Slops opened his mouth to tell his name _The cradle of the deep

lather off the brush into it. The sailors laughed heartily at Slops’

discomfiture. The tar in the lather stuck to his face, and when it was

at the proper gluey stickiness to hold the “feather,” Neptune threw

dried copra on him. It stuck fast and gave Slops the appearance of a

wild ape. He tried to resist Neptune and that made his lot worse, for

the sailors, as a punishment for his insubordination, fastened a long

rope to his body and threw him overboard. They dragged him along until

he was almost unconscious and then hauled him on deck.

“Let’s splice the mainbrace, Neptune,” said Father, and he opened a

bottle of rum. Each man got a big swig out of it, but Slops got only a

smell of the cork.

I was laughing so hard at the whole performance that I was oblivious of

the preparations of Neptune to lather some one else. I was not to be

kept in ignorance for long.

“Captain,” bawled Neptune, “has your daughter got her passport for

crossing the Line?”

“Say, I crossed the Equator when I was a year old, and they never did

anything to me because I was a baby,” I bragged, “and besides that, I’ve

crossed about twenty times.” I swelled my chest out and bulged my

muscles in true sailor-fashion, so cocky was I about being a regular old

salt.

“You ain’t been initiated, huh? Well, Captain, it’s about time she was.

What about it?” he asked. Father looked at me as if he was full of pity

for my predicament, and then in a half-mocking, sad tone he said,

“Guess she’ll have to get tarred and feathered, too.”

“Hey, what the hell?” I piped up.

“This is the what,” said Neptune. “You’re next,” and he waved to the tub

of lather.

“Just try and do it,” I challenged him, really getting sore. It had

ceased to be funny to me, and the more excited I got the funnier it

seemed to the sailors.

“You cock-eyed quart of bilgewater, you haven’t got a chance of tarring

and keelhauling me,” I snorted and jumped for the rigging. I got no

farther. Swede dragged me back by the foot. They bound me as they had

the luckless Slops and applied the brush and lather to my face.

“What is your name, little girl?” cooed that damned Neptune. I was too

wise to open my mouth, so I thought, for I had no intention of

swallowing any of that concoction.

“Answer me,” he bellowed.

I closed my lips tighter. Huh, I was smarter than they were after all.

I’d show them! “Smack” on my behind went a plank, heaved by the ape-like

Slops. It was such a hard whack that I opened my mouth to holler, and no

sooner had I done that than Neptune stuck a big gob of lather in the

wide aperture of my jaws, and then I heard the whole crew and my father

guffawing at me. Slops had been initiated, so he rated disciplining me.

From head to foot they soaked me in that lather. The tar in it matted my

long thick hair together and stuck my eyelashes so that I couldn’t open

my eyes. I wouldn’t have minded it so much if I hadn’t heard them all

laughing at me.

When no more lather would stick to me I heard Father say to Neptune:

“Let’s throw her over and give her a bath. She’s so dirty now that

she’ll just love it.” What I thought of my father and the whole bunch at

that moment cannot be written here, but it was very graphic!

Overboard I went, tied by the same rope that had been on Slops. The salt

water has the interesting effect of making tar stick so that it will not

come off without turpentine. When they thought I had had enough of a

bath, they hauled me out and sprinkled me with some dried copra. I

looked worse than Slops did. I sat in the scupper picking off the shreds

of coconut husks that came in the copra, and I gave the appearance of a

she-orang outang picking off fleas.

As they say in the movies, time passed, but not my temper. The copra I

picked off stuck to my fingers. I picked that off with the other hand

and it stuck to the other. It was a thankless job. And then there was my

hair. Never in this world would the tar come out of it. I went to my

ally, the cook, and asked him for some oil to rub on me. He wouldn’t

give me any for he was afraid the sailors would jump on him if he helped

me.

“Well, at least you might give me some turpentine,” I said to the mate.

“Sure, all you want,” and he gave me a five gallon tin of it. “Now go

ahead and enjoy yourself,” he said. I rubbed turpentine on the tar and

it came off, but with it large pieces of my own skin.

“How in the hell will I get this stuff out of my hair?” I wailed.

“That’s very simple, Joan; I guess I’ll have to shave your hair off,”

said Father. He promptly set about to do it. With a carving knife he cut

my long hair off, then he shaved my head with his razor. I was as

sunburned as walnut juice, but my scalp was white, and the two-color

tone of my face and head gave me the weird appearance of a native ready

for a war dance.

I was not going to forget that little initiation party in a hurry. I

didn’t overlook any opportunity to get even with the sailors, Slops, the

mate and my father during the rest of the trip.

I lay for Slops near the poop deck ladder one day when he was to bring

the dinner basket aft. As he started to mount the ladder, I tripped him

and sent the basket and the dinner flying over the deck. I caught some

bedbugs and put them in my father’s and the mate’s bunks, and to make

sure the bugs would stay in them and bear millions of other little

bedbugs, I stuck brown sugar in the ticking in their mattresses. It was

not so easy for me to get even with the sailors, for I had no excuse to

be in the fo’c’s’le. About a month after the Equator episode I got my

chance. It was a Sunday. We were in the trade winds and there was no

ship work to be done. The sailors had one of those rare days at sea, to

loaf. I’d show them how long they could loaf. Taking my penknife, I

sneaked to the mizzen boom and pretended I was just swinging on it. I

was really ripping the stitching in the middle of the sail. The wind

caught in the little hole, and I ran and hid below, when I heard it

start to rip. The force of the wind tore the sail right up to the gaff,

and before Father saw it in time to lower it, the sail was in ribbons.

“All hands on deck!” he shouted. Away from their naps and pipes came the

sailors. The ruined sail put the ship out of control, so Father had to

heave to. “All hands on deck until a new sail is made,” he ordered, and

amid cursing and grumbling, far into the night, they sweated and slaved,

getting up the new mizzen. That is, all hands, except me. I sat on the

windward rail laughing at them.

[Illustration]

A bucko Captain and his Bible chart for me the mysteries of sex

“Joan, when you’ve learned to take a licking without a squawk outta you,

when you can lose something you’ve wanted for a long time and not be

discouraged, when you can be becalmed for weeks in the doldrums without

sight of the sun or a star to navigate by and not lose your faith in God

Almighty because you can’t understand His wisdom in confusing you—then

you can go.”

It was Father, for the dozenth time answering my question:

“Will I always have to be on a ship and never live in cities ashore?”

I am still, in my father’s eyes, his baby girl, but how he fought to

keep maturity from catching up with me! He never in my life fondled me

affectionately—never held me and kissed me as fathers of little girls

ashore do. He was afraid of making me hungry for the tender attentions

that women give, and as there was no woman on board to give those

attentions, he hardened me against them. He has told me since that he

often ached to crush me to him when some childish thing I did made him

realize how utterly lonely I was. One day he saw Stitches stroking my

dark curls lovingly, and it was only Stitches’ age that kept Father from

beating him up. He sent Stitches to the fo’c’s’le on rations of bread

and water for three days with the warning that if he ever got

softhearted over me again he’d have to take his sea bag to some other

ship! When Father showed me affection he usually did it with a good hard

kick or a hearty punch on the back such as men use to express emotion to

each other without detracting from their manliness.

If Father believed in the wisdom of a rope’s end on my southernmost

portion to discipline me, he didn’t neglect my character building. In

spite of his roughness—his bellowing voice to the sailors in a storm,

his demand for obedience from his crew—he had a tender side to his

nature that he showed me on rare occasions. He never trusted his own

judgment in giving me advice. Every time I went to him with a question

about life that puzzled my young mind he would turn to his old worn

Bible and quote me a passage that satisfied my questioning.

When I confronted him with a bewildered question about the process of

maturity, Father without a word, reached for his Bible. He turned its

pages until he found a certain chapter in the Old Testament.

“Joan, listen to this passage. It will tell you better than I can what

you should know. If only there was a woman on board, she could tell you

better.”

Of course I then asked questions and he explained the meaning of the

verse. In simple words Father revealed to me the mysteries of maturity.

To me it was so beautiful that I pitied the sailors because they were

not the chosen ones of God.

From that time on everything in Nature took on a different meaning to

me. Ashore on the islands I sought out native women to play with. I was

afraid to ask them questions but I wanted to watch them to see if I was

just as they were. One day, on a little island about eighty miles south

of Suva, I went ashore with four of our crew and Stitches to get some

breadfruit and guavas. We took a sack of nails and rope to use as

commodities of trade. Once ashore, Stitches and I left the sailors and

wandered through the village streets. We hadn’t gone more than a quarter

of a mile before we were attracted to a group of natives playing

tom-toms. We pushed through the outer circle of natives to see what was

happening. There in the center of the group I saw a native mother in

childbirth. Unaided by any other woman, when her time came, she squatted

on the sand. The tom-toms were being played in celebration of a child’s

being born to their tribe. Just at the moment the baby came from the

mother the natives broke into an ecstatic song of triumph. Apparently

paying no attention to her audience, the native mother broke the navel

cord that bound the infant to her and tied the end of it with a piece of

coconut fiber. Then she took her baby down to the surf and washed it in

the cold sea water which brought its first cry of life. The natives lost

interest in her as soon as they heard the baby’s tiny voice, and they

scattered, leaving her to her task of nurturing the little life.

“Your Old Man will get sore if he finds out I’m letting you watch this,

Skipper,” observed Stitches. “But there’s no telling when you’ll ever

see the likes of this again.”

I didn’t care what happened to me afterwards for I was so fascinated

with the native mother that I didn’t want to leave her. She put the baby

to her breast to suckle it. After it had its first meal she scraped a

place in the sand under the warm sun for it to sleep in, then she lay

beside it, full of pride and content. I thought it must be fun to have a

baby and have a lot of natives singing and dancing to celebrate the

event, but I was to learn years later that most civilized women didn’t

agree with me.

When we returned to the ship I was full of my latest experience. But

somehow life had turned from a simple thing into something so full of

puzzling contradictions that I longed to leave the ship and live on

shore where I thought I would find an answer to everything that

bewildered me.

Within a year from that time I found out that sailors’ loves were not

all beautiful. They talked of the women on the waterfront they gave

their pay to for a night’s love; they remembered young sweethearts in

the Old Country; and I heard them say they were sweet on the little

native girls. But their affairs were confused in my mind. One day I

asked Swede, while he was standing at the helm, if he had ever been in

love.

“Sure, Skipper, all us sailormen are in love—with the same woman!”

“How do you mean, Swede?” I queried.

“Yep, the same woman satisfies us all. You know how the sails look at

night, filled out in firm curves by the wind?”

“Yes,” I answered, but I failed to see the connection of sails with

Swede’s sweetheart.

“Well,” he went on, “them sails are so pretty and round, that with the

moon lighting them up they looks like a woman’s breasts and us sailormen

stand aft at the helm just content to follow them wherever they lead.”

“I like the water better than sails, Swede,” I offered. “When I swim in

the sea, with the waves lapping at my body, it feels like millions of

little mouths were kissing me.”

Swede didn’t answer me, but he nearly swallowed his wad of tobacco in

his astonishment. I decided not to tell him any more of my secrets if he

was going to get so scared of them. That night I turned in my bunk early

so that I could think of love. Just thinking about it made me feel

funny, as if I was hungry and yet I wasn’t hungry. I woke up from a

sound sleep feeling cold all over but my face was burning hot. The next

morning I made up my mind I wasn’t going to think about love any more

because it frightened me.

The first disillusion about sex came to me when the Chief of the little

island we had visited south of Suva refused to let us land again.

The Chief felt to his tribe as a father feels to his family. There was

bitterness in his voice, where a scant year before he had welcomed us.

“Last trip here, some your sailors bring sickness to my people. Many

maidens die quickly. I cannot let your white man come on this island

ever again.”

“How do you know it was some of my men?” Father asked the Chief.

“After white man make love, maidens get sick. One get so sick she throw

herself in the sea.”

I loved the natives but I was more loyal to our crew.

“How the hell could any one of our crew hurt the native girls?” I

demanded.

The Chief ignored me. His quarrel was with the white Chief, my father,

and I had no place in the conversation. But after the Chief left, I

sought out Father.

“What did the Chief mean about our sailors?” I asked. Father tried to

explain to me that one or two of our men were sick—sick with something

that was like living death and they had given that sickness to two

native girls. The malady spread rapidly because the natives are so

in-bred that their resistance is not strong enough to throw off disease.

When the full purport of Father’s explanation came to me I experienced

my first hate and intolerance of men. It wasn’t that I cared what the

sailors did, but I resented their conduct keeping me from going ashore

and being welcomed.

Father saw the hate in my eyes as I listened to him. Once more he fell

back upon his Bible to explain to my child mind a problem too complex

for his tongue. He read to me the parable of the Adulteress and then he

attempted to explain it.

“The greatest Philosopher among men understood sex; it is in everyone’s

life and in promiscuity alone is there evil. He was pretty wise, Joan,

and He understood. Understandin’ is greater than forgiveness!” Such was

the wise interpretation Father put on the parable to comfort me. I don’t

think he realized that he had given me the great gift of

tolerance.—Though I could understand I couldn’t get over the hate

within me—Father watched me silently for a while and then spoke:—

“You shouldn’t be hatin’ anything, Joan,” he said, “hatin’s like a

headwind—it won’t get you nowhere.”

“Didn’t you ever in your life hate anything?” I asked him.

My question landed home to him. Father started to answer No—then he

paused and looking beyond me as if seeing his past, he said, bitterly:

“It’s the biggest mistake I ever made, Joan—carryin’ a festerin’ hate

in my heart for fourteen years—hate of them that wrecked my ship and

killed my men.”

Then, with a break in his voice he told me the story of the famous wreck

of the _Star_. Father made me promise never to repeat it, for he wanted

its memory lost forever. I would never have told it as long as he lived

for his sake, but he is still alive, and when I wrote to him that I was

going to write _The Cradle of the Deep_ he sent me the following letter:

My Dear Joan:

I take my pen in hand to reply to your letter advising me that

you are going to write a story of your early life at sea with

your old Daddy. There is something I wish you would write

of—the story of the wreck of my old full-rigged ship _Star_.

If it hadn’t been for that wreck I would never have steered my

course South to the Southern Cross and the Atoll Islands of the

Pacific. I loved the North, the Aurora Borealis and the

magnificent splendor of the icebound Arctic. I knew it as you

know your navigation. If I hadn’t left it you would never have

lived in the tropics and thrived on coconut milk and yarrow

root. Instead you might have chawed blubber with the Eskimos.

I would prefer to let sleeping dogs lie, for the memory of that

wreck is a bitter one for me, but I want you to tell it anyway

so that the world may have a glimpse into the realism of the sea

in fact.

Keep a strong hand on the helm and watch for squalls from

leeward.

Your affectionate

Father.

[Illustration]

“The Sea gives up its dead”

San Francisco in April. High out of the network of masts and rigging of

ships that made the waterfront look like a black spider web across the

skyline, jerked the blue house flag, with its flying fish tails, of the

famous _Star_, queen of the fleet of sailing ships in the Alaska salmon

trade. The American flag fluttered no less proudly from her spanker

gaff. It was Spring and sailing day!

The _Star_ was making ready to sail for Wrangel, Alaska. On board the

crew, canners and fishermen, one hundred and thirty-eight in all,

eagerly awaited the start. It was a strange conglomeration of humans

gathered from the ends of the earth. Quartered in the forward hold the

Chinese canners disputed the space with thousands of bitterly resentful

rats. A Chinese cook prepared their native food for the canners, and

over the crowded hold, filled with squealing rats and chattering

Chinese, a brass Joss god, made fast to an under beam, looked calmly

down. Him the Chinese worshipped believing he would bring them good

luck. What the rats thought about the brass Joss no one knew or cared.

Probably they respected him for he was the only thing in the hold they

could not bite successfully!

The crew of all nations, Swedes, Yankees, Chinese, Irish, lived in the

fo’c’s’le head.

Amidships was a veritable little Italy. The Italian fishermen were

housed in cabins on deck. They too carried their native Italian cook who

prepared rich-smelling Italian foods. The aromas of their cooking, when

wafted forward and merged with the smell of boiling rice and herbs from

the Chinese hold, made a queer combination of Latin and Oriental odors.

Then, maintaining the peculiar social distinctions of the sea, the white

tradesmen and officers of the ship and cannery lived aft in luxurious

quarters. The walls of the cabins were of bird’s eye maple. In the

dining salon hung a six foot oil painting of the _Star_ under full sail

outriding a hurricane. The swinging lamps were brass, ornately decorated

with whales’ teeth and carved ivories. In my father’s cabin, curtains of

red plush proclaimed the captain’s aloofness. A “telltale” compass over

his bunk and a rack of rifles within easy reach were additional

furnishings.

On April 8th, my father stood at the taffrail watching the finishing of

the loading of great pieces of steel machinery for the cannery, barrels

of oils and salt, and lumber to rebuild some of the warehouses of the

company in far distant Wrangel. At his side stood my mother, fighting

back, as she had done every year for fifteen years, the quiver of sorrow

that sailing day always brought her. Father would be gone for six

months. He would sail up past Nome into the frozen Arctic, and if luck

was with him, sail back the following fall before the ice froze him in.

Father looked at her with a twinkle in his eye.

“What’s the matter, Mother?”

“Nothing,” she answered, “only I wish Joan was old enough so that I

could go with you this trip. I feel you are in danger.” She forced a

smile she was far from feeling. A deadly foreboding that seems to be

instinctive with the womenfolk of deep sea sailors came upon her.

“Shame on you, Mother. Why I’ll outsail the _Star of Alaska_ and the

_Star of Nome_ and the _Star of the North_ by a month. Don’t let the

crew see you weakening.” The mate interrupted them:

“Beg pardon, sir. It’s time to let the men knock off for lunch and their

last mug of beer. It always makes them sail happier if they have an hour

on sailing day to get drunk and kiss their sweethearts good-bye.”

“Let them knock off now and come back at four o’clock,” instructed

Father, “I was a young fellow myself once.”

No sooner had the men left their stations on the deck and were ashore

than a ripping, tearing roar brought Father rushing to the poop deck.

The main yard had broken from the spar and had crashed through the

rigging down to the deck as if cut by an invisible hand! It broke into

three pieces, but miraculously injured no one. That ill omen was to be

remembered later. A mast breaking in three pieces is a sign that before

the trip is completed the vessel itself will break into as many parts.

Folk laugh at the superstitions of sailormen, but few who have lived at

sea will dispute their justification.

Instead of sailing, the _Star_ went back to the drydock where the new

yard was rigged on. It took three days, and on April 11th, at the five

o’clock flood tide, the _Star_ was once more ready to go. The crowd

jostled on the docks. Chinese women in their quaint native costumes of

pants and jackets stood on the wharf near the fo’c’s’le head, their

waxen faces immobile beneath their shining black hair ornamented with

jades and corals. The Italian women were most demonstrative. Their

shawls were torn from their heads as they jumbled against each other,

pushing for the extreme edge of the dock. Tears and laughter fought for

supremacy as they waved good-bye to the Italian fishermen amidships. One

young wife with two babies tugging at her skirts was praying, and here

and there a rosary was thrust into the hands of the departing fishermen.

The American friends of the officers and traders were on the dock

nearest the stern, and handkerchiefs and jokes of bravado sent the

_Star_ off to the Arctic.

My father stood at the helm and with a bellow ordered,

“Let go the hawsers!”

“Let go the hawsers,” echoed back at him from the fo’c’s’le head, and

the cobra-like ropes that held the _Star_ to her mooring splashed limp

into the bay as the men hauled in their slack on the capstan to the

accompaniment of a chantey. The Chinese on board set off thousands of

firecrackers to foil off the devil, and threw countless red streamers

into the air. The Italians sang and gesticulated with their arms as the

tug _Dundee_ pulled the _Star_ out into the harbor. My father is a

registered pilot of San Francisco harbor, so he directed the course of

the _Star_ as they set her sails just off Alcatraz Island, and sailed

majestically out of the Golden Gate and nosed her way north.

A quick trip of twenty-seven days brought the _Star_ to Wrangel. In five

months her mission was completed. She was loaded with fifty-four

thousand cases of fine Alaska salmon to take back to San Francisco. It

was a dull, thick daybreak as the tugs steamed alongside. All hands were

aboard, glad their hard work was done, and jubilant at being homeward

bound. The last to come down to the ship was my father. As he walked

down the dock, little Arvis Babler, the nine year old daughter of the

cannery superintendent, ran along beside him holding his hand. She

chattered gaily about his ship. She even suggested that some day he

would bring his little girl to Alaska to play with her. None of her

light spirit infected my father. He only stared gloomily and silently at

the loaded vessel.

“What’s the matter, Captain?” she asked, when Father didn’t respond to

her. “I should think you would be happy today when you are going home.”

“I feel as if I were going to my grave,” he answered.

The tugs _Hattie H._ and _Kyak_ were to tow the _Star_ out. Nearly all

the crew of these two tugs were drunk before they left the dock. In that

alone they violated the code of the sea, but in Alaska at that time

there was but one tugboat company and no competition to make a high

standard of seamanship necessary. To make matters worse, the rival

captains of the two tugs were fighting over which was to be the leading

boat. Finally they settled their dispute, apparently to the satisfaction

of neither, and the tugs started to pull the _Star_ down the Wrangel

Narrows, a distance of one hundred and twenty-five miles to the sea. In

that dangerous passage there was only room for one ship to pass. At the

mouth of the Narrows the _Star_ was to set her sails and steer a course

off shore for home. All day long the tugs towed her slowly. Meantime

those on board the leading tug had celebrated their victory over the

crew of the rival tug so thoroughly that the boat was left in charge of

a boy mate—while the engineer, to put it mildly, was far from at his

best.

Toward night the sky became overcast and the wind increased with the

coming darkness. By eight o’clock a gale had arisen. It was off

Coronation Island that my father noticed that the tugs were dragging his

ship over to the north or dangerous side of the channel. He could hear,

above the moaning of the gale, breakers crashing on the rocks! Father

tried to signal the tugs of the danger, for their crews evidently had

not realized it. Vainly he called through his megaphone, and vainly he

sent up flares to attract the attention of the captain of the first

tugboat. The condition of the men on those tugs must have kept them from

recognizing the warning calls for they pulled on and on towards the

shore in the face of the rising gale. Finally at the tugboat end of the

forward hawser, some deck hand on the _Hattie H._ saw the cable slacken.

They had towed the _Star_ into a dangerous bight or indenture in the

cliffs. Panic-stricken, the _Hattie H._ pulled off to one side leaving

the _Star_ in a straddled position between the two tugs. Neither tug was

very powerful, but together and properly handled they could have dragged

the ship out of danger. Instead the tugs see-sawed against each other

doing nothing. Apparently those supposed to be in command did not know

what to do.

Nearer and nearer the treacherous rocks the _Star_ was driven by the

wind. In desperation Father dropped both anchors to hold her. No sooner

had he dropped the anchors than the tugboats, instead of fighting for

the ship and the lives of the men on board, cut their towing hawsers and

ran for it—deliberately steaming away at full speed, presumably for

Wrangel. They didn’t even heave to long enough to see what the _Star’s_

fate was. Later the master of the _Hattie H._ said he thought the _Star_

was pounding to pieces on the rocks. (He had heard the anchor chain

running out of the hawse pipe!) The _Kyak_ steamed to shelter in the lee

of an adjacent island. The _Hattie H._ returned to Wrangel, arriving the

following Sunday morning. Her master, after the disaster, was asked why

he did not stand by to assist the ship.

“What the hell could I do? She was wrecked anyway,” he went on record as

saying. But had those tugs stood by what followed would never have

happened.

On the _Star_ the crew huddled on deck all night through, listening to

the menacing hissing of the hidden surf crashing against the rocky

cliffs. Would the anchors hold? That was fate—there was nothing they

could do.

Dawn brought no hope. Scarce five hundred yards off loomed precipitous

cliffs with huge waves dashing against them.

Only the anchors still held. If they should slip! But the men fought

back that picture of inevitable destruction. Those tugs were surely

coming back! They had only disappeared in the night to go for help!

Waiting was torture. If only the tugs came back in time.

Hours passed. No tugs appeared. Then the anchors began to slip. The

terrific strain of the huge waves was too great for the hooks to hold.

Hours on hours! Waiting was gruesome now, as the anchors dragged and the

men on board watched the jagged-toothed rocks come nearer. The heavy

load of salmon in the holds shifted, and the _Star_ listed first to

starboard and then to port as each ground swell that rose lifted her

high and carried her nearer the barren cliffs.

Father gave instructions to the men to make preparations for getting

ashore when the ship struck. Life preservers were fastened on the

Chinese who had become panic-stricken. The white officers and officials

of the cannery company, realizing the added danger of a hundred crazed

Chinese rioting, begged my father to batten them down in the hold like

so much cattle to keep them off the decks. Father called the Boss

Chinaman to him.

“Boss, you guarantee that your men not riot?” he began. “I won’t lock

them down in hold. You tell them if danger come Captain tell you.”

That old Boss Chinaman had been with Father for fourteen years and he

trusted him almost as he trusted his Joss god. He went back to his

Chinamen in the hold and told them of my father’s promise, and they were

calmed to a degree. They cramped together in their hold paralyzed with

fear, but they kept off the decks.

After Father had seen to the Chinamen and Italian fishermen, he returned

aft to the officers’ quarters and told them to be prepared for the worst

as the anchors were useless now. Down in the stuffy red plush cabin the

men sat around the chart table. They were all silent and depressed. They

all had a look of finality on their faces. It was small choice—on deck

they could see sure death looming up; in the cabin they could shut their

eyes to it and wait! In the last few moments of their lives strange

reactions took place in them. The clerk of the cannery, a man about

thirty-three years of age, pale and husky-voiced, asked my father to

take the money he had, nine hundred dollars, and give it to his family,

when my father reached San Francisco. Another man asked Father to take a

message to his wife, and still another broke out into vile profanity. A

huge man, one of the wealthy owners of the cannery, forgot his pose of

dignity and knelt down on the cabin floor and prayed like a frightened

child.

“You all have the same chances, men, and each one of you will bear your

own responsibility,” Father told them in answer to their pleas.

He set about to have a trunk packed with medicines and stimulants which

was taken on deck. Later that trunk was picked up in the wreckage ashore

and the contents helped revive some of the men and dress their injuries.

Only four lived of the white men who sat around the table in the cabin

awaiting the verdict of the storm.

On deck the flying spray from the mountainous seas was like a white

blinding screen, but Father could see Ole Swenson, a Norse man, powerful

and gigantic, standing on the fo’c’s’le head scanning the horizon for

the return of the tugs. Swenson saw nothing but the storm rising in

velocity, and the cliffs looming blacker on shore. Roaring and cursing

against the fate that was murdering his beloved ship, Ole Swenson jumped

into the sea to end his agony.

It was only a matter of minutes before sure death would claim the

hundred and thirty-eight men on the _Star_. Father called for volunteers

to man a boat and take a line ashore so that a breeches buoy could be

rigged. A breeches buoy is a little buoy on a rope, made fast to the

mast and on some point on shore, much like a big pulley line, by which

shipwrecked men can slide to the mainland high above a pounding surf.

Four young men responded to his call for volunteers. Among them were two

brothers, Hasen by name. One of them, the younger, couldn’t swim. His

older brother urged him not to go. He, the older one would go, for he

was a strong swimmer. The younger boy would not hear his pleading and

went first. The good swimmer was drowned just out of reach of help a few

moments later.

With great difficulty the crew swung a lifeboat off its davits with the

four young men in it fighting for their lives against the running sea.

The men on the _Star_ watched them pull for the shore—watched them

almost get in—and then saw their shell of a boat dashed on the rocks of

the narrow beach. Three of them jumped to safety and were cheered by the

crew on board whose lives they would save.

The three men dragged the rope up and fastened it on a tree trunk high

out of reach of the waves. This done, they turned their attention to

fastening the running rope which would propel the breeches buoy, but

that line had broken loose and was lost in the sea. Father called for

another volunteer to go ashore with another line to replace it. The

ship’s carpenter stepped forward. He tied the rope to his body and

ascended the rigging, then hand over hand he slid along the rope which

the men had stretched to the shore. The _Star_ was toppling like a

drunken sailor from side to side. The men on board watched the carpenter

get caught in a green comber which first sucked him under and then threw

him high in the air. When he was almost ashore an extra hard strain

flipped him off like a fly from a rubber band. He struck the water with

a terrific blow on his back. He was close enough to shore for the three

surviving young men to pull him in to safety.

Then the end came! The _Star_ crashed on the saw-toothed rocks. The

forward part of her, the fo’c’s’le head and the foremast broke off just

before the crew fled aft. They hung on like leeches to the after railing

and deck houses. The force of the relentless pounding sea was so great

that the _Star_ quivered and broke into three pieces, just as her yard

arm had broken on that ominous day in San Francisco. The stern of the

ship was all that was afloat and that was covered by screaming,

frightened men. The sea around was a seething mass of salmon cases, dead

Chinamen, screaming Italians and Americans being smothered in the spray.

The waves licked up viciously as if to devour the few hanging on for

life on the stern. Clinging to the wheelhouse and after railing, a small

group of officials and white men held their balance. A sea lifted a

piece of wreckage to windward as if to capsize it and most of the men

jumped in the opposite direction to avoid being pinned beneath. Three

remained with my father. The piece of wreckage, instead of turning

turtle to windward, was caught in the backwash of a wave and capsized

with all remaining hands to leeward! They came up into a seething

maelstrom of pitching wreckage, packing-cases swirling, outstretched

arms and kicking legs of drowning men, shrieks of fear and the terrible

seas breaking with a roar over all. And on the shore, only two hundred

yards away, four of the five men who had taken the first desperate

chances, waited helpless. They scanned the incoming combers for bodies,

Chinese or white, that might wash in close enough to fish out, but the

shore was abrupt and it had become piled with the cargo and wreckage

from the _Star_. The men could reach only a few and yank them out of the

jaws of the sea as they washed in.

When the last man had left the wreck my father jumped overboard. He said

it took about a half a minute for him to reach the surface. He felt a

heavy bulk above his head when he was under the water. He thought it was

the keel of his ship and that he was pinned beneath it. Holding his

breath, he made one herculean effort to rise to the surface. The “bulk”

over his head was the top of one of the hatchings which had broken loose

from the ship and was floating on the sea. Father struck out for the

shore. The icy water numbed his senses. He remembered nothing more. A

big green roller crested with salmon cases overtook him and one of them

struck him on the head and mercifully knocked him unconscious. The

backwash of the surf carried his inert body to the beach.

Of the one hundred and thirty-eight men on board, only twenty-seven

survived. Those that reached the shore before my father set about to

rescue the others. Two of them, the carpenter and a Scotch sailor named

Frank Muir, pulled my father’s body out of the water.

“The Old Man’s drowned. Let’s pull out the living ones,” spoke up the

carpenter and he went down the beach to salvage more of the men. Frank

Muir was as devoted to my father as a son. He didn’t heed the carpenter,

but dragged the apparently dead body to the shelter of a rock and tried

to revive him. It seemed a thankless task. The Captain was gone. If he

couldn’t save him he would at least bury him away from the others, and

Frank Muir carried Father higher up to a little table of rock in the

cliff. There he rolled him and pounded him until a glow of life came

into his battered, frozen body.

By late afternoon no life could be seen in the surf. My father was so

crippled and frozen that he couldn’t walk. He crawled around on all

fours directing his men in reviving the others. No rest for any until,

beyond any doubt, all were rescued that it was possible to rescue.

“We won’t give up until we find all of us,” said my father, and the

twenty-seven survivors agreed to a man.

They set about to search the wreckage that was piled high on the beach

for bodies. They found several groups of men, dead men, so entangled and

twisted together by the churning of the sea that they couldn’t be pulled

apart. Dismembered bodies were strewn on the rocky coast like driftwood.

Arms and legs and headless trunks washed back and forth in the foam. One

living being was found in the mess, a Japanese. He was buried in a hill

of salmon cases. The men had to burrow to get into it. He was very weak

through loss of blood from a gash extending from his temple the length

of his chin!

By dragging wreckage together the men built a huge fire around which

they snuggled for warmth. Instead of relief the fire was only an added

torture, a Dante’s Inferno, for the thick smoke from the damp wood

blinded them.

In the morning the bodies of the white men were gathered, and shallow

graves dug for them in the rocky shore to keep the wolves from eating

them. Over the graves Father ordered the men to pile heavy debris so

that the sea washing up couldn’t snatch them back to a watery grave.

The lot of the survivors was almost as bad as that of the lost men, for

there was no sign of rescue, and the coast was barren of habitation for

hundreds of miles around. The icy wind made existence almost impossible.

The next day one of the tugs returned. Her captain was surprised to see

the men ashore for he had not dreamed that supposedly dead men could

live to tell the tale. It was too rough to send a boat in, but the tug

hove to until the following day, when the crew took aboard the survivors

and returned to Wrangel. The survivors were so incensed against the tug

crew for cutting the hawser and sending one hundred and eleven men to

their death that they started to murder them. Father stopped the

violence. He said the law would deal with the tug people when the facts

were made known. At Wrangel the survivors were furnished clothing from

the cannery store and sent by steamers to San Francisco.

Several days after the wreck, the company’s tugs were sent with a crew

to dispose of the bodies on Coronation Island. They found an

indescribable confusion of corpses, provisions and debris covering the

shore for a depth of many feet. Pieces of human bodies were mingled with

the sides of hams and bacons and canned goods which the sea spewed up

from the ship’s holds. Instead of segregating the bodies, the rescue

crew drove picks into them and dragged them into heaps. After they had

made piles of human wreckage they poured oil over them and set them

afire like so much rubbish. Then they did something that is almost

beyond human comprehension. After they had burned the bodies, they

salvaged the hams and bacons and other foods they found mixed with the

dead men and took them back to Wrangel where they sold them to the

Eskimos.

What became of the few survivors? They were scattered by the company

that owned the tugboats so that they couldn’t be used to witness against

them. Those whose injuries prevented employment were treated in

hospitals—the others were placed on various ships.

My mother was in San Francisco waiting for any bit of news of the

survivors. The report came to her that my father’s dead body had been

found, mangled almost beyond recognition, and then the report was

confirmed. I was only six months old at the time. The shock to my mother

brought her an illness from which she has never recovered. It was

through this illness that I came to be raised by my father.

Father was retained on full salary during the official investigation of

the wreck. Then he learned how much law, justice or right mean to greedy

and selfish men. The tugs belonged to the same company that owned the

_Star_. If the responsibility for the wreck was fastened on the two

captains of the tugboats, the corporation faced enormous damage suits

from the families and dependents of the hundred and eleven dead men. So

the owners used every bit of their influence and resources to protect

the guilty tugboat captains. The verdict acquitted them—the blame

rested on the gale! And thus they settled the most famous and most

unnecessary wreck in American maritime history. My father was fired in

disgrace with the remark: “We have no ship for you now.”

That was the way he was rewarded for his effort to procure the “justice”

he had promised his men when they wanted to avenge the murder done by

the crews of the tugboats. The slogan went from Alaska to Seattle after

the verdict: “Don’t kick Power.”

Fifteen years of faithful and intelligent service in the Arctic swept

away in a night! Father could never go North again. The bodies of a

hundred and eleven men on the rocks of Coronation Island would drive him

to murder. He bought an old schooner and turned to the opposite end of

the world, the South Seas, warmth and maybe forgetfulness!—But he still

carries the bitterness and hate in his heart!

[Illustration]

A cursing contest and a hangman’s noose

Most of the men I knew were typical old shellback sailors, a species of

human that began to go out with the increase of steam vessels until now

the type is almost extinct. The shellback was unlike any other human, a

law unto himself, with few wants and a large philosophy of content that

was none the less real because he grumbled all the time. His ration of

tobacco, enough money for grog, and a few days in port at the end of a

long sea trip to blow his pay on some skirt, satisfied his creature

desires. For mental relaxation he cursed the ship, cursed his officers,

cursed the grub and cursed the cook, and withal, he wouldn’t have traded

places with any king on his throne.

The shellback’s attitude toward the sea was all his own, and quite

typical of the breed. He loved it—he lived on it. He expected to be on

top of the waves all his life and beneath them when he died. And so

fatalistic was he, that half of the deep sea sailors never learned to

swim! Stitches expressed the attitude best.

“What’s the use of learnin’ to swim?” he argued. “Any sailor dumb enough

to fall overboard oughta drown and if he’s washed overboard he couldn’t

swim anyhow—so what’s the use?”

“But Father made me learn to swim,” I protested.

“That’s different,” grinned Stitches. “You see, Skipper, the Captain

knows a woman ain’t got sense enough not to fall overboard. Now if you

was to fall overboard and couldn’t swim, some dumb sailor, whether he

could swim or not, would jump in and get drowned trying to save you; but

bein’ as you kin swim, if _you_ fall overboard, nobody don’t worry—they

just toss you a rope and you pull out by yourself and the Captain don’t

lose no good sailor. All that happens is you come back aboard and you

get your stern tanned with a rope’s end to warm up the chill. No ma’am!

Captain ain’t goin’ to let no good sailor go dead tryin’ to save a

woman.”

Quite unconvinced, I puzzled and puzzled over Stitches’ point of view,

but it was not until some years later, in one tragic moment, that I

learned how wide can be the difference between a man’s philosophy and

his action in a crisis.

Next to Stitches the most interesting shellback I ever knew was John

Henry, a withered old seaman close to seventy, with a cracked whiskey

voice and a face so furrowed that it looked like the relief map of a

mountain range. He chawed a hunk of tobacco incessantly and the juice

drooled down his chin, leaving a little yellow rut marked in his

whiskers. He had sailed the Horn a hundred times, to hear him tell it,

and he would have been a captain long ago instead of a common seaman,

only a captain couldn’t get drunk in public on the waterfront—so John

Henry preferred not to be a captain. But for all his shortcomings, John

Henry was a real seaman. An ordinary gale was music to his soul and a

hurricane seemed to take off thirty years—for no young man could hold

to the foot ropes aloft better than he and few could steer a dangerous

course as well.

We shipped John Henry at Frisco and in a week Stitches’ nose was out of

joint, for John Henry had quite won me. He would sit for hours, on his

watch below, and teach me to tie intricate sailor knots—everything from

splices, monkey fists, running bowlines, Turk’s heads, true lover’s

knots to a hangman’s noose.

“I bin in every jail from Seattle to Port Said,” he confided, “an’ I can

learn you every kind of a knot they use for killin’ off undesirables.”

Stitches was disgusted.

“Damned old shellback! Teaching you how to tie knots to get rid of

undesirables, is he? I dunno nobody as undesirable as he is. If he had

what was comin’ to him, somebody’d tie a knot for him long ago. Mebbe

they will yet.”

On the end of a halyard John Henry was chief chanteyman. One day I was

helping haul in the slack of the fore topsail and he said:

“You gotta eat more beans before you can pull like a regular sailor.

Women ain’t no use on a ship except to eat up grub.”

Then he burst into a chantey that sailors sing about “Womenfolk on

Ships,” and put my name in it.

This is the song:

“Sweet Joan, a maiden of fourteen years old,

Not once in her life had been kissed.

Except by her cats and her dogs, I been told,

And the beauties of life she had missed.

“And OH! how she longed for the love of a man

But all seemed to turn her away.

Till one day she set on a capital plan

And put it in form this way.

“Now sailors are jolly good fellows, thought she,

To take a trip she’d a notion,

For sailors oft get very blue out at sea,

And—girls are scarce on the ocean!”

“Aw, what the hell do you mean by that?” I asked. “I can do something

that nobody in the fo’c’s’le can do and that is, I can navigate.

Father’s taught me how to find our position by the Southern Cross at

night,” I boasted.

“Yeh? Well, I still says women ain’t got no place on shipboard. Why,

they can’t even talk like sailors,” and he spat a juicy stream with

unerring accuracy through the hawse hole on the port side of the ship.

He had thrown down the challenge to me to make good as a sailor. I was

no frail little Captain’s daughter that the sailors slew each other to

get. I had to win them! From that day on I never lost an opportunity to

emulate a deep sea sailor in every way.

At night in my cabin I rubbed my hands over rough rope to make

callouses. I began to practise every swear word I heard the sailors use.

After a month of careful observation I was able to curse four minutes in

succession and never repeat a word. When I had them all down glibly I

waylaid John Henry.

“Listen, you bastard,” I started, and then I traced his ancestors from

several kinds of animals down to biological defects in himself and

compared him with every known form of low life and waste products

imaginable. When I finished my four minute tirade I stood on guard,

thinking he would make a pass at me. Instead he listened intently, then

his face broke into a grin:

“You’re improvin’, Skipper,” he complimented me. I was so elated at

winning his approval that I thought I would try my vocabulary out on my

father. I went up on the poop deck where Father was sitting, smoking his

pipe.

“Tell me to do something,” I invited him.

“Now, what are you up to?” he asked suspiciously.

“Just you tell me to do something as if I was a sailor in the

fo’c’s’le,” I repeated.

“All right,” he replied, pleased at what appeared to be my desire to

work. “You get a chip-hammer and chip the rust off the anchor chains.

They got to be given a coat of red lead to keep them from rusting away.”

Then I let fly with my newly acquired sea language. I got as far as

one-half minute of it when I felt myself going through space toward the

cabin below with my father attached to my collar and the seat of my

pants.

“Where in the so and so did you hear any such language as that?” he

shouted.

“From you when you’re tacking ship and the wind won’t catch the sails,”

I answered, wishing I had never learned them.

“I’ll be goddamned if you ever heard your father curse,” he yelled.

“I’ll break your damned neck if I ever hear you curse again—do you

hear?”

I heard him. The whole ship heard him with glee. Stitches said he

embarrassed the flying fish! Father went on:

“Your mouth ain’t fit to put grub in after such language,” he roared,

“so you don’t get no meals until you forget every curse word you know!”

and with that he tied a rag over my mouth and went after a piece of rope

to warm my posterior.

I was in my bunk, my mouth tied up and my behind too sore to sit on.

What I thought of John Henry was worse than the words I had memorized to

impress him. I’d get even with him if I died in the attempt. Lying down

there on my stomach I couldn’t understand where the justice of it came

in. I had tried to be a regular sailor and had got the worst of it.

However, I was far from licked—I mean in spirit.

I amused myself by watching some bedbugs parading on my straw mattress.

Then they gave me an idea. I caught a few and put them on me. At least I

could be lousy, and so that much nearer to perfection as a seaman!

At twenty minutes past five the cabin-boy rang the supper bell. I was

hungry, but I didn’t dare to leave my cabin. I stuck my head out of my

porthole and watched the foam making pictures on the water. From

experience I knew that was the easiest and surest way to make myself

sleepy. Next morning I awoke, ravenously hungry and oh, how repentant my

empty insides made me!

I found Father behind a rapidly disappearing bowl of oatmeal in the

dining saloon.

“Hey, I’ll never curse any more if I can eat,” I promised him. He

grunted his forgiveness, then added:

“We’ll be in Brisbane along about noon today. Don’t you dare leave the

ship.”

“Can’t I be the watchman in port and save you the wages?” I inquired,

eager to get back in his good graces again.

“That wouldn’t be such a bad idea. I don’t want none of the crew ashore

in this port. I’ll have to bail them out of jail for drunkenness, and I

haven’t got the time nor the money to do that.”

“I won’t let any of them get away,” I assured him.

At about two o’clock we pulled into the harbor after sailing up the long

Brisbane River. The Customs officials came aboard and sealed up our

stores and tobacco. Then came the port doctors to examine the crew.

“Have the crew strip and line up on deck for examinations, Captain,”

instructed one of the doctors. “Everyone of them has to be vaccinated

before you can land here. We’ve got some smallpox ashore started by

sailors off a ship from China and the Philippines and the harbor is

under quarantine.”

I hurried down to the main deck to take my place in the line-up of the

crew. I was the last in the line. The doctor looked at me curiously, and

then said,

“Well, well, little one, if you aren’t the very picture of health,” and

he pinched my muscles, admiringly.

“No, I’m not,” I assured him, “I have had everything that sailors have,

worse than they get it. You better vaccinate me good,” I advised. “I

even have bedbugs on me.”

That doctor looked horrified, but he dug into my arm with three long

scratches even deeper than the men’s. It hurt like the devil, but I was

very proud at that moment because I had as many as John Henry and just

as deep. To this day I carry those scars—proud proof of my equality

with sailors.

Before Father went ashore with the Customs officials he admonished me

again to let no sailor have shore leave.

“The mate will be busy discharging cargo, and I may not be back before

late tonight, so you keep your eye on the gangway.”

I took up my station at the gangway and chawed on some dried prunes.

They were as close to seamen’s tobacco as I dared attempt. The cabin-boy

tried to go ashore, but I pushed him back. One or two of the sailors

made a bluff at sneaking past but I stood in the middle of the gangway

with a belaying pin and forgetting Father’s lesson, I laid down the law

in language to make John Henry proud. Each time they retired, defeated,

but chuckling.

I was hot in the sun, but I didn’t care. Proudly I stood my post until

six o’clock, when the crew knocked off discharging. Then came the supper

bell, and of course, no one could expect me to stay on guard at grub

time. In my father’s absence I sat in his place opposite the two mates.

After I had finished my meal I picked my teeth with a fork just as I had

watched the second mate do so many times before. I wouldn’t have dared

to do that with Father present.

I strolled up on deck to take up my gangway watch again. If any sailor

got ashore it would be over my dead body, I promised myself. I sat there

for fully two hours.

There was no sign of life from the fo’c’s’le. Not one man came out to

cross that gangway and go ashore.

“Huh!” I gloated to myself, “they’re afraid of me. They know they can’t

get away with anything with me here watching.”

I was so full of my own sense of importance and authority that I didn’t

suspect anything queer in the silence forward, until the cabin-boy came

aft, after taking the dinner basket back to the galley.

“All them guys forrard is ashore and I’m going to go ashore too,” he

sniffed at me contemptuously.

“What?” I asked, too surprised to believe I had heard him aright.

“Sure, they all went ashore while you was eating your grub. Nobody left

for’ard except the cook.”

What could I do? I had gained Father’s respect only to lose it when his

back was turned. I thought at first I’d go ashore and find the sailors

in the saloons and bring them back on board before Father got back. That

plan wasn’t wise, though, for, if I left, the cabin-boy and the two

mates might go ashore in my absence and I would be a complete failure.

I took up the belaying pin and perched myself on the top of the gangway,

and waited. I waited until long past midnight before I heard a human

sound on the dock. Suddenly my ear caught a thick, throaty song dimly

coming from among the cargo piles on the dock:

“McGinty’s back again;

He’s dressed up like a dandy,

He’s down at Mike’s saloon,

He’s drinkin’ wine and brandy . . .”

It was the voice of John Henry singing the old sailors’ funeral dirge

“McGinty.” McGinty is the legendary sea captain who sank to the bottom

of the sea, and when sailors get drunk their favorite vision is of

McGinty arisen from the dead and drinking in waterfront saloons.

“John Henry!” I called as loud as I could.

I got no answer, except his drunken voice rising in the old song.

Then he weaved out from the shadow of the cargo piled on the wharf to

stand at the foot of the gangway. He was so drunk he could hardly keep

his balance. He made three gallant efforts to place his foot on the

bottom of the gangway; finally, by grabbing the hand ropes he pulled

himself aboard and toppled over on the deck. I lifted him up and shook

him violently.

“John Henry, stand up!” I shouted at him.

He babbled something unintelligible and drooled down his shirt front as

I shook him. His bloodshot eyes focused on me and held there.

“Get your Ole Man give me money for whiskey. Got to have whiskey.”

“You’ll get a kick in the seat of the pants, that’s what you’ll get,” I

answered him.

“Got to have money for whiskey—only want whiskey,” he insisted, and he

started to sob pathetically.

“You’re drunk, John Henry. Come on and get forrard into your bunk.”

He pulled away from me and demanded through his sobs:

“You going to get Ole Man to give me some more money?”

“He isn’t here, John Henry. Come on and get forrard and turn in,” I

coaxed him.

“You get me money for whiskey or I’ll croak.”

His body began to tremble. His lips were blue, his eyes fiery and

bloodshot.

“I don’t care if you croak or not,” I answered, for I had heard threats

like that before.

“All right, gonna croak. You watch me. I’m gonna croak,” and he started

forward. I followed, hoping to get him safely to his bunk. Just beneath

the fo’c’s’le head he picked up a long piece of rope that was coiled

there on a stanchion.

“See this rope? Gonna croak if you don’t get Ole Man get me money, see?”

and he burst out crying again. He tied the piece of rope into a

hangman’s noose, nine slip knots on a loop, just as he had once taught

me to tie it months before. He held the noose up to my face and said

once more:

“I’ll croak if you don’t.”

Of course I didn’t believe him, so I just answered:

“All right, John Henry, you’ll feel better when you do!”

Instead of quieting, that seemed to set him off again. He slipped the

noose over his head and thrust his face right up against mine.

“Do I get the money?” he half shrieked in his cracked whiskey voice.

Scenes with drunken sailors were no novelty to me. They always made dire

threats against themselves, or the captain or their mates, and then they

stumbled to bed and forgot it. Now I lost patience.

“You don’t get a damned cent,” I yelled back at John Henry.

It seemed almost to sober him. He straightened.

“You’ll be sorry,” he said, and turning with great dignity he marched

out of sight forward with the hangman’s noose around his neck and the

rope trailing on the deck after him.

I turned and with what I conceived to be equal dignity marched back

toward the gangway. Duty called me. There would be more drunken sailors

to drive to their bunks.

I don’t know why I left the gangway after a short ten minutes except

that I loved John Henry and felt a vague desire to see that he was all

right. But of course I wouldn’t let him know that. I couldn’t sacrifice

my dignity as watchman in charge of the ship. So I marched forward very

importantly, past the mizzen, past the mainmast and around the cook’s

galley and there I found John Henry!

He had tied the rope around the capstan on the fo’c’s’le head and jumped

down toward the main deck. There he hung, with his feet scarce six

inches from the main deck and the hangman’s knot under his left ear

canting his head rakishly to one side. His body was turning slowly on

the rope and as I stared his face came around so his popped eyes stared

back at me and his wide opened mouth seemed to sneer, “I told you I’d do

it.”

Staring into those popped eyes I couldn’t cry out—I couldn’t move; and

then after what seemed a million years the body turned on the rope and

the face went away from me, releasing me from my speechless terror. I

shrieked, and whirling away I ran aft, down into the lazarette and hid

underneath a pile of old canvas. I heard the rats running to safety at

my approach to their domains in the dark. I had killed John Henry! I had

killed John Henry! Over and over in a numbing pain the words rushed to

my brain!

I don’t know exactly how long I stayed there before I heard voices on

the deck above me. I was afraid to come out of hiding. I could tell by

the excitement that John Henry’s body had been found. A few hours before

in the afternoon I had been sore at him for encouraging me to curse and

now he was dead!

Weak, and still shaking with fright I found my way on deck. I saw Father

and a group of strange men on deck surrounding a figure covered with

canvas.

I called to Father:

“Here I am. I didn’t do it—honest I didn’t.” And I crumpled over

crying.

Father picked me up and held me in his arms.

“What makes you think you did it, Joan?” he asked, so quietly and

tenderly that I told him the whole story.

Johnny was buried in Brisbane, but I have never to this day wanted to

tie a hangman’s noose.

[Illustration]

Ideas about Women

“Women ain’t going to do you no good, Joan. Takin’ them by and large

they’re mostly liars anyhow, and the ones you find around the waterfront

is just plain head winds.”

We were tied up at the dock in Brisbane, Australia, when Father

delivered his dictum. I knew he meant by “women” the gold-toothed, plump

barmaids and the laughing sweethearts that swarmed around every arriving

ship to get the sailors’ pay, or beg curios from them. Those women had

always been objects of curiosity to me and Father knew it.

“If any of them women try to talk to you, you go below and don’t have

anything to do with them, understand?”

I understood and promised to obey. I did not imagine that there was any

danger of my not obeying, for two reasons. First, I was afraid of women.

Second, they were all much too grand and beautiful ever to pay attention

to me. Father had planted that fear of my own sex in me to keep me from

picking up with chance women. He was afraid I would learn things from

them that would destroy his years of careful protection of my ideals. He

never let me look at myself in a mirror.

“You’re an ugly kid, Joan, so you won’t gain anything from looking at

yourself in a mirror.”

It would have been worth a sailor’s life to offer a mirror to me and in

all the years I was on board I don’t believe it occurred to any of the

men forward. Aft, there was only one looking-glass, a small cracked one

used by Father when he shaved in port, and even that he kept carefully

hidden from me. My only chance to see myself was in the rain barrels on

deck. If you think you can get a good idea of your personal appearance

by looking into a rain barrel on a swaying, rolling ship, try it. My

face used to ripple back at me like a blurred cabbage. As far as I knew

I looked exactly like that image reflected in the rain barrel, so of

course I believed Father when he told me I was so ugly that women ashore

looking at my face would laugh at me.

Since then Father has confessed he made me think myself hopelessly ugly

so that I should never be conceited. He said it was one of his dreams

for me that I should be unspoiled and be beautiful inside. But, I did

not know that then, and I believed all he said about my personal

appearance.

How I used to envy the barmaids and the sweethearts about the docks! To

me they seemed so beautiful and the sailors were always so glad to see

them. No sailor, save old Stitches, ever seemed really glad to see me.

The crew all thought I was a nuisance. Father’s warning was unnecessary.

I would not have dared to speak to those beautiful land women.

The day after he so put me on my guard I was sitting on the skylight

aft, watching the cargo boom dip down in the hold and bring up a

rope-net full of copra and swing it over to the dock where the

stevedores dumped it into a big dory. McLean and Axel Oleson were on

duty at the mizzen hatch where they bellowed orders to the crew below to

get the “barnacles off their sterns and load up the nets quicker.” The

men below seemed in no mood to hurry, judging by Oleson’s remarks to

them, for he traced their ancestors to dubious origins in English and

Scandinavian. It was no novelty to me to hear such talk—it wasn’t even

varied enough to keep me interested.

I was beginning to get tired of watching when from my perch on the

skylight I saw a pretty woman coming down the dock. She walked slowly as

if she wasn’t sure of her destination, but when she drew close enough to

the ship to be noticed she became all smiles. She pretended she didn’t

see McLean and Axel on deck, but I could tell she did see them by the

careful way she avoided looking at them. She came up the gangway, which

was just forward of the poop deck and spoke to me.

“Hello, little girl,” she said.

I got all goose flesh, I was so thrilled at being noticed. All thought

of Father’s warning vanished.

“Hello,” I answered. “Where the hell are you going? Have you got

business on this ship?” I was being very nautical, as it was my one

chance to show off my authority.

She was so fluffy and soft-looking, surely she couldn’t hurt me. Now she

was staring at me—at my overalls and my bare feet sticking out beneath

them.

“You know you’re a bloody pretty kid,” she said. I flushed to the roots

of my hair. It was the first time I had ever been paid a compliment. I

studied her face closely to see if she was just making fun of me, but

she seemed sincere.

“Aw, hell, I’m not as pretty as you, Miss!” I replied, taking in her

high heel buttoned shoes and her hat with flowers and ribbons on it.

“And you smell good, too.” That vision of loveliness was bathed in cheap

perfume, but to me it was divine compared to the stink of the rotten

copra being hauled out of the hold.

I had no way of judging women except from the conversation among the

sailors that I had caught. I thought every woman’s character was

measured by her ankles and her hips, for often I had heard the sailors

say: “a good pair of hips and little ankles is worth nine months’ pay.”

So, using their standard of perfection of womanhood, I measured the

woman who stood before me. She was perfect.

“Got any glad rags, Kid?” she asked.

“No, but I’ve got some tapa cloth and two tortoise-shell bracelets with

pearl in them,” I answered, hoping to impress her.

“I mean, haven’t you got any pretties to go around with gents? I bet all

the sailors aboard here are nuts about you.”

“No, they ain’t,” I answered hastily. “If I ever lay down on the job of

pulling on ropes when I’m needed, or get in their way when they unload a

cargo, they kick my pants for me.”

She became very much interested in me.

“Say, what do you stick on this bloody barge for? You ought to be down

with me and the girls where you’d be appreciated.”

“You mean leave the ship?”

“Sure, I’ll get you a swell job with me and the girls down at the Union

Hotel.”

It sounded wonderful to me. I was tired of staying on the ship, day

after day in port, with no one to play with. Perhaps I would find

companions ashore. I was sure no harm could come from just going with

her for a little while. For a moment I hesitated, then one glance at her

thin ankles and her broad hips assured me that she must be a good woman.

Proudly I followed her down the gangway, and as I passed McLean I told

him to tell Father I was going to take a job at the Union Hotel for a

few days until the ship was ready to sail.

How set up I was to be walking along the dock with this beautiful woman

who thought I was pretty!

The Union Hotel was a small, dingy-looking place about a block from the

wharf. I had passed it several times on my walks ashore with Father, and

I had heard the sailors speak of it as the “Seamen’s Rest.” They always

grinned when they said that and I wondered why.

“Come in and meet my lady friends,” urged my new friend. I accompanied

her gladly. The stuffy interior of the cheap waterfront hotel seemed the

height of elegance to me. We entered the “pub” (English for saloon).

“Where’s the job?” I asked, for on shipboard the first thing a man did

was to get to work. Then I discovered that my guide and her “lady

friends” were barmaids.

“Here, sailor-girl, you take this end station, and you’ll get lots of

tips. Sometimes the blokes gives as much as sixpence if we smile

pretty.”

I was so pleased to be accepted by those women that I put my conscience

out of its misery about leaving the ship and went to my station behind

the bar. I was having a lot of fun until some sweating stevedores came

in.

“Beer for us,” was their order.

One of the group I recognized as the cargo tally man from our dock. He

seemed shocked to see me behind the bar drawing foamy mugs of beer.

“Say, does your old man know you’re here?” he asked suspiciously.

“It’s none of your business,” I answered. The girls giggled and

encouraged me to go on. “Besides, I can knock your block off if you

squeal on me.” Again the barmaids cheered me on. The other stevedores

gathered around and began guying him, but the tally man persisted:

“I’ve known your father off and on for fifteen years and I’m going to

take you back on board ship for him.” He reached over and pulled me by

the arm to hasten my departure.

“I’m warning you to take your hands off me or I’ll knock your block

off,” I snarled at him. I was thrilled at being the center of attention.

I wanted to show off in front of the barmaids how strong I was and how

well I could scrap. The tally man seemed to have but one thought—to get

me out of the place in a hurry even if he had to use force to do it. I

was equally determined to stand my ground. He tried to pull me to the

door. I swung around on him and hit him as hard as I could. The girls

cheered me again. I hit the tally man once more, then he took me by the

shoulders and shook me like a rag.

That was too humiliating; I saw red. Hitting, kicking, butting with my

head, I sailed into him. Taken by surprise he went down. The barmaids

let out squeals of delight—the stevedores roared with laughter. We were

on the sawdust floor of the pub, rolling over and over, punching and

clawing. He didn’t want to hurt me and I wanted to kill him. That made

it almost an even fight.

For about three minutes we were at it and then I found myself flat on my

face with one of his hands gripping my neck and my own right fist held

up between my shoulder blades. It was the hammerlock hold I had seen

used in sailor fights and I was completely helpless.

“Now, you little hell-cat, you march back to that ship,” he growled, and

lifted me from the floor, pushed me out the door, and walked me down the

dock to the vessel. I had a cut lip and a black eye. The tally man

called to McLean:

“Say, you better watch this kid until her father gets back. She was

hanging around a bar down at the Union Hotel—and that joint’s a bed

house.”

I hurried below and washed the blood from my face, ashamed that any of

our sailors should see me licked. But no matter how I scrubbed I

couldn’t erase my black eye so I decided to get in my bunk and not

attract Father’s attention to me. It seemed I always remembered to obey

Father after I had forgotten to!

When Father returned to the ship he came in my cabin and asked:

“What are you turning in so early for?”

I took great care to lie face downwards so he couldn’t see my eyes as I

told him:

“I don’t feel very well. Guess I don’t want any supper.”

What relief! I could see Father hadn’t heard of my humiliating defeat at

the hands of a tally man in the Union Hotel.

“If you’re sick, there’s no use bellyaching about it. I’ll fix you up a

dose of salts and that’ll get the kinks out of you.”

He brought me a coffee mug half full of epsom salts. I swallowed the

stuff and then I lay there thinking deep and unkind thoughts about

women. The laughter of the barmaids as I was marched out of that pub by

the tally man still rang in my ears. My soul was bitter within me and I

swore to myself that I would never again trust a woman—not even if she

smelled of perfume to high heaven and had inch-thin ankles!

But I wasn’t to get off from my latest escapade as easily as I had

thought. I was still lying in my bunk, trying to figure out how I was

fooled by that barmaid, when I heard a man’s voice in the companionway

asking:

“Can I see the Captain? I gotta tell him something he oughta know.”

My heart sank. The voice was that of the tally man and I suspected that

he had come to tell on me. I wasn’t left in doubt long, for soon I heard

Father’s indignant voice asking:

“Do you mean to tell me that my kid was in a pub with a barmaid?”

“Yes, Captain, and she started a brawl there. It’s pretty dangerous

business to leave a girl like her hang around the waterfront. I wouldn’t

let a kid of mine do it, no sir!”

Their voices dropped to an indistinguishable mumble of words, but I knew

the result would be serious. I’d get even with that tally man before he

knew it! I’d teach him to squeal on me after he had given me a black

eye. Whatever thoughts I had about the matter left me when Father came

into my cabin. He wasn’t angry, as I expected him to be. Rather he

seemed unusually quiet and thoughtful. He sat on the edge of my bunk and

after a pause, he said:

“Joan.”

“Huh?” I murmured, with my face still hidden in my pillow to hide my

telltale black eye.

“Turn over and look at me.”

“I know what you look like,” I countered, still face downwards. “You

haven’t changed since I saw you a couple of hours ago.”

“Yes, I have changed. I’ve changed my mind about you.” I didn’t know

what to think about his sudden tack, so I stalled for an opening to

defend myself:

“Can’t you let a fellow sleep that don’t feel good?”

Father took me by the shoulders and turned me over. He didn’t say a word

about my black eye, he seemed to overlook it.

“Joan, we’re going to be here in port about thirty days. I gotta get a

new foremast set in, and a general overhaul of the vessel when the cargo

is discharged.”

I still couldn’t see where he was heading.

“You’ve disobeyed me for the last time. But I’m partly to blame, so I’m

not goin’ to punish you. Only when you get big enough to go with

barmaids and fight with men, it’s time to put some thought on your

future. I’ve got a lot of thinkin’ to do about you, Joan—a lot of

thinkin’.”

And he went away leaving me vastly relieved, only had I known what was

to come out of his thinking I would have been more worried than ever

before in my life.

Father kept me on board ship all during our stay in port, with only

occasional walks along the waterfront in his company. We sailed with a

cargo of wool and ballast for the United States. We were going to Frisco

to get a load of lumber.

After ninety-three days of uneventful sailing we sighted the Farallone

Islands off the Golden Gate. A tugboat steamed out thirty miles to pick

us up. How excited I was to see the smoke of that tug coming toward us!

When it came within hailing distance the captain called through his

megaphone:

“Want a tow?”

“How much?” called back Father.

“Four hundred dollars to inside anchorage.”

“I’ll see you in Hell first,” answered Father.

“Two hundred dollars,” came back the tugboat captain.

“I’ll sail this bloody ship right up to the ferry building under her own

canvas,” came Father’s reply.

Cursing, the tugboat captain let out a string of degrading opinions of

the kind of master Father was—and Father returned the compliment. My

father holds a license as pilot of San Francisco harbor so he didn’t

even have to hire a pilot or a tugboat to get inside the Heads. The

tugboat steamed alongside us at half-speed, ready to throw us a hawser

if the wind died and we were forced to be towed in, but Father entered

the Golden Gate, sailed past Mile Rock Light House, dipped the flag in

salute to the lighthouse keeper, and came to safe anchorage off Alcatraz

Island. He let go the hooks and waved a superior good-bye to the

indignant tugboat captain.

There was a brisk breeze blowing over the Bay and hardly a cloud

overhead. To the eastward rolled the hills of Berkeley.

“Your mother’s over there, Joan. I’m going to ship you off this trip.”

I stared at Father.

“You mean me leave the ship?”

He didn’t look at me as he replied:

“Yes, it’s high time you had a woman’s care of you.” That was the first

he told me of his plan to send me ashore to live.

“Are you going to quit the sea too?” I was filled with terror. Not to be

on the ship any more—ever? Never to steer a course under the Southern

Cross—reef a sail in a storm, never to set a halyard to the rhythm of

Swede’s chantey?

“No. I’m goin’ to stay on this ship as long as she floats. I’ll stand by

her until she goes down under me.” He looked away from the hills out

towards the sea. Little did Father realize when he spoke those words

that they would come true!

I was going to live on shore with my mother and brothers and sister. I

didn’t even remember what my mother looked like. She was only a

beautiful symbol to me—something far off and not quite real that had

been painted for me in words from my father—and not someone real that I

could live with. But now I must. Father would make me. It seemed too

terrible to endure.

The Quarantine officers and Customs officers passed us. There was

nothing then to keep me from going ashore. Father packed my canvas sea

bag full of my belongings. It bulged with my sea boots, my oilskins and

sou’wester. I wrapped my little boats carefully in burlap and carried

them under my arm for they were too precious to trust to careless hands.

My other treasures were a jaw of shark teeth and an octopus in a big can

of alcohol.

Stitches came aft to help load my things into the dinghy to go ashore.

“Ain’t you ever comin’ back to us, Skipper?” Stitches asked me in a

hoarse voice which was barely audible. I hadn’t realized until then that

I’d be leaving him behind. I couldn’t leave Stitches, for I loved him.

“Can’t you come to the land with me, Stitches? You can live with me for

always,” I said.

Stitches didn’t answer me; he just sort of blew his nose and looked

away.

“I’m coming back some time, Stitches,” I promised. I saw his old hands

shaking as he tied my bundles up. He seemed to delay the parting by

fumbling around. I gave him my ships to hold and I went below to change

into my dress and hair ribbon. When I came up on deck the crew had

disappeared off the decks. Weren’t they going to say good-bye to me?

Even Stitches was nowhere to be seen.

“Come on, cast off now,” Father called.

Bulgar and Oleson were in the dinghy below waiting to row Father and me

ashore. I climbed up to the rail and started down the Jacob’s ladder

when I suddenly remembered something I had forgotten. I dashed back on

deck and made for the cabin.

“Now what the hell?” called Father after me.

I grabbed my four kittens I had forgotten and put them in a flour sack,

then I went up on the poop deck to where my pet seagull was in a

packing-case cage.

“Come on, Old Man, we’re going ashore,” I told the gull as I put him

under one arm. Then I swung the sack of cats over my shoulder, and once

more I went to the Jacob’s ladder to disembark.

What a fine bunch of barnacles the crew were, I thought, when I couldn’t

see them anywhere. Just as I went over the side I spotted them—Stitches

was behind the mizzen mast pretending to be looking the opposite

direction from me; Swede and the Jap cook were peeking out at me from

the donkey-room forward. Fred Nelson acted the queerest of all of them.

He appeared to be absorbed in polishing the brass on the binnacle, but

he polished the one spot so steadily I thought he would wear it out.

“Hey Skipper,” he called: “Here’s somethin’ to remember the ship by.” He

came down to me and handed me a plug of Star Cut Plug Tobacco. “It ain’t

much, but it’s wishin’ you a fair wind for your westin’.” His face

seemed white and drawn. He looked at me so hard I thought he was looking

right through me.

“Pile down here and quit your dawdling,” Father ordered from his seat in

the dinghy.

A funny lump came in my throat. It felt as if I had swallowed too big a

hunk of oatmeal and it had stuck in my windpipe. I couldn’t make the

feeling go away. I was afraid I would start to blubber at leaving the

crew forever and especially my adored Stitches, so I yelled out very

loud as I descended the Jacob’s ladder:

“So long, everybody. I won’t ever forget you.”

[Illustration]

I find navigating on shore full of shoals

In the small boat Father asked why I had brought the gull and what was

in the flour sack.

“My belongings!” I answered.

“Your mother’ll never stand for that junk to clutter up her house.

You’re a landsman now, Joan, and things is going to be different.” I

couldn’t understand why Father didn’t give me the devil instead of

talking so low and quiet-like. I thought he was glad to get rid of me

because I was always such a worry to him.

The ride on the ferry boat across San Francisco Bay to get a train to

Berkeley was an experience I’ll never forget. A crowd gathered around me

on the ferry to look at my seagull and the octopus in the can. The

kittens squirmed around in their sack but I didn’t open it because I was

afraid they’d get away from me. I didn’t realize then that I was a freak

sight. I thought all the people who grouped around me wanted to be

friends, so I took them into my confidence freely. They smiled and

looked at one another as I talked. I was telling them about the South

Seas; how I got the little octopus; what the name of our ship was. No

one did any talking except me—the crowd just stared at me and listened.

At the Oakland Pier we got a train. The conductor came along and tried

to take the seagull and bag of cats away from me. He wanted to put them

in the baggage car, but I protested, and he let me keep them. When we

arrived in Berkeley Father took a taxi from the station up to my

mother’s house. I was all eyes at the surrounding view, the rolling

hills, the houses with neat lawns, trolley cars, groups of laughing boys

and girls strolling along the streets. I forgot the ship for an instant.

In my transport of joy I could think of nothing but my new life.

We got out of the cab in front of a two-story wooden house. We walked up

a path and through a gate that had two tall posts on either side of it.

On one of them was a weather vane—a whale on a stick that spun around

in the wind. It had been there for years and Mother used it to watch for

shore winds to blow my father home. A tangled mass of bright-colored

flowers lined the walk. A huge climbing vine with flowers the color of

South Sea coral hanging from them half covered the porch. They were

roses, the first I had ever seen. The appearance of the house made me

think of a contented turtle asleep in seaweeds. I couldn’t get enough of

the beauty of the garden. I felt Father’s hand tugging at my arm.

“There’s your mother, Joan.”

I looked up, and there I saw my mother standing in the doorway. She was

wiping her hands on her apron and crying and laughing all at once. My

first impression of her was of a round, chubby little woman—round and

delicious, like a duff pudding that looked so good I could eat it. Her

skin was very white, her eyes as blue as the water in a lagoon, and the

wisps of grey hair that fell on her forehead reminded me of white sea

spray. I couldn’t take my eyes off her—my mother! I had seen her five

years before when she came to a lumber camp in Oregon to see Father, but

the memory of her was blurred. Father’s romantic picture of her was more

vivid in my mind than my actual recollection. She was so different from

any woman I knew. Dressed in a faded blue house dress with a white

collar fastened with a shell pink coral brooch—wiping her hands on her

apron—always will that picture remain with me. I didn’t know what to

say to her. She was expecting her seafarers home, for Father had

telephoned her from San Francisco. Was I as much of a surprise to her as

she was to me? I expected my mother to be gruff like Father but her

voice was gentle—she was all softness.

What did daughters do when they met their mothers?

Father threw his arms around Mother and lifted her from the floor. He

hadn’t seen her for five years! I felt a twinge of jealousy at being

left out. I had always been most important to Father and Mother was

usurping my place. She left Father’s arms and gathered me to her. Her

hands were so soft and smooth they felt funny as they petted me. She

seemed so weak compared with sailors. Her arms didn’t have as much

strength as one of my toes. Physical strength was my ideal and she did

not have it. I knew she was somebody wonderful but she was going to have

to prove it.

“Speak to your mother,” Father said.

I eyed her up and down, from truck to keel, before I answered:

“Are you going to let me have my seagull and cats here?”

Mother laughed and said:

“You can keep them in the back yard.”

With that compromise settled, I let down my barriers of hostility. I

don’t know whether I was thrilled at being in a house that was a home or

whether I was terrified. I remember I felt shut in and cramped, and my

brothers and sister standing around staring at me as if I were a mirage

instead of a real person didn’t put me at my ease.

“Joan, you change your dress because it is dinner time. We have dinner

for the boarders at twelve o’clock,” was the next thing Mother said.

“I haven’t got any other dress,” I answered. My voice, attuned to the

open sea, boomed like a cannon in that small room.

“Don’t talk so loudly,” cautioned Mother.

My mother, to help make both ends meet, kept boarders from the

University of California.

“They are professors, dear. You can sit at the same table with them.”

“Are professors all men?” I wanted to know. Mother said they were men,

the ones that lived at that house.

“Because I don’t like women,” I added.

My sister retired from the room. She was a very proper young lady and

she didn’t approve of me at all. That noon I met the boarders. They were

introduced to me, and then they began firing questions at me from all

sides.

I thought they were nice, friendly men who were interested in the sea,

until they took sides against me.

“Do you mean to tell us that you _saw_ a native child actually being

born?” came the horrified voice of the professor of economics.

“Sure I saw it. You didn’t think she stopped having her baby just

because I was there, did you?” I retorted. Those professors thought I

was lying. What did they know about the sea, anyway? Then, contradicting

another statement I had happened to make, came the retort:

“In our civilized world today there is no such thing as slave trading.”

The bewhiskered professor across from me brought his hand down on the

table with a smack as he said it. He was trying to show me up and it got

under my collar.

“The hell there ain’t,” I cried back at him just as hard and so much

louder that he drew back in his shell.

“Sssh! Joan!” It was Mother’s voice from the head of the table. I guess

she thought I would drive away her boarders.

“I won’t sssh!” I cried just as loud as ever. “He’s trying to make me

out a liar. Ask Father, he’ll tell you.”

“Sure there is slave trading today,” said Father grudgingly. “It’s

called blackbirdin’ in the South Seas. Some sea captains on sailin’

ships take cargoes of natives and ‘contract’ them for a pound apiece for

five years to the planters in Northern Australia. When the natives have

been worked almost to death the planters pay the sea captains to take

the natives back to the islands they stole them from. Instead of takin’

them back to their own islands, the captains dump their loads of blacks

on the first handy island that lies in their course. That’s why now you

hardly ever see a pure breed of native in any tribe—the blackbirders

have mixed them up.”

“Astonishing!” was the comment of the learned questioners.

“Astonishing!” Mother didn’t tell Father to sssh! They didn’t dare

openly dispute Father so they turned back on me. First they asked about

storms at sea, adventures on our voyages—then they disbelieved them.

The professor of economics was the worst.

“You are a very interesting study, little girl.” He rose from the table

leaving me feeling like a germ under a microscope. I could see that

navigating wasn’t going to be so easy with those landlubbers.

That night I slept for the first time in my life in a regular bed. The

sheets felt so tickly and cool and the mattress was soft, but I couldn’t

sleep. The house was so still and it didn’t rock! The stillness made me

feel seasick. I couldn’t hear the noise of feet on deck above me. My

bird and cats were in the hold, or rather what is called on shore, the

cellar of the house. And so I lay awake most of the night pitching and

tossing and wishing the house would just rock a little bit so I could go

to sleep.

The following morning I was up at daybreak. I dressed quickly and ran

through the house calling:

“All hands on deck. It’s four bells!”

Father came out of his room and caught me by the back of the neck.

“Pipe down, you. There’s folks asleep,” he said. It was time to eat

breakfast according to ship schedule. The boarders were awakened by my

cries. Mother served them their breakfast as soon as she could prepare

it. When she called breakfast I dashed to the table and grabbed the

biggest portion of scrambled eggs and a stack of pancakes and began

scoffing them.

“Where are your manners?” It was Mother speaking as she took my

self-helping away from me.

“I got here first,” I protested, “and it’s first come first get!” But

Mother just couldn’t understand.

There followed a series of days full of bewildering problems for me. The

other children on our block, instead of playing with me as I used to

dream children would, drew away from me.

“She swears bad words,” I heard one girl tell another.

“That girl off the ship is too rough, my mother says,” confided her

little friend. And so it went. Why didn’t they like me? Here were

children my own age and I didn’t know how to play with them. Everything

I said or did sent them away from me. My own sister and my brothers

found excuses to take them away to their friends, leaving me behind.

Running her boarding house kept Mother constantly busy and Father was at

the ship all day long. When he came home in the evenings it was Mother

he naturally turned to. I seemed forgotten. Oh, how I longed for a storm

to arise to blow away the fear and loneliness of the land. I couldn’t

stay in the house because it crushed me down and the professors didn’t

approve of me. I kept out in the backyard as much as I could. Everything

was so different on land. My seagull died the second day I was home. I

tried to replace it with love for the chickens Mother kept. But chickens

couldn’t fly. They seemed as bound down to the earth as I was, away from

the ship. Even the roses in the garden had thorns on them. The lilies in

the islands were soft-stemmed and lovely. I couldn’t bear it. I wouldn’t

obey my mother because I knew she wasn’t strong enough to lick me. Every

night Father came home from the ship and she would tell him how

difficult I was to handle.

“She is your child. You’ll have to handle her,” I heard her tell Father.

“Joan will get used to land ways soon, Mother, don’t you worry about

her.”

I heard Father and Mother discussing me.

“You raised her—so perhaps you can discipline her,” Mother said.

“Joan is your daughter. If you try to understand her she’ll steer as

easy as a full-rigger in a fair wind,” came back Father.

“She’ll drive all my boarders away. Last night I heard her ask one of

the professors if he had ever gone through a shark’s guts with his

hands.” Mother was horrified as she related the facts to Father. Instead

of finding sympathetic ears for the story of my disgraceful conduct,

Mother saw Father laughing.

“As if that wasn’t bad enough Joan said this was a hell of a house

because there wasn’t a bedbug or a cockroach in it. I tell you, you’ll

have to speak to her.”

I couldn’t understand why Mother thought that I was terrible because I

acted as I did. She went on:

“The child insists on practising spitting through a crack in the back

fence at the woman next door.”

Poor Mother! At that time I wondered why she was so distressed. Now that

the first glamour was gone, I looked upon my sister and brothers as

jelly fish because they couldn’t lick me or climb or spit or swear for

beans. I had been home, “on land” as I termed it, for three weeks when

Father announced that he was going to sail. Mother packed his sea bag.

Father never had a suitcase. He always used his own sea “ditty bags.”

A shot of agony went through me when I realized he was leaving, and

without me. I couldn’t bear it. I wouldn’t stay on the land. Unable to

contain myself I ran to my father and kicked him in the pants to make

him notice me more than he noticed Mother.

“Say, ain’t I going with you?” I pleaded.

Father looked at me in a puzzled way, as if he didn’t know how to answer

me, then he said:

“I’m just getting ready to sail, Joan. Thought I’d get my things on

board all ready in case we get a fair wind that’ll take us out without

any towboat.”

That settled it for me. I’d run away. If he thought he could leave me on

land while he sailed off to the South Seas again he’d be mistaken. My

sense of navigation came in handy. I remembered how we came from San

Francisco to Berkeley. I’d go back to San Francisco the same way, but I

didn’t have any money. That night when the house was asleep I sneaked

into my father’s room and got his pants. I stole a big silver dollar

from them and kept it in my fist all night. It was my price to freedom.

The following morning while Mother was busy, and after my brothers and

sister had started for work or school, I left home. Without hat or coat

I took shore leave from the house with only my four kittens for company

and went to San Francisco. I found my way to the dock opposite our

schooner which lay at anchorage and I told a fisherman that I belonged

on the _Minnie A. Caine_.

“Will you row me out for this much money?” I asked, and I showed him a

half dollar in change. The old fisherman grinned and told me to get in

his row boat, and he pulled me out to the ship, but he wouldn’t take my

money. I climbed on deck and bumped smack into Stitches. The old man’s

eyes nearly popped out in joy at seeing me again.

“I knowed the Old Man wouldn’t let you stay ashore. I know he’d bring

you back,” he repeated over and over like a chant.

“He didn’t bring me back. I ran away.” I didn’t even ask Stitches not to

tell. He hid me in the lazarette in a bed of old canvas. The Jap cook

brought me some bread and a big can of soup. Fred Nelson was the only

one of the crew who didn’t volunteer to help deceive my father about me.

He came down to speak to me, but I guess he forgot what he wanted to say

because his only words were:

“It ain’t much company for you, kid, these rats what live down here,”

and so saying he turned on his heel and went back on deck. I stayed down

in the dark hold all day, but I would have stayed there forever rather

than go back to the land where everything I did was wrong. Along about

six o’clock I heard Father’s voice on the poop deck above me.

“I’ll break every goddamned one of your necks if you don’t tell me where

she is,” he said.

I heard Swede and Stitches and the Jap cook stalling.

“I know she came back here. She wouldn’t go no place else, so out with

it. Where is she hiding?” he demanded. I heard each of the crew deny

over and over that they knew anything about me, then I heard a scuffle.

Father was beating some one of them up. I might just as well give up, I

concluded, so I climbed out of the lazarette on deck. I faced an angry

father.

“What the hell’s the idea?” he shouted at me, but somehow I didn’t feel

he was as mad as he looked.

“If I let you give me a good licking, can I stay?” I asked. I would

rather have died on that ship than give up. The crew gave me a look with

one accord that seemed to say: “You’ve made liars of us.” But strangely

enough, Father didn’t try to punish them.

“Get forrard about your duties. What are you loafin’ around here for?”

he roared at them. Father gave me a licking with a rope’s end and I

swear it felt good. It was like old times again, but when he had

finished he took me ashore. My mother was very silent that night. I ate

my supper in the kitchen and went to bed without speaking to her.

I was up at daylight the next morning, but I wasn’t soon enough for

Father. He had left for the ship an hour before. I went outside and a

strong wind was blowing. The sky was clear and I could see the blue

water of the bay from our front porch. In the backyard was a giant

eucalyptus tree. I climbed it with as much ease as I could scale the

rigging on the ship. The higher I climbed the farther I could see out

the Golden Gate. From my perch on the peak of the tree, I saw the ships

at anchor in the bay. One of them was my ship. That wind meant Father

would set sail. He was going without me! I found myself crying

inside-like and I kept saying:

“Don’t leave me on land, Father! Come back and get me! Please, oh,

please don’t let me die of loneliness here on land.”

I didn’t take my eyes off the distant harbor. I stared through the cold

wind until my eyes burned with pain. I must have been up there for about

three hours. I was hoping against hope that Father would hear me calling

to him to come back and get me, when through my daze I heard my mother’s

voice far below me at the root of the tree calling to me to come down.

But I wouldn’t come down. Maybe our ship would sail if I took my eyes

off the bay. Maybe I wouldn’t see her go. After a while Mother quit

calling and went away.

A loud clanging of bells broke into my spell. Glancing below I saw a big

red firewagon in front of the house. Firemen were rigging up two ladders

against the tree and three of the men climbed up after me. Mother had

called out the fire department, to get me down.

“I won’t come down,” I warned. “Go away and leave me alone.”

Instead of coming down I climbed one branch higher. I would stay there

until I dropped. The wind was like a soothing hand to my bewildered

mind. Up there it was friendly. Silly little fool that I was, I thought

the land was all off its keel and it was really only me. I couldn’t

adjust myself to foreign surroundings.

But soon, how soon I don’t remember, I heard my father’s voice bellowing

up at me:

“On deck, you!” That was all he called, but I came down the tree like a

sailor shaken off the foot ropes in a storm.

“Yes, sir?” I said when I faced him on the ground, surrounded by a

frantic group of neighbors who had been attracted by the firewagon.

There was great confusion and explanations. I stuck to my story that I

thought he was sailing without me. My mother didn’t say anything. She

looked as if she was crying inside.

“Take Joan back to the sea. She’ll fret herself away here,” she told

Father when we went in the house.

“What makes you think I want her?” Father came back.

“You’ve been delaying sailing for a week. Your cargo is on board; you’ve

had fair winds off shore; now you come and tell me your sailors have

refused to ship out with you because Joan’s leaving is a bad omen—and

yet you didn’t fight about it. If you told the truth to yourself it

would be that you don’t want to go without Joan. Take her back with

you.”

I could have kissed my mother, and I would have if I hadn’t thought it

was too sissy to do it.

Father hotly denied that he had held up sailing on account of me, but he

didn’t look mother in the eye when he blustered:

“I’m sailin’ on the flood tide tonight, Mother, and Joan goes with me.”

True to his word Father sailed that night and I was on board. After

helping set sail, I climbed to the crosstrees where I watched the

receding lights of the harbor disappear into a foggy bank of night. A

snorting breeze carried us out the Golden Gate past the Farallone

Islands, and beyond the moan of the bell buoy on the shoals. Our bow was

pointed due west. The jibboom plunged under rising swells and shook

itself free. The ship rolled and groaned as if she were relieved in her

freedom from anchorage. I heard six bells ring below, and the watch was

set. Nelson was at the wheel, Stitches was singing on the fo’c’s’le

head, and the dim glow of Father’s pipe traced his paces from the

binnacle to the rail and back, and I, up in the spanker crosstrees

thumbed my nose at the land we left far astern.

[Illustration]

From the region of floating mountains of ice to the Island of White

Natives

“We’ll have to dodge the hurricanes south of the Equator this trip,”

said my father to the mate, as we sailed out of Adelaide, South

Australia, with a load of salt for the States. “With a dead weight on

board of wet salt it’ll be too dangerous to try to outride the storms at

this time of the year.”

It was April—just the beginning of tropic winter time. By the time we

had sailed south of Tasmania and had circled the South Island of New

Zealand, which would take about two months, we would be right in the

midst of the worst weather of the year.

“We better get the fog horn out and the riding lights trimmed if you’re

going to take that south passage, Captain,” observed the mate. “Them

fogs and mists from the Antarctic are mean beggars.”

I was soon to find out why the mate referred to the Antarctic as mean.

Father had set a course around to the southward of Tasmania. For three

weeks we sailed with fair wind and clear skies, and then the fair wind

gradually changed to a stinging sharpness. The skies misted up in a sort

of transparent fog, and mirages appeared on the horizon. Mirrored

against the indefinite horizon were two islands with tropical foliage

seemingly floating in space. The mirage is a dangerous thing to

mariners, for it confuses even the most careful navigation.

“Joan, you ain’t much use, you go on the fo’c’s’le head and turn the

foghorn, three short blasts a minute, then one long one,” said my

father.

“Are you afraid of running into another vessel down here?” I asked.

“Not a chance of sighting even a hunk of driftwood, but the marine law

says we have to squawk a foghorn when we get in the iceberg region.”

I had never seen an iceberg, and I was over-eager to be on the lookout

on the fo’c’s’le head to sight the first one. Our foghorn was a

contraption that looked like a big coffee grinder. It was green with

tarnish and thick with rust. I took my position just port of the capstan

and ground away. I was rewarded by a rasping grunt. It took all my

strength to spin the handle around just to make one blast. In spite of

the cold I soon got very warm trying to make the three short and one

long blasts come. Father came forward and watched me straining away on

it. He grinned at my exhaustion and said he thought that would keep me

out of deviltry for a while, or make me so tired that I’d be willing to

sleep and give him a respite from watching me.

The noise of the horn began to echo back at me in an eerie tone. I

called to Father:

“We must be near land. The echo is coming back at me strong.”

He dashed to the fo’c’s’le head, and peered into the thickening mush of

fog. The sea was so still that every sound became magnified. In a few

minutes the suck-suck sound of water washing against some bulk came to

our ears.

“Drop the topsails,” he bellowed, “bring her around.” With a violent

jerk, the ship came up in the wind and stopped. Ahead of us, not more

than five hundred yards away, loomed a giant iceberg. As we watched it,

it sank deep in the black water and then, as if it were some living

beast, it heaved high out of the sea. The swish of the water around it,

the suction of its movements, made a dangerous current. We began to

drift nearer to it. Our ship had no power except that of the sails, and

the wind had dropped and left them limp and powerless.

“Throw over the kedge anchors,” Father ordered. Kedge anchors are small,

and used for emergency cases. The men rushed aft and threw one over each

side the vessel. They gave weight and pulled us back from drifting head

on to the iceberg. For a few minutes they held, but the water around us

was a seething mass of cross currents. Other bergs, larger and deeper,

were in the offing. We had run into a whole nest of them. A steamer

could have backed away, turned around, and left the place of danger, but

our ship was helpless to move. The bergs made deep valleys, and whatever

wind there was was cut off by their height. The water sounded as if it

were boiling around us. The mate threw over a chip of wood to see which

way we were drifting, but the chip just whirled around and went down. A

typhoon would have been a welcome visitor then, for at least its wind

would have carried us away—but just being becalmed, waiting for the

jaws of the iceberg to finish us, was like a terrible nightmare.

The cabin-boy and the Jap cook crouched behind the galley, pale and

shaking with fright. Father’s face was set grimly. A frozen death

awaited us. Things at sea seem to take on human qualities. The

perversity of the wind was the curse of some dead sea captain, and

baffling calms were from the souls of lost sailors. That nearest iceberg

was like a sea beast gloating over us as its prey.

“All hands on deck!” went the cry from Father, and it was repeated down

the fo’c’s’le. The men came scrambling up, buttoning their oilskins and

sou’westers around themselves closely. When they were all ready Father

turned to them:

“You’ve got one chance in a thousand to get out of here with your lives.

Throw overboard the cargo.”

In a flash the crew were tearing away the battens off the hatches. If

the heavy cargo was thrown overboard, the ship would ride lighter and

higher on the waves, and the impact from a smash would be lessened. The

curses of the men in the hold as they chucked up sacks of salt beat a

staccato on the still air.

“Joan, you and the cook and cabin-boy load up the lifeboat. Put tins of

hardtack, a keg of water and a tarpaulin in it.” With those instructions

he took his post at the fo’c’s’le head and watched our ship go nearer

the bergs. Two frigate birds with long spiked tails hovered above. A

frantic little mother-carries-her-chicken bird flew around and around in

a dizzy circle near the stern. And Father just waited! With each roll of

the ship we came nearer. The crew worked throwing out the sacks of salt

like men possessed, and the ship lightened.

Father ordered the rope bumpers put out, and two cork buoys lowered over

the bowsprit to break the crash if we hit the iceberg. The ship wouldn’t

answer to the rudder, for the currents were more powerful. Just as we

braced ourselves for the destroying collision we were caught in an eddy

that lifted us high on the water and sent our ship dizzily about one

hundred yards past the iceberg. Our relief was so great that we didn’t

mind the loss of cargo.

All night long we drifted in the ice floes, miraculously avoiding being

crushed by them.

The following morning we found ourselves afloat in a world of white

icebergs and thick mist. It seemed as though we were at the end of the

world. It was difficult for Father to figure out our position, as there

was no sun, and to navigate by dead reckoning was useless as the log

line couldn’t register how much we had drifted in the cross currents.

For a week that continued—breathless days and nights that were ghostly

in those white canyons of frozen water.

Sometimes in the night we could hear the screech of sea birds leaving

the ice, and then silence again.

Whenever any real danger was upon us my father used to whistle or sing,

or play his old water-soaked violin. I asked him how he could be so gay

when death was staring us all in the face, and he said:

“What the hell do you expect me to do, bawl about it? Besides, if the

crew hear me singin’ they’ll think there’s nothin’ to be afraid of and

it keeps their guts from freezin’ inside of them.”

He sang often in the two weeks that followed as we blindly picked our

way out of the iceberg region. The first time the sun shone after that

was about three hundred miles southeast of New Zealand. A stiff breeze

cleared the sky, and our sails bellied out tautly under it.

“We’ll sail due East, Mr. Swanson,” Father said to the mate, “and try

and make Pitcairn. I haven’t been there for years and I want Joan to see

it.”

I had heard the name of Pitcairn Island all my life. Every sailor looks

upon it as the haven for seafarers. From their descriptions it was the

one perfect spot on earth, free from worries, money, and work.

Old Stitches used to tell me about Pitcairn and its qualities of a

paradise, but I thought it was the ravings of a mind that had had too

much liquor and too many girls in port.

“What are we going to see on Pitcairn?” I asked my father.

“White natives. It’s the only South Sea island that has a tribe of

English-speaking, light-skinned inhabitants.”

I was thrilled at the prospect of visiting Pitcairn—for white people

were more of a curiosity to me than natives. As our ship nosed her way

across the sea towards Pitcairn, I spent many hours listening to tales

about that strange island from my father and two old sailors who had

been there often.

When Kipling gave to the world his much overquoted lines, “East is East

and West is West and never the twain shall meet,” he probably forgot

that in the most remote part of the South Seas, East and West had met

and had formed a race of people, living in a high degree of civilization

and in a community almost free from sin—to disprove his theory.

I looked up the island on the chart, and found it marked there with an

inconsequential dot, and flaunting the austere name of “Pitcairn, 23

degrees S. latitude, 120 W. longitude.” By latitude and longitude I can

locate a spot on the ocean as accurately as a landlubber can find 42nd

Street and Broadway.

Father saw me studying the chart, and observed:

“On the approach from the southeast the island looks like a cone of rock

juttin’ out of the sea. Some times mariners call it ‘Neptune’s Thimble’

because of its resemblance to a thimble in shape.”

“How did anybody get on a rock island so far away from the big island

groups?” I asked.

“I’ll tell you, Joan, because I think you ought to know the whole

romance of Pitcairn. Lots of folks has written about it, but none of

them know all the facts like we sailormen know.”

“Have the islanders been there forever?” I wanted to know.

“Nope. You see in the year 1789 His Majesty’s Ship _Bounty_ was sent out

from England to the South Seas to gather breadfruit trees for the

purpose of transplantin’ the same in the British West Indies. In command

of the _Bounty_ was a tyrannical, overbearin’ taskmaster, a regular

s.o.b. His name was Lieutenant William Bligh, and the crew was afraid of

him, and at the same time they hated his guts.

“For months there had been a seething undercurrent of revolt brewing in

the fo’c’s’le, and it was led by the ship’s carpenter, a Mr. Christian.

They laid their plans carefully for mutiny—but they bided their time

until the _Bounty_ sailed into the vicinity of Tahiti.”

“What good would it do to mutiny in the South Seas?” I asked, for I knew

that escape in the islands was almost impossible for a white man

fugitive on English possessions.

“Huh,” snorted Father, “those bastards were so sore on Old Man Bligh

they didn’t give a damn what became of them just so as they got rid of

him and his officers.” And from Father I learned how the “white native

island” was founded.

When Mr. Christian learned from one of the officers that the _Bounty_

was about two hundred miles off Tahiti he gave the signal for the

mutiny. With more daring than the pirates of the Arabian Nights the crew

mutinied. They bound and gagged the captain and those officers that were

loyal to him, and set them adrift in the open sea in the ship’s cutter

which they had provisioned and watered. Christian assumed command of the

_Bounty_ and her mutineers.

The abandoned captain and officers drifted for weeks through uncharted,

shark-infested waters. They circumvented a dangerous coral shoal to land

on what appeared to be a fertile uncharted island, only to be driven

from there by the cannibalistic inhabitants. After a time their supplies

ran short, and they subsisted on turtle, sun-dried fish—and saved the

raindrops for water.

Bligh was stricken with a peculiar malady from the strain and exposure.

His officers had to save his life because he alone knew how to navigate,

and that little cutter had to make some port soon, or their goose was

cooked. They didn’t dare land on any of the islands that weren’t charted

because they might run into a nest of cannibals again.

Nowadays we have charts and surveys of the islands, but in 1789 a lot of

these atolls were never heard of.

They had to get some fresh water and food for Bligh or he’d die on them,

so one night the officers put into an atoll island and stole fresh

fruits and coconuts to nourish him. Weeks drifted into months and at the

end of five months they reached New Guinea, a distance of three thousand

five hundred miles from where they were set adrift. From New Guinea they

secured passage on a trading schooner to Australia. Lieutenant Bligh

lost no time in informing His Majesty of their predicament. Some time

later he was rewarded by being appointed Governor of New South Wales.

Indignant upon learning of the mutiny of his sailors, King George

ordered H.M.S. _Pandora_ sent to the scene of the rebellion.

In the meantime the _Bounty_ was cruising around the South Seas looking

for a place to land and at the same time avoid capture. Fourteen of the

_Bounty_ crew who had mutinied went ashore at Tahiti and took up native

lives in preference to being “stretched by the neck” by His Majesty’s

officers if they were caught. Besides, those fourteen men preferred a

life among beautiful native girls to that of hard work on shipboard.

They used poor judgment, however, for the officers of the _Pandora_

found them and took them prisoners. They were chained like dogs to the

stanchions of the ship, and put on rations of bread and water. The

_Pandora_ set sail for England where a death penalty would have been

dealt to the mutineers, but she struck a submerged coral reef and became

a total wreck. That reef is now known as Pandora Reef on the charts.

While the _Pandora_ was smashing to pieces on the sharp reef, the

officers tried to get away, but they made no attempt to free the

prisoners from their chains and they left them to a miserable slow

death. They didn’t give them the fighting chance that the mutineers had

given Bligh and his men.

Christian had sailed the _Bounty_ to Ruratu. His men grew so restless

and lonely, that he advised them each to take to himself a native wife.

Fascinated by the white skin of the sailors, their peculiar clothing and

strange language, the young native girls looked upon them as gods, and

showered gifts of fruit and flowers upon them. Mr. Christian, acting in

the capacity of minister, conducted the ceremony, and each man became a

husband to a native girl.

The Chief of Ruratu had a daughter Loa-Lea of unusual beauty who offered

herself to Christian. This so angered the old Chief that he was planning

to exterminate every white man of the crew, along with their native

wives who had set a bad example for his Loa-Lea. His plans were

frustrated in their inception because Loa-Lea loved the Lily-Man, or “he

of the white skin” as she termed Christian, because he treated her with

such kindness—such respect. To be treated with deference was a new

experience to her, for native women have little or no importance in a

tribe other than as creatures of convenience and producers of sons.

Loa-Lea brought news of her father’s plan to exterminate them to her

“lily-man,” and Christian secretly departed in the night with all his

men, their native wives and Loa-Lea, whom he married.

Christian had heard that the seas were being combed for them, and so he

sailed far to the westward to escape His Majesty’s forces. Just as our

ship was heading now, the _Bounty_ was heading. Fifteen hundred miles

south of the Equator and about the same distance west of the coast of

South America, they came upon an uninhabited island.

They had great difficulty in finding a way to land on the island, as

there was no beach and the cliffs were almost perpendicular. Christian

and a handful of men went ashore to explore the island’s possibilities.

On the east end they found a cove, overlooked by a plateau, which had

the semblance of great steps up the side of the cliff, as if some sea

giant had carved them for doorsteps to his castle. On the table top of

the island they found an abundance of fresh fruits, water in springs,

and wild birds.

Christian returned to the _Bounty_, called his people together and

impressed upon them that if they landed on that island it was to be

forever, as he intended to destroy the _Bounty_, and with it gone there

would be no means of escape. With one accord the mutineers agreed to

colonize the island of rock. They named it after General Pitcairn.

The mutineers set about to strip the _Bounty_ of all metal which they

would use ashore. They set their supplies adrift on rafts to float in

shore. Those who did not swim in went to the landing in small boats.

When the last man had left the vessel, Christian lashed the helm

amidships, headed her bow directly into the island and deserted her.

Gathered on the cliff of their new colony, the crew watched the ground

swells of the Pacific wash the _Bounty_ in toward the cliffs, until with

a mighty crash she struck the wall and sank into the unsounded depth of

the sea. Gone forever was their hope of ever leaving the island, but

also, gone forever was any evidence of the _Bounty_ to betray them into

the hands of His Majesty’s officers.

Each man and wife set about and built a hut and portioned off a plot of

land for a home. Every variety of tropical fruit and berries grew in

great profusion. There was more than enough of everything for everybody.

But in spite of that all did not run smoothly on Pitcairn. Christian was

chief. The Bible was the only form of government. Their religion was and

is to this day Seventh Day Adventism.

In time children were born to the mutineers by the native wives, and the

children were white. South Sea natives have intermarried so much for

generations that their blood is depleted and the white man’s blood

predominated.

The sailors call Pitcairn Eden, and rightly perhaps, because a woman was

the cause of a quarrel which proved fatal to the whites. One of the

mutineers, a Mr. McCoy, had sent his wife to gather sea bird eggs from

the rocks on the edge of the cliff. Losing her foothold she fell a

thousand feet to the reef below and was instantly killed. As there was

only an equal number of women and men, and all of them married, the

mutineer, when he became lonely, took to himself the wife of one of the

men. That so angered the husband that he killed his wife. McCoy became

an outcast, and all the husbands looked upon him as a danger to their

happiness. From that time on dissension and intrigue flourished. Several

of the mutineers set out in a small boat to find another island, and

that left McCoy, Christian, a Charles Adams, and seven other whites with

their native wives on the island. The natives there now are the

descendants of those families.

Those whites and natives have a colony now without quarrels. They are

industrious and God-fearing—but lockjaw is rapidly wiping them out.

* * * * *

The mate came up on the poop deck to where Father was sitting and asked,

“Shall we give the Pitcairn Islanders some rope and canvas this trip,

Captain?”

We were only about fifty miles from Pitcairn, and by nine o’clock that

evening we would be hove to off it.

“Yes. We’ve lost our cargo, so we might as well divide up our supplies.”

The Pitcairn Islanders wait months and months for sailing ships to come.

Very few ships ever go so far off the beaten sailing tracks, and when

one does, the islanders offer up devout thanksgiving. Along about nine

o’clock, Pitcairn loomed ahead. On the top of it fires were burning.

First they appeared on one end of the island, then on the other. They

had sighted us. The fires were beacon lights to us, so that we would not

strike the shoals by sailing in too close.

“Give them the freedom of the ship when they come aboard,” Father

instructed the mate. “These natives never steal anythin’.”

Within an hour from the time we hove to, three boats from Pitcairn were

alongside, and about thirty-five islanders came on board. I studied them

closely for signs of native blood, but they were as white as I am. They

spoke English, simply, and with a peculiar accent. The women were

delighted to see me, another white woman. One old dame stroked my hair;

a young girl offered to trade her native fibre dress for a pair of

overalls.

We went up behind the companionway and swapped the clothes. She thought

she had made a grand bargain as she strutted around with my faded blue

overalls on. She ran down on the main deck and brought back a tall,

quiet young woman, who seemed to be revered by the natives.

“This is Frances McCoy, who is saving our people.” Miss McCoy placed

both hands on my shoulders—a custom of greeting probably inherited from

her native maternal ancestors.

“Did you have a peaceful voyage?” she asked, and her voice was smooth

and quiet.

“No. We had the goddamndest trip we’ve ever had. We struck icebergs

south of Tasmania and had to shoot our cargo of salt to hell.”

Miss McCoy turned away from me quickly and looked off to sea, but didn’t

speak. McLean, who had heard me talking came over to me and said:

Slops opened his mouth to tell his name and Neptune put some of the