THE MEN OF THE "ALEXANDER"
The brig _Alexander_ was a staunch, sea-worthy little vessel. She had no
fine lines; there was nothing about her to please a yachtsman's eye; but
she was far from being a tub as whaling ships are often pictured. She was
built at New Bedford especially for Arctic whaling. Her hull was of sturdy
oak, reinforced at the bows to enable her to buck her way through ice.
Though she was called a brig, she was really a brigantine, rigged with
square sails on her fore-mast and with fore-and-aft sails on her main.
She was of only 128 tons but quite lofty, her royal yard being eighty
feet above the deck. On her fore-mast she carried a fore-sail, a single
topsail, a fore-top-gallant sail, and a royal; on her main-mast, a big
mainsail with a gaff-topsail above it. Three whale boats--starboard,
larboard, and waist boats--hung at her davits. Amidships stood the brick
try-works equipped with furnaces and cauldrons for rendering blubber into
oil.
As soon as I arrived on board I was taken in charge by the ship keeper and
conducted to the forecastle. It was a dark, malodorous, triangular hole
below the deck in the bows. At the foot of the ladder-like stairs, leading
down through the scuttle, I stepped on something soft and yielding. Was
it possible, I wondered in an instant's flash of surprise, that the
forecastle was laid with a velvet carpet? No, it was not. It was only
a Kanaka sailor lying on the floor dead drunk. The bunks were ranged
round the walls in a double tier. I selected one for myself, arranged my
mattress and blankets, and threw my bag inside. I was glad to get back to
fresh air on deck as quickly as possible.
Members of the crew kept coming aboard in charge of runners and boarding
bosses. They were a hard looking lot; several were staggering drunk,
and most of them were tipsy. All had bottles and demijohns of whiskey.
Everybody was full of bad liquor and high spirits that first night on the
brig. A company of jolly sea rovers were we, and we joked and laughed
and roared out songs like so many pirates about to cruise for treasure
galleons on the Spanish Main. Somehow next morning the rose color had
faded out of the prospect and there were many aching heads aboard.
On the morning of the second day, the officers came out to the vessel.
A tug puffed alongside and made fast to us with a cable. The anchor was
heaved up and, with the tug towing us, we headed for the Golden Gate.
Outside the harbor heads, the tug cast loose and put back into the bay in
a cloud of smoke. The brig was left swinging on the long swells of the
Pacific.
The captain stopped pacing up and down the quarter-deck and said something
to the mate. His words seemed like a match to powder. Immediately the
mate began roaring out orders. Boat-steerers bounded forward, shouting
out the orders in turn. The old sailors sang them out in repetition. Men
sprang aloft. Loosened sails were soon rolling down and fluttering from
every spar. The sailors began pulling on halyards and yo-hoing on sheets.
Throughout the work of setting sail, the green hands were "at sea" in a
double sense. The bustle and apparent confusion of the scene seemed to
savor of bedlam broke loose. The orders were Greek to them. They stood
about, bewildered and helpless. Whenever they tried to help the sailors
they invariably snarled things up and were roundly abused for their pains.
One might fancy they could at least have helped pull on a rope. They
couldn't even do that. Pulling on a rope, sailor-fashion, is in itself an
art.
Finally all the sails were sheeted home. Ropes were coiled up and hung
neatly on belaying pins. A fresh breeze set all the snowy canvas drawing
and the brig, all snug and shipshape, went careering southward.
At the outset of the voyage, the crew consisted of twenty-four men.
Fourteen men were in the forecastle. The after-crew comprised the captain,
mate, second mate, third mate, two boat-steerers, steward, cooper, cook,
and cabin boy. Captain Shorey was not aboard. He was to join the vessel at
Honolulu. Mr. Winchester, the mate, took the brig to the Hawaiian Islands
as captain. This necessitated a graduated rise in authority all along the
line. Mr. Landers, who had shipped as second mate, became mate; Gabriel,
the regular third mate, became second mate; and Mendez, a boatsteerer, was
advanced to the position of third mate.
Captain Winchester was a tall, spare, vigorous man with a nose like Julius
Caesar's and a cavernous bass voice that boomed like a sunset gun. He
was a man of some education, which is a rarity among officers of whale
ships, and was a typical New England Yankee. He had run away to sea as
a boy and had been engaged in the whaling trade for twenty years. For
thirteen years, he had been sailing to the Arctic Ocean as master and
mate of vessels, and was ingrained with the autocratic traditions of the
quarter-deck. Though every inch a sea dog of the hard, old-fashioned
school, he had his kindly human side, as I learned later. He was by far
the best whaleman aboard the brig; as skillful and daring as any that ever
laid a boat on a whale's back; a fine, bold, hardy type of seaman and an
honor to the best traditions of the sea. He lost his life--poor fellow--in
a whaling adventure in the Arctic Ocean on his next voyage.
Mr. Landers, the mate, was verging on sixty; his beard was grizzled, but
there wasn't a streak of gray in his coal-black hair. He was stout and
heavy-limbed and must have been remarkably strong in his youth. He was a
Cape Codder and talked with a quaint, nasal, Yankee drawl. He had been
to sea all his life and was a whaleman of thirty years' experience. In
all these years, he had been ashore very little--only a few weeks between
his year-long voyages, during which time, it was said, he kept up his
preference for liquids, exchanging blue water for red liquor. He was a
picturesque old fellow, and was so accustomed to the swinging deck of a
ship under him that standing or sitting, in perfectly still weather or
with the vessel lying motionless at anchor, he swayed his body from side
to side heavily as if in answer to the rise and fall of waves. He was a
silent, easy-going man, with a fund of dry humor and hard common sense. He
never did any more work than he had to, and before the voyage ended, he
was suspected by the officers of being a malingerer. All the sailors liked
him.
Gabriel, the second mate, was a negro from the Cape Verde islands. His
native language was Portuguese and he talked funny, broken English. He
was about forty-five years old, and though he was almost as dark-skinned
as any Ethiopian, he had hair and a full beard as finely spun and free
from kinkiness as a Caucasian's. The sailors used to say that Gabriel was
a white man born black by accident. He was a kindly, cheerful soul with
shrewd native wit. He was a whaleman of life-long experience.
Mendez, the third mate, and Long John, one of the boatsteerers, were also
Cape Verde islanders. Long John was a giant, standing six feet, four
inches; an ungainly, powerful fellow, with a black face as big as a ham
and not much more expressive. He had the reputation of being one of the
most expert harpooners of the Arctic Ocean whaling fleet.
Little Johnny, the other boatsteerer, was a mulatto from the Barbadoes,
English islands of the West Indies. He was a strapping, intelligent
young man, brimming over with vitality and high spirits and with all a
plantation darky's love of fun. His eyes were bright and his cheeks ruddy
with perfect health; he loved dress and gay colors and was quite the dandy
of the crew.
Five of the men of the forecastle were deep-water sailors. Of these one
was an American, one a German, one a Norwegian, and two Swedes. They
followed the sea for a living and had been bunkoed by their boarding
bosses into believing they would make large sums of money whaling.
They had been taken in by a confidence game as artfully as the man who
loses his money at the immemorial trick of three shells and a pea. When
they learned they would get only a dollar at the end of the voyage and
contemplated the loss of an entire working year, they were full of
resentment and righteous, though futile, anger.
Taylor, the American, became the acknowledged leader of the forecastle. He
quickly established himself in this position, not only by his skill and
long experience as a seaman, but by his aggressiveness, his domineering
character, and his physical ability to deal with men and situations.
He was a bold, iron-fisted fellow to whom the green hands looked for
instruction and advice, whom several secretly feared, and for whom all had
a wholesome respect.
Nels Nelson, a red-haired, red-bearded old Swede, was the best sailor
aboard. He had had a thousand adventures on all the seas of all the
world. He had been around Cape Horn seven times--a sailor is not rated
as a really-truly sailor until he has made a passage around that stormy
promontory--and he had rounded the Cape of Good Hope so many times he had
lost the count. He had ridden out a typhoon on the coast of Japan and had
been driven ashore by a hurricane in the West Indies. He had sailed on an
expedition to Cocos Island, that realm of mystery and romance, to try to
lift pirate treasure in doubloons, plate, and pieces-of-eight, supposed
to have been buried there by "Bugs" Thompson and Benito Bonito, those
one-time terrors of the Spanish Main. He had been cast away in the South
Seas in an open boat with three companions, and had eaten the flesh of the
man whose fate had been sealed by the casting of lots. He was some man,
was Nelson. I sometimes vaguely suspected he was some liar, too, but I
don't know. I think most of his stories were true.
He could do deftly everything intricate and subtle in sailorcraft from
tying the most wonderful knots to splicing wire. None of the officers
could teach old Nelson anything about fancy sailorizing and they knew it.
Whenever they wanted an unusual or particularly difficult piece of work
done they called on him, and he always did it in the best seamanly fashion.
Richard, the German, was a sturdy, manly young chap who had served in the
German navy. He was well educated and a smart seaman. Ole Oleson, the
Norwegian, was just out of his teens but a fine sailor. Peter Swenson,
a Swede, was a chubby, rosy boy of sixteen, an ignorant, reckless,
devil-may-care lad, who was looked upon as the baby of the forecastle and
humored and spoiled accordingly.
Among the six white green hands, there was a "mule skinner" from western
railway construction camps; a cowboy who believed himself fitted for
the sea after years of experience on the "hurricane deck" of a bucking
broncho; a country boy straight from the plow and with "farmer" stamped
all over him in letters of light; a man suspected of having had trouble
with the police; another who, in lazy night watches, spun frank yarns
of burglaries; and "Slim," an Irishman who said he had served with the
Royal Life Guards in the English army. There was one old whaler. He was a
shiftless, loquacious product of city slums. This was his seventh whaling
voyage--which would seem sufficient comment on his character.
"It beats hoboing," he said. And as his life's ambition seemed centered on
three meals a day and a bunk to sleep in, perhaps it did.
Two Kanakas completed the forecastle crew. These and the cabin boy, who
was also a Kanaka, talked fair English, but among themselves they always
spoke their native language. I had heard much of the liquid beauty of the
Kanaka tongue. It was a surprise to find it the most unmusical and harshly
guttural language I ever heard. It comes from the mouth in a series of
explosive grunts and gibberings. The listener is distinctly and painfully
impressed with the idea that if the nitroglycerine words were retained in
the system, they would prove dangerous to health and is fearful lest they
choke the spluttering Kanaka to death before he succeeds in biting them
off and flinging them into the atmosphere.