Chapter XXI (1)

“_You pull for the shore, boys, Praying to Heaven
above, But I’ll go down in the angry deep, With the
ship I love._” 247

THE CRADLE OF THE DEEP

1
“I spit a curve in the wind”

“She ain’t any water rat, ma’am! She’s a girl flower, she is, with the tropic heavens fer a hothouse, and the scoldin’ of the storm fer her when she’s bad. An’ she knows all that we sailormen know—all the good—’cause no one of us ever let her hear nothin’ else.”

It was Old John Henry, one of our sailors, defending me to the wife of an American Consul in an Australian port. She had asked him, as he stood on watch at the gangway, what kind of a “water rat” was the Captain’s daughter, living such a rough life among rough men on a schooner. And John Henry, feeling he must uphold the dignity of the Captain’s daughter and the genteelness of sailormen, had replied with all the sea poetry he could command.

“But how awful for a girl to be raised on a ship with nothing but men,” persisted the woman unconvinced. She hadn’t seen me but she had heard the talk of the waterfront and she knew I must be rough, and coarse and low—just awful—raised without the softening feminine influence.

“Awful, hell!” snorted John Henry. “She ain’t no damn fool like most women; her Old Man uses a rope’s end on her stern often enough to keep the foolishness outen her head.”

I was taking it easy, rolled up in the canvas of the mizzen sail which was furled on the mizzen boom. If I hadn’t been afraid of women I would have come down to see how different she was from me because I couldn’t understand why any one should think it strange that I lived on a ship with no woman to care for me. Hadn’t she gone to sea when she was a little girl? I supposed every girl went to sea when she was young for I knew nothing but the sea and strange island ports.

The smell of rotting copra, putrid pearl oysters drying, sandalwood in little bundles piled high on our deck, the fumes from a cargo of guano, and sacks of ivory nuts—these things, the places they came from and the people who brought them to us were the commonplaces of my life. The legends of the sea told me by the sailors on our ship were my fairy tales; the freak storms, the bewildering doldrums in the tropics, and the companionship of old shellback sailors, the foundation of my experience.

My father’s ship, the _Minnie A. Caine_, was a four-masted, windjammer rigged schooner, engaged in the copra and sandalwood trade between the islands of the South Seas and Australia. I couldn’t remember when I wasn’t on a ship. Born in Berkeley, California—known in the maritime world as “the sea Captain’s bedroom”—I was the eleventh child in our family. Four of my brothers and sisters had died in two years. They called me the lick of the pan because I was last and not much of me. No one expected me to grow up, but Father said:

“This is the last one and I’m going to save it. I’ll take it away from the land and let the sea make it the pick of the puppies.” So he took me when I was less than a year old and I lived on shipboard until I was seventeen, and if the sea didn’t make me the pick of the puppies, at least it made me the huskiest.

Father brought me up with no creed except fear and respect for the gods that brew the storms and calms.

As to God Himself, I can say only that in my early life He and I were on most intimate terms. I had not half the fear of Him that I had of Father. I felt much closer to Him because I could discuss many things with Him that I wouldn’t have dared mention to Father. He was my friend, confidant, and counselor and I always felt that He approved of everything I did, and if I felt He disapproved I would argue until I convinced Him—in my own mind! Our arguments and discussions took place at the masthead far above the deck where no one could hear our private conversations.

Many a time I climbed to the crosstrees of the foremast and had it out with Him. If things had gone well with me I thanked Him—as for instance, if I managed to steal an extra hunk of brown sugar from the storeroom for my oatmeal, without being caught, I thought He was a good sport and told Him so. But I gave Him hell if He let us get caught in a sudden storm that ripped our sails or if we were becalmed in the deadly doldrums.

Father was very different—much more concrete, harder to twist around my finger—more to be feared than God, in my estimation. I could say anything to God—praise Him, gossip with Him or tell Him to go to the devil, and I did. But in all my years on the ship I heard few ever tell Father to go to the devil and none ever did it twice!

It was from my father that I inherited my love of the sea, the understanding of it, and the courage to face it. The sea was his life and he never wanted any other. How could a boy, born on an old clipper ship lying in far-off Geelong Bay, Australia, expect to do anything but follow the sea, and, if the Wanderlust ruled his blood, certainly he came by it naturally.

My grandfather, Louis Lazzarrevich, was a Montenegrin land owner and my grandmother a beautiful girl of Turkish blood whom Louis Lazzarrevich had married in spite of the Montenegrin hatred of the Turks. Life in Montenegro with a Turkish wife was not so pleasant. Consequently, after the birth of their first child, the young couple, to get away, planned a trip around the world in a sailing ship. In Geelong Bay, Australia, where the ship had put in, my father was born. My grandmother was so ill that her husband took her ashore and told the captain of the clipper ship that they would stay in Australia, and he could pick them up on his return voyage in two years.

Within a week of the time of their landing, my grandfather was accidentally drowned in Geelong Bay. That left my grandmother stranded with two children, my father and his older sister.

Shortly after my grandfather’s death, my grandmother met a fascinating German pearl-trader, Captain Wagner. Beautiful women were scarce in Australia in those days, and there has always been a certain affinity between beautiful women and pearls. Moreover Turkish women are fatalistic. So it was not long before the pearl-trader married my grandmother, but, once married, he absolutely refused to have his honeymoon cluttered up with his predecessor’s children. As to my grandmother, new love and the pearls outweighed old love and her children—and as I have said before, Turkish women are fatalistic.

So she and her pearl-trader sailed away to the South Seas, and the good Jesuit Fathers took in the unwanted children.

For the first ten years of his life my father endured the confinement, the strict discipline and the soul loneliness of the Jesuit Orphan Asylum, and then the Wanderlust in his blood took hold. Fearing the good Fathers might not understand, and not wishing to hurt their feelings by telling them what he thought of their orphanage, he departed quietly one night without saying good-bye. A few days later when he left Australia on a trading schooner plying between Melbourne and China, that same modesty and diffidence kept him from letting the captain or the crew know he was on board until, when they were out at sea, hunger forced his confession. They whipped him and put him to work, but they couldn’t turn back or stop the ship on his account so he got to China.

Then followed eight years’ work on traders in the Far East before the boy, now eighteen, sailed into San Francisco Bay, deckhand on a full-rigged English clipper.

San Francisco at that time was only a sheltered harbor with a dock about a block long!

One day a young girl wandered down to the wharf to watch the ships come in. On the clipper ship she saw a handsome, dark-haired young man holystoning the deck. He spoke to her. She had never seen any one like him before. He told her stories of the sea, stories of trading and escapes from sea thieves off the China coasts. She was so fascinated by his tales that she stole away every day to meet him. The girl was Emmaline Trask Lowell, the fourteen year old daughter of Dr. Butler Lowell, once of Boston, but then of more liberal-minded San Francisco.

The Lowells were a very respectable family in Massachusetts. Young Doctor Butler Lowell had relatives enough to keep any young doctor comfortably occupied,—he was a cousin, though twice removed, of James Russell Lowell—but when he began to preach that “consumption was catching” and people with the dry cough should be put off by themselves, all the sisters and the cousins and the aunts turned against him. I guess there were too many in Massachusetts in that day rather proud of their dry cough as an added subject of conversation!

When the neighbors turn against a doctor there is only one thing for the doctor to do, and Dr. Butler Lowell did it. His move landed him in San Francisco.

Although Dr. Lowell had radical medical ideas his other notions were quite in accord with his family tradition. Which perhaps was the reason that Emmaline Lowell didn’t tell her parents of the deckhand she had fallen in love with. Instead she eloped with her sailor to Niles, California. They kept their marriage a secret and a month later my father sailed for Samoa to be gone for a year. When he returned he found a baby son—my oldest brother.

My mother hated the sea. It took my father away from her sometimes for months, sometimes for two or three years. She never went with him, for the babies came along too fast—I was the eleventh!

Over a period of years Father worked himself up until he was the ranking captain of the Alaska Packers fleet of salmon ships. During the months his ship was frozen in, in Alaska, he learned the North like a book. He made charts of the wilds around Nome for the government. He prospected for gold; he went whaling for oil, and sealing for rich furs. He traded with the Eskimos, giving them tools, lumber and firearms in exchange for rare, carved ivory tusks of walrus, and polar bear skins.

I have always thought of Father as the swordfish of the ship. I began thinking of him that way the day I saw a swordfish and a whale in deadly combat.

Because of its size and the pictures they have seen of small boats being smashed by one sweep of its tail, most people naturally think of the whale as king of the ocean, but that impression is wrong. The swordfish is the boss. Both the whale and the shark are too slow and too clumsy to whip the real ruler of the sea. The swordfish doesn’t grow beyond fifteen feet, but it fights because it likes to fight, and on occasion has driven its weapon ten inches through the copper and oak side of a ship.

We were in the trade winds about ten degrees north of the Equator one hot afternoon when, close to the ship and entirely without warning, a sperm whale leaped frantically clear and while in the air smacked down at the water savagely with its tail. The yell of the man at the wheel and the noise of that resounding slap brought all hands to the rail.

“Swordfish,” said Father. “Nothing else ever made a whale jump out of the water.”

Three times that whale jumped and what a thrashing about there was! The battle was ahead of us and a little to one side but neither fighter paid the slightest attention to the ship. The swordfish would come up from under to thrust at the tender underside of the whale. Then the whale would leap and come down lashing with its huge tail with terrific force to kill its attacker, but always in vain. In a few minutes the commotion quieted, the water was bloody. There was no whale in sight.

Father wasn’t a large man, and every once in so often some whale of a sailor, deceived by his size, would undertake to defy him with force. Then followed the battle and Father always emerged the swordfish of the ship. Every time he won a battle his crew seemed prouder of him and he became kinder than before.

Just because I was the only girl on board I was not accorded any privileges that sailors didn’t get. I went without food as they did when we were on a long trip and the provisions ran short. I stood my trick at the wheel steering, pulled at the ropes when we tacked, manned the pumps when the ship sprang a leak, said “Yes sir” to my father and was taught to obey as a sailor obeys the master of a ship. Above all I was taught the code of the sea:—never to squeal on anyone, take punishment without a squawk and be ashamed to show fear.

I had no other children to play with, no other woman-thing on board, so my playthings were sea birds, little toy ships, and a lifeboat which was made fast to the deck and was seldom used. I would get in that lifeboat and pretend to row. I measured my strokes and counted a thousand strokes to the mile. In my lifeboat, strapped to the deck, I used to row away on long picnic trips by myself to places where I would find children to play with; children like I had seen playing around the docks in port. And what games we had! The games played with those imaginary children always involved something to eat.

You see, on a sailing ship bound on a voyage of one hundred and twenty days, the food is rationed so many ounces per person per day. Because I was little my rations rated one-half of a grown sailor’s share. That was probably an excellent thing for my health but there was never a day when I couldn’t have eaten four times as much—so food and playmates were my dreams of unattainable bliss. At my picnics we would set tables with piles of wonderful foods and I would eat all the things I wanted to. The only food I knew about was rough ship food, such as lentils, rice, salt beef in brine, dried fish and dried fruits. The sailors told me about delicious “vittles” that people on land had for every meal—fresh juicy apples and cakes and chickens stuffed with raisins and lots of sugar and real milk. Of course I thought the sailors just made up those things, so I pretended I really had them on my dream voyages. The children—and there were always thousands of them—would play with me. I had long conversations with them about pretty dresses and mothers and living in one house for a long time and waking up in the same place every day. I had these conversations out loud, but no one ever paid any attention to me because the crew and Father were too busy all the time to notice what I did. When my games were over I pretended the children were sorry to have me leave and I would promise to row back the next day and play with them again. But no matter where I went, or how far, I had to count my strokes carefully, because if I made a mistake, how could I ever get back to the ship? When my picnic was finished I’d climb back in the lifeboat and begin carefully counting my strokes for the return voyage until I had reached the proper number and knew it was safe to disembark from my stationary lifeboat to the deck of our schooner, once more just a sea captain’s daughter.

Our trips usually took from eighty to one hundred and twenty days at sea without sighting land. Through storms, calms, waterless days—when our water casks ran dry—scurvy, and head winds, we travelled from port to port. If I ever felt fear I knew better than to express it. My father and the sailors had taught me a faith that made me hold on, no matter what happened. They believed there was God in the sunsets, in the storms, in the whiteness of an albatross’s wing, and in the winds that blew our ship along.

Life at sea did not seem any mystery. An old sailor taught me that thunder was the growling curse of a dead sea captain who had lost his course; the blinding flashes of lightning were the combined sparkles of barmaids’ eyes luring seamen to a pleasant harbor; the groaning, creaking noises in the rigging and the hull of the ship which seemed so much louder at night were the tired squawkings of our schooner, her complaints at carrying such heavy cargoes. That was what I believed, but sometimes I knew that those noises were really seams that had opened under the stress of the pounding sea; that water was leaking into the hold as fast as the crew could pump it out—and the straining noises in the rigging told of weather-rotting blocks which might carry away at any minute. Every night before I turned in to my bunk I realized I might be going to sleep for the last time. There are so many dangers besetting a sailing ship on the deep seas that every sailorman knows the end may come at any moment. Yet in spite of that ghost which stalked the decks at night, I would fall asleep, unafraid.

Our sailors were the huskiest men Father could assemble—Swedes, Norwegians, Germans, Irishmen and Poles. What they lacked in brains they more than made up for in brawn. Natural-born rovers, they were content as long as we sailed, but when we hit port they floundered hopelessly in waterfront saloons, or in the islands where they went ashore, and the native girls, thrilled by their physiques and white skins, gave themselves freely. The native girls were fascinated by the white-skinned men off ships that sailed to their islands from the “lands beyond the horizon” and the sailors were more than willing to be adored gods to the little bronze beauties who caressed them and covered them with flowers. The fact that some day the question of sex would be an issue for me to face never occurred to me, for I had my whole world of people catalogued from my one-sided perspective on sailors. Mates were usually married to some faithful woman in the Old Country—Sweden; captains in my opinion, never drank or made love to women because they loved some woman in the States as my father loved my mother. Cabin-boys represented to me pimply youths just out of high school who ran away to sea for adventure and didn’t find it, or dreamy boys who were too lazy to work ashore. Cooks, because we had Japanese cooks, were heavenly people who would give me extra food.

As an antidote for unsavory influences such as perfume which I smelled on the cook and dreams of living in cities, Father made me take a salt water bath in a canvas tank on deck every day. Only when it rained did I get a fresh water bath.

There was no seaman’s work that my father or the sailors didn’t teach me. I learned arithmetic by adding up tide tables in navigation books. Before I was twelve I could take a “sight of the sun” and figure out our position on the chart. I learned to read “intelligent” things, as I termed them, from an old, battered set of the encyclopedia. We had a complete set except for the volumes from “N” to “S”. As a result I had read everything in those encyclopedias except the subjects contained in the missing volumes.

Our ship’s library, supplied by those well-meaning societies ashore that feel seamen need fine literature to uplift them, consisted of such books as “The Care and Feeding of Pedigree Dogs,” “Modern Science of Surgery,” “Engineering,” Hymn books, Cæsar’s Conquest (in Latin) and other such works guaranteed to inspire the minds of sailors to loftier ideals than the fleshpots. In desperation for something to read at sea the sailors would borrow the books, read them from cover to cover and return them to the library feeling rich in the priceless knowledge they imparted. Even I read them all and Father highly approved because he said they wouldn’t fill my head full of silly notions. Once a sailor fell so low as to bring a sixpenny paper-covered novel on board entitled “Mad Love.” The sailors all read it and I managed to get it by standing its owner’s tricks at the wheel for two whole days. If it wasn’t elevating, at least “Mad Love” appealed to me more than the “Care and Feeding of Pedigree Dogs.” Some day, when I’m rich, I’m going to supply all the sailing ships in the world with real story books to avenge those years of barren reading which were foisted upon us by the uplift societies!

One of the chief accomplishments of our sailors was their spitting. They chewed tobacco and spat the juice freely. They could spit at a crack and hit it without a miss, and one sublimely endowed sailor could spit a curve to windward without mishap! I tried chewing tobacco, but the first time I chawed a hunk Father told me to swallow the juice if I wanted to be a good spitter. Obediently I swallowed a whole mouth full of bitter tobacco juice. The result was as expected. After that lesson I chawed dried prunes which made grand spit. After long weeks of practice I could not only spit at a crack but I could hit it, and it is on record that I spit two curves on a windy day, which gave me a high rating as an able bodied seaman!

When that woman was disapproving of me to John Henry because I lived on a ship, a man-raised child, I wondered if she could even spit straight herself, and if she couldn’t, what did she know about our sea anyhow?

2
In which an alarm clock and some dried apricots are exchanged with
natives for a nurse for me. The ship becomes my cradle

My life at sea started when I was eleven months old. Father had brought me down to the schooner, a tiny bundle wrapped in a blanket. I was so small I would have been lost in his bunk, so Father had Stitches—the sailmaker—make a diminutive hammock of canvas. This hammock was swung from bolts, one sunk in the wall above the middle of Father’s bunk and the other into the stanchion at the foot of the bunk on the outside. The rolling of the ship rocked the hammock more steadily than the most indulgent mother.

From the time he made my baby hammock, Stitches devoted his life to me. For fourteen years he thought of me first, then of the ship, last of himself, and in the final tragedy of our ship, he died to save me. I loved him and pestered him and abused his love as only a child can, but I’ll never forget him.

I first recall Stitches as being the only man in the world older than Father. In reality he must have been close to sixty when I was brought on board. His life was one of the romantic tragedies of the sea, for when he came to sign on the Ship’s Articles he said “I’m a kind of Johnny-All-Sorts, Skipper. I’ve been all the way up and down the ladder from cabin-boy to Captain and back to sailmaker. My name’s my own business, and I’ll sign on in my own way, if you want me.”

“Sign any way you damn please,” answered Father, who knew a sailor when he saw one.

So the old sailor signed the Articles just “Stitches” and that’s the way he was known for more than fifteen years on our ship. In appearance there was no sailor like Stitches. Years of bending over his work as sailmaker had brought his head forward and his stomach protruding full speed ahead. He waddled a little when he walked, and always sat tailor fashion with his legs crossed so that he gave the impression of a mild, wise old turtle upright on his tail. Every man on the ship came to Stitches with his troubles because they all knew that he had forgotten more about the sea than most men ever learn, and he had had so many troubles of his own that he understood.

Stitches must have been born lacking the iron in his soul to make him set his course and hold it. Rather he had chosen to ride before the storms of life, but as a compensation for his successive failures, he had developed his own peculiar philosophy of content that made the crew love him.

Why didn’t Stitches give up the sea? He couldn’t. The sea was in his blood and he would rather stay on a ship in any capacity than live ashore in comfort.

“I’ll drop my final anchor with the wind howling in my ears above and the swish of bilge water below me,” he declared, “and that way I’ll go content.” And when the time came, I’m sure he went content.

I had inherited my father’s lusty lungs, and my crying did not help my popularity with the men trying to sleep on their watch below. The cabin-boy had to heat sea water in a saucepan over an oil lamp for my daily bath which Father gave me. My bathtub was an empty codfish keg, and how I yelled whenever I faced it. The mate usually turned in at nine in the morning and at that time I was always squalling my loudest. He made a remark which cost him his berth when it was repeated to my father.

“Damned if I ever thought I’d live to see the day when a deep water schooner would be made into a howling nursery.”

Friends of my father along the waterfront in Frisco thought he was crazy to take a baby to sea. We were bound for Chile and thence to Australia. Father’s friends reminded him that the trip was a hard one on account of sudden storms and freak weather off the west coast of South America.

“If I can handle a bunch of squareheads and a scow of a ship in a typhoon, a baby will be easy,” was Father’s answer to their warnings. With characteristic, clear vision he knew his course, and he determined to keep a strong hand on the helm of my life.

That trip, which was my first one, brought all the predicted complications. The patent foods which Father had provided to feed me did not agree with me. I lost weight and became so puny that Father had about given up hope that I would survive until we reached Sydney. There was only one thing for him to do and that was get some kind of food that would nourish me. We would not be in Australia for fifty or sixty days, so he turned in at Norfolk Island to see if he could buy something there to feed me.

“I tried to get a native woman with a small child to come on board and feed you from her breasts,” Father told me years afterwards, “but she was afraid to venture beyond the horizon on a white-winged ship.”

Not to be defeated in his mission, Father sent Stitches in one direction on the island and he went another, seeking some way of solving the feeding problem. Many search islands for treasure, but Father’s exploring was for something more rare on a South Sea island—food for a sick baby. Native children are fed on yarrow roots and raw fish washed down their little throats with coconut milk, but white children can digest no such diet.

After combing the island all day Father returned to the ship, discouraged. He had begun to think finer things of the land than he had when he had taken me from my home to raise on the sea.

At about midnight Stitches came on board. With triumph in his face he rolled aft and asked permission to speak to Father.

“Cap’n, I found somethin’ for the kid.”

Father looked at Stitches’ empty hands.

“Where in the hell is it?” he asked.

Stitches grinned.

“She’s up in the fo’c’s’le now. Come on and sign her on!” and he waddled out of the cabin followed by Father. Father thought “her” was some native woman that Stitches had coerced into coming on board. Stitches led the way under the fo’c’s’le head and pointed to his prize.

“Cap’n, I had a helluva time gettin’ that one, but I woulda got her if I had to kill all that tribe with me own fists.”

Father looked through the shadows under the fore-peak and saw a terrified milch goat. The beast was balancing dizzily on her legs among the anchor chains.

“How’d you get it?” Father asked.

“Well, as I said, Cap’n, them natives wasn’t gonna let me have her, and I figured I’d forfeit my sea boots if I’d let ’em out-talk me with that baby aft wastin’ away, so I trades ’em an old alarm clock and a handful of dried apricots for this here dairy.”

It was the best trade Stitches ever made. Father was so grateful for the goat that he appointed Stitches my nurse and guardian under him with the special privilege of talking back to Father on any matter concerning me without getting his block knocked off. His lesser reward was free tobacco so long as he stayed on the ship. For fourteen years to the day he died for me Stitches exercised all his special rights and privileges to the full. I grew to love him as a second father and I knew I was the mainspring of his life; knowing that, of course I took advantage of him every time I could.

The sailors named the goat “Wet Nurse” and to Wet Nurse and her generous supply of milk I owe my life today. In exchange for her milk Wet Nurse was fed oatmeal and coconuts.

After we put out to sea from Norfolk Island, Wet Nurse got seasick. Father knew that seasickness, like fright, will wear off if you don’t pay any attention to it, so he bided his time. He was rewarded when Wet Nurse got her sea legs and gave milk freely. Stitches always said I had an appetite like a goat’s because I could digest anything—so perhaps I inherited my iron stomach from Wet Nurse. For weeks I thrived on her milk, but it wasn’t to be for long. Wet Nurse was not exactly ship broke in her personal habits. She needed a valet with a broom and pan if ship’s orderliness was to be preserved. The crew took shifts of cleaning the decks where Wet Nurse took her exercise, with the result that she was not popular with the men forward! Wet Nurse got lonesome for her island home, and perhaps for her goat husband. She seemed to choose the hours when the sailors were sleeping to maaa her call. The sound of a she-goat calling her mate is not very beautiful, and it took all of Stitches’ strength to fight off the sailors when they wanted to make Wet Nurse walk the plank! Father treated her as if she were a cabin passenger, and it would have been tough on any sailor who harmed her.

One day, when I was about two years old, our ship was caught in a white squall off Lord Howe Island. A white squall is a sudden wind storm that rises without warning on the barometer and its velocity is so great that it will sweep the sea with huge waves ten minutes after it starts. Wet Nurse was standing by the galley door looking wistfully at the cook in the hope of getting an occasional scrap or two from his pans, when the squall hit the ship.

Whipped by the wind the vessel listed far over to leeward and great seas washed over the decks. I was tied in my hammock below, for Father had called all hands on deck. The crew was reefing down the topsails and battening down the hatches. Father stood at the helm steering the ship out of the belly of the swells to keep the seas from swamping us. Everyone forgot Wet Nurse. A giant green wave came over the fo’c’s’le head, washed over the galley, put out the cook’s stove and drove Wet Nurse against the bulwarks. With a shudder the vessel hove to the windward side and another sea smacked her deck with such force that it lifted the fore hatch from its cleats and sent it swirling to the lee bulwarks pinning Wet Nurse beneath its wreckage.

She lay crippled and terrified and nearly drowned under the debris until the storm subsided. The mate and Stitches found her, and lifting her gently, as if she were a person, from beneath the hatch, they carried her up to the poop deck to my father. She had broken both her legs and several ribs were smashed in. Father, who has always had a gentle hand with animals, carefully set her legs in splints and bound her ribs with bandages made from small pieces of canvas. Then he lay Wet Nurse in his bunk beneath my hammock. In spite of everything he could do for her, Wet Nurse died that night. She was given a regular ship’s funeral. The ship hove to for five minutes, as her body, sewn in sailcloth and weighted with a piece of chain, was committed to the deep.

And the next day I went on regular sailor’s diet.

3
“A ship is called a ‘she’ because her riggin’ costs more than her
hull.”—Stitches.

Father had devised and carried out the scheme for nourishing a baby at sea, but another and more difficult problem for any man is clothing womenfolks.

When I was two years old I could walk and say “goddamned wind.” That was my first sentence, which I picked up from the mate. I had outgrown my baby dresses—so something had to be done about it. On deep water vessels the crew, as well as the mates and captain, usually wear coarse dungarees and heavy woolens in cold weather, white cotton undershirts and short cotton trousers in the tropics. Shoes are worn only in port as it is too dangerous, as well as too expensive, for sailormen to walk around the slippery decks in leather soles.

When I began to walk by holding on to the rail of the poop deck we were off Easter Island, getting a load of guano, which is bird manure used for fertilizing purposes. It would be months before we hailed the mainland, so again Father was ingenious in solving a difficulty. I had to have something to wear! Father turned the fo’c’s’le into a sewing room. His seamstresses were Lars Erickson—a Dane, Scotty—an old Scottish sailor who had only one snag tooth in his mouth and that brown from tobacco stain, and the trusty Stitches.

These men were commissioned to make my wardrobe. They cut a small pair of pants from Stitches’ well worn dungarees and made little suspenders on them. The button-holes were works of art embroidered with infinite pains by Stitches. While they were engrossed in their sewing a Hungarian sailor who was a bit of a bully, by name “Gooney” Bulgar, leaned out of his bunk and remarked:

“You ladies of the sewing circle will now adjourn an’ tea will be served in the Cap’n’s parlor,” with which he waved an effeminate, coy hand in the shellbacks’ faces.

It was never definitely settled which of them landed on him first. Bulgar claimed that Stitches had scratched him with his needle and none would bear witness that Scotty and Erickson hadn’t used a steel marlinspike on him. At any rate he resembled a piece of raw hamburger steak when they brought his limp body aft to my father to be revived. If there is one thing prevalent on shipboard it is he-men, and any suggestion that impugns their virility has to be settled with belaying pins to the finish. Whatever really happened, the event is recorded in the Log Book as follows:

“This day at sea, the 27th of September, Able-Bodied Seaman
Gustav Bulgar fell, in the course of duty, off the fo’c’s’le
head on to the main deck and was badly injured. Treated by
Captain. Given dose of salts and wounds painted with Friar’s
Balsam. Captain found it advisable to fine seaman Five Dollars
for carelessness.”

After that slight interruption to their sewing, the three men resumed, and turned out a complete wardrobe for me. Scotty had an old pair of rubber sea boots that were worn out at the bottoms so he cut off the tops, and turned out a pair of tiny rubber sea boots for me. With the remaining scraps he fashioned a sou’wester oilskin hat for me. He was at a loss for something to line it with, as the only available material on the ship was cast off clothing. A sailor never does anything by halves, and unless that sou’wester was lined, it was not complete in his estimation. As he was taking a mental inventory of the material he could lay hands on in the fo’c’s’le, “Pimples,” the cabin-boy, came in. It was his first trip at sea. He had come to get experiences so he could be a famous writer of sea stories like Jack London. He was still so green in the ways of the sea that he wore shoes and socks. Pimples had won his cognomen by his complexion which was caused half by adolescence and half by the food which fell to his lot after the crew and captain had eaten the best of it. It was unfortunate for Pimples that he intruded into the fo’c’s’le at that moment, for Scotty saw his shoes and socks.

“Come here, Barnacles,” he cooed to the cabin-boy. “Come closer so I can see how big your muscles are getting now you are at sea.”

Pimples came over to him eagerly, happy to be recognized as an equal by a regular sailor. When he was close enough, Scotty tripped him, and sat on his stomach. While Pimples squirmed, Scotty took off his shoes and socks and, holding a brown woolen sock up for the others to see, he shouted:

“Here’s the lining for the sou’wester,” and then he booted the luckless cabin-boy out of the fo’c’s’le.

When the little clothes were finished and the sock-lined oilskin cap proudly displayed, the sailors called in the Jap cook, Yamashita, to approve of their handiwork. The cook looked at them and then snorted with Oriental disapproval:

“Where nightgown for Missy? No damn sense sailor got.” He went back to his galley and presently emerged with two bottles and three flour sacks. The bottles contained cake frosting coloring, red and green. He took some string and dipped it in the red and made red string, and then dipped some more string in the green. These colored strings he used to embroider intricate cross stitch designs on the neck and arms of the flour sack nightgown and dress. In spite of his many washings of the sacks to remove the printing on them, a dim memory of the words, “Pure as the drifted snow,” remained on them forever.

I wore overalls all my life on board the ship. Father kept me dressed as a boy in fairness to the crew and for my protection. He did everything in his power to keep them and me from becoming conscious of my sex. When I was big enough to wear them Father bought me regular men’s size overalls. They buttoned in front and I was very proud that even in my clothing I resembled the sailors.

The first time I wore a dress after I left the ship I didn’t know how to walk in it. The skirt got tangled up in my legs and kept me from taking long sea strides. I had to wear underclothes with a dress and they seemed to stifle my body that was used to salt soaked overalls next to a bare skin. It was a tragic day for me when Father informed me that with a dress I had to wear shoes and stockings. The shoes hurt my feet and the cotton stockings itched—but more of the impediments of civilization later.

To go back to my babyhood—When a young lady is big enough to walk, able to say “goddamned wind” and to occupy the attention of three tailors, it is obviously time to begin thinking about her education. Father and Stitches consulted gravely.

“The fust thing she’s gotter learn, Cap’n,” argued Stitches, “is to keep from fallin’ overboard.”

“All right,” agreed Father, “every time you catch her near the rail, paddle her bottom.”

Stitches nodded in partial approval.

“That’s all right, too, Cap’n, but kids is natcha’lly ornery and their sterns gits calloused, awful fast.”

Father saw the point.

“We’ll tie her up,” he said.

So they put me at the end of a fifteen foot rope tied to the wheelbox on the poop deck. That was fine for a few days until in a sudden blow I got the rope around the steersman’s feet, with the result that my head and his stern nearly broke the deck and the ship got off her course.

Stitches and Father again went into conference.

“In one week she’s slipped her hawser twice and tripped up the steersman. We gotter try somethin’ else, Cap’n,” urged Stitches. Father thought it over.

“Sooner or later she’s pretty sure to go overboard anyhow, so you’d better teach her to swim.”

“That’s a fine idea, Cap’n,” replied Stitches, “only I don’t know how to swim myself.” Which is one of the queer things about the sea: more than half of the sailors can’t swim.

“You fix a tank. I’ll teach her,” decided Father.

Just aft the mizzen mast, Stitches rigged up a canvas tank about four feet square and equally deep. This was collapsible, so that when it was empty it could be folded up and put in the cabin out of the way of the storms. It was a sailor’s job to fill it with sea water every morning. This he did by throwing overboard a canvas bucket in which he baled up a hundred gallons of water to fill it. When it was full he reported the fact to my father. Then Father would go to my hammock, get me and carry me down to the tank. I was a wiggling, squirming, protesting bundle of muscular little girl, as husky as a seal, and full of objections to the idea of being pulled out of a comfortable warm hammock and plunged naked into a cold sea dip.

The routine was always the same. Before he plunged me into the tank he would roll me on the deck. Then he made me turn somersaults, and box with him. My share of the boxing might be described as down again, up again. As soon as I could get to my feet he would tumble me over with his pawlike hand, and keep that up for about ten minutes. If I cried or protested at all against that rough treatment I got a sound slap on my bottom to “knock that nonsense out of you.” Then came the great moment when, warm and glowing, I was plopped into cold sea water to strike out blindly, and in vain. Holding his hand under my back, Father told me to throw out my stomach and bend my head back to balance. I couldn’t understand how that would help me float because when I put my head back I got my mouth and ears and eyes full of salt water. Then he explained it in words to penetrate my infant comprehension.

“Throw your head back and puff your stomach up until YOU CAN SEE YOUR BELLY-BUTTON.”

Then it became a game, and in my eagerness to see if I could puff my stomach up high enough for me to see that portion of my anatomy, I achieved the art of floating. While I was thus absorbed in watching myself perform, Father took his bracing hand from under my back and left me to my own resources. Once I had learned to float, swimming came easy and I soon outgrew the limitations of the four foot tank. I didn’t think I had, but Father did. The next port we arrived in was Newcastle, Australia, and he chose that harbor to polish off my swimming ability.

When he looked for me to begin another lesson he found me playing with a tame gooney on the deck, perfectly contented. A gooney is a species of gull, dull grey in coloring, and a bit larger than the common seagull. Father had snagged him on a big hook baited with a piece of salt pork, pulled him aboard and clipped his wings so he could not fly away. When we first got him the gooney tried to bite, but by feeding him a few days he became tame, and quite a fascinating toy for me. We had named him “Salt Pork.”

We were playing a game called “Grub” which Stitches had invented for us. “Grub” was a unique game in that it gave me my first philosophy of doing things for myself and increased my propelling powers immensely. The rules for “Grub” were simple. A line was drawn on the poop deck with chalk behind which Salt Pork and I lined up. The goal was a piece of bread on the rail aft by the wheel. At a given signal from Stitches he let go of Salt Pork and off we both went across the deck after the grub; me, a hungry kid and Salt Pork, a ravenous sea bird. I crawled on all fours after it and the gooney ran with webbed feet. If I got there first I ate the bread on the spot as fast as I could cram it down my gullet or Salt Pork would have grabbed it right out of my hand. If Salt Pork got it first I couldn’t get it away from him because he’d swallow it whole without even chewing it.

“Say, Stitches,” called Father from the gangway, “let’s give Joan a lesson in keeping her mouth shut!” He undressed me and took me to the fo’c’s’le head. Two of the crew were cooling off with a nice swim under the shadow of the bowsprit. He called to them to keep an eye on me and without further warning he threw me fifteen feet into the water below. I thought I had sunk to the bottom of the world and would never come up. When I finally did I was so frightened that I started to yell and was rewarded with a mouthful of salt water. There was nothing to hang on to, so I had to swim. My father and Stitches on the jibboom above laughed at my struggle. Of course there was no danger for me as the two sailors could have pulled me out in an instant. It seems useless to add that I learned to swim in deep water very rapidly.

Father, evidently satisfied that Lesson Number One in practical nautical knowledge was a success, remarked to Stitches:

“See how quick she shut her mouth when she hollered about nothing! If every woman could learn to keep her mouth shut at the age of two they’d be better off.”

Every day after that, during the weeks we were in Newcastle, I was thrown overboard. I came to love it and soon was a strong swimmer with an instinct for action instead of noise!

4
In which I learn that young ladies must not take baths in gentlemen’s
drinking water

From the time I was two years old until about my sixth birthday nothing startling impressed itself on my baby mind. Ours was just the usual routine of a trading schooner: Seattle to Sydney with lumber and from Sydney it was “bound to the South Sea Islands for copra,” loaded with red calico, cheap knives, soap, tinfoil, anything shiny to catch the eyes and thrill the hearts of the natives.

We cruised from island to island picking up half a ton of copra here, a quarter ton there until we had filled the hold, and for a deck load we got generally about five hundred bundles of sandalwood. Of course we took lots of smaller stuff, but copra and sandalwood were our staples from the islands.

Copra—the word itself is common to sea traders, but to landlubbers it is a strange expression found in stories of the South Seas.

Copra is the meat of coconuts dried in the sun. The natives break open the nuts and lay them out on woven mats to rot. The rotting process in the tropic heat brings out the oils and acid of the coconut. It takes about three months of drying process to make the copra rotten enough to be ready for market. The natives load it in bales of reeds and carry it off the island in canoes to waiting ships.

In appearance copra is dark brown and fibrous. No copra is first class until it is so putrid that vermin infest it. The stench of it is almost unbearable. In its ripe stage copra is highly explosive. During the war many uses were found for the stuff. The waste of its matter was used for ammunition, the oils to preserve foods for the soldiers, and the acids were invaluable in surgery.

One of the most common uses of copra is in the manufacture of linoleum and some forms of paper. I often wonder when people are walking on the linoleum in their homes if they realize that the substance of it came from the savage islands of the South Seas.

In trading between the islands, Australia and the States in my early years our greatest rival and bug-bear was the barkentine, _Mary Winklemund_, a three-master under the command of Captain Swanson. A barkentine by reason of its rig, square yards on the fore mast, is naturally faster than a schooner and the _Mary Winklemund_ for years won every race with the _Minnie A. Caine_, whether it was from Hawaii to New Zealand or from Samoa to Seattle. My father and Captain Swanson were rivals, both in shouting the praise of their ships and in pride of their navigation, but Swanson had the edge. He would beat us by a few hours, by a few days, and on occasion by two months. Father always blamed the bad winds and incompetent sailors, and said that Swanson was afraid to carry as big a load as we for fear of sinking. But in spite of his alibis, the fact remained that in every nautical endeavor Swanson made us look like a leaking lifeboat in a hurricane.

Naturally to a man of Father’s combative temperament being beaten was bad enough, but Captain Swanson, not content with winning, never let a chance go by to rub in the victory with heavy-handed sea humor. As a result Father, I believe, would have run his ship on the rocks or jumped overboard himself, if thereby he could have scored on that “goddamned, squareheaded Sea Hog,” as he always delicately described his rival. How Father did even up the score stuck in my mind because it was combined with the memory of my first attempt at the age of six to get rich quick.

We were anchored in Double Bay, Sydney, my sixth winter, and Swanson sent word to Father to come aboard the _Mary Winklemund_ for dinner. Father sent back word that he would accept free grub even on the _Winklemund_. I was delighted, for I welcomed any opportunity to get off our own vessel. As we were leaving in a small boat to scull over to the _Winklemund_ Father turned to me and said:

“Swanson is trying to show off to me what good grub they serve on his packet. I’ll paddle you if you dare eat like you enjoy it.”

When we boarded the _Mary Winklemund_ by means of a Jacob’s ladder thrown over the side, Captain Swanson met us. He showed us around his ship which was newly painted white from stem to stern. He pointed out the ship’s fine points, not forgetting to tell just where and how much she excelled ours. Father was getting madder and madder all the time and I was afraid he would blow up and go back without waiting for dinner.