh!
Over a period of years Father worked himself up until he was the ranking
captain of the Alaska Packers fleet of salmon ships. During the months
his ship was frozen in, in Alaska, he learned the North like a book. He
made charts of the wilds around Nome for the government. He prospected
for gold; he went whaling for oil, and sealing for rich furs. He traded
with the Eskimos, giving them tools, lumber and firearms in exchange for
rare, carved ivory tusks of walrus, and polar bear skins.
I have always thought of Father as the swordfish of the ship. I began
thinking of him that way the day I saw a swordfish and a whale in deadly
combat.
Because of its size and the pictures they have seen of small boats being
smashed by one sweep of its tail, most people naturally think of the
whale as king of the ocean, but that impression is wrong. The swordfish
is the boss. Both the whale and the shark are too slow and too clumsy to
whip the real ruler of the sea. The swordfish doesn’t grow beyond
fifteen feet, but it fights because it likes to fight, and on occasion
has driven its weapon ten inches through the copper and oak side of a
ship.
We were in the trade winds about ten degrees north of the Equator one
hot afternoon when, close to the ship and entirely without warning, a
sperm whale leaped frantically clear and while in the air smacked down
at the water savagely with its tail. The yell of the man at the wheel
and the noise of that resounding slap brought all hands to the rail.
“Swordfish,” said Father. “Nothing else ever made a whale jump out of
the water.”
Three times that whale jumped and what a thrashing about there was! The
battle was ahead of us and a little to one side but neither fighter paid
the slightest attention to the ship. The swordfish would come up from
under to thrust at the tender underside of the whale. Then the whale
would leap and come down lashing with its huge tail with terrific force
to kill its attacker, but always in vain. In a few minutes the commotion
quieted, the water was bloody. There was no whale in sight.
Father wasn’t a large man, and every once in so often some whale of a
sailor, deceived by his size, would undertake to defy him with force.
Then followed the battle and Father always emerged the swordfish of the
ship. Every time he won a battle his crew seemed prouder of him and he
became kinder than before.
Just because I was the only girl on board I was not accorded any
privileges that sailors didn’t get. I went without food as they did when
we were on a long trip and the provisions ran short. I stood my trick at
the wheel steering, pulled at the ropes when we tacked, manned the pumps
when the ship sprang a leak, said “Yes sir” to my father and was taught
to obey as a sailor obeys the master of a ship. Above all I was taught
the code of the sea:—never to squeal on anyone, take punishment without
a squawk and be ashamed to show fear.
I had no other children to play with, no other woman-thing on board, so
my playthings were sea birds, little toy ships, and a lifeboat which was
made fast to the deck and was seldom used. I would get in that lifeboat
and pretend to row. I measured my strokes and counted a thousand strokes
to the mile. In my lifeboat, strapped to the deck, I used to row away on
long picnic trips by myself to places where I would find children to
play with; children like I had seen playing around the docks in port.
And what games we had! The games played with those imaginary children
always involved something to eat.
You see, on a sailing ship bound on a voyage of one hundred and twenty
days, the food is rationed so many ounces per person per day. Because I
was little my rations rated one-half of a grown sailor’s share. That was
probably an excellent thing for my health but there was never a day when
I couldn’t have eaten four times as much—so food and playmates were my
dreams of unattainable bliss. At my picnics we would set tables with
piles of wonderful foods and I would eat all the things I wanted to. The
only food I knew about was rough ship food, such as lentils, rice, salt
beef in brine, dried fish and dried fruits. The sailors told me about
delicious “vittles” that people on land had for every meal—fresh juicy
apples and cakes and chickens stuffed with raisins and lots of sugar and
real milk. Of course I thought the sailors just made up those things, so
I pretended I really had them on my dream voyages. The children—and
there were always thousands of them—would play with me. I had long
conversations with them about pretty dresses and mothers and living in
one house for a long time and waking up in the same place every day. I
had these conversations out loud, but no one ever paid any attention to
me because the crew and Father were too busy all the time to notice what
I did. When my games were over I pretended the children were sorry to
have me leave and I would promise to row back the next day and play with
them again. But no matter where I went, or how far, I had to count my
strokes carefully, because if I made a mistake, how could I ever get
back to the ship? When my picnic was finished I’d climb back in the
lifeboat and begin carefully counting my strokes for the return voyage
until I had reached the proper number and knew it was safe to disembark
from my stationary lifeboat to the deck of our schooner, once more just
a sea captain’s daughter.
Our trips usually took from eighty to one hundred and twenty days at sea
without sighting land. Through storms, calms, waterless days—when our
water casks ran dry—scurvy, and head winds, we travelled from port to
port. If I ever felt fear I knew better than to express it. My father
and the sailors had taught me a faith that made me hold on, no matter
what happened. They believed there was God in the sunsets, in the
storms, in the whiteness of an albatross’s wing, and in the winds that
blew our ship along.
Life at sea did not seem any mystery. An old sailor taught me that
thunder was the growling curse of a dead sea captain who had lost his
course; the blinding flashes of lightning were the combined sparkles of
barmaids’ eyes luring seamen to a pleasant harbor; the groaning,
creaking noises in the rigging and the hull of the ship which seemed so
much louder at night were the tired squawkings of our schooner, her
complaints at carrying such heavy cargoes. That was what I believed, but
sometimes I knew that those noises were really seams that had opened
under the stress of the pounding sea; that water was leaking into the
hold as fast as the crew could pump it out—and the straining noises in
the rigging told of weather-rotting blocks which might carry away at any
minute. Every night before I turned in to my bunk I realized I might be
going to sleep for the last time. There are so many dangers besetting a
sailing ship on the deep seas that every sailorman knows the end may
come at any moment. Yet in spite of that ghost which stalked the decks
at night, I would fall asleep, unafraid.
Our sailors were the huskiest men Father could assemble—Swedes,
Norwegians, Germans, Irishmen and Poles. What they lacked in brains they
more than made up for in brawn. Natural-born rovers, they were content
as long as we sailed, but when we hit port they floundered hopelessly in
waterfront saloons, or in the islands where they went ashore, and the
native girls, thrilled by their physiques and white skins, gave
themselves freely. The native girls were fascinated by the white-skinned
men off ships that sailed to their islands from the “lands beyond the
horizon” and the sailors were more than willing to be adored gods to the
little bronze beauties who caressed them and covered them with flowers.
The fact that some day the question of sex would be an issue for me to
face never occurred to me, for I had my whole world of people catalogued
from my one-sided perspective on sailors. Mates were usually married to
some faithful woman in the Old Country—Sweden; captains in my opinion,
never drank or made love to women because they loved some woman in the
States as my father loved my mother. Cabin-boys represented to me pimply
youths just out of high school who ran away to sea for adventure and
didn’t find it, or dreamy boys who were too lazy to work ashore. Cooks,
because we had Japanese cooks, were heavenly people who would give me
extra food.
As an antidote for unsavory influences such as perfume which I smelled
on the cook and dreams of living in cities, Father made me take a salt
water bath in a canvas tank on deck every day. Only when it rained did I
get a fresh water bath.
There was no seaman’s work that my father or the sailors didn’t teach
me. I learned arithmetic by adding up tide tables in navigation books.
Before I was twelve I could take a “sight of the sun” and figure out our
position on the chart. I learned to read “intelligent” things, as I
termed them, from an old, battered set of the encyclopedia. We had a
complete set except for the volumes from “N” to “S”. As a result I had
read everything in those encyclopedias except the subjects contained in
the missing volumes.
Our ship’s library, supplied by those well-meaning societies ashore that
feel seamen need fine literature to uplift them, consisted of such books
as “The Care and Feeding of Pedigree Dogs,” “Modern Science of Surgery,”
“Engineering,” Hymn books, Cæsar’s Conquest (in Latin) and other such
works guaranteed to inspire the minds of sailors to loftier ideals than
the fleshpots. In desperation for something to read at sea the sailors
would borrow the books, read them from cover to cover and return them to
the library feeling rich in the priceless knowledge they imparted. Even
I read them all and Father highly approved because he said they wouldn’t
fill my head full of silly notions. Once a sailor fell so low as to
bring a sixpenny paper-covered novel on board entitled “Mad Love.” The
sailors all read it and I managed to get it by standing its owner’s
tricks at the wheel for two whole days. If it wasn’t elevating, at least
“Mad Love” appealed to me more than the “Care and Feeding of Pedigree
Dogs.” Some day, when I’m rich, I’m going to supply all the sailing
ships in the world with real story books to avenge those years of barren
reading which were foisted upon us by the uplift societies!
One of the chief accomplishments of our sailors was their spitting. They
chewed tobacco and spat the juice freely. They could spit at a crack and
hit it without a miss, and one sublimely endowed sailor could spit a
curve to windward without mishap! I tried chewing tobacco, but the first
time I chawed a hunk Father told me to swallow the juice if I wanted to
be a good spitter. Obediently I swallowed a whole mouth full of bitter
tobacco juice. The result was as expected. After that lesson I chawed
dried prunes which made grand spit. After long weeks of practice I could
not only spit at a crack but I could hit it, and it is on record that I
spit two curves on a windy day, which gave me a high rating as an able
bodied seaman!
When that woman was disapproving of me to John Henry because I lived on
a ship, a man-raised child, I wondered if she could even spit straight
herself, and if she couldn’t, what did she know about our sea anyhow?
[Illustration]
2
In which an alarm clock and some dried apricots are exchanged with
natives for a nurse for me. The ship becomes my cradle
My life at sea started when I was eleven months old. Father had brought
me down to the schooner, a tiny bundle wrapped in a blanket. I was so
small I would have been lost in his bunk, so Father had Stitches—the
sailmaker—make a diminutive hammock of canvas. This hammock was swung
from bolts, one sunk in the wall above the middle of Father’s bunk and
the other into the stanchion at the foot of the bunk on the outside. The
rolling of the ship rocked the hammock more steadily than the most
indulgent mother.
From the time he made my baby hammock, Stitches devoted his life to me.
For fourteen years he thought of me first, then of the ship, last of
himself, and in the final tragedy of our ship, he died to save me. I
loved him and pestered him and abused his love as only a child can, but
I’ll never forget him.
I first recall Stitches as being the only man in the world older than
Father. In reality he must have been close to sixty when I was brought
on board. His life was one of the romantic tragedies of the sea, for
when he came to sign on the Ship’s Articles he said “I’m a kind of
Johnny-All-Sorts, Skipper. I’ve been all the way up and down the ladder
from cabin-boy to Captain and back to sailmaker. My name’s my own
business, and I’ll sign on in my own way, if you want me.”
“Sign any way you damn please,” answered Father, who knew a sailor when
he saw one.
So the old sailor signed the Articles just “Stitches” and that’s the way
he was known for more than fifteen years on our ship. In appearance
there was no sailor like Stitches. Years of bending over his work as
sailmaker had brought his head forward and his stomach protruding full
speed ahead. He waddled a little when he walked, and always sat tailor
fashion with his legs crossed so that he gave the impression of a mild,
wise old turtle upright on his tail. Every man on the ship came to
Stitches with his troubles because they all knew that he had forgotten
more about the sea than most men ever learn, and he had had so many
troubles of his own that he understood.
Stitches must have been born lacking the iron in his soul to make him
set his course and hold it. Rather he had chosen to ride before the
storms of life, but as a compensation for his successive failures, he
had developed his own peculiar philosophy of content that made the crew
love him.
Why didn’t Stitches give up the sea? He couldn’t. The sea was in his
blood and he would rather stay on a ship in any capacity than live
ashore in comfort.
“I’ll drop my final anchor with the wind howling in my ears above and
the swish of bilge water below me,” he declared, “and that way I’ll go
content.” And when the time came, I’m sure he went content.
I had inherited my father’s lusty lungs, and my crying did not help my
popularity with the men trying to sleep on their watch below. The
cabin-boy had to heat sea water in a saucepan over an oil lamp for my
daily bath which Father gave me. My bathtub was an empty codfish keg,
and how I yelled whenever I faced it. The mate usually turned in at nine
in the morning and at that time I was always squalling my loudest. He
made a remark which cost him his berth when it was repeated to my
father.
“Damned if I ever thought I’d live to see the day when a deep water
schooner would be made into a howling nursery.”
Friends of my father along the waterfront in Frisco thought he was crazy
to take a baby to sea. We were bound for Chile and thence to Australia.
Father’s friends reminded him that the trip was a hard one on account of
sudden storms and freak weather off the west coast of South America.
“If I can handle a bunch of squareheads and a scow of a ship in a
typhoon, a baby will be easy,” was Father’s answer to their warnings.
With characteristic, clear vision he knew his course, and he determined
to keep a strong hand on the helm of my life.
That trip, which was my first one, brought all the predicted
complications. The patent foods which Father had provided to feed me did
not agree with me. I lost weight and became so puny that Father had
about given up hope that I would survive until we reached Sydney. There
was only one thing for him to do and that was get some kind of food that
would nourish me. We would not be in Australia for fifty or sixty days,
so he turned in at Norfolk Island to see if he could buy something there
to feed me.
“I tried to get a native woman with a small child to come on board and
feed you from her breasts,” Father told me years afterwards, “but she
was afraid to venture beyond the horizon on a white-winged ship.”
Not to be defeated in his mission, Father sent Stitches in one direction
on the island and he went another, seeking some way of solving the
feeding problem. Many search islands for treasure, but Father’s
exploring was for something more rare on a South Sea island—food for a
sick baby. Native children are fed on yarrow roots and raw fish washed
down their little throats with coconut milk, but white children can
digest no such diet.
After combing the island all day Father returned to the ship,
discouraged. He had begun to think finer things of the land than he had
when he had taken me from my home to raise on the sea.
At about midnight Stitches came on board. With triumph in his face he
rolled aft and asked permission to speak to Father.
“Cap’n, I found somethin’ for the kid.”
Father looked at Stitches’ empty hands.
“Where in the hell is it?” he asked.
Stitches grinned.
“She’s up in the fo’c’s’le now. Come on and sign her on!” and he waddled
out of the cabin followed by Father. Father thought “her” was some
native woman that Stitches had coerced into coming on board. Stitches
led the way under the fo’c’s’le head and pointed to his prize.
“Cap’n, I had a helluva time gettin’ that one, but I woulda got her if I
had to kill all that tribe with me own fists.”
Father looked through the shadows under the fore-peak and saw a
terrified milch goat. The beast was balancing dizzily on her legs among
the anchor chains.
“How’d you get it?” Father asked.
“Well, as I said, Cap’n, them natives wasn’t gonna let me have her, and
I figured I’d forfeit my sea boots if I’d let ’em out-talk me with that
baby aft wastin’ away, so I trades ’em an old alarm clock and a handful
of dried apricots for this here dairy.”
It was the best trade Stitches ever made. Father was so grateful for the
goat that he appointed Stitches my nurse and guardian under him with the
special privilege of talking back to Father on any matter concerning me
without getting his block knocked off. His lesser reward was free
tobacco so long as he stayed on the ship. For fourteen years to the day
he died for me Stitches exercised all his special rights and privileges
to the full. I grew to love him as a second father and I knew I was the
mainspring of his life; knowing that, of course I took advantage of him
every time I could.
The sailors named the goat “Wet Nurse” and to Wet Nurse and her generous
supply of milk I owe my life today. In exchange for her milk Wet Nurse
was fed oatmeal and coconuts.
After we put out to sea from Norfolk Island, Wet Nurse got seasick.
Father knew that seasickness, like fright, will wear off if you don’t
pay any attention to it, so he bided his time. He was rewarded when Wet
Nurse got her sea legs and gave milk freely. Stitches always said I had
an appetite like a goat’s because I could digest anything—so perhaps I
inherited my iron stomach from Wet Nurse. For weeks I thrived on her
milk, but it wasn’t to be for long. Wet Nurse was not exactly ship broke
in her personal habits. She needed a valet with a broom and pan if
ship’s orderliness was to be preserved. The crew took shifts of cleaning
the decks where Wet Nurse took her exercise, with the result that she
was not popular with the men forward! Wet Nurse got lonesome for her
island home, and perhaps for her goat husband. She seemed to choose the
hours when the sailors were sleeping to maaa her call. The sound of a
she-goat calling her mate is not very beautiful, and it took all of
Stitches’ strength to fight off the sailors when they wanted to make Wet
Nurse walk the plank! Father treated her as if she were a cabin
passenger, and it would have been tough on any sailor who harmed her.
One day, when I was about two years old, our ship was caught in a white
squall off Lord Howe Island. A white squall is a sudden wind storm that
rises without warning on the barometer and its velocity is so great that
it will sweep the sea with huge waves ten minutes after it starts. Wet
Nurse was standing by the galley door looking wistfully at the cook in
the hope of getting an occasional scrap or two from his pans, when the
squall hit the ship.
Whipped by the wind the vessel listed far over to leeward and great seas
washed over the decks. I was tied in my hammock below, for Father had
called all hands on deck. The crew was reefing down the topsails and
battening down the hatches. Father stood at the helm steering the ship
out of the belly of the swells to keep the seas from swamping us.
Everyone forgot Wet Nurse. A giant green wave came over the fo’c’s’le
head, washed over the galley, put out the cook’s stove and drove Wet
Nurse against the bulwarks. With a shudder the vessel hove to the
windward side and another sea smacked her deck with such force that it
lifted the fore hatch from its cleats and sent it swirling to the lee
bulwarks pinning Wet Nurse beneath its wreckage.
She lay crippled and terrified and nearly drowned under the debris until
the storm subsided. The mate and Stitches found her, and lifting her
gently, as if she were a person, from beneath the hatch, they carried
her up to the poop deck to my father. She had broken both her legs and
several ribs were smashed in. Father, who has always had a gentle hand
with animals, carefully set her legs in splints and bound her ribs with
bandages made from small pieces of canvas. Then he lay Wet Nurse in his
bunk beneath my hammock. In spite of everything he could do for her, Wet
Nurse died that night. She was given a regular ship’s funeral. The ship
hove to for five minutes, as her body, sewn in sailcloth and weighted
with a piece of chain, was committed to the deep.
And the next day I went on regular sailor’s diet.
[Illustration]
3
“A ship is called a ‘she’ because her riggin’ costs more than her
hull.”—Stitches.
Father had devised and carried out the scheme for nourishing a baby at
sea, but another and more difficult problem for any man is clothing
womenfolks.
When I was two years old I could walk and say “goddamned wind.” That was
my first sentence, which I picked up from the mate. I had outgrown my
baby dresses—so something had to be done about it. On deep water
vessels the crew, as well as the mates and captain, usually wear coarse
dungarees and heavy woolens in cold weather, white cotton undershirts
and short cotton trousers in the tropics. Shoes are worn only in port as
it is too dangerous, as well as too expensive, for sailormen to walk
around the slippery decks in leather soles.
When I began to walk by holding on to the rail of the poop deck we were
off Easter Island, getting a load of guano, which is bird manure used
for fertilizing purposes. It would be months before we hailed the
mainland, so again Father was ingenious in solving a difficulty. I had
to have something to wear! Father turned the fo’c’s’le into a sewing
room. His seamstresses were Lars Erickson—a Dane, Scotty—an old
Scottish sailor who had only one snag tooth in his mouth and that brown
from tobacco stain, and the trusty Stitches.
These men were commissioned to make my wardrobe. They cut a small pair
of pants from Stitches’ well worn dungarees and made little suspenders
on them. The button-holes were works of art embroidered with infinite
pains by Stitches. While they were engrossed in their sewing a Hungarian
sailor who was a bit of a bully, by name “Gooney” Bulgar, leaned out of
his bunk and remarked:
“You ladies of the sewing circle will now adjourn an’ tea will be served
in the Cap’n’s parlor,” with which he waved an effeminate, coy hand in
the shellbacks’ faces.
It was never definitely settled which of them landed on him first.
Bulgar claimed that Stitches had scratched him with his needle and none
would bear witness that Scotty and Erickson hadn’t used a steel
marlinspike on him. At any rate he resembled a piece of raw hamburger
steak when they brought his limp body aft to my father to be revived. If
there is one thing prevalent on shipboard it is he-men, and any
suggestion that impugns their virility has to be settled with belaying
pins to the finish. Whatever really happened, the event is recorded in
the Log Book as follows:
“This day at sea, the 27th of September, Able-Bodied Seaman
Gustav Bulgar fell, in the course of duty, off the fo’c’s’le
head on to the main deck and was badly injured. Treated by
Captain. Given dose of salts and wounds painted with Friar’s
Balsam. Captain found it advisable to fine seaman Five Dollars
for carelessness.”
After that slight interruption to their sewing, the three men resumed,
and turned out a complete wardrobe for me. Scotty had an old pair of
rubber sea boots that were worn out at the bottoms so he cut off the
tops, and turned out a pair of tiny rubber sea boots for me. With the
remaining scraps he fashioned a sou’wester oilskin hat for me. He was at
a loss for something to line it with, as the only available material on
the ship was cast off clothing. A sailor never does anything by halves,
and unless that sou’wester was lined, it was not complete in his
estimation. As he was taking a mental inventory of the material he could
lay hands on in the fo’c’s’le, “Pimples,” the cabin-boy, came in. It was
his first trip at sea. He had come to get experiences so he could be a
famous writer of sea stories like Jack London. He was still so green in
the ways of the sea that he wore shoes and socks. Pimples had won his
cognomen by his complexion which was caused half by adolescence and half
by the food which fell to his lot after the crew and captain had eaten
the best of it. It was unfortunate for Pimples that he intruded into the
fo’c’s’le at that moment, for Scotty saw his shoes and socks.
“Come here, Barnacles,” he cooed to the cabin-boy. “Come closer so I can
see how big your muscles are getting now you are at sea.”
Pimples came over to him eagerly, happy to be recognized as an equal by
a regular sailor. When he was close enough, Scotty tripped him, and sat
on his stomach. While Pimples squirmed, Scotty took off his shoes and
socks and, holding a brown woolen sock up for the others to see, he
shouted:
“Here’s the lining for the sou’wester,” and then he booted the luckless
cabin-boy out of the fo’c’s’le.
When the little clothes were finished and the sock-lined oilskin cap
proudly displayed, the sailors called in the Jap cook, Yamashita, to
approve of their handiwork. The cook looked at them and then snorted
with Oriental disapproval:
“Where nightgown for Missy? No damn sense sailor got.” He went back to
his galley and presently emerged with two bottles and three flour sacks.
The bottles contained cake frosting coloring, red and green. He took
some string and dipped it in the red and made red string, and then
dipped some more string in the green. These colored strings he used to
embroider intricate cross stitch designs on the neck and arms of the
flour sack nightgown and dress. In spite of his many washings of the
sacks to remove the printing on them, a dim memory of the words, “Pure
as the drifted snow,” remained on them forever.
I wore overalls all my life on board the ship. Father kept me dressed as
a boy in fairness to the crew and for my protection. He did everything
in his power to keep them and me from becoming conscious of my sex. When
I was big enough to wear them Father bought me regular men’s size
overalls. They buttoned in front and I was very proud that even in my
clothing I resembled the sailors.
The first time I wore a dress after I left the ship I didn’t know how to
walk in it. The skirt got tangled up in my legs and kept me from taking
long sea strides. I had to wear underclothes with a dress and they
seemed to stifle my body that was used to salt soaked overalls next to a
bare skin. It was a tragic day for me when Father informed me that with
a dress I had to wear shoes and stockings. The shoes hurt my feet and
the cotton stockings itched—but more of the impediments of civilization
later.
To go back to my babyhood—When a young lady is big enough to walk, able
to say “goddamned wind” and to occupy the attention of three tailors, it
is obviously time to begin thinking about her education. Father and
Stitches consulted gravely.
“The fust thing she’s gotter learn, Cap’n,” argued Stitches, “is to keep
from fallin’ overboard.”
“All right,” agreed Father, “every time you catch her near the rail,
paddle her bottom.”
Stitches nodded in partial approval.
“That’s all right, too, Cap’n, but kids is natcha’lly ornery and their
sterns gits calloused, awful fast.”
Father saw the point.
“We’ll tie her up,” he said.
So they put me at the end of a fifteen foot rope tied to the wheelbox on
the poop deck. That was fine for a few days until in a sudden blow I got
the rope around the steersman’s feet, with the result that my head and
his stern nearly broke the deck and the ship got off her course.
Stitches and Father again went into conference.
“In one week she’s slipped her hawser twice and tripped up the
steersman. We gotter try somethin’ else, Cap’n,” urged Stitches. Father
thought it over.
“Sooner or later she’s pretty sure to go overboard anyhow, so you’d
better teach her to swim.”
“That’s a fine idea, Cap’n,” replied Stitches, “only I don’t know how to
swim myself.” Which is one of the queer things about the sea: more than
half of the sailors can’t swim.
“You fix a tank. I’ll teach her,” decided Father.
Just aft the mizzen mast, Stitches rigged up a canvas tank about four
feet square and equally deep. This was collapsible, so that when it was
empty it could be folded up and put in the cabin out of the way of the
storms. It was a sailor’s job to fill it with sea water every morning.
This he did by throwing overboard a canvas bucket in which he baled up a
hundred gallons of water to fill it. When it was full he reported the
fact to my father. Then Father would go to my hammock, get me and carry
me down to the tank. I was a wiggling, squirming, protesting bundle of
muscular little girl, as husky as a seal, and full of objections to the
idea of being pulled out of a comfortable warm hammock and plunged naked
into a cold sea dip.
The routine was always the same. Before he plunged me into the tank he
would roll me on the deck. Then he made me turn somersaults, and box
with him. My share of the boxing might be described as down again, up
again. As soon as I could get to my feet he would tumble me over with
his pawlike hand, and keep that up for about ten minutes. If I cried or
protested at all against that rough treatment I got a sound slap on my
bottom to “knock that nonsense out of you.” Then came the great moment
when, warm and glowing, I was plopped into cold sea water to strike out
blindly, and in vain. Holding his hand under my back, Father told me to
throw out my stomach and bend my head back to balance. I couldn’t
understand how that would help me float because when I put my head back
I got my mouth and ears and eyes full of salt water. Then he explained
it in words to penetrate my infant comprehension.
“Throw your head back and puff your stomach up until YOU CAN SEE YOUR
BELLY-BUTTON.”
Then it became a game, and in my eagerness to see if I could puff my
stomach up high enough for me to see that portion of my anatomy, I
achieved the art of floating. While I was thus absorbed in watching
myself perform, Father took his bracing hand from under my back and left
me to my own resources. Once I had learned to float, swimming came easy
and I soon outgrew the limitations of the four foot tank. I didn’t think
I had, but Father did. The next port we arrived in was Newcastle,
Australia, and he chose that harbor to polish off my swimming ability.
When he looked for me to begin another lesson he found me playing with a
tame gooney on the deck, perfectly contented. A gooney is a species of
gull, dull grey in coloring, and a bit larger than the common seagull.
Father had snagged him on a big hook baited with a piece of salt pork,
pulled him aboard and clipped his wings so he could not fly away. When
we first got him the gooney tried to bite, but by feeding him a few days
he became tame, and quite a fascinating toy for me. We had named him
“Salt Pork.”
We were playing a game called “Grub” which Stitches had invented for us.
“Grub” was a unique game in that it gave me my first philosophy of doing
things for myself and increased my propelling powers immensely. The
rules for “Grub” were simple. A line was drawn on the poop deck with
chalk behind which Salt Pork and I lined up. The goal was a piece of
bread on the rail aft by the wheel. At a given signal from Stitches he
let go of Salt Pork and off we both went across the deck after the grub;
me, a hungry kid and Salt Pork, a ravenous sea bird. I crawled on all
fours after it and the gooney ran with webbed feet. If I got there first
I ate the bread on the spot as fast as I could cram it down my gullet or
Salt Pork would have grabbed it right out of my hand. If Salt Pork got
it first I couldn’t get it away from him because he’d swallow it whole
without even chewing it.
“Say, Stitches,” called Father from the gangway, “let’s give Joan a
lesson in keeping her mouth shut!” He undressed me and took me to the
fo’c’s’le head. Two of the crew were cooling off with a nice swim under
the shadow of the bowsprit. He called to them to keep an eye on me and
without further warning he threw me fifteen feet into the water below. I
thought I had sunk to the bottom of the world and would never come up.
When I finally did I was so frightened that I started to yell and was
rewarded with a mouthful of salt water. There was nothing to hang on to,
so I had to swim. My father and Stitches on the jibboom above laughed at
my struggle. Of course there was no danger for me as the two sailors
could have pulled me out in an instant. It seems useless to add that I
learned to swim in deep water very rapidly.
Father, evidently satisfied that Lesson Number One in practical nautical
knowledge was a success, remarked to Stitches:
“See how quick she shut her mouth when she hollered about nothing! If
every woman could learn to keep her mouth shut at the age of two they’d
be better off.”
Every day after that, during the weeks we were in Newcastle, I was
thrown overboard. I came to love it and soon was a strong swimmer with
an instinct for action instead of noise!
[Illustration]
[Illustration]
4
In which I learn that young ladies must not take baths in gentlemen’s
drinking water
From the time I was two years old until about my sixth birthday nothing
startling impressed itself on my baby mind. Ours was just the usual
routine of a trading schooner: Seattle to Sydney with lumber and from
Sydney it was “bound to the South Sea Islands for copra,” loaded with
red calico, cheap knives, soap, tinfoil, anything shiny to catch the
eyes and thrill the hearts of the natives.
We cruised from island to island picking up half a ton of copra here, a
quarter ton there until we had filled the hold, and for a deck load we
got generally about five hundred bundles of sandalwood. Of course we
took lots of smaller stuff, but copra and sandalwood were our staples
from the islands.
Copra—the word itself is common to sea traders, but to landlubbers it
is a strange expression found in stories of the South Seas.
Copra is the meat of coconuts dried in the sun. The natives break open
the nuts and lay them out on woven mats to rot. The rotting process in
the tropic heat brings out the oils and acid of the coconut. It takes
about three months of drying process to make the copra rotten enough to
be ready for market. The natives load it in bales of reeds and carry it
off the island in canoes to waiting ships.
In appearance copra is dark brown and fibrous. No copra is first class
until it is so putrid that vermin infest it. The stench of it is almost
unbearable. In its ripe stage copra is highly explosive. During the war
many uses were found for the stuff. The waste of its matter was used for
ammunition, the oils to preserve foods for the soldiers, and the acids
were invaluable in surgery.
One of the most common uses of copra is in the manufacture of linoleum
and some forms of paper. I often wonder when people are walking on the
linoleum in their homes if they realize that the substance of it came
from the savage islands of the South Seas.
In trading between the islands, Australia and the States in my early
years our greatest rival and bug-bear was the barkentine, _Mary
Winklemund_, a three-master under the command of Captain Swanson. A
barkentine by reason of its rig, square yards on the fore mast, is
naturally faster than a schooner and the _Mary Winklemund_ for years won
every race with the _Minnie A. Caine_, whether it was from Hawaii to New
Zealand or from Samoa to Seattle. My father and Captain Swanson were
rivals, both in shouting the praise of their ships and in pride of their
navigation, but Swanson had the edge. He would beat us by a few hours,
by a few days, and on occasion by two months. Father always blamed the
bad winds and incompetent sailors, and said that Swanson was afraid to
carry as big a load as we for fear of sinking. But in spite of his
alibis, the fact remained that in every nautical endeavor Swanson made
us look like a leaking lifeboat in a hurricane.
Naturally to a man of Father’s combative temperament being beaten was
bad enough, but Captain Swanson, not content with winning, never let a
chance go by to rub in the victory with heavy-handed sea humor. As a
result Father, I believe, would have run his ship on the rocks or jumped
overboard himself, if thereby he could have scored on that “goddamned,
squareheaded Sea Hog,” as he always delicately described his rival. How
Father did even up the score stuck in my mind because it was combined
with the memory of my first attempt at the age of six to get rich quick.
We were anchored in Double Bay, Sydney, my sixth winter, and Swanson
sent word to Father to come aboard the _Mary Winklemund_ for dinner.
Father sent back word that he would accept free grub even on the
_Winklemund_. I was delighted, for I welcomed any opportunity to get off
our own vessel. As we were leaving in a small boat to scull over to the
_Winklemund_ Father turned to me and said:
“Swanson is trying to show off to me what good grub they serve on his
packet. I’ll paddle you if you dare eat like you enjoy it.”
When we boarded the _Mary Winklemund_ by means of a Jacob’s ladder
thrown over the side, Captain Swanson met us. He showed us around his
ship which was newly painted white from stem to stern. He pointed out
the ship’s fine points, not forgetting to tell just where and how much
she excelled ours. Father was getting madder and madder all the time and
I was afraid he would blow up and go back without waiting for dinner.
“And just to show you how much better and cheaper I manage my ship,”
concluded Captain Swanson, “look at this.” He reached into a barrel and
brought out a small piece of something that looked like dirty
marshmallow.
“See that, Captain?” he boasted. “Well, I had a whole barrel of it. Used
it to oil down the masts this trip, saved me buying oil. Maybe if you
was to oil down the sticks on your ship you could sail faster.”
Father took the substance from his hand, and smelled it, and looked up.
I was surprised to see all the mad had gone out of his face.
“Got any more of this?” he asked, and there was a twinkle in his eye.
“Naw, I ain’t got no more. When we struck hot weather it stunk to high
heaven so I throwed it over the side.”
“How much have you got left?”
“Just about a bucketful in this barrel,” he answered. “And I told the
ship’s chandler he could have it. He asked me for it.”
“The hell you say,” observed my father, and I thought I saw him smile.
“You’re a smart old barnacle, aren’t you, Swanson?” Swanson puffed in
pride, and led the way to the dining saloon. There before us was a meal
intended to impress Father with its luxuriousness. I looked at it
glumly, remembering Father’s words, “I’ll paddle you if you eat like you
enjoy it.” How could anybody eat all that food and not show enjoyment?
He must have seen what was in my mind for he slapped me on the shoulder,
exclaiming: “Forget it, Joan. Eat all you can and enjoy every bit of it.
I’m going to.”
I had my mouth full before they were in their chairs, but, once squared
away, I never saw Father eat so much or enjoy it so heartily. When he
finished he pushed back his chair, looked at Swanson and burst out
laughing.
“What’s so funny?” asked Swanson uncomfortably.
“Nothing, you big squarehead, but do you know what that grease is you
threw overboard?”
“Naw. I found it floating off the Gilbert Islands. Saw some sea birds
picking at it, so I put off a boat and investigated. Looked like good
grease so I hauled a couple of barrels aboard and used it like I told
you to grease down the masts.”
“They’re fine sticks, Swanson,” grinned Father. “They ought to be,
greased down with a hundred thousand dollars worth of ambergris.”
Swanson gulped and turned pale. His eyes were almost popping out of his
head.
“Huh? Ambergris?” he gasped.
“Yes, ambergris!” shouted Father. “Worth thirty-two dollars an ounce.
And you threw a barrel of it overboard. You threw away a fortune, you
goddamned, ignorant, stingy squarehead.” And Father lay back in his
chair and roared with laughter.
Swanson was livid now. “You think you’re smart, don’t you?” he yelled.
“Only don’t forget this—there was twice as much stuff there as I took.
I know where it is and I’ll go back and get it.”
“Good luck,” laughed Father, “if you can find it again you’re entitled
to it.”
“I’ll find it,” were the grim parting words of the squarehead Captain.
Going back in the small boat to our ship I asked Father what ambergris
was.
“Whale vomit,” he answered.
I couldn’t see what was so funny about Swanson throwing away whale vomit
so I persisted in questioning further.
“What’s it good for?”
“Joan, ambergris is worth thirty-two dollars an ounce. He threw away
about sixty thousand dollars worth just through ignorance.”
“Well, what’s the good of whale vomit? Why is it worth money?”
“Perfume companies use it as the base for rare perfume. And I wish to
Christ I could find some.”
“Why don’t you try and find what Captain Swanson left?”
“Because anybody but an old fool like Swanson would know that sea birds
eat ambergris. What he left is gone long ago. I only hope he does hunt
it. It will keep him off the trade route for six months.”
And that is exactly what happened. Captain Swanson spent six months
looking for his ambergris and found nothing. But Father told the story
in every port and nowhere Swanson went did seafolk allow him to forget
it.
I couldn’t forget ambergris either. If Swanson could find it why
couldn’t we? There must be some way of locating it.
But the more I thought the more discouraged I became. A few barrelsful
of ambergris in a whole ocean—not much chance of finding that. Then
like a flash the idea came to me. It was so simple I wondered why
Stitches or Father or some other sea captain had not thought of it. All
I had to do was just to make the whales in the ocean sick at their
stomach and they would belch forth ambergris enough to fill our ship.
And that much I figured would be worth millions and millions and Father
would never have to worry about bad trading seasons or port charges any
more. We put to sea in a week and were headed for the Union Group of
islands about twenty-eight degrees latitude South, one hundred and
sixty-seven degrees longitude West. There ought to be some whales around
there. I thought if I poisoned the water in the sea all the whales would
be sick. The only drawback to my scheme was that I didn’t have any
poison, so I made some of my own.
I begged an empty codfish keg from the cook and poured some cold split
pea soup in it. I hated split pea soup so I was sure that was poison.
Then I emptied the spittoon from the wheel which was full of tobacco
juice and spit into the soup. To this I added tar and some dead rats.
The finishing touch was some dead cockroaches. I caught them and mashed
them up in the mixture, and then, positive that I had concocted a potion
to ruin all the whales, I waited for nightfall.
About ten o’clock that night I slipped to the lee rail and dumped my
poison into the sea, and waited. For hours, I waited, straining my eyes
against the darkness, searching the water for some signs of ambergris to
float. At four bells I turned in, and spent the rest of my night at my
porthole looking for a promise of a seasick whale, but of course there
was none. My scheme to poison the entire ocean failed, and when the cook
found that I had wasted a pot full of good pea soup, I got a licking for
my effort. To this day the only consolation I have for my failure is
that when I detect rare perfume on beautiful ladies, I speculate with
pleasure as to what they would think if they knew the base of their
scent was whale vomit!
As long as I was a baby the sailors thought me a grand toy to play with
and make a fuss over but when I grew old enough to become a bother their
kindly attitude was frequently subject to change.
Of course it is the common belief that when a captain has a girl aboard
ship the sailors slay each other to get the captain’s beautiful
daughter—that her very presence on shipboard uplifts them and inspires
them to lofty ideals.
That might be the case in novels, but in real life it is far more
practical! Never in all my experience did any sailor attempt any act of
violence to gain my favor. Their acts of violence, at times, were
directed against me instead.
It was on our next voyage after Father squared accounts with Captain
Swanson that I saw my first real mutiny and felt what it was like to
have an entire ship’s crew against one. It all came about in the most
natural way from being caught in the doldrums with a short water supply.
Our ship carried our fresh water supply in a tank under the fo’c’s’le
head and in two iron tanks lashed on the poop deck just aft of the
spanker mast. These tanks contained in all about five thousand gallons
of water, to be used by sixteen people over a period of from eighty to
one hundred and twenty days at sea. It was a precious commodity and it
was guarded zealously by the cook whose job it was to portion it out
daily, three cups to a person. In the tropics the water became so hot
and stagnant that “wigglers” came out in it. Wigglers are small worms
which hatch in the water. It is an old maritime law that every
“off-shore” vessel must carry a certain amount of lime juice as a
preventative against scurvy. A drop of lime juice in a mug of water
kills the wigglers and thus enables the consumer to drink water without
live stock in it. To this day old English sailing ships are referred to
as “lime juicers,” and that name came down to them from the old custom.
We had been out eighty-three days from Mukelteo, bound for Brisbane,
Australia, with a million feet of lumber. The water supply ran very low,
and the residue was so alive with tiny wigglers and germs that it was
like a death warrant to drink it. The cook came aft and told Father that
a plague would come on the ship from that water. The stench of it was
terrible. Even the rats were boldly searching the decks for something
fresh. We were in the doldrums, about eleven degrees south of the
Equator. The ship just wallowed in the glassy sea, and seemed to crack
and shrivel in the heat. There was no shade anywhere. The sails hung
limp and useless, like unstarched linens. The bedbugs and roaches seemed
to multiply by the million.
“All hands on deck,” ordered my father, and the mate repeated his order
to the men sleeping below. In a few minutes the entire crew were on
deck.
“There’s no more water, men, until we hit a rain squall. The glass is
down and I look for a squall, so stand by with kegs and catch all the
rain you can if you want fresh water.”
There was a mad hurry to get kegs to catch the rain. The men brought
everything from salt pork barrels to empty tomato tins and placed them
under the booms and scuppers. The cook and a sailor put a barrel under
the drain on the main deck just below the poop deck to catch the water
that washed down the poop.
No sailor tried to sleep any more. They sat huddled in the scuppers
looking thirstily at the deceitful clouds that drifted by and
disappeared to the horizon with their refreshing cargoes.
Night came, and still no sign of rain. Just at sunset, at about a
quarter point off the starboard bow, appeared the end of a rainbow,
dipping right into the sea and making an arch of vivid colors, which
dissolved into the mist of a rain squall a mile away. It was
aggravatingly near, and the men bent every inch of sail to hurry the
ship into its midst to catch some of its rain, but just within a hundred
yards of it, the little gust of wind died, and once more the sails hung
limp and impotent.
That night for dinner we had a sticky mess of salt dried codfish. Its
odour was so bad from the intense heat that the only way it could be
swallowed was to smother it with mustard and hold your breath, to kill
the smell.
“This damn stuff stinks,” observed the mate, whereupon he proceeded to
pick out the remnants of fish from his teeth with the prongs of his
fork. I was just old enough to recognize the expression on my father’s
face as a sign of trouble.
“Yeh? Well any time you get disgruntled about the menu on this packet,
just write me a letter and I’ll file it in my correspondence.” The
mate’s remark, however, spoiled his appetite and he shoved the dish of
ill smelling fish at the cabin-boy.
“Chuck that overboard.”
For my dinner I had boiled lentils, which only accentuated my thirst, as
the salt fish had increased the men’s.
At sea a very little thing will start a feeling of mutiny, and thirsty,
dried-up men, scorched by heat and discouraged by no winds and bad food,
are like dynamite to handle. They started to quarrel among themselves,
viciously. Father anticipated trouble. Right after dinner he sent me to
my bunk.
“And if you hear anything on deck, you stay below,” he added and swung
up to the poop deck. He searched the horizon for some sign of a storm to
bring relief. If another day passed and no fresh water fell, there was
no foretelling what uprising would occur. The sky was red, and the old
legend, “Red sky at night, sailor’s delight” gave no promise that the
morning would bring water.
Father heard the men mumbling in the scuppers, for in some way they
blamed him for their plight. Old Stitches, whose loyalty to father was
like iron, came up on the poop deck beside him, and casually started to
smoke his pipe. Beneath his nonchalance were grim, tight lips. He knew
there was going to be trouble, and he wanted Father to know he was still
swinging a belaying pin on his side.
I could feel something was going on that I didn’t understand, and
whenever I felt there was something being kept from me I just had to
find out about it. So after I had been sent to bed, I sneaked back on
deck and hid out of sight of Father. Nobody on the ship was asleep. I
could hear the men stirring and grumbling for’ard.
Hour after hour passed, and in the deadman’s watch, which was from
twelve midnight until four, the men broke. Larsen, who had always been
one of the best sailors, led the rest of the crew up on the poop deck,
seething and snarling.
“What do you want?” roared my father.
“Water!”
“Where in the hell will I get water for you?” Father asked, as he eyed
the men who were closing in on him.
“Water,” came the accusing chorus again.
Stitches put down his pipe, and edged closer to Father.
“The barometer is low, we ought to run into a squall ’fore daybreak,”
explained Father.
“Yeh? Well we want water NOW, do you hear, and if you don’t give us
some, you and your goddamned ship will be sucking water in hell!” And
with that two of the sailors jumped for him, and hit out with terrific
blows, the blows of thirst-crazed men. Father hit back, and his punch
was like a shot of steel. Stitches struck blindly with the belaying pin.
Blood smeared the deck. I could hear a sickening, crunching sound of
bones breaking. Slowly, one by one, the two of them backed the cowed men
on to the main deck. I scuttled back to my berth and hid myself under my
straw mattress.
Stitches came below and I heard him fumbling in the gun rack near my
bunk.
“Nothin’ like being watchful in nights like this,” he said, and he came
back on deck with two rifles. For the rest of the night the two of them
stood off the men on the deck below.
Morning came early, for the sun rose at five-thirty. I was on deck
early, too uncomfortable to stay below, and fretful from thirst. About
six o’clock a black cloud which looked like a splotch of ink on the sky
appeared on the horizon. A light breeze scurried it towards us. In ten
minutes it was upon us, and rain fell in great cool sheets on the
swollen decks and the parched lips of the men. They fought each other
for places at the drains to grab the first water. They were like
frenzied, caged animals suddenly loosed on raw meat as they opened their
mouths to let the rain pour in.
I stood on the poop deck, under the spanker boom, and the water fell on
me. It was so cool, so caressing, so life-giving! I couldn’t soak enough
of it in, it seemed, so I took off my overalls, and let it rain on my
naked body. I was so absorbed in my fresh water bath that I was
oblivious to the men standing on the main deck to catch the water that
washed off the poop. I would do my bath up right! A real fresh water
bath with soap!
Naked, and unconscious of the threats of the men who objected to my
being in their way, I ran forward to the galley and asked the cook for
some soap. He made soap from the grease drippings of the salt pork. To
the grease he added lye and kept the conglomeration in a kerosene can
under his bunk. I grabbed a handful of it, and began smearing it on me
as I ran aft once more, and up to my place under the spanker boom. I was
a mass of sticky bubbles, and the rain carried them, after they washed
off me, down the drain into the waiting kegs of the crew. The soap suds
ruined their water. Two of them leaped up on deck by me and were about
to choke me when my father interfered. He grabbed me by my slippery body
and put me behind him, while he ordered the men down on deck.
Then he turned to me.
“What the hell’s the big idea?” he yelled, so enraged with me he was
pale.
“It feels so goddamned good to get cool in the fresh rain,” I answered.
The humor of my remark didn’t appeal to him. I could see I was going to
get another licking, and my bare body was a good target for a rope’s
end!
“I’ll teach you to spoil fresh water,” he said, and he went forward. He
returned with a handful of the soap!
“Now open your mouth. You’re so anxious to be washed clean, just taste
that,” and he washed the inside of my mouth with the rotten soap.
And I’ve never wanted to be washed clean since then!
[Illustration]
[Illustration]
5
Perfume on the cook’s feet and hair on my chest.—What of it?
As I grew up, strong and healthy, I had three very simple ambitions in
life: to be able to hand, reef and steer; to spit as far as any Swede
could; and to get as much food, if not more, than anyone else. On
sailing ships the food is portioned out in what is called “whack;” that
is, so many ounces of food per week is allotted to each person. There
was no way of definitely estimating the exact number of days a trip
would take, as we depended entirely on winds to blow us to our
destination.
We carried no fancy foods—there wasn’t room for anything except plain
necessities in the storerooms. Lentils, rice, salt beef pickled in
barrels of brine, dried codfish, powdered milk, dried prunes and
apricots for desserts on holidays, and lime juice. The stores were
stowed in an after-hold and were kept under lock and key. Only the Jap
cook and my father had keys to that sanctum of grub and they guarded
them relentlessly. The locked storeroom made life a bit difficult for
me. I never seemed to get enough to eat. For instance, breakfast
consisted of a big dish of cooked oats, dry bread and coffee. When the
cabin-boy rang the breakfast bell it had the effect of a fire alarm and
we all stampeded to the dining saloon. The first one that got to the
table grabbed the bowl of mush and scraped off a big pile on his plate.
I soon learned to grab the quickest. I developed in me the ability to
take care of myself. Once a week, on Thursday, we had duff pudding. Duff
day at sea was always an occasion. The cook prepared a sticky, glutinous
mess of steamed suet and flour and put a few raisins in it. Plum duff it
was called, but I always thought the cook put the pudding at the top
mast and tossed plums at it, always missing, for I never could find any
fruit in it. Weeks became important to me because of the plum duff
pudding, and instead of saying of the future, “next week,” I always
calculated next duff day, or two duff days ago. Frequently the salt
horse, as the pickled beef was nicknamed, stank so that I couldn’t eat
it, and neither could the sailors without drowning out the smell with
mustard pickles, and holding their breath as they swallowed it.
Sometimes by way of variety of menu, the bread took on the appearance of
raisin bread, but the raisins were unfortunate cockroaches that had
dived into the dough when the cook was kneading it. Little fresh meat
additions like that never killed our appetites.
The final blow to my father’s æsthetic sense came one day at lunch time.
Father bit into a crust of bread and then his face became livid with
anger.
“Slops!” he yelled at the cabin-boy. We had a new boy every trip. “What
kind of so and so does the cook call this bread? It stinks of perfume
like some barmaid.”
“I don’t know, sir. The cook just baked that bread fresh this morning,”
answered Slops. There was never any love lost between the cabin-boy and
the cook and I think that Slops was enjoying the prospects that
confronted his enemy.
I tasted the bread. It tasted of perfume, or rather of bay rum, the
stuff the Jap cook always smelled of, but I couldn’t figure out how it
had got into the bread.
Father left the table and hurried forward to the galley, with me in his
wake.
“Yamashita! Come out of your rat hole.” The cook, trembling in fear,
looked up from where he was sitting on the edge of the bunk.
“Yes sir?” he asked, as he continued washing his feet.
“Let me see the pan you mixed this bread in.”
Yamashita looked up at Father in all innocence and replied, “This pan,
Captain. This pan I wash my feet in!” Father let a snort of rage out and
grabbed at the cook. He shook him within an inch of his life, and would
have hit him if the cook had been anywhere near his size. I beat it aft
to get out of the fight, for the cook was my friend.
Every time I got a chance to sneak forward to his galley I did so, and
would sit on his lap listening to his stories of Japan. I would tolerate
his tales, just so he would let me sit on him and smell his bay rum. The
odor of it was exquisite to me, for everyone else on the ship smelled of
rope and tobacco. I often measured a person’s worth by the smell of him.
One day an American consul’s wife came aboard, and she smelled of some
delicious powder. When I got a good sniff of it I said to her:
“You don’t stink like men do, do you?” I intended it for a compliment,
but the woman took umbrage and left in great haste, mumbling something
about the uncouth persons that lived on ships!
No two days at sea were ever alike. Even in the monotonous trade winds,
with the breeze so steady that the wheel could be lashed down and the
ship would keep on her course alone, something would happen. It was on
such a day as that that John McLean, an able-bodied seaman, won my
heart. He was a huge, lumbering sailor with more muscle than brain, and
was so crabby that the other sailors were afraid of him. He was always
friendly with me in his rough sort of way because I would sit by the
hour at his feet and admire him. On his chest, which was covered with
hairs, he had a tattooed, full-rigged ship under sail that was one of my
prize sights. If he was in a good humor he would undo his shirt and let
me see that ship, then wiggle his chest so that the ship looked as if it
were in a storm. Then he would bulge out his chest muscles and the ship
looked as if it were under sail in a fair wind, or else he relaxed his
chest and it looked becalmed in a lifeless sea.
“Gee, McLean,” I exclaimed, “do you think I could ever have a ship on my
chest?”
He moved his wad of tobacco to the other side of his cheek, looked at me
scornfully and then condescended to answer:
“Naw, can’t be tattooed like me unless you got hair on your chest.”
That finished me, for my chest was as smooth as a piece of silk. But I
wasn’t to be outdone. I went to my father and asked him what made hair
grow on people’s chest. That question played right into his hand because
he replied:
“Hair on your chest, Joan? Well, let me see. I warrant if you was to eat
your pea soup every meal that would grow hair on your chest.”
And I hated pea soup, but if it was necessary to cause a growth on my
chest like McLean’s, I would endure it. So for weeks I ate the pea soup
with the secret consolation that some morning I would awake with a thick
crop of hair on my chest. We arrived in Adelaide, South Australia, and
still no hair on my chest. I was worried for fear I would probably never
be able to grow any, so I went to McLean who was in the hold of the ship
unloading copra.
“McLean,” I confided, “I’ve looked every morning for nine weeks and
there isn’t any hairs on me yet—not even any fuzz. What shall I do?”
He grinned, one of his rare indulgences, and said:
“Hey, Skipper, is the Old Man aboard?”
“No, he isn’t. He’s up at the American Consul’s office this morning.”
McLean continued to grin for a moment, then said:
“All right, Skipper. We got an hour to knock off at noon, and I’ll take
you up to be tattooed.”
“Really, McLean? You’re not filling me with wind?” I could hardly
believe my ears.
“Sure. I know the best tattooer this side of Tokio. He’s just a quarter
of a mile from here, back of the fish store and ship chandler’s.”
I was elated. I was to be like a real sailor, tattoo and everything!
McLean had offered to take me and have it done because in his
inarticulate way he liked me, and in his own mind he was being very
generous to pay for me to be tattooed. It never occurred to a deep sea
sailor like him that girls are not tattooed.
At noon time I was ready, waiting for him at the gangway. I had put on
my sailor cap which was an old mate’s cap elaborately embroidered with
anchors and little ships and fish by the sailors. McLean kept his
promise to meet me, and hand in hand we walked up the dock. My feet
hardly touched the ground, I was so happy. We plotted what we would have
put on me. I decided I wanted a naked lady in red tattooed on my
forearm, a full-rigged ship on my breast and an American flag on the
bottom of my foot so I could stick it out of the porthole and make it
look as though I was waving a flag. If I was to be tattooed I was going
to do it up right!
As we walked up the dock I saw Father standing by the warehouse talking
to the boss stevedore. I was so exultant that I let my enthusiasm get
the best of my discretion and I yelled at him:
“Ain’t I swell? I’m going to be tattooed all over like a sailor.”
Like a shot he wheeled around and said, “What?”
“I said I’m going to have a naked lady tattooed on my arm near my elbow
so I can move my arm and wiggle her stomach like she was dancing.”
A murderous look came on his face. I turned around and saw McLean
hotfooting it down the dock back to the ship! I followed him in haste,
for Father grabbed me by the seat of my pants and the nape of my neck
and propelled me along the dock at double speed.
“I can’t leave you for five minutes but that you get into some kind of
deviltry, so now I’ll teach you how to behave.”
He took me up on the poop deck and tied me to the wheel in full sight of
the sailors. My heart was broken with disappointment, but no tears for
mine. I stood there and swore all the words that I knew, and at that age
my vocabulary included enough adjectives to keep me swearing two minutes
without repeating a word.
As if it wasn’t humiliation enough to be tied up like a bad puppy, the
mate came aft and heard me swearing. I started all over again when he
came near and looked at me. I could have murdered him for laughing at
me. He listened to me going it and then scratched his head and said:
“I’ll forfeit my grub if you can’t cuss as good as if you had hair on
your chest.”
Oh, the music of his words! I pulled my jumper closer together so that
he couldn’t see if I had hairs or not, but having him think I did have
hair on my chest was almost as good as really having it, so the day
wasn’t lost after all.
[Illustration]
[Illustration]
6
A dead fish and a squarehead’s kiss
I was seven years old when I first met Fear, and what happened at the
meeting and what followed did more to shape my character and life than
anything I can remember. For I learned the important lesson that if I
stuck to the code of the sea never to squeal, no matter what happened,
but to fight my own battles in my own way—I could win against odds,
provided I licked Fear.
It all came about through Stitches teaching me to fish. Of course
careful old Stitches had too much sense to start me after deep sea fish,
for they are so heavy and powerful that one might have yanked me
overboard before help could reach me.
“You can practice gettin’ little ones first, Skipper,” he said, as he
baited a line with a cockroach for me. “If you get a pull, take your
line in easy.”
I fished every day for weeks, and never got so much as a nibble. As I
hadn’t had any luck deep sea fishing, I tried casting my line in the
harbor at Sydney. Father was ashore attending to bills of lading, and
the crew were cleaning up the ship, painting, chipping paint and reeving
on new canvas.
I felt a nibble; the line twitched, and I pulled with all my
seven-year-old strength on it. On the hook was a flat fish about six
inches long with huge bulging eyes. He wiggled and squirmed, but I got
him in my fist and called to anyone who could hear to come and see my
catch. Alex Svenson, a Norwegian sailor, who was holystoning the poop
deck, came over to look at my fish.
“Ain’t he a whopper?” I asked him, full of pride and enthusiasm. Svenson
picked up the fish in his big paw and grunted a negative.
“This is a bloody bullfish. It ain’t no good to eat,” he said, and he
ground the fish under his heel and laughed at my tears of
disappointment.
No one ever fought my battles except myself, and this insult to my first
catch was cause for war.
“That’s my fish, you bloody squarehead,” I shouted at him, as I grabbed
my shining treasure and stuck it inside the bib of my overalls next to
my skin.
“I’ll kill you for making fun of my fish,” and I kicked Svenson on the
shins as hard as I could. But kicking a six foot Scandinavian on the
shins with bare feet is not to be recommended. I only stubbed my toes
and the more I kicked the more they hurt and the louder Svenson laughed.
Ordinarily he was vile-tempered, but now my helpless rage seemed to
please him.
“Say, you got a helluva lotta spirit, ain’t you?” he grinned in my face.
“You killed my fish. I’ll kill you, do you hear? You just wait!”
“Now be a nice little girl and don’t get your temper up and I’ll give
you a big box of candy.”
I was young enough for the prospect of candy to be a pacifier for any
woe. My father never let me have any, and the rare occasions when the
sailors sneaked it to me made me regard heaven as the place where you
got all the candy you wanted.
Wiping away my tears with a fishy hand I forced a smile.
“I bet you ain’t got any candy,” I challenged him.
“Well, don’t you squeal to Stitches or the Old Man, and I’ll give you a
whole box just for yourself.”
I promised him I wouldn’t betray him, and he went forward to get it. I
twisted up my fish line in a neat coil while I waited for him. Presently
I saw him coming aft with something concealed behind his back.
“Where is it?” I asked, a bit suspicious that he was only fooling me.
Svenson looked up the deck to make sure no one was watching him.
“Come on down in the cabin. Some of these stool pigeons might squeal on
you,” he said.
“Hey, sailors ain’t allowed in the after quarters,” I protested.
Svenson snarled something out of the corner of his mouth, and then he
shook me by the shoulders.
“Do you want this candy or don’t you?”
“Yes, I do.”
“All right then, shut your trap and come on down below.”
I followed him down into the chartroom. He made no show of giving me any
box of candy.
“Where is it?” I asked.
Svenson held out a five pound box of candy wrapped in shiny paper and
tied with lots of pink ribbon. I grabbed for it. As I did so he snatched
it away just out of my reach.
“Oh no, you don’t! Give me a kiss and you can have it.”
“You said you’d give me the candy because you killed my fish.” I
couldn’t understand why he still held the candy as another bait.
“Come on with the kiss or you don’t get it,” he insisted.
I looked at his tobacco-stained mouth and the yellow stubs of teeth that
showed when he spoke. He looked horrible to me, but it was a five pound
box of candy and it would be all my own and I had never had a whole
pound of candy in my life, and I thought it would be worth even kissing
Svenson for. I pursed my lips up to kiss him as I had kissed my father,
my kittens and sea birds.
“Here’s the kiss,” I said.
He put his face down close to mine and I remember now how hot his breath
was in my face. His mouth was twisted and his eyes narrowed and for
years after in every horrible dream I ever had I saw Svenson’s yellow
teeth and narrowed eyes. . . .
I forgot the candy and turned to run. He made a noise in his throat like
a snarling animal and grabbed me up in his arms. His face was against
mine. He forced my mouth open and kissed me—horribly! One of his hairy
arms nearly crushed my ribs and his big paws patted over my body as I
kicked and struggled. With his face against mine I couldn’t make a
sound. I managed to get my fingers in his eyes and tried to push them
in. Suddenly he dropped me so that I fell to the deck of the cabin and
he ran out of the chartroom and up to the deck. I scrambled to my feet
and scurried like a rat to my own cabin, slammed the door and threw
myself on my bunk. There I beat my hands against the wall and bit into
my straw pillow to keep from screaming.
I don’t know how long it was before I felt Father’s hands shaking me.
“For the love of Christ, what’s the matter, Joan?” he kept saying above
my muffled sobbing.
“Get out of here, I hate you! Get out of here! Get out!” I screeched at
him. I didn’t want to be touched; I just wanted to hide in the dark
somewhere to get away from the feeling of Svenson’s kiss.
Then I remembered the fish in my breast. I put my hand down and brought
it out. When Father saw it he asked:
“Say, are you bawling over a dead fish?” He was annoyed at what he
thought my childish sentiment. I didn’t have time to answer him, for he
left my cabin abruptly. I lay down again in the bunk clasping my dead
bullfish and shivering with fear. Father came back with a big can of
Epsom salts.
“Now, no more of this nonsense. What’s the matter with you anyway? Are
you sick?”
“No, Father, I just—I—” I couldn’t finish for I knew the penalty of
squealing on anyone in a fight. Sailors don’t do that; they take their
beating and settle with the offender at their leisure. I felt that if I
told on Svenson I wouldn’t be fit to be a regular sailor, and it was
Father himself who had drilled that code into me.
“Answer me, are you sick, or is this just a show of bad temper?”
“I’m sick,” I wailed in a weak voice. I knew what would follow. Father
made me take a big dose of salts and then told me to go to bed.
“You don’t get any supper. You probably been sneaking something to eat
that wasn’t good for you, so no food for you until we get your stomach
cleaned up.”
I didn’t mind swallowing the salts, for it got Father away from me, and
I was afraid I would tell him the truth if he asked me many more
questions or accused me of being a blubbering child.
I didn’t come out of my bunk all the next day. I stayed there with my
fish. The fish began to smell bad so Father took it away from me and
threw it out of the porthole.
That evening we sailed for the Midway Islands. I could hear the
scuffling of the crew’s feet on the poop deck above my cabin as they ran
about setting the sails. The creak and groan of the rigging and the
whistle of the wind through the sails gave me the creeps. Ordinarily the
sound of our ship getting under way thrilled me, and I wasn’t content
unless I could be on deck helping pull the ropes. But I was afraid to go
on deck. I heard Svenson’s voice answering that of the mate’s as he took
the helm, and I couldn’t bear to see him again.
When we had been out about a week, I ventured on deck, after I had found
out from the cabin-boy that Svenson was on his watch below. I hated him
but I was going to repay him in full when I got my courage back. I knew
to be a regular sailor I had to cure the sick feeling I got whenever
Svenson was near. I had to quit being afraid; I had to get hunk without
help. I couldn’t even tell Stitches.
So I schemed and schemed, and I was so eager to get even that gradually
I began to stop being afraid. The mate had switched Svenson into the
second mate’s watch because he wanted another sailor to fix some sails
and Svenson couldn’t sailmake. But he could steer. I found him at the
wheel. Here was my chance! Just as I knew better than to squeal on him I
was sure he would not dare to squeal on me, no matter what I did. Father
had set a course, “Northeast by east, a quarter point east,” and had
told Svenson to keep a true course, for we were in the region of some
coral reefs, and a quarter of a mile off in navigation would run us
aground.
“Keep her full and by and call me if the wind veers a point,” Father
instructed him and then went below for a short nap. I knew if Svenson
let that ship even get so much as a tenth of a point off the course that
he would get hell from Father. Well, I’d help Svenson get his hell!
I climbed on the binnacle box (the box that holds the compass), which
was in front of the wheel, and I put my two feet over the compass so
that Svenson couldn’t see it to steer by.
“Get the hell out of the way so I can see,” he snarled at me.
“You make me!” I shot back at him. If he took his hands off the helm the
rudder would spin around and the ship would be out of control. “Come on,
make me get off this binnacle,” I invited him again. Svenson knew I had
him. He lost his temper and began cursing me, but he kept to the wheel.
I heard the topsails aloft begin to flap. The wind had caught them
“aback.” The jibs and mainsails began to luff—and in vain Svenson spun
the wheel to get the ship back on her course. Then it was my turn to
laugh. I heard the mate, on the fo’c’s’le head where he was fixing a
jib, bellow aft at Svenson to pull the goddamned ship back into the
wind. The mate ran down the deck to help get her back on course. He
wasn’t fast enough though, for Father, who had been watching his
telltale compass over his bunk, was leaping up the companionway ladder
to the poop. I ran to the windward rail and pretended I was interested
in watching some schools of flying fish skim over the water. Father
jerked the helm from Svenson’s hand and spun it hard over to leeward.
With a slapping crash the booms went over to the port tack, and he got
her once more headed up to the wind.
“Joan, take this wheel,” he ordered. I came over and took hold of its
big spokes. “Show this cock-eyed so and so sea louse how to steer a
course,” he said out of the corner of his mouth, and at that he grabbed
Svenson.
“Who in the hell ever told you you were a sailor? What do you mean by
letting her run afoul in the wind?” He shouted in Svenson’s face.
“That ain’t my fault, Captain,” whispered back Svenson. “I couldn’t help
it.”
“You’ll talk back to me, will you?” and Father sent him flying on the
deck with a left uppercut: “Trying to run the goddamned ship on a reef
for us, are you?” Svenson jumped to his feet and went for Father.
“Why you white-haired old bastard, I’ll knock the so and so out of you,”
and he swung a fierce right to Father’s head. Then the two of them
wallowed around the deck, punching and mauling each other in a bloody
mess. I’ll never forget the sound of the bones in Svenson’s jaw
crunching under Father’s blows.
“I’ve got enough!” cried Svenson, on his back, just as Father’s upraised
arm was about to put him to sleep. The mate, who was standing by with a
belaying pin in his hand in case of real trouble, lifted the Norwegian
to his feet.
“Take him for’ard, and put him in irons,” Father ordered the mate, “and
tell any of the crew in the fo’c’s’le that think they can talk back to
the captain of this ship that Svenson is only a sample of what’ll happen
to them.”
The mate had Svenson by the neck and the seat of his pants marching him
forward. Father called after them: “When that piece of ballast gets his
eyes open again, I’ll have Joan here show him how to steer a ship.”
Svenson, however, was kept in irons and on rations of bread and water
until we reached the Midway Islands, where Father discharged him in
disgrace—I hadn’t squealed, but I don’t think Svenson, wherever he is
today, feels that he got the best of it.
[Illustration]
7
A runaway sea horse
My days at sea were divided up between work, study and play. In fair
weather my schedule was crowded. At seven-thirty in the morning I got my
breakfast. At eight bells, when the morning watch came on duty, I had to
swab down the poop deck, polish the brass work and make up my bunk. My
bunk was graced by a mattress of “donkey’s breakfast” or straw, which
was the nearest thing to material luxury I ever knew. I never worked
very hard at my duties; rather I made them into games whenever I could.
I had to haul up water in a canvas bucket to wash down the decks. I
liked that because it gave me the chance to use the bucket to catch
things that floated by. Sometimes this led to adventures I had not
foreseen.
I’ll always remember the morning I tried to catch the sea horse. A sea
horse sounds very formidable for a ten-year-old girl to go after with a
canvas bucket because naturally when one says “sea horse” many people
compare it to a huge clumsy sea animal weighing hundreds of pounds. But
the sea horse is quite different. He is a funny fish from two or three
inches to a foot long. I call him a funny fish because for a fish he
can’t swim any more than a cockroach, but he has a tail that he wraps
about a piece of seaweed or any drifting thing. So he meanders over the
ocean with his head out of water at such an angle that from a short
distance he looks like a horse’s head—hence his name.
It is only about once in a blue moon that any sailor catches a sea
horse, so of course at ten it was the dream of my life to land one.
What a thrill it was that morning when leaning over the side, bucket in
hand, I saw floating just beneath me a sea anemone on which was a tiny
sea horse riding as if the sea flower was its throne, and the sea horse
was king of the ocean. What an opportunity! The morning was calm, the
flat sea like glass, and the lazy ship crawling along at scarcely three
knots an hour made fishing conditions ideal. The sea horse was a
transparent, gelatine-looking blue. I could see the tiny threads of blue
veins in its insides. I lowered the bucket under the anemone and started
to haul it up, but the water carried it floating off. I threw the bucket
at it again. In the foam it had disappeared. I watched carefully and was
rewarded by seeing it reappear again near the stern of the ship. I ran
to the taffrail and plunged the bucket again after it, but missed it by
about two feet. There was not time to pull up the bucket and make
another cast. The stern of the moving ship would pass the drifting
anemone. I saw my life’s ambition slipping away from me. I wouldn’t
fail!
That miss gave me a wild desire to possess the sea horse or die in the
attempt to get it. Without a thought as to the utter foolishness of what
I was doing I jumped overboard after the sea horse! When I landed with a
splash in the water I heard Stitches’ voice shout:
“The skipper’s overboard!”
Such a hullabaloo that started on deck. Father had come up, the
cabin-boy, Bulgar and Axel Oleson. They were huddled at the stern rail.
The mate and Swede were unfastening the leachings on the dinghy to lower
it over after me.
“Keep your head up, Skipper,” called Stitches in a frantic voice. He
couldn’t swim a stroke and his helplessness to aid me as he wanted to
was funny. He kept calling instructions to me.
The wake of the vessel was washing the sea horse farther away from me.
Instead of swimming back to the ship and grabbing hold of the life line
that Father threw after me, I swam lickety-split astern after my
prize—the ship going on in one direction and I in the other. I never
got many opportunities to get off the ship and I was exhilarated at my
freedom. I was free—my goal was the rapidly fleeing sea flower. I knew
I would achieve my ambition!
“Tread water,” came the bellowing voice of my father through his cupped
hands. “Don’t get scared and you’ll be all right.”
I turned my head to look at him, sent him a smile, waved my hand at him
and plunged on after my flower. I would no sooner swim within easy reach
of it, so I thought, than a gentle wave lapped it out of my grasp. I
forgot the gang on the ship who were trying to call me back. With
several swift strokes I overtook the sea horse on its flower chariot. I
grabbed it in my fist. The anemone crushed in my hand. Triumphant at
catching it I turned back to catch up with the ship. Father had hove to
in the little wind that was wheezing out of some straggling clouds. The
mate was in the lifeboat with Stitches and Bulgar. They were pulling for
dear life after me. With the thrill of my success still tingling in my
soul I decided to give the men in the lifeboat some work. I had jumped
overboard with my overalls on, so stuffing my prize in my front pocket I
turned about and began swimming away. I swam as fast as I could. The men
in the lifeboat pulled with longer and swifter strokes. I plowed on a
few yards and then turned and waved a hand to them to come and get me. I
heard them begin to curse the air blue. I trod water until they almost
got up with me, then I dived under the water, and came up a few yards
behind them and started back to the ship. By the time they got the
lifeboat turned around I was way ahead. It wasn’t every day in my life
that I was important enough to get the whole crew off duty to chase me
around the ocean and I was making the most of it!
When I got under the shadow of the stern, just far enough away to clear
the suction of the rudder, I looked up to the deck and saw the crew
laughing—that is, they were all laughing with the exception of my
father.
“That damned old sea horse thought he could get away from me but I got
him,” I called up, grinning in my success.
“Come up this rope at once,” roared Father.
Hand over hand I climbed up the piece of halyard he lowered over to me.
My hair was streaked in wet strings over my face as I stood on deck
dripping in front of Father. Before he could say a word I put my hand in
my pocket to bring out my beautiful anemone when to my dismay the thing
I brought forth in my fist was no dainty colored flower but a dirty
piece of seaweed that looked like a hunk of rotten sponge. In the water
in its bed of blue sea it had the beauty of a lace-like piece of coral,
but in my hand it was a brutal disillusion—just ugly seaweed. My heart
sank in disappointment—the thing I had wanted to possess for its
loveliness didn’t exist. Whatever philosophic reflections this might
have started were checked abruptly by my father’s voice.
“Turn over that skylight,” he said.
Obediently I draped my body over the skylight with my back part exposed
heavenwards.
“This will teach you to run away from this ship,” and he gave me a
whipping with the end of the rope he had thrown to me to climb aboard
with. The licking didn’t really hurt. It took a pretty healthy whack to
hurt me anywhere physically. But the comedown! The blow to my pride! To
be turned over a skylight and licked on the pants before a circle of
grinning sailors—and for what? Merely for jumping overboard in
mid-ocean and stopping the ship. I could hear the mate who had chased me
in the lifeboat laughing the loudest. Would I ever recover? As if the
sea horse and the anemone hadn’t treated me badly enough.
“Now you get the Bible and copy a verse twenty times,” he added. It was
the familiar finish to a licking. Father used the Bible as a text book
for me—spelling, grammar and composition. If you’ve ever had to learn
to spell all the words in the Bible you can see what I was up against. I
had to copy verses out of the Bible every day, but Father could never
make me do it voluntarily—so he gave it to me to do as punishment.
I got the Bible, and lying down on my stomach on the hot deck in the sun
so my pants would dry, I began my penmanship lesson. I was darned if I
was going to do Revelations again. I knew them by heart—all about
roasting in Hell and being eaten by snakes and never being able to die
and get out of it—besides which the verses in Revelations were too
long. I wanted to get it over with. I thumbed the New Testament over
until I found the shortest verse in it—“Jesus Wept.” That suited my
frame of mind too, so I copied that one twenty times and turned my
homework in to Father. He was so pleased at my promptness in doing my
lesson that he looked as if he had forgotten my latest offense.
“Here it is,” I said to him, with the air of a martyr, and disdaining
even to look at that bunch of sailors who were occupied doing various
jobs around the deck. As I handed him the paper I began to make a
discreet retreat to the main deck. I got as far as the poop deck ladder
when I heard him explode like a firecracker. And then I got a real
licking to “teach me to be funny again.”
Studying was the hardest thing I had to do. It wasn’t only because I
didn’t want to study that I looked upon knowledge-getting as a curse,
but I had so much physical energy that I just couldn’t sit still long
enough. So Father used all sorts of schemes to make me work at my
lessons. He had one that never failed, no matter how often he tried it.
He would call me into his cabin and tell me with a grave face he had
made a mistake in his navigation problem and would I work it over and
catch his mistake, because otherwise the result might be very serious to
all of us on the ship. I didn’t care a hang about the seriousness to all
of us on the ship, but how I did want to catch him. So I would tie into
that problem tooth and nail and at the end of half an hour or an hour be
able to go to Father with a very superior air and tell him that no
matter what he thought I knew he had _not_ made a mistake. Then he’d
always thank me with an expression of great relief and I’d go away very
proud—never realizing that I had done my arithmetic lesson.
There was always plenty of work for me to do, but nothing for me to play
with that I didn’t invent myself. Father always said:
“I don’t have playthings—why should you?”
Left to my own resources I copied my few toys from the things I saw
around me—sailors, ships and cargoes. I built a drydock under the
ladder leading to the poop. In my drydock I had several types of ships
in the making. My prize ship was a full-rigger in a whiskey bottle. The
sailors had taught me to make long crochet hooks from bits of wire and
to make my own glue from fish heads.
I worked for months making the parts of the ship to rig up. Then came
the problem of getting it inside the narrow neck of the whiskey bottle
and setting it up inside. That was where the crochet hooks came in. I
put all the parts of the full-rigger in the bottle separately and then I
put them into place with the use of the glue and hooks. I worked a
little every day on my masterpiece for I wanted it to be superior to any
bottle boat that could be produced in the fo’c’s’le. Eventually I had
built a fleet of little ships. I made them to trade in English ports for
candy.
My most spectacular vessel, however, was a boat that sailed on the deck
on little wooden wheels. It was about two feet long with a mainsail,
squaresail and two jibs. I made the diminutive blocks in its rigging
from bits of sandalwood. The mainsail and squaresail were fashioned from
an old cotton shirt, while its jibs had once been a pair of underdrawers
which the cook cast off.
Stitches made a boat on the same model and on the day both were
completed we were to have a race. My boat was called the _Neversink_.
Stitches’ boat was the _Sonofabitch_.
“I’ll wager you my boat’ll outsail yours, Skipper,” he said. “An’ if I
lose you can embroider the name of your winner, the _Neversink_, in
white twine on my pants’ seat, an’ I’ll wear the same for every man
aboard to see.”
“That’s a bet, Stitches,” I said, taking his wager. Unfortunately I
didn’t stop to consider that if his boat won he would embroider its
name, _Sonofabitch_, on the back of me.
Came the day of the race. It was the rule that we had to man our boats
with a crew—the owner having the sole pick of whatever kind of crew he
desired. The captain of my boat was a fat cockroach. I tied him to his
post aft with a piece of thread. However I never called much attention
to him in my father’s hearing for fear Father would think there was
something personal about it. You see, I learned early that a girl can’t
be too careful with a man’s dignity. My “crew” was a kitten which I tied
on just forward of midships to serve the double purpose of crew and
ballast to hold the _Neversink_ on deck when the wind blew its sails. As
in all well-regulated ships I had trouble with my crew.
We had our boats at the starting line on the main deck. The goal was the
water tank abaft the mizzen.
“Shove off!” signalled Stitches and down the decks the _Neversink_ and
the _Sonofabitch_ careened along on their wheels. My boat took the lead
and kept a couple of inches ahead of the _Sonofabitch_, when my crew
mutinied. The wind got under the kitten’s tail and he didn’t like it so
he clawed at the sails and pulled the mast and rigging down, finally
dumping the _Neversink_ over on her side in dismal defeat.
I didn’t wait for Stitches to gloat over his victory.
“You can have my overalls when I turn in tonight but don’t embroider
_Sonofabitch_ in too big letters,” I said.
Sometimes my games got me in trouble, and once I was badly injured. On
the “dog watches” from four to six and six to eight in the evenings,
both watches were on deck and I didn’t have to keep quiet so they could
sleep. It was then that I ran the decks, careless of the thudding noise
my feet made; or I sang chanteys loud and long at the top of my voice.
One night I persuaded Swede to play tag with me. Owing to the limited
space there is on a ship to run around in, we made a rule that the
person who was “it” had to catch the pursued by hitting him three hard
swats in the middle of the back. There were no bases. The topmasts were
the limit above and the hold the limit below. I was it. I chased Swede
forward, through the galley, back to the mizzen, around the mizzen mast,
over the hatchway and almost caught him when he leaped to the shrouds
and started up the mizzen rigging. I went after him with a rush. He was
about half way up the ratlines when I almost overtook him. Instead of
continuing up and sliding down a halyard to the deck again from the
crosstrees as I thought he would, he stopped short in the rigging.
“Get down or I’ll step on your hands,” he said with a grin.
“Step away and be damned,” I answered him, intent on catching him at any
cost. Of course a huge Swede sailor is not the most gentle playmate
there is for a child, but he was all that was available. In his
clumsiness he was only playing, but he raised one foot as if to trample
on my hands and said again:
“Get down or you get me hoof on your mitts.”
I didn’t believe he meant it, so instead of taking his warning I went up
another rung of the rigging. He intended to step lightly but he slipped.
I felt a stinging pain and then I was flying through space. I suppose my
hands went out as protection instinctively for they struck the deck
first. Something seemed to snap in both wrists and my face slapped
against the planks of the deck.
The next thing I knew Swede had me in his arms lugging me aft and I was
kicking and blubbering cross words through bloody lips. It was bad
enough to be smashed up but to be carried like a helpless puppy was too
much.
“Put me down,” I demanded and I wriggled from his arms. Mustering all
the strength I could I walked up the poop. Father had come up the
companionway to investigate the commotion. When he saw me he asked:
“Now what the hell have you been up to?”
My face evidently looked like a muffin that had spilled over lopsided in
baking, for my nose was broken and two points off its course.
“Answer me. What happened?” Father repeated with force.
“I guess I’ve busted my flippers. Can you fix them?” was all I could
reply.
He took my broken wrists in his hands and examined them, then sent the
man at the wheel after a fruit box.
“Now you get below, Joan. I’ll make some splints out of slats of wood
and set your arms. But about your nose, how in the hell can I do
anything with that?”
Despite his doubts, Father made a good job of patching me up. He used a
ruler broken in two pieces for a splint for my nose, and then put a
finishing touch on his handiwork by giving me a big dose of salts.
Father sincerely believed salts were a cure for everything from bad
temper to a broken neck, and I became so inured to swallowing the darn
stuff that I almost learned to like it.
[Illustration]
[Illustration]
8
We catch a female shark and I learn about women from her—
One of the earliest lessons that I learned from the sea was the
importance of observation. Book learning is almost useless in a storm,
and science an unknown quantity when the elements lash against a
man-built ship. But observing the laws of the sea, watching it destroy
or create, teaches much about life. All that I learned of philosophy,
biology and astronomy came to me from my father and the sailors.
I often wondered where children came from, and in reply to my queries
the sailors gave me no stork fable or yarn about being found in a
cabbage patch. When I asked Father where I came from he replied:
“Don’t ask questions. Just keep your eyes open and you’ll find out
everything you want to know.”
The first opportunity I had to find out about babies being born came
when Father landed a shark. I was down on the main deck helping Stitches
sew on a ripped sail. He was teaching me how to use the “palm” or
sea-going thimble that sailors use when they sew canvas. The “palm” is a
metal perforated disk set on a leather strap that fits the palm of the
hand. In fair weather the sailors always brought the torn sails on deck
and repaired them ready for emergency use in a storm. Stitches was very
painstaking in his instruction to me because he wanted me to be a
regular sailor some day.
Father was sitting on the taffrail, sextant in hand, waiting for the sun
to come out from behind a cloud so that he could “shoot the sun,” or
take a sight to figure out our position by navigation.
“Say, Joan,” he called, “come here and look at this shark.”
I dropped my sewing and ran up to the poop to the after rail. I looked
over the stern and saw a greenish white shadow deep in the water. Slowly
the shadow came closer to the surface and a grey fin stuck out of the
water like a three-cornered sail. The shark was about ten feet long. It
swam around in circles following in our wake, stalking us. It was the
first time I had ever seen a man-eating shark.
“Don’t go too near the rail, Joan. If you fall overboard now you’ll be a
nice dessert for that shark.”
“Do sharks eat people?” I asked.
“That kind of a shark does. All sharks that live on the surface of the
water and follow sailing ships are man-eaters.”
I looked at the shark again. It looked harmless to me as it circled and
played around in the wake from our rudder.
“How could a shark eat me? I can’t see any mouth on it,” I countered,
still unconvinced.
“I’ll show you. Go ask the cook for a big chunk of salt pork, and we’ll
put it on an iron hook, then watch the fun.”
I got the chunk of salt pork and Father baited a hook with it. Instead
of lowering the hook overboard by a rope, he fastened a thin chain about
twenty feet long onto it.
“Now get my rifle, and stand clear of the rail,” he ordered.
I brought the gun up, and Stitches and McLean came aft to help land the
shark. Stitches tied a piece of board on the chain so that the pork and
hook would float on the surface. The shark, led by its little
vari-colored pilot fish, smelled at the bait—then it circled away. It
came back again and after pushing the pork with its snout, the shark
turned belly up, and opened its jaws on the meat. A shark can only bite
when it is bottom up, as the lower part of its jaw is receding. As it
turned up and snagged the hook Father shot at his throat with his rifle.
The shark kicked out with its powerful tail and pulled away. McLean let
out some slack as the shark started to bite viciously at the chain
holding the hook. Again and again Father fired shots into its body, but
still it fought. The pilot fish had disappeared—nothing remained but a
bleeding, fighting shark pulling at the hook.
“Haul him up, head out of water,” Father called, and as Stitches and
McLean pulled him out of the water Father slipped a running bowline
around him.
“Get the hell out of the way now or you’ll get hurt,” he called to me as
he hauled the heavy shark up by the bowline. Stitches had slipped
another line around the shark’s pounding tail and was pulling him up by
the stern. After a terrific struggle they landed him on the poop deck.
It slapped and wallowed around the deck, its huge jaws with seven rows
of saw-teeth gaping and trying to kill its attackers. Father ran a
scantline down its throat and shot it again. McLean chopped its tail
off, splintering its spine as he did so. Still the shark fought
desperately. Nothing seemed to kill it.
“A shark don’t die until sundown,” said my father, “but we can cut him
up so he can’t do any damage. Only don’t get too near him because he may
only be foxing. A shark is the hardest deep sea thing to kill there is.”
Father told the men to haul the body of the shark down on the main deck
and leave it in the lee scuppers until it died. The sailors were more
than willing to comply because a shark has a lot of value to sailormen.
“When it’s dead, you men skin it. We’ll sell the skin in Australia for
shoe leather. Whatever else you want of the shark you can have,” he told
the men, and he went about his task of “shooting the sun.”
I forgot all about my sail sewing lesson in the excitement of carving up
a man-eating shark. Stitches sharpened my knife for me on his marlin
spike, and we set about carving up the shark.
“What part can I do?” I asked him.
“Well, seeing as this is the first man-eating shark you ever seen
caught, you go through its guts. Some sailors tell as how sharks swallow
pearls on the bottom of the ocean, and maybe if you was to carefully go
through all its entrails you might find a pearl.”
It is true that sharks are the scavengers of the underseas, but Stitches
gave me the job of looking through its guts to initiate me into the
realm of sharkdom. “Nothing like learning the insides of things to be
sure of your facts,” he said.
I am glad now that he made me go through that shark’s insides for it
gave me first hand information that has backed me up when landlubbers
doubt me when I tell them of the mammal shark.
It took about three hours to go carefully through the yards and yards of
gut of that shark and I didn’t find any pearls. All I found was a rusty
piece of tin and a small devil fish, or octopus, that spit indigo ink
all over me when I freed it from the grip of the shark.
“I’m goin’ to cut out this backbone, Skipper, and make a walking stick
out of it. I can sell it when I get ashore for a bottle of rum,” said
Stitches, and he dug his knife into the back of the shark. The shark
still quivered, hacked up as it was.
“And now let’s get his ugly mug off his body. His yawnin’ jaws look too
hungry for comfort.” McLean got an ax and a saw, and the two of them
sawed and hacked off the huge iron-like head.
“Now I’ll show you where the shark keeps his eyes.” You see, a shark is
blind, it can only see about four inches in front of its snout. Every
shark has two little parasite fish, pilot fish, that see for it, and in
time of trouble the shark swallows its pilot fish for protection. Down
in little sockets behind the shark’s gills, Stitches brought out two
squirming, brightly colored fish, about three inches long.
People have often asked me how it is that natives seem to swim unharmed
in shark-infested waters. They escape from death because they know a
shark’s habits. A shark, by reason of its near-sightedness, depends upon
its pilot fish to spot food for it. The tiny fish can see any animate
object in the water and head for it. The bright color of their bodies
shines in front of the shark who follows where they lead. A shark will
not attack an inanimate object for it cannot notice it! A moving object
in the water attracts attention and the natives, wise to this, let their
bodies go limp when a shark circles too near them. Then, when a shark
circles to turn around to attack, the native moves like lightning to
dive under the animal and rip its throat with his sharp tortoise-shell
knife.
“Now always remember, Skipper, if you ever are overboard and near a
shark, keep your head and keep quiet until the shark circles from you.
Don’t be a landlubber fool and try to fight because that just makes you
a movin’ target fer the little pilot fish.” I have been laughed at when
I have told about the pilot fish of a shark, and unbelievers have said
it was just a good fish yarn, but nevertheless it is a fact.
“Do any other kind of fish eat you, too?” I asked, a bit worried.
“Hell, a shark ain’t a fish, it’s a mammal—just like a porpoise and a
whale is a mammal.”
A shark not a fish? It had fins and a body and tail like one and it
doesn’t have to come up to the surface to breathe like a porpoise and a
whale.
“Now you take that shark jaw and hang it over the side in the water and
in a week all the meat will rot off it; then you’ll have a pair of fine
shark’s jaws to hang up in your cabin.”
No portion of that shark was to be wasted. McLean had taken the empty
gut and had stretched it out in the sun to dry. “For shoelaces” he
answered, when I asked him what he was keeping it for.
“But it stinks,” I protested.
“Well, it won’t when I cure it in salt,” he replied.
“Now we’ll cut its stomach open, Skipper,” said Stitches and he slit up
the upper stomach of the mutilated shark. I bent over him, carefully
watching everything he did, for wonders never ceased to come from it.
Stitches reached his hand and wrist into the opening and felt inside.
Then he let forth a “Jesus!”
“What’s the matter, Stitches?”
“Skipper,” he replied, his face crestfallen, “this is a mother shark.
Look, she has young ’uns in her.”
I looked, and there in a pouch in her stomach were six baby sharks,
about eighteen inches long. He reached in deeper and brought out a
second pouch with another litter of six young in it.
“Is it bad luck to kill a she-shark, Stitches?” I asked, puzzled at his
sudden grief.
“Bad luck? No sailor ever kills a female thing, because they give life.
Givin’ life is part of the Creator’s job, and no man would willingly
kill a mother thing.”
There is an old superstition that to kill any female thing at sea will
bring a curse on the ship. If a female bird is killed, its wing is
nailed on the mast head as an offering against a curse. When Stitches
saw we had killed a mother shark in young, he took the tail and nailed
it on the end of the jib boom. That is the reason why ships returning
from deep sea voyages are often decorated with parts of birds or fish.
After Stitches had put up the tail on the jib boom, he came back to the
shark. “Maybe we can save these young ’uns, Skipper.” Carefully, and
almost tenderly, he took the baby fish out of the pouch and broke the
cords that bound them to the mother shark. Then he took some twine that
he had been using to sew sails with, and tied up the end of each cord,
and threw the little fish overboard. They probably never lived but
Stitches did everything in his power to save them.
I didn’t know that sharks bore their young. I supposed they laid spawn
as any other fish did, but Stitches explained to me that a shark bears
her children like a human, and suckles them from a teat until they can
forage for their own food. The reason that shark had fought so viciously
was to protect the young in her. A male shark is much easier to land,
and much more stupid than a female.
I asked Stitches if all children were born the way the sharks were and
he answered, yes.
As there were eleven children in our family I thought that we came in
batches of six like the sharks.
“But how do we get in the pouches?” I insisted.
“The guy that created you put the seed of you under your father’s and
your mother’s heart, then when they fell in love you was born.”
I have since learned that some modern naturalists who evidently never
have traveled further south than Sandy Hook, have expressed a doubt as
to whether there really is such a beast as a man-eating shark and
whether it will actually attack a man unprovoked. Evidence, they claim,
has always been at second-hand and the testimony of seafaring men they
reject. Well, without wishing to lock horns with the learned, you may be
interested in firsthand evidence of man-eating sharks.
I saw a nurse shark, perhaps the deadliest species of the shark family,
attack a sailor from our ship, one Eric Johanssen. Johanssen dived off
the ship for a swim against the express command of my father that no
member of the crew leave the vessel. We were anchored in Paramatta River
in Sydney Harbor. Johanssen hadn’t been in the water five minutes before
two sharks began circling about him.
“You bloody fool, swim for the ship,” called Swede to Johanssen.
Johanssen turned to strike out for the Jacob’s ladder, but he wasn’t
swift enough. The tri-cornered fin of the biggest shark followed in his
wake. Johanssen struck out wildly with his arms and legs. He evidently
thought that by making a big splash in the water he would confuse the
shark, but the disturbance Johanssen kicked up only served to make an
accurate target for the shark’s pilot fish.
The man had about reached the ship when the triangular fin following
disappeared. Watching, the men on board knew what that meant. The brute
was turning on its back. It came up below its prey and turned open its
huge maw to bite.
There came a short shriek of pain; the water bloodied, and Johanssen’s
body doubled up. The shark’s jaws had set about his stomach. With a
sinuous motion of its tail the shark drew away taking in its jaws the
middle of Johanssen’s body almost through to the backbone.
There had been no time to lower a boat, but Swede was on the Jacob’s
ladder; Father and the mate above, all the boathooks fighting to save at
least the body from the man-eaters. They caught the body with their
hooks and brought it out, but not until another hunk of flesh had been
torn from the thigh. Then the vicious monsters, balked of their complete
meal, swam along the sides of the ship, scraping against it and slapping
their tails against the hull as though in a frenzy of rage. Finally they
drew off, but for hours they swam close by, waiting for another victim.
Father had Johanssen’s body sewn up in sailcloth and it was buried in
the potter’s field in Sydney.
Stitches told me of a foolhardy sailor in the islands dragging his arm
over the side of a dinghy going ashore. A nurse shark came up
unexpectedly and caught the trailing arm. The sailor either was dragged,
or in his fright fell out of the boat. There was a swirl of bloody water
and the man was gone. Then, attracted by the blood another huge shark
came alongside and scraped the dinghy trying to overturn it. Stitches
and the remaining sailor had a hard time getting the boat safely ashore.
Such are the habits of man-eating sharks.
[Illustration]
[Illustration]
9
In which I learn to take a joke. Hoping you may do the same
We were nearing the Equator bound south from Puget Sound. Father, the
mate, and I were eating our noon meal, “onion bouillon” (one bucket of
water with one onion in it), rice with curry sauce and boiled tapioca
with pale lavender cornstarch sauce. The Jap cook delighted in coloring
the food to make it appear more appetizing than it was.
Father and the mate were discussing our position on the chart.
“We ought to make the crossing along about four bells this afternoon,
Mr. Swanson. Better get the big hawser out and stretch it on deck in
case we need it.”
The mate caught the twinkle in Father’s eye and raised his voice for the
benefit of the greenhorn cabin-boy who was listening to the
conversation, big-eyed, in the pantry.
“All right, Captain, and when Neptune comes aboard shall I tell him
about Slops trespassing on his domain?”
“Yes. He’ll probably raise hell because he doesn’t like the uninitiated
to cross the Equator.”
The cabin-boy came out of the pantry and made a pretense of passing the
bread to me.
“I beg your pardon, sir,” he said to Father, “but what does the Equator
look like?”
“It’s a white line about three feet under the water. I just told Mr.
Swanson here to get out the hawser and have it ready. When we cross the
Equator we begin goin’ down hill and slip south so fast we got to tie a
line on to the Equator,” Father lied without blinking an eye.
Slops sniffed, pretending contempt.
“You can’t fool me, Captain,” he protested.
Father looked very stern.
“When you have washed up here I want you to lean overboard and look for
the line and when you see it, call me,” he ordered the cabin-boy.
Slops’ eyes nearly popped out of his sallow face, but he claimed that he
didn’t believe it.
When Father and the mate left the table and went on deck, Slops came to
me.
“Does the Old Man mean that stuff about us going too fast when we cross
the Equator?” he asked.
“Sure he does, and what’s more, Neptune knows you’ve never crossed the
line before, and you’re going to be tarred and feathered,” I promised
him. “Besides that, you’ll probably have to clean up all the mess they
make tarring and feathering you.”
Slops didn’t think so much of me at that moment, and he turned back to
his pantry with a sniff. An hour later Father asked me where Slops had
disappeared to. I didn’t know, but I set about to find him. I looked in
the pantry, in his cabin, up in the galley, under the fo’c’s’lehead,
aloft in the rigging, down in the lazarette, everywhere, so I thought,
and I couldn’t track him. We were just about to cross the Equator, and
Slops’ presence was desired on deck for the initiation. Mr. Swanson
stepped up to my father!
“Come with me, Captain, and I’ll show you where that cat-livered
cabin-boy is.” I went with them, forward, and there we found Slops. He
was leaning far out the hawse hole staring at the water below looking
for the Equator! The mate planted his foot in the hind part of the
cabin-boy and nearly sent him hurling into space through the hawse hole.
“Get amidships, you so and so ignoramus.” Poor Slops, quaking with fear,
ambled aft. There on the mizzen hatch he saw a platform built of timber
on which was a big wooden tub of “shaving lather.” The sailors were
sitting around the tub on their haunches with treacherous innocence on
their faces.
“Tie up the beggar,” ordered Swede, who had assumed charge of the
activities. Slops was grabbed by Bulgar and McLean and bound hand and
foot with rope. For a moment there was an ominous pause, and then slowly
coming down off the fo’c’s’le head was old Neptune himself. One of the
sailors had rigged himself up in a torn gunny sack, with long, straggly
beard made of rope yarn and he carried a trident. It is the custom for
the Captain of the ship to turn over all authority to Neptune when
crossing the Line. Neptune took his stand on the wooden platform. He
called for silence, and then his voice boomed out,
“Where is the son of a bitch that dares trespass my Equator without his
passport?”
McLean and Swede shoved Slops in front of Neptune.
“This is the offender, sir,” said Swede.
Neptune looked at him condemningly. He took the old stubble paintbrush
in his hand and dipped it into the lather. We all knew just what was in
that lather!
“What is your name?” roared Neptune.