There was nothing to drink on the Sophie Sutherland, and we had fifty-one
days of glorious sailing, taking the southern passage in the north-east
trades to Bonin Islands. This isolated group, belonging to Japan, had
been selected as the rendezvous of the Canadian and American sealing
fleets. Here they filled their water-barrels and made repairs before
starting on the hundred days' harrying of the seal-herd along the
northern coasts of Japan to Behring Sea.
Those fifty-one days of fine sailing and intense sobriety had put me in
splendid fettle. The alcohol had been worked out of my system, and from
the moment the voyage began I had not known the desire for a drink. I
doubt if I even thought once about a drink. Often, of course, the talk
in the forecastle turned on drink, and the men told of their more
exciting or humorous drunks, remembering such passages more keenly, with
greater delight, than all the other passages of their adventurous lives.
In the forecastle, the oldest man, fat and fifty, was Louis. He was a
broken skipper. John Barleycorn had thrown him, and he was winding up
his career where he had begun it, in the forecastle. His case made quite
an impression on me. John Barleycorn did other things beside kill a man.
He hadn't killed Louis. He had done much worse. He had robbed him of
power and place and comfort, crucified his pride, and condemned him to
the hardship of the common sailor that would last as long as his healthy
breath lasted, which promised to be for a long time.
We completed our run across the Pacific, lifted the volcanic peaks,
jungle-clad, of the Bonin Islands, sailed in among the reefs to the
land-locked harbour, and let our anchor rumble down where lay a score or
more of sea-gypsies like ourselves. The scents of strange vegetation
blew off the tropic land. Aborigines, in queer outrigger canoes, and
Japanese, in queerer sampans, paddled about the bay and came aboard. It
was my first foreign land; I had won to the other side of the world, and
I would see all I had read in the books come true. I was wild to get
ashore.
Victor and Axel, a Swede and a Norwegian, and I planned to keep together.
(And so well did we, that for the rest of the cruise we were known as the
"Three Sports.") Victor pointed out a pathway that disappeared up a wild
canyon, emerged on a steep bare lava slope, and thereafter appeared and
disappeared, ever climbing, among the palms and flowers. We would go
over that path, he said, and we agreed, and we would see beautiful
scenery, and strange native villages, and find, Heaven alone knew, what
adventure at the end. And Axel was keen to go fishing. The three of us
agreed to that, too. We would get a sampan, and a couple of Japanese
fishermen who knew the fishing grounds, and we would have great sport.
As for me, I was keen for anything.
And then, our plans made, we rowed ashore over the banks of living coral
and pulled our boat up the white beach of coral sand. We walked across
the fringe of beach under the cocoanut-palms and into the little town,
and found several hundred riotous seamen from all the world, drinking
prodigiously, singing prodigiously, dancing prodigiously--and all on the
main street to the scandal of a helpless handful of Japanese police.
Victor and Axel said that we'd have a drink before we started on our long
walk. Could I decline to drink with these two chesty shipmates?
Drinking together, glass in hand, put the seal on comradeship. It was
the way of life. Our teetotaler owner-captain was laughed at, and
sneered at, by all of us because of his teetotalism. I didn't in the
least want a drink, but I did want to be a good fellow and a good
comrade. Nor did Louis' case deter me, as I poured the biting, scorching
stuff down my throat. John Barleycorn had thrown Louis to a nasty fall,
but I was young. My blood ran full and red; I had a constitution of
iron; and--well, youth ever grins scornfully at the wreckage of age.
Queer, fierce, alcoholic stuff it was that we drank. There was no
telling where or how it had been manufactured--some native concoction
most likely. But it was hot as fire, pale as water, and quick as death
with its kick. It had been filled into empty "square-face" bottles which
had once contained Holland gin, and which still bore the fitting legend
"Anchor Brand." It certainly anchored us. We never got out of the town.
We never went fishing in the sampan. And though we were there ten days,
we never trod that wild path along the lava cliffs and among the flowers.
We met old acquaintances from other schooners, fellows we had met in the
saloons of San Francisco before we sailed. And each meeting meant a
drink; and there was much to talk about; and more drinks; and songs to be
sung; and pranks and antics to be performed, until the maggots of
imagination began to crawl, and it all seemed great and wonderful to me,
these lusty hard-bitten sea-rovers, of whom I made one, gathered in
wassail on a coral strand. Old lines about knights at table in the great
banquet halls, and of those above the salt and below the salt, and of
Vikings feasting fresh from sea and ripe for battle, came to me; and I
knew that the old times were not dead and that we belonged to that
selfsame ancient breed.
By mid-afternoon Victor went mad with drink, and wanted to fight
everybody and everything. I have since seen lunatics in the violent
wards of asylums that seemed to behave in no wise different from Victor's
way, save that perhaps he was more violent. Axel and I interfered as
peacemakers, were roughed and jostled in the mix-ups, and finally, with
infinite precaution and intoxicated cunning, succeeded in inveigling our
chum down to the boat and in rowing him aboard our schooner.
But no sooner did Victor's feet touch the deck than he began to clean up
the ship. He had the strength of several men, and he ran amuck with it.
I remember especially one man whom he got into the chain-boxes but failed
to damage through inability to hit him. The man dodged and ducked, and
Victor broke all the knuckles of both his fists against the huge links of
the anchor chain. By the time we dragged him out of that, his madness
had shifted to the belief that he was a great swimmer, and the next
moment he was overboard and demonstrating his ability by floundering like
a sick porpoise and swallowing much salt water.
We rescued him, and by the time we got him below, undressed, and into his
bunk, we were wrecks ourselves. But Axel and I wanted to see more of
shore, and away we went, leaving Victor snoring. It was curious, the
judgment passed on Victor by his shipmates, drinkers themselves. They
shook their heads disapprovingly and muttered: "A man like that oughtn't
to drink." Now Victor was the smartest sailor and best-tempered shipmate
in the forecastle. He was an all-round splendid type of seaman; his
mates recognised his worth, and respected him and liked him. Yet John
Barleycorn metamorphosed him into a violent lunatic. And that was the
very point these drinkers made. They knew that drink--and drink with a
sailor is always excessive--made them mad, but only mildly mad. Violent
madness was objectionable because it spoiled the fun of others and often
culminated in tragedy. From their standpoint, mild madness was all
right. But from the standpoint of the whole human race, is not all
madness objectionable? And is there a greater maker of madness of all
sorts than John Barleycorn?
But to return. Ashore, snugly ensconced in a Japanese house of
entertainment, Axel and I compared bruises, and over a comfortable drink
talked of the afternoon's happenings. We liked the quietness of that
drink and took another. A shipmate dropped in, several shipmates dropped
in, and we had more quiet drinks. Finally, just as we had engaged a
Japanese orchestra, and as the first strains of the samisens and taikos
were rising, through the paper-walls came a wild howl from the street.
We recognised it. Still howling, disdaining doorways, with blood-shot
eyes and wildly waving muscular arms, Victor burst upon us through the
fragile walls. The old amuck rage was on him, and he wanted blood,
anybody's blood. The orchestra fled; so did we. We went through
doorways, and we went through paper-walls--anything to get away.
And after the place was half wrecked, and we had agreed to pay the
damage, leaving Victor partly subdued and showing symptoms of lapsing
into a comatose state, Axel and I wandered away in quest of a quieter
drinking-place. The main street was a madness. Hundreds of sailors
rollicked up and down. Because the chief of police with his small force
was helpless, the governor of the colony had issued orders to the
captains to have all their men on board by sunset.
What! To be treated in such fashion! As the news spread among the
schooners, they were emptied. Everybody came ashore. Men who had had no
intention of coming ashore climbed into the boats. The unfortunate
governor's ukase had precipitated a general debauch for all hands. It
was hours after sunset, and the men wanted to see anybody try to put them
on board. They went around inviting the authorities to try to put them
on board. In front of the governor's house they were gathered thickest,
bawling sea-songs, circulating square faces, and dancing uproarious
Virginia reels and old-country dances. The police, including the
reserves, stood in little forlorn groups, waiting for the command the
governor was too wise to issue. And I thought this saturnalia was great.
It was like the old days of the Spanish Main come back. It was license;
it was adventure. And I was part of it, a chesty sea-rover along with
all these other chesty sea-rovers among the paper houses of Japan.
The governor never issued the order to clear the streets, and Axel and I
wandered on from drink to drink. After a time, in some of the antics,
getting hazy myself, I lost him. I drifted along, making new
acquaintances, downing more drinks, getting hazier and hazier. I
remember, somewhere, sitting in a circle with Japanese fishermen, Kanaka
boat-steerers from our own vessels, and a young Danish sailor fresh from
cowboying in the Argentine and with a penchant for native customs and
ceremonials. And with due and proper and most intricate Japanese
ceremonial we of the circle drank saki, pale, mild, and lukewarm, from
tiny porcelain bowls.
And, later, I remember the runaway apprentices--boys of eighteen and
twenty, of middle class English families, who had jumped their ships and
apprenticeships in various ports of the world and drifted into the
forecastles of the sealing schooners. They were healthy, smooth-skinned,
clear-eyed, and they were young--youths like me, learning the way of
their feet in the world of men. And they WERE men. No mild saki for
them, but square faces illicitly refilled with corrosive fire that flamed
through their veins and burst into conflagrations in their heads. I
remember a melting song they sang, the refrain of which was:
"'Tis but a little golden ring,
I give it to thee with pride,
Wear it for your mother's sake
When you are on the tide."
They wept over it as they sang it, the graceless young scamps who had all
broken their mothers' prides, and I sang with them, and wept with them,
and luxuriated in the pathos and the tragedy of it, and struggled to make
glimmering inebriated generalisations on life and romance. And one last
picture I have, standing out very clear and bright in the midst of
vagueness before and blackness afterward. We--the apprentices and I--are
swaying and clinging to one another under the stars. We are singing a
rollicking sea song, all save one who sits on the ground and weeps; and
we are marking the rhythm with waving square faces. From up and down the
street come far choruses of sea-voices similarly singing, and life is
great, and beautiful and romantic, and magnificently mad.
And next, after the blackness, I open my eyes in the early dawn to see a
Japanese woman, solicitously anxious, bending over me. She is the port
pilot's wife and I am lying in her doorway. I am chilled and shivering,
sick with the after-sickness of debauch. And I feel lightly clad. Those
rascals of runaway apprentices! They have acquired the habit of running
away. They have run away with my possessions. My watch is gone. My few
dollars are gone. My coat is gone. So is my belt. And yes, my shoes.
And the foregoing is a sample of the ten days I spent in the Bonin
Islands. Victor got over his lunacy, rejoined Axel and me, and after
that we caroused somewhat more discreetly. And we never climbed that
lava path among the flowers. The town and the square faces were all we
saw.
One who has been burned by fire must preach about the fire. I might have
seen and healthily enjoyed a whole lot more of the Bonin Islands, if I
had done what I ought to have done. But, as I see it, it is not a matter
of what one ought to do, or ought not to do. It is what one DOES do.
That is the everlasting, irrefragable fact. I did just what I did. I
did what all those men did in the Bonin Islands. I did what millions of
men over the world were doing at that particular point in time. I did it
because the way led to it, because I was only a human boy, a creature of
my environment, and neither an anaemic nor a god. I was just human, and
I was taking the path in the world that men took--men whom I admired, if
you please; full-blooded men, lusty, breedy, chesty men, free spirits and
anything but niggards in the way they foamed life away.
And the way was open. It was like an uncovered well in a yard where
children play. It is small use to tell the brave little boys toddling
their way along into knowledge of life that they mustn't play near the
uncovered well. They'll play near it. Any parent knows that. And we
know that a certain percentage of them, the livest and most daring, will
fall into the well. The thing to do--we all know it--is to cover up the
well. The case is the same with John Barleycorn. All the no-saying and
no-preaching in the world will fail to keep men, and youths growing into
manhood, away from John Barleycorn when John Barleycorn is everywhere
accessible, and where John Barleycorn is everywhere the connotation of
manliness, and daring, and great-spiritedness.
The only rational thing for the twentieth-century folk to do is to cover
up the well; to make the twentieth century in truth the twentieth
century, and to relegate to the nineteenth century and all the preceding
centuries the things of those centuries, the witch-burnings, the
intolerances, the fetiches, and, not least among such barbarisms, John
Barleycorn.