THE HOTEL HELEN MAR. THE NARRATIVE CONTINUED.
Most ships trading round the Horn to the West Coast in those days would
take a charter on the Gulf Stream to clean them well, on account of
carrying guano. The _Helen Mar_ carried no guano, and charged freightage
accordingly for being clean. Drygoods she'd brought out from New York,
linens, cottons, tinware, shoes, and an outfit of furniture for a
Chilian millionaire's house, including a half-dozen baby carriages, and
a consignment of silk stockings and patent medicines. Now she was going
back, expecting to pick up a cargo of rubber and cocoa and what not,
along the West Coast. Captain Goodwin was master, and it happened he was
short of hands, including his cook. He hired Stevey Todd for cook, and
shipped the rest of us willing enough. It was in October as I recollect
it, and sometime in November when we came to lie in the harbour of the
city of Portate.
Portate is about seven hundred miles below the equator, and has a
harbour at the mouth of a river called the Jiron, and even in those
days it was an important place, as being at the end of a pass over the
Cordilleras. There's a railroad up the pass now, and I hear the city has
trolleys and electric lights, but at that time it hadn't much excitement
except internal rumblings and explosions, meaning it had politics and
volcanoes. Most of the ships that came to anchor there belonged to one
company called the “British-American Transport Company,” which took most
of the rubber and cocoa bark, that came over the pass on mules--trains
of mules with bells on their collars. But the _Helen Mar_ had a
consignment promised her. The pack mules were due by agreement a week
before, so they naturally wouldn't come for a week after. “Manana” is
a word said to mean “tomorrow,” but if you took it to mean “next month”
you'd have a better sight on the intentions of it. That's the way of it
in South America with all but the politics and the climate. The politics
and the climate are like this; when they're quiet, they're asleep; and
when they're not, politics are revolutions and guns, and the climate is
letting off stray volcanoes and shaking up earthquakes.
But it was pleasant to be in the harbour of Portate. Everything there
seemed lazy. You could lie on a bunch of sail cloth, and see the city,
the sand, and the bluffs, and the valley of the Jiron up to the nearer
Andes. You could look up the level river to some low hills, but what
happened to the Jiron there you couldn't tell from the _Helen Mar_.
Beyond were six peaks of the Andes, and four of them were white, and two
blue-black in the distance, with little white caps of smoke over them.
The biggest of the black ones was named “Sarasara,” which was a nasty
volcano, so a little old boatman told us.
“Si, senor! Oh, la Sarasara!”
His name was Cuco, and he sold us bananas and mangoes, and was drowned
afterwards. The Sarasara was a gay bird. The mule drivers called her
“The Wicked Grandmother.”
It came on the 23d of November. Captain Goodwin and all the crew were
gone ashore, excepting Stevey Todd and me left aboard. Sadler and Irish
had been ashore several days without showing up, for I remember telling
Captain Goodwin that Sadler wouldn't desert, not being a quitter, at
which he didn't seem any more than satisfied. I was feeling injured too,
thinking Sadler was likely to be having more happiness than he deserved,
maybe setting up a centre of insurrection in Portate, and leaving me out
of it. Cuco come out in his boat, putting it under the ship's side, and
crying up to us to buy his mangoes.
Stevey Todd came out of the galley to tell him his mangoes were no good,
so as to get up an argument, and Cuco laughed.
“Si, senor,” he says, “look! Ver' good.” Then he nodded towards the
shore:
“La Sarasara! Oh, la Sarasara!” laughing and holding up his mangoes.
The smoke-cap over the Sarasara was blacker than usual and uncommon big
it looked to me. Just then it seemed to be going up and spreading
out. Stevey Todd looked over the side, and gave a grunt, and he says,
“Something's a-suckin' the water out of the harbour.”
Then I felt the _Helen Mar_ tugging at her anchor, and the water was
going by her like a mill race, and Cuco was gone, and on shore people
were running away from the wharves and the river toward the upper town.
I saw the trees swaying, though there was no wind, and a building fell
down near the water.
Then Stevey Todd whirled around and flung up his hands.
“Oh!” he says; “Oh! Oh!”
I never saw a scareder cook, for he dropped on the deck, and clapped his
legs around a capstan and screamed, “Lord! Lord!”
For the whole Pacific Ocean appeared to be heaving out its chest and
coming on, eighty feet high. I tied myself around another capstan, and I
says, “Good-night, Tommy!”
The tidal wave broke into surf an eighth of a mile out, and came on us
in a tumble of foam, hissing and roaring like a loose menagerie, and
down she comes on the _Helen Mar_, and up goes the _Helen Mar_ climbing
through the foam. Me, I hung on to the capstan.
The next thing I knew we were shooting past the upper town, up the
valley of the Jiron, and there wasn't any lower town to be seen. We were
bound for the Andes. The crest of the wave was a few rods ahead, and
the air was full of spray. I saw the Sarasara too, having a nice time
spitting things out of her mouth, and it looked to me like she waggled
her head with the fun she was having. But the _Helen Mar_ was having no
fun, nor me, nor Stevey Todd.
It was four miles the _Helen Mar_ went in a few minutes, going slower
toward the end. By-and-by she hit bottom, and keeled over against a
bunch of old fruit trees on the bank of the river, and lay still, or
only swayed a little, the water swashing in her hold. Right ahead were
the foothills of the Cordilleras, and the gorge where the Jiron came
down, and where the mule path came down beside the river. The big wave
went up to the foot of the hills, and now it came back peaceful. Then it
was quiet everywhere, except for the sobbing of the ebb among the tree
trunks, and afterward lower down in the bed of the river. The ground
rose to the foothills there, and the channel of the river lay deep
below, with a sandy bank maybe twenty feet high on either side, and on
the bank above the river lay the _Helen Mar_, propped up by the fruit
trees.
By dusk there was no water except in the river, and some pools, but
there were heaps of wreckage. Stevey Todd and I got down and looked
things over. Down the valley we saw pieces of the town of Portate lying
along, and beyond we saw the Pacific. And Stevey Todd wiped his face on
his sleeves, and he says, “Maybe that's ridiculous, and maybe it ain't”
he says, “but I'd argue it.”
We swabbed off the decks of the _Helen Mar_, and scuttled the bottom
of her to let the water out. Then the next day we went down to Portate.
There were a sad lot of people drowned, including Captain Goodwin and
most of the crew. Sadler and Irish we didn't find, and some others, and
there was a man named Pickett who wasn't drowned. He went south to Lima
by-and-by.
Afterwards we did up the ship's papers, and the cash and bills in the
Captain's chest, thinking them proper to go to the ship's owners. And
Stevey Todd says:
“A wreck's a wreck. That river ain't three foot deep. How'd they float
her out of this? You say, for I ain't made up my mind,” he says, which I
didn't tell him, not knowing how they'd do it.
For a few days Stevey Todd and I lived high on ship's stores, loafing
and looking down the valley at the damaged city. All the river front was
wrecked. Halfway up the long sloping hill the streets were sloppy, and
any man that had a roof to sleep on, slept drier there than inside, but
the upper city was well enough.
We woke up from sleeping on the shady side of the _Helen Mar_ one
afternoon, to hear the jingle of bells, and soon the mule train pulled
up alongside, and the drivers weren't used to seeing ships in that
neighbourhood. They were expecting trouble from the _Helen Mar_ for
their being two weeks late; but still, finding the _Helen Mar_ up by the
foothills looking for them, it appeared to strike them as impatient and
not real ladylike. But what seemed strange to me was to see Sadler and
Irish, that were taken for drowned beyond further trouble, standing in
front of the mule-drivers, looking down at us, and then up at the _Helen
Mar_, and Sadler seeming like he had a satirical poem on his mind which
he was going to propagate.
I says, “No ghosteses allowed here. You go away.”
“Tommy,” says Sadler, and he came and anchored alongside us in the
shadow of the _Helen Mar_, “I take it these here's the facts. Your
natural respectfulness to elders was shocked out of you, and you ain't
got over it.”
“Over what?”
“Why, she must've got tanked up bad,” he says. “She must have been full
up and corked before she'd ever have come prancin' up here. My! my! It's
turrible when a decent ship gets an appetite for alcohol. Here she lies!
Shame and propriety forgotten! Immodestly exposed to grinnin' heathens!”
“You let the _Helen Mar_ alone,” I says pretty mad. “She ain't so bad as
drowned corpses riding mules.”
Then Stevey put in cautiously, and said he'd never really made up his
mind, and had doubts of it which he was ready to argue, supposing Sadler
had any facts to put up as bearing on his and Irish's condition in
nature.
Sadler said they had gone up the mule path expecting to climb Sarasara,
but getting near the top of her, she began to act as if she disliked
them, Sarasara did, and she threw rocks vicious and more than playful;
so that they left her, and went on up the pass to look for the mule
train. They didn't know anything had happened in Portate.
We put the mule-drivers up that night and charged them South American
rates. That was the way Stevey Todd and I started keeping the _Helen
Mar_ as a hotel. Sadler and Irish didn't care for the business. They
went down to Portate and got jobs with the Transport Company, but Stevey
Todd and I stayed by the _Helen Mar_, and ran the hotel.
All the year through or nearly, the mule trains might come jingling at
any day or hour, coming from inland over the pass to the sea, with the
packs and thirsty drivers, who paid their bills sometimes in gum rubber
and Peruvian bark. Tobacco planters stopped there too, going down to
Portate. Men from the ships in the harbour came out, and carried off
advertisements of the hotel, and plastered the coast with them. I saw
an advertisement of the “Hotel Helen Mar” ten years after in a shipping
office in San Francisco, and it read:
“Hotel Helen Mar, Portate, Peru. Mountain and Sea Breezes. Board and
Lodging Good and Reasonable. Sailor's Snug Harbour. Welcome Jolly Tar.
Thomas Buckingham and Stephen Todd.”
That was for foreign patronage. The home advertisements were in Spanish
and went up country with the mule trains. Up in the Andes they knew more
about the Hotel Helen Mar than they did of the Peruvian Government. We
ran the hotel to surprise South America.
It was nearly a year before we heard from the ship's owners, though we
sent them the proper papers; and then a man came out, and looked at the
_Helen Mar_, and says:
“I guess she belongs where she is. Running a hotel, are you?” and he
carried off the sails and other rigging.
She was propped up at first only by the bunch of fruit trees, but
by-and-by we bedded her in stones. We painted a sign across her forty
feet long, but cut no doors, because a seaman won't treat a ship that
way. You had to climb ladders to the deck.
Inside she was comfortable. No hotel piazza could equal the _Helen
Mar_'s deck on a warm night, with the old southern stars overhead, when
a bunch of mule-drivers maybe would be forward talking, and I and Stevey
Todd aft with a couple of Spanish planters, or an agent, or the officers
of a warship maybe from England or the States. Over on the hillside
lay Captain Goodwin and most of the crew of the _Helen Mar_, wishing us
well, and close to starboard you heard all night the tinkle of the
Jiron River down in its channel. It was twenty feet from the deck of the
_Helen Mar_ to the ground, and twenty feet from there to the river.
Portate was a pleasant little city in those days. It had pink-uniformed
soldiery for the city guard, and a fat, warm-tempered Mayor, who used
often to come up to the hotel and cool off when something had stuck a
pin into his dignity that made him feverish. Stevey Todd was cook and I
was manager. Business was good and the company good at the Hotel Helen
Mar.