"You German dogs like to guzzle. Wake up and take some of this!"
He put the neck of a vodka bottle in my mouth and let the liquid fire
trickle down my throat. Next day I was too sick to stand on my feet.
The captain ordered me out of my bunk and to work. I tried but
couldn't get up. Then he beat me, saying I was a drunken loafer.
Later I learned that when I had fallen overboard the quartermaster
immediately called for volunteers to man the lifeboat. The captain,
who had never dreamed of sending help to me, shouted to him, shaking
a harpoon:
"If you lower the boat, you will get this harpoon in your belly."
As a matter of fact, they were not obliged to send a boat for me. A
captain need not attempt the rescue of a man overboard if it is
liable to endanger the lives of others of his crew.
The quartermaster, however, calmly walked away, got his volunteers,
lowered the boat, went after me, and left the captain in a towering
rage.
The shock of that experience brought on a sort of nervous spasm which
made my hands shake. I was like that for four years, and even to-day
I sometimes have nightmares and dream of falling from a mast, of the
albatross, of the captain and the vodka.
I lay in my bunk and thought it over. I had been Count Felix von
Luckner, of a titled, landowning family, descendant of a long line of
military officers and of an illustrious Marshal of France. Now I was
a mere cleaner of the pig sties and the latrines, fed like a pig on
scraps left by others, cursed and beaten and considered by the
captain to be carrion not worth saving from the sea. I said to
myself:
"You put yourself in this fix, by Joe, and you've got to take your
humiliation and punishment like a man."
So this was the life at sea? Certainly, it was not what I had
expected. I wondered if I had made a mistake. Well, mistake or no
mistake, I had promised my father to wear the Emperor's uniform with
honour, and I would not go home until I wore the Emperor's naval
uniform with honour. But how far away from me now seemed epaulettes
and gold braid.
The _Niobe_ did not put in at a single port on our way out. After we
passed through the English Channel, until we reached Western
Australia, we saw nothing save sky and sea, the sky light or dark,
the sea in quiet or in storm. In fact, we only came in sight of land
once. This was when we sighted an island somewhere off the African
coast. I could see palms, rows of palms, and white houses with red
roofs and green shutters. I stood at the rail and gazed. What joy
it must be to walk and breathe on that green island. It seemed an
abode of all happy things. I was sure that living there must be a
fairy princess. I was very much of a boy, and I had been reared on
German stories. I was wretched, and yonder was a land so fair. It
must be the haunt of a fairy princess. I stood with my elbows on the
rail and my chin on my hands and dreamed of her.
Singular that I should have then thought of a fairy princess. A few
years later, I visited that same isle. By then I had become a naval
officer of the Kaiser. I wandered all through its palm groves,
remembering how once I had sailed past it, the miserable cabin boy of
the _Niobe_, and had had visions of a fairy. This time I did indeed
find a fairy princess there, and promptly lost my heart to her. We
became engaged, and a little later she became the guardian angel of
the raider in which I sailed the seas. She was a visitor on the
isle, and her name was Irma.
But my fairy princess was only a wild fancy as I stood at the rail of
the _Niobe_. The dreamy bit of land with its graceful palms and
pretty houses grew small in the distance as the wind bellied out the
mainsail and swept us on toward Cape Verde. Finally, I was left
gazing at a speck that vanished on the horizon. And still I remained
motionless and in my trance, until a howl cracked my ears and a kick
nearly split me in two.
"Get along there, you loafer," roared the captain.
But the latter part of the voyage was not so bad as the first. I was
getting used to mistreatment, and was rapidly developing into a
hardened seaman. The captain remained brutal, and so did most of the
men, but there were several who grew kind toward me, among them the
boatswain and the helmsman. So I began to experience some of that
comradeship of the sea for which a sailor will endure many a hardship.
Finally, after eighty days at sea without touching at a single port,
we sailed into the harbour at Fremantle. I had always thought of
Australia as a land of kangaroos, of black aborigines with bows and
arrows, and of bushrangers. But Fremantle turned out to be as
commonplace and bleak a port as you could hope to see. However, I
met some sailors off a German ship, and the sound of my native
language and association with my countrymen made me happy. They took
me to the Hotel Royal. They went there to drink beer and I to share
their company. But the proprietor had a daughter, and I transferred
my interest to her. She was what you call a bonnie lassie, and she
listened to my chatter. After I told her my story, she urged me to
desert from my ship. She even talked to her father about me and got
him to take me on as a dishwasher. That was all right. Dish-washing
had been perhaps the most elegant of all the jobs assigned to me on
the _Niobe_. But I could not abandon old Peter's sea chest. So the
German sailors helped me to smuggle it off the ship. The _Niobe_
sailed presently. Luckily, the captain did not ask the police to
find me, as he had a right to do. Maybe he considered himself lucky
to get rid of me.