WHY WE DON'T DESERT
As soon as we were under sail, the crew was called aft and the watches
selected. Gabriel was to head the starboard watch and Mendez the port.
The men were ranged in line and the heads of the watches made their
selections, turn and turn about. The deep-water sailors were the first to
be chosen. The green hands were picked for their appearance of strength
and activity. I fell into the port watch.
Sea watches were now set--four hours for sleep and four for work
throughout the twenty-four. My watch was sent below. No one slept during
this first watch below, but we made up for lost time during our second
turn. Soon we became accustomed to the routine and found it as restful
as the usual landsman's method of eight hours' sleep and sixteen of
wakefulness.
It is difficult for a landlubber to understand how sailors on shipboard
can be kept constantly busy. The brig was a veritable hive of industry.
The watch on deck when morning broke pumped ship and swept and flushed
down the decks. During the day watches, in addition to working the ship,
we were continuously breaking out supplies, keeping the water barrel on
deck filled from casks in the hold, laboring with the cargo, scrubbing
paint work, polishing brass work, slushing masts and spars, repairing
rigging, and attending to a hundred and one details that must be looked
after every day. The captain of a ship is one of the most scrupulous
housekeepers in the world, and only by keeping his crew busy from morning
till night is he able to keep his ship spick and span and in proper
repair. Whale ships are supposed to be dirty. On the contrary, they are
kept as clean as water and brooms and hard work can keep them.
The food served aboard the brig was nothing to brag about. Breakfast
consisted of corned-beef hash, hardtack, and coffee without milk or sugar.
We sweetened our coffee with molasses, a keg of which was kept in the
forecastle. For dinner, we had soup, corned-beef stew, called "skouse," a
loaf of soft bread, and coffee. For supper, we had slices of corned-beef
which the sailors called "salt horse," hardtack, and tea. The principal
variation in this diet was in the soups.
The days were a round of barley soup, bean soup, pea soup, and back
to barley soup again, an alternation that led the men to speak of the
days of the week not as Monday, Tuesday, and so on, but as "barley soup
day," "bean soup day," and "pea soup day." Once or twice a week we had
gingerbread for supper. On the other hand the cabin fared sumptuously on
canned vegetables, meat, salmon, soft bread, tea, and coffee with sugar
and condensed milk, fresh fish and meat whenever procurable, and a dessert
every day at dinner, including plum duff, a famous sea delicacy which
never in all the voyage found its way forward.
From the first day, the green hands were set learning the ropes, to stand
lookout, to take their trick at the wheel, to reef and furl and work
among the sails. These things are the A B C of seamanship, but they are
not to be learned in a day or a week. A ship is a complicated mechanism,
and it takes a long time for a novice to acquire even the rudiments of
sea education. Going aloft was a terrifying ordeal at first to several of
the green hands, though it never bothered me. When the cowboy was first
ordered to furl the fore-royal, he hung back and said, "I can't" and "I'll
fall," and whimpered and begged to be let off. But he was forced to try.
He climbed the ratlines slowly and painfully to the royal yard, and he
finally furled the sail, though it took him a long time to do it. He felt
so elated that after that he wanted to furl the royal every time it had to
be done;--didn't want to give anyone else a chance.
Furling the royal was a one-man job. The foot-rope was only a few feet
below the yard, and if a man stood straight on it, the yard would strike
him a little above the knees. If the ship were pitching, a fellow had to
look sharp or he would be thrown off;--if that had happened it was a nice,
straight fall of eighty feet to the deck. My own first experience on the
royal yard gave me an exciting fifteen minutes. The ship seemed to be
fighting me and devoting an unpleasant amount of time and effort to it;
bucking and tossing as if with a sentient determination to shake me off
into the atmosphere. I escaped becoming a grease spot on the deck of the
brig only by hugging the yard as if it were a sweetheart and hanging on
for dear life. I became in time quite an expert at furling the sail.
Standing lookout was the one thing aboard a green hand could do as well
as an old sailor. The lookout was posted on the forecastle-head in fair
weather and on the try-works in a storm. He stood two hours at a stretch.
He had to scan the sea ahead closely and if a sail or anything unusual
appeared, he reported to the officer of the watch.
Learning to steer by the compass was comparatively easy. With the ship
heading on a course, it was not difficult by manipulating the wheel to
keep the needle of the compass on a given point. But to steer by the
wind was hard to learn and is sometimes a nice matter even for skillful
seamen. When a ship is close-hauled and sailing, as sailors say, right in
the wind's eye, the wind is blowing into the braced sails at the weather
edge of the canvas;--if the vessel were brought any higher up, the wind
would pour around on the back of the sails. The helmsman's aim is to
keep the luff of the royal sail or of the sails that happen to be set,
wrinkling and loose--luffing, sailors call it. That shows that the wind is
slanting into the sails at just the right angle and perhaps a little bit
is spilling over. I gradually learned to do this in the daytime. But at
night when it was almost impossible for me to see the luff of the sails
clearly, it was extremely difficult and I got into trouble more than once
by my clumsiness. The trick at the wheel was of two hours' duration.
The second day out from San Francisco was Christmas. I had often read that
Christmas was a season of good cheer and happiness among sailors at sea,
that it was commemorated with religious service, and that the skipper sent
forward grog and plum duff to gladden the hearts of the sailormen. But
Santa Claus forgot the sailors on the brig. Bean soup only distinguished
Christmas from the day that had gone before and the day that came after.
No liquor or tempting dishes came to the forecastle. It was the usual day
of hard work from dawn to dark.
After two weeks of variable weather during which we were often becalmed,
we put into Turtle bay, midway down the coast of Lower California, and
dropped anchor.
Turtle bay is a beautiful little land-locked harbor on an uninhabited
coast. There was no village or any human habitation on its shores. A
desolate, treeless country, seamed by gullies and scantily covered with
sun-dried grass, rolled away to a chain of high mountains which forms
the backbone of the peninsula of Lower California. These mountains were
perhaps thirty miles from the coast; they were gray and apparently barren
of trees or any sort of herbage, and looked to be ridges of naked granite.
The desert character of the landscape was a surprise, as we were almost
within the tropics.
We spent three weeks of hard work in Turtle bay. Sea watches were
abolished and all hands were called on deck at dawn and kept busy until
sundown. The experienced sailors were employed as sail makers; squatting
all day on the quarter-deck, sewing on canvas with a palm and needle. Old
sails were sent down from the spars and patched and repaired. If they were
too far gone, new sails were bent in their stead. The green hands had the
hard work. They broke out the hold and restowed every piece of cargo,
arranging it so that the vessel rode on a perfectly even keel. Yards and
masts were slushed, the rigging was tarred, and the ship was painted
inside and out.
The waters of the harbor were alive with Spanish mackerel, albacore,
rock bass, bonitos, and other kinds of fish. The mackerel appeared in
great schools that rippled the water as if a strong breeze were blowing.
These fish attracted great numbers of gray pelicans, which had the most
wonderful mode of flight I have ever seen in any bird. For hours at a
time, with perfectly motionless pinions, they skimmed the surface of the
bay like living aeroplanes; one wondered wherein lay their motor power
and how they managed to keep going. When they spied a school of mackerel,
they rose straight into the air with a great flapping of wings, then
turned their heads downward, folded their wings close to their bodies,
and dropped like a stone. Their great beaks cut the water, they went
under with a terrific splash, and immediately emerged with a fish in the
net-like membrane beneath their lower mandible.
[Illustration: When Whaling Is An Easy Job]
Every Sunday, a boat's crew went fishing. We fished with hand lines
weighted with lead and having three or four hooks, baited at first with
bacon and later with pieces of fresh fish. I never had such fine fishing.
The fish bit as fast as we could throw in our lines, and we were kept busy
hauling them out of the water. We would fill a whale boat almost to the
gunwales in a few hours. With the return of the first fishing expedition,
the sailors had dreams of a feast, but they were disappointed. The fish
went to the captain's table or were salted away in barrels for the cabin's
future use. The sailors, however, enjoyed the fun. Many of them kept lines
constantly over the brig's sides, catching skates, soles, and little
sharks.
By the time we reached Turtle bay, it was no longer a secret that we would
get only a dollar for our year's voyage. As a result, a feverish spirit of
discontent began to manifest itself among those forward and plans to run
away became rife.
We were anchored about a half mile from shore, and after looking over the
situation, I made up my mind to try to escape. Except for an officer and a
boatsteerer who stood watch, all hands were asleep below at night. Being
a good swimmer, I planned to slip over the bow in the darkness and swim
ashore. Once on land, I figured it would be an easy matter to cross the
Sierras and reach a Mexican settlement on the Gulf of California.
Possibly the officers got wind of the runaway plots brewing in the
forecastle, for Captain Winchester came forward one evening, something he
never had done before, and fell into gossipy talk with the men.
"Have you noticed that pile of stones with a cross sticking in it on the
harbor head?" he asked in a casual sort of way.
Yes, we had all noticed it from the moment we dropped anchor, and had
wondered what it was.
"That," said the captain impressively, "is a grave. Whaling vessels have
been coming to Turtle bay for years to paint ship and overhaul. Three
sailors on a whaler several years ago thought this was a likely place in
which to escape. They managed to swim ashore at night and struck into the
hills. They expected to find farms and villages back inland. They didn't
know that the whole peninsula of Lower California is a waterless desert
from one end to the other. They had some food with them and they kept
going for days. No one knows how far inland they traveled, but they found
neither inhabitants nor water and their food was soon gone.
"When they couldn't stand it any longer and were half dying from thirst
and hunger, they turned back for the coast. By the time they returned to
Turtle bay their ship had sailed away and there they were on a desert
shore without food or water and no way to get either. I suppose they
camped on the headland in the hope of hailing a passing ship. But the
vessels that pass up and down this coast usually keep out of sight of
land. Maybe the poor devils sighted a distant topsail--no one knows--but
if they did the ship sank beyond the horizon without paying any attention
to their frantic signals. So they died miserably there on the headland.
"Next year, a whale ship found their bodies and erected a cairn of stones
marked by the cross you see over the spot where the three sailors were
buried together. This is a bad country to run away in," the captain added.
"No food, no water, no inhabitants. It's sure death for a runaway."
Having spun this tragic yarn, Captain Winchester went aft again, feeling,
no doubt, that he had sowed seed on fertile soil. The fact is his story
had an instant effect. Most of the men abandoned their plans to escape,
at least for the time being, hoping a more favorable opportunity would
present itself when we reached the Hawaiian islands. But I had my doubts.
I thought it possible the captain merely had "put over" a good bluff.
Next day I asked Little Johnny, the boatsteerer, if it were true as the
captain had said, that Lower California was an uninhabited desert. He
assured me it was and to prove it, he brought out a ship's chart from the
cabin and spread it before me. I found that only two towns throughout the
length and breadth of the peninsula were set down on the map. One of these
was Tia Juana on the west coast just south of the United States boundary
line and the other was La Paz on the east coast near Cape St. Lucas, the
southern tip of the peninsula. Turtle bay was two or three hundred miles
from either town.
That settled it with me. I didn't propose to take chances on dying in the
desert. I preferred a whaler's forecastle to that.