Hearing the boys in the office talking of a lecture at the Sailor's
Haven a few nights ago was what set me thinking to-day. It was on
superstition, and the speaker digressed to expend ten minutes, as he put
it, on sailors. A most superstitious lot, sailors.
He had a lot of fun with the sailors, and a crowd of old seafaring men
sat there and let him, until a boss stevedore from our wharf who'd been
one time mate of a coaster, with the preliminary contribution that this
was sure the wisest party he'd listened to in all o' seven years, rose
to inquire of the gentleman how long he'd been to sea.
Well, he had been to sea quite a little. Twice to Europe and return,
once to Panama and return, once to Jamaica in the West Indies and----
"--return?" finishes our stevedore. "Sure you returned each time? 'N' in
what sortivver craft'd you sail to them places--and return--in?"
"Why, steamers," answers the lecturer.
"Passinjer?"
"Passenger? Certainly."
"Excuse _me_!" says our stevedore. "I oughter known better. O' course,
_you know_ all about sailors," and sits down.
The lecturer was all right. He was doing the best he knew, with the
finest and fattest of words he could pick out, to make things clearer to
his audience; and his audience, appreciating that, let him run on, until
he said that there was not one mysterious thing which had ever happened
that could fail to be proved very ordinary by mathematical, or
historical, or logical, or physical, or some other "cal" deduction;
which bounced our watch-dog out of his seat again.
"How d'you 'count," he growls, "for th' _Orion_ 'n' _Sirius_?"
Well-l, he could not account for it, for the simple and overwhelmingly
conclusive reason that, previous to that very moment, he had never heard
of the ships named.
"Then s'pose you hear 'f 'em now," says our stevedore, and starts in and
delivers the lecturer a lecture on the _Orion_ and _Sirius_, and it
wound up the show; for when the lecturer started to butt in, all the old
barnacles, who before this had been clinging warily to the edge of their
seats, now rose up and rallied around our stevedore to finish his
story, which he did; and the old fellows, on leaving the hall, said that
the credit of the proceeds for the Sailor's Haven fund, for that night,
anyway, ought to go as much to their old college chum from the coal
wharf as to any imported lecturer with his deckload of lantern slides.
But our stevedore didn't tell all there was of the _Orion_ and the
_Sirius_. The lecturer went home thinking he had been told all about it,
but he hadn't. Here it is as it was.
I
In the fleet of big coal schooners, which at this time were running from
the middle Atlantic ports to Boston, the twin five-masters, the _Orion_
and the _Sirius_, were notable.
They were twins in everything: built from the one set of moulds in the
one yard at the one time, launched together, rigged together, sailed on
their maiden trips together, and were brought home with their first
cargoes of coal together by two masters who were almost as twinlike to
look at as their vessels.
It was the history of these two big schooners, that they seemed always
to be wanting to get together. Their crews used to say of them that if
left anchored at all near each other in the stream, they would start
right away to swing toward each other. Even if it was slack water they
would. Yes, sir.
I can't speak from personal knowledge of that tide-swinging trick, but I
do know that I saw them a few hours after they had twice smashed into
each other--once under sail off the Capes and once in tow up Boston
Harbor; and it was not to be doubted that in both cases they had more
than drifted into each other. And of their near-collisions! A day's loaf
along the water-front would yield gossip of a dozen or more.
Now, these next few lines are from out of the sailors' book of gossip of
mysterious happenings at sea; and it is true that the more sailorly the
gossip, the more likely will it be to try to account for unusual
accidents at sea in a natural way; and the most usual reason given is
inefficiency--lack of seamanship. As to that, it is true that lack of
seamanship or of sea instinct has accounted for many calamities at sea,
and the same lack would probably account for many another not so set
down on the public tablets; but lack of seamanship won't account for all
the queer happenings at sea. Every now and then comes a ship which no
earthly power seems able to keep up with. From out of our superior shore
knowledge we may deduce that the builder or designer was in fault, that
there must have been an asymmetry in her hull, or that her rigging
lacked balance, such defects tending to render her uncontrollable under
certain conditions. Maybe; but there she is, as she is, with the malign
fates seeming to be working double tides to get her.
"Hoodoo ships," sailors term such, and "Hoo-doos, both of 'em," the
crews of the collier fleet early labelled the _Orion_ and the _Sirius_.
Yes, _sir_. And some day the pair of them were going up--or down--in a
whirl of glory. If only they would smash only each other, and not go to
putting poor innocent outsiders out of commission when they did
go!--that was all they'd ask of _them_.
The master of the _Orion_ was Oliver Sickles; of the _Sirius_, Norman
Sickles; and they were from the same little hamlet in that Cape Shore
region whence come so many capable sailormen. Each was named for his
father, and their fathers were brothers who hated each other and brought
up their children to hate each other.
It was curious to see them--two master mariners commanding sister ships
for the same owners--passing each other on the wharf, brushing elbows in
the office, putting to sea time and time together, sailing, again and
again, side by side for days together, and yet never seeming to see each
other. Indifference was the word; but if by any chance a third person
referred to one in the presence of the other in anything like
complimentary terms, that third person was soon let to know that he
wasn't making any hit with whichever Captain Sickles it was who had to
listen. If it was Norman of the _Sirius_, he would shift his feet and
start to stare intently at the ceiling or the sky; if it was Oliver of
the _Orion_, with a snarl of disgust he would get up and walk off.
I had heard a lot of the Sickles cousins, but had never had more than a
hailing acquaintance with either of them, until this early fall when my
firm chartered, among others, the _Orion_ and the _Sirius_, and sent me
down to Newport News to see that they lost no time in loading and
getting out. It was the time of a threatened coal famine in New England,
with coal freights up to two dollars a ton, and my firm chartering
everything they could get hold of to take the coal from the railroads at
Newport News and rush it east.
In our two new schooner captains, Norman and Oliver Sickles, I found,
when I came to have dealings with them, a pair who knew their business.
Implacable toward each other they surely were, but so long as their
feelings weren't delaying their sailing days, that was their own
business. Tall, broad, powerful chaps they both were, twenty-eight or
thirty years of age to look at, slow in thought, heavy in action, but
competent sailormen always. I had no need to know their records, nor to
talk with them too many hours, to find that out. Not much about a
schooner, be she two or five master, nor much about the North Atlantic
coast, that they didn't know.
I had been three months in Newport News, Christmas was at hand, and the
railroad people were telling me that they would have no more coal for my
firm until after New Year's. There were twenty thousand tons not yet
gone; but if my four four-master schooners could sail next morning, and
the five-masters, _Orion_ and _Sirius_, get away the morning after, that
twenty thousand tons would be cleaned up.
I hunted up the Captain Sickles of the _Sirius_ and put the question to
him: "Captain Norman, if I can get you loaded and cleared by the morning
after to-morrow, what's the chance of your making Boston by Christmas?"
And he answered, after some thought: "It's a westerly wind with a medium
glass to-day. It ought to hang on westerly and dry for another four or
five days. Clear me by the morning after to-morrow, and I'll lay the
_Sirius_ to anchor in Boston Harbor Christmas Eve, or"--he was a man of
serious ways, and spoke most seriously now---"or I'll give you a good
reason why."
I hunted up Captain Oliver Sickles of the _Orion_, and I found him
having a drink in the bar of the Tidewater Café. He looked as if he'd
welcome a quarrel, but that was nothing strange in him. I put the same
question to him that I had put to his cousin, and the answer came in
almost the same words as to the medium glass and the westerly wind, but
at that point he looked sharply at me.
"And when does the _Sirius_ sail?" he asked.
"The morning after to-morrow."
"And"--suspiciously--"who first that morning, the _Sirius_ or me?"
"I don't know. You'll be loaded and cleared together--it's for
yourselves to say who sails first."
"And what did he say?"
Captain Oliver had a hectoring way about him which used to make me
promise myself that some day, after he'd done hauling coal for my
outfit, I'd tell him what I thought of him. "What did who say?" I asked
him now.
"Warn't you talkin' to my cousin awhile ago about the same thing?"
"I was, though I don't remember telling you about it."
"H-m," he sneered, "I thought so. Y' always go to him first."
"Yes, I do!" I snapped at him. "And why? Because he knows his mind. And
he's a man to give an answer without using up an afternoon talking about
it. He said he'd have the _Sirius_ to anchor in Boston Harbor by
Christmas Eve or give me a good reason why."
"He did, did he? Then set this down in your log"--with the end of a
prodigiously thick forefinger he was tapping the bar as he said
it:--"The _Orion_ will be laying to anchor in Boston Harbor by Christmas
Eve or there'll be a _damn_ good reason why."
Right here I should say that there was more than a rivalry of
craftsmanship between the Sickles cousins. Once, thinking it was the
_Sirius_, Norman Sickles's sweetheart, a very pretty and a very good
girl, had gone aboard the _Orion_ as it lay in Boston Harbor. Oliver at
once locked her in the cabin, put to sea, and carried her to
Philadelphia, where, urged by her mother, and to save her good name as
she thought, she married Oliver. But that her heart was still with
Norman was current gossip in the fleet.
Because he had lately heard that I had been free-spoken in my comment on
that exploit was why Captain Oliver now--his forefinger tapping the bar
and he eying me from under his hat-brim--added to his "good reason" the
word that, no matter what my firm or any other firm thought of this or
that, which warn't none o' their business anyway, he wanted 'em all to
understand that he was as capable of getting a quick passage out of a
vessel as any Norman Sickles that ever walked; which gave me a fine
chance to say: "Well, the place to prove that is at sea, and not in a
barroom ashore."
Not very delicate--no; but it sent him almost on the run down aboard his
vessel, to clear his decks for loading, which was mostly what I was
after.
And I let it leak out--the answer of the two cousins about being in
Boston before Christmas. A little rivalry of that kind doesn't do any
harm; and I wanted to walk into the office on Christmas Eve and say,
"The last of that Newport News coal is lying out there in the stream
waiting to dock," and then go home, even as many of the crews would want
to go home, with an easy conscience for a Christmas holiday.