THROUGH THE ROARING FORTIES
Before leaving the islands, we shipped a Portuguese negro boat-steerer
to take the place of the Night King. He was coal black, had a wild roll
to his eyes, an explosive, spluttering way of talking, looked strikingly
like a great ape, and had little more than simian intelligence. His feet
had the reputation of being the largest feet in the Hawaiian Islands.
When I had seen them I was prepared to believe they were the largest in
the world. He was dubbed "Big Foot" Louis, and the nickname stuck to him
during the voyage. He came aboard barefooted. I don't know whether he
could find any shoes in the islands big enough to fit him or not. Anyway,
he didn't need shoes in the tropics.
When we began to get north into cold weather he needed them badly, and
there were none on board large enough for him to get his toes in. The
captain went through his stock of Eskimo boots, made of walrus hide and
very elastic, but they were too small. When we entered the region of snow,
Louis was still running about the deck barefooted. As a last resort he
sewed himself a pair of canvas shoes--regular meal sacks--and wore them
through snow and blizzard and during the cold season when we were in the
grip of the Behring Sea ice pack. Up around Behring straits the captain
hired an Eskimo to make a pair of walrus hide boots big enough for Louis
to wear, and Louis wore them until we got back to San Francisco and went
ashore in them. I met him wandering along Pacific Street in his walrus
hides. However, he soon found a pair of brogans which he could wear with
more or less comfort.
One night while I was knocking about the Barbary Coast with my shipmates
we heard dance music and the sound of revelry coming from behind the
swinging doors of the Bow Bells saloon, a free-and-easy resort. We stepped
inside. Waltzing around the room with the grace of a young bowhead out of
water was "Big-Foot" Louis, his arm around the waist of a buxom negress,
and on his feet nothing but a pair of red socks. We wondered what had
become of his shoes and spied them on the piano, which the "professor" was
vigorously strumming. Louis seemed to be having more fun than anybody, and
was perfectly oblivious to the titters of the crowd and to the fact that
it was not _de rigueur_ on the Barbary Coast to dance in one's socks.
We left the Hawaiian Islands late in March and, standing straight north,
soon left the tropics behind, never to see them again on the voyage. As we
plunged into the "roaring forties" we struck our first violent storm. The
fury of the gale compelled us to heave to under staysails and drift, lying
in the troughs of the seas and riding the waves sidewise. The storm was
to me a revelation of what an ocean gale could be. Old sailors declared
they never had seen anything worse. The wind shrieked and whistled in the
rigging like a banshee. It was impossible to hear ordinary talk and the
men had to yell into each other's ears. We put out oil bags along the
weather side to keep the waves from breaking. But despite the oil that
spread from them over the water, giant seas frequently broke over the
brig. One crushed the waist boat into kindling wood and sent its fragments
flying all over the deck. We were fortunate to have several other extra
boats in the hold against just such an emergency. Waves sometimes filled
the ship to the top of the bulwarks and the sailors waded about up to
their breasts in brine until the roll of the vessel spilled the water
overboard or it ran back into the sea through the scuppers and hawse-holes.
The waves ran as high as the topsail yard. They would pile up to windward
of us, gaining height and volume until we had to look up almost vertically
to see the tops. Just as a giant comber seemed ready to break in roaring
foam and curl over and engulf us, the staunch little brig would slip up
the slope of water and ride over the summit in safety. Then the sea would
shoot out on the other side of the vessel with a deafening hiss like that
of a thousand serpents and rush skyward again, the wall of water streaked
and shot with foam and looking like a polished mass of jade or agate.
I had not imagined water could assume such wild and appalling shapes.
Those monster waves seemed replete with malignant life, roaring out their
hatred of us and watching alertly with their devilish foam-eyes for a
chance to leap upon us and crush us or sweep us to death on their crests.
I became genuinely seasick now for the first time. A little touch of
seasickness I had experienced in the tropics was as nothing. To the rail
I went time and again to give up everything within me, except my immortal
soul, to the mad gods of sea. For two days I lay in my bunk. I tried
pickles, fat bacon, everything that any sailor recommended, all to no
purpose. I would have given all I possessed for one fleeting moment upon
something level and still, something that did not plunge and lurch and
roll from side to side and rise and fall. I think the most wretched part
of seasickness is the knowledge that you cannot run away from it, that you
are penned in with it, that go where you will, on the royal yard or in
the bilge, you cannot escape the ghastly nightmare even for a minute.
There is no use fighting it and no use dosing yourself with medicines or
pickles or lemons or fat meat. Nothing can cure it. In spite of everything
it will stay with you until it has worked its will to the uttermost, and
then it will go away at last of its own accord, leaving you a wan, limp
wreck. I may add, to correct a general impression, that it is impossible
to become seasoned to seasickness. One attack does not render the victim
immune from future recurrences. I was very sick once again on the voyage.
After a season ashore, the best sailors are liable to seasickness,
especially if they encounter rough weather soon after leaving port. Some
time later we were frozen solidly in Behring Sea for three weeks. When a
storm swell from the south broke up the ice and the motionless brig began
suddenly to rock and toss on a heavy sea, every mother's son aboard,
including men who had been to sea all their lives, was sick. Not one
escaped.
[Illustration: Unalaska]
During the storm we kept a man at the wheel and another on the try-works
as a lookout. One day during my trick at the wheel, I was probably
responsible for a serious accident, though it might have happened with
the most experienced sailor at the helm. To keep the brig in the trough
of the seas, I was holding her on a certain point of the compass, but the
big waves buffeted the vessel about with such violence that my task was
difficult. Captain Shorey was standing within arm's length of me, watching
the compass. A sea shoved the brig's head to starboard and, as if it had
been lying in ambush for just such an opportunity, a giant comber came
curling in high over the stern. It smashed me into the wheel and for an
instant I was buried under twenty feet of crystal water that made a green
twilight all about us.
Then the wave crashed down ponderously upon the deck and I was standing
in clear air again. To my astonishment, the captain was no longer beside
me. I thought he had been washed overboard. The wave had lifted him
upon its top, swept him high over the skylight the entire length of the
quarter-deck and dropped him on the main deck in the waist. His right leg
was broken below the knee. Sailors and boat-steerers rushed to him and
carried him into the cabin, where Mr. Winchester set the broken bones.
We put into Unalaska a week later and the surgeon of the revenue cutter
_Bear_ reset the leg. This was in the last days of March. The captain was
on crutches in July, when we caught our first whale.
The storm did not blow itself out. It blew us out of it. We must have
drifted sidewise with the seas about six hundred miles. At dawn of
the second day, after leaving the fury of the forties behind, we were
bowling along in smooth water with all sails set. The sky was clear and
the sea like hammered silver. Far ahead a mountain rose into the sky--a
wedge-shaped peak, silver-white with snow, its foot swathed in purple
haze. It rose above Unimak Pass, which connects the Pacific Ocean and
Behring Sea between Unimak and Ugamok islands of the Fox Island chain.
Unimak Pass is ten miles broad, and its towering shores are sheer, black,
naked rock. Mr. Winchester, who had assumed command after the captain
had broken his leg, set a course to take us directly through the passage.
Running before a light breeze that bellied all our sails, we began to draw
near the sea gorge at the base of the mountain. Then, without warning,
from over the horizon came a savage white squall, blotting out mountain,
pass, sea, and sky.
I never saw bad weather blow up so quickly. One moment the ship was
gliding over a smooth sea in bright sunlight. The next, a cloud as white
and almost as thick as wool had closed down upon it; snow was falling
heavily in big, moist flakes, a stiff wind was heeling the vessel on its
side, and we could not see ten feet beyond the tip of the jib boom.
The wind quickened into a gale. By fast work we managed to furl sails and
double-reef the topsail before they carried away. Soon the deck was white
with four or five inches of snow. On the forecastle-head Big Foot Louis
was posted as lookout. Everybody was anxious. Mr. Winchester took his
stand close by the main shrouds at the break of the poop and kept gazing
ahead through his glasses into the mist. The sailors and boat-steerers
crowded the forward rails, peering vainly into the swirling fog. Big Foot
Louis bent forward with his hand shielding his eyes from the falling snow.
"Land, land!" he cried.
If it were land that Louis saw through the clouds and blinding snow, it
was mighty close. Our doom seemed sealed. We expected the ship to crash
bows-on upon the rocks. We nerved ourselves for the shock. A momentary
vision of shipwreck on those bleak coasts in snow and storm obsessed me.
But Louis's eyes had deceived him. The ship went riding on its stately way
through the blinding snow before the gale.
The situation was ticklish, if not critical. We had been headed squarely
for the passage before the storm closed down. Now we could not see where
we were going. If we held directly upon our course we were safe. If the
gale blew us even slightly out of our way, shipwreck and death on the
rock-bound shore awaited us. Which would it be?
Mr. Winchester was a man of iron nerve. He demonstrated this now as he
did many times afterward. He was as skillful a navigator as he was a
fearless one. He knew his reckonings were good. He knew that when the
squall shut out the world the brig's nose was pointed directly at the
center of Unimak Pass. So he did not veer to east or west, or seek to tack
back from the dangerous coasts on our bows, but drove the vessel straight
upon its course into the blank white wall of mist and snow.
An hour later the squall lifted as quickly as it had come. Blue skies and
sunshine came back. We found ourselves almost becalmed on a placid sea. To
the south lay the outline of a lofty coast.
A boat-steerer bustled forward. "We are in Behring Sea," he said with a
laugh.
We had shot through the narrow channel without sighting the shores. I have
often wondered just how close to port or starboard death was to us that
morning on the black cliffs of Unimak Pass.