Forty miles from Nome, Alaska, breaking under the Arctic winter on the
shores of bleak King Island, lies the skeleton of a wrecked top-mast
schooner.
Early in June, 1919, a small crew of adventurous spirits had turned
her nose out through the Behring Sea, headed for the Lena River and
Anadyn--and gold. She was small and old, this yacht, but what are
thirty-three years when a craft has the proper tradition for daring,
hazardous adventure?
September storms swept upon the _Casco_, pounding her teak sides with
unfamiliar Northern blasts. Fog, cold, night--and she lay shuddering on
the rocks, snow-beaten, ice-broken, abandoned by her crew.
So ships pass and become smooth driftwood on scattered beaches. But
sometimes the magic of long adventure will gather around an abandoned
hull, and form a rich memory to tempt the eternal wanderlust of man.
What is an old ship but a floating castle built upon the memories of
the men who have helmed her? Sometimes she plies the same dull course
throughout her existence. Sometimes she changes trade with surprising
chances. So it was with the _Casco_--now a glittering pleasure yacht,
whim of an old millionaire, now stripped of gaudy trappings and bent
to the grim will of seal hunter and opium trader.
In the opening of Robert Louis Stevenson's novel, "The Wrecker," with
red ensign waving, sailing into the port of Tai-o-hae in the Marquesas,
the _Casco_ takes her place in fiction. But she is far more romantic as
she has sailed in fact.
"Winged by her own impetus and the dying breeze, the _Casco_ skimmed
under cliffs, opened out a cove, showed us a beach and some green
trees, and flitted by again, bowing to the swell ... from close aboard
arose the bleating of young lambs; a bird sang on the hillside; the
scent of the land and of a hundred fruits or flowers flowed forth to
meet us; and presently"--
Presently they sailed among the Isles of Varien, sunny and welcoming in
the South Seas.
Stevenson wrote this in the cabin of the _Casco_, in the summer of
'88. His always delicate health had broken completely under the San
Francisco climate. Friends had urged a cruise to the South Seas, he had
gladly acquiesced, and looked around for a ship. There was a subtle
romantic call for the author of "Treasure Island" in a voyage on a ship
of his own choosing and direction under the soft skies of the tropics.
The _Casco_ had been built by an eccentric California millionaire, Dr.
Merritt, for cruising along the coast, and no money had been spared in
her fittings. She was a seventy-ton fore-and-aft schooner, ninety-five
feet long, with graceful lines, high masts, white sails and decks,
shiny brasswork, and a gaudy silk-hung saloon. She was not perhaps
too staunch a cruiser. "Her cockpit was none too safe, her one pump
was inadequate in size and almost worthless; the sail plan forward was
meant for racing and not for cruising; and even if the masts were still
in good condition, they were quite unfitted for hurricane weather."
Nevertheless, negotiations were opened with Dr. Merritt. That
gentleman had read of Stevenson. He had conceived him as an erratic,
irresponsible soul who wrote poetry and let everything else go to
the devil. He'd be blamed, he said, if he'd let any scatter-brained
writer use his precious yacht. Finally, a meeting between the two was
effected; and, speedily charmed by Stevenson's manner, he decided to
let him have the _Casco_. Therefore, with Capt. Otis as skipper, four
deck hands, "three Swedes and the inevitable Finn," and a Chinese cook,
the Stevensons sailed June 28, 1888, for the Marquesas.
Stevenson's health rapidly improved in the first weeks of the voyage.
He was charmed by the Southern islands and began making notes and
gathering data from the natives for later books. He wrote parts of "The
Master of Ballantrae" and of "The Wrong Box," and spent much of his
time studying the intricate personality of his skipper, whose portrait
afterward appeared in the pages of "The Wrecker."
After months of idle cruising, it was discovered that the _Casco's_
masts were dangerously rotten. Repairs were immediately necessary.
Meantime Stevenson became less and less well. When the ship was
again in commission and took them to Hawaii, he realized the
impossibility of his returning to America, and, sending
the _Casco_ back to San Francisco, started upon the exile that was to
terminate in his death.
Thereafter, the _Casco_ changed hands frequently, exploring the
mysteries of seal-hunting, opium-smuggling, coast-trading and
gold-adventure, among other things. In the early nineties, she was
known, because of her swiftness, quickness and ease of handling at
the wheel, to be the best of a hundred and twenty ships engaged in
the extinction of the pelagic seal. But when, in 1898, the sealers
found themselves impoverished by their own ruthlessness, the _Casco_,
her decks disfigured with blood and her hold rotten from the drip of
countless salty pelts, was discarded and left to rot on the mud flats
of Victoria. Too much of the spirit of adventure, however, lurked in
the tall masts of the _Casco_ to let her waste away to such an ugly
ending. When the smuggling of Chinese and opium was at its height, up
and down the coast there were whisperings of the daring work of the
smuggler _Casco_. The revenue officers knew positively that she was
laden with illicit Oriental cargo, and with Chinese immigrants; but she
escaped them again and again, her old speed and lightness returning.
Once, however, the wind failed her, and the revenue launch hauled
alongside. Search for contraband was instituted; but not a Chinaman
appeared, not a trace of opium. Fooled!--and they climbed down
sheepishly into their launch. Later it developed that while the revenue
men were still far astern, the crew had weighted the sixty Chinamen and
dumped them overboard along with the opium!
[Illustration: THE CASCO, JUST BEFORE IT WAS WRECKED ON KING ISLAND
_Kind permission of_ MR. L. W. PEDROSE]
From the swift romance of opium running the _Casco_ turned drudge. She
carried junk between Victoria and Vancouver; she was
a training ship for the Boy Sea Scouts of Vancouver; she was a coasting
trader in 1917 when the shipping boom gave value to even her little
hulk; and in between times she lay on mud flats.
In the spring of 1919 came the stories of gold in Northern Siberia.
With high hopes of fortunes to be made, the Northern Mining and Trading
Company sprang into existence, and the _Casco_ was chartered to dare
the far Northern seas and icy gaps.
So she died at sea, as all good ships should, with the storm at her
back and the mists over her, with snow as a shroud, and brooding
icebergs to mourn. She lies cold and stately, with her memories of
tropical splendor, high adventure, and light romance--this little ship
whose cabin knew Stevenson.