Chapter XXI (3)

“Now you get the Bible and copy a verse twenty times,” he added. It was the familiar finish to a licking. Father used the Bible as a text book for me—spelling, grammar and composition. If you’ve ever had to learn to spell all the words in the Bible you can see what I was up against. I had to copy verses out of the Bible every day, but Father could never make me do it voluntarily—so he gave it to me to do as punishment.

I got the Bible, and lying down on my stomach on the hot deck in the sun so my pants would dry, I began my penmanship lesson. I was darned if I was going to do Revelations again. I knew them by heart—all about roasting in Hell and being eaten by snakes and never being able to die and get out of it—besides which the verses in Revelations were too long. I wanted to get it over with. I thumbed the New Testament over until I found the shortest verse in it—“Jesus Wept.” That suited my frame of mind too, so I copied that one twenty times and turned my homework in to Father. He was so pleased at my promptness in doing my lesson that he looked as if he had forgotten my latest offense.

“Here it is,” I said to him, with the air of a martyr, and disdaining even to look at that bunch of sailors who were occupied doing various jobs around the deck. As I handed him the paper I began to make a discreet retreat to the main deck. I got as far as the poop deck ladder when I heard him explode like a firecracker. And then I got a real licking to “teach me to be funny again.”

Studying was the hardest thing I had to do. It wasn’t only because I didn’t want to study that I looked upon knowledge-getting as a curse, but I had so much physical energy that I just couldn’t sit still long enough. So Father used all sorts of schemes to make me work at my lessons. He had one that never failed, no matter how often he tried it. He would call me into his cabin and tell me with a grave face he had made a mistake in his navigation problem and would I work it over and catch his mistake, because otherwise the result might be very serious to all of us on the ship. I didn’t care a hang about the seriousness to all of us on the ship, but how I did want to catch him. So I would tie into that problem tooth and nail and at the end of half an hour or an hour be able to go to Father with a very superior air and tell him that no matter what he thought I knew he had _not_ made a mistake. Then he’d always thank me with an expression of great relief and I’d go away very proud—never realizing that I had done my arithmetic lesson.

There was always plenty of work for me to do, but nothing for me to play with that I didn’t invent myself. Father always said:

“I don’t have playthings—why should you?”

Left to my own resources I copied my few toys from the things I saw around me—sailors, ships and cargoes. I built a drydock under the ladder leading to the poop. In my drydock I had several types of ships in the making. My prize ship was a full-rigger in a whiskey bottle. The sailors had taught me to make long crochet hooks from bits of wire and to make my own glue from fish heads.

I worked for months making the parts of the ship to rig up. Then came the problem of getting it inside the narrow neck of the whiskey bottle and setting it up inside. That was where the crochet hooks came in. I put all the parts of the full-rigger in the bottle separately and then I put them into place with the use of the glue and hooks. I worked a little every day on my masterpiece for I wanted it to be superior to any bottle boat that could be produced in the fo’c’s’le. Eventually I had built a fleet of little ships. I made them to trade in English ports for candy.

My most spectacular vessel, however, was a boat that sailed on the deck on little wooden wheels. It was about two feet long with a mainsail, squaresail and two jibs. I made the diminutive blocks in its rigging from bits of sandalwood. The mainsail and squaresail were fashioned from an old cotton shirt, while its jibs had once been a pair of underdrawers which the cook cast off.

Stitches made a boat on the same model and on the day both were completed we were to have a race. My boat was called the _Neversink_. Stitches’ boat was the _Sonofabitch_.

“I’ll wager you my boat’ll outsail yours, Skipper,” he said. “An’ if I lose you can embroider the name of your winner, the _Neversink_, in white twine on my pants’ seat, an’ I’ll wear the same for every man aboard to see.”

“That’s a bet, Stitches,” I said, taking his wager. Unfortunately I didn’t stop to consider that if his boat won he would embroider its name, _Sonofabitch_, on the back of me.

Came the day of the race. It was the rule that we had to man our boats with a crew—the owner having the sole pick of whatever kind of crew he desired. The captain of my boat was a fat cockroach. I tied him to his post aft with a piece of thread. However I never called much attention to him in my father’s hearing for fear Father would think there was something personal about it. You see, I learned early that a girl can’t be too careful with a man’s dignity. My “crew” was a kitten which I tied on just forward of midships to serve the double purpose of crew and ballast to hold the _Neversink_ on deck when the wind blew its sails. As in all well-regulated ships I had trouble with my crew.

We had our boats at the starting line on the main deck. The goal was the water tank abaft the mizzen.

“Shove off!” signalled Stitches and down the decks the _Neversink_ and the _Sonofabitch_ careened along on their wheels. My boat took the lead and kept a couple of inches ahead of the _Sonofabitch_, when my crew mutinied. The wind got under the kitten’s tail and he didn’t like it so he clawed at the sails and pulled the mast and rigging down, finally dumping the _Neversink_ over on her side in dismal defeat.

I didn’t wait for Stitches to gloat over his victory.

“You can have my overalls when I turn in tonight but don’t embroider _Sonofabitch_ in too big letters,” I said.

Sometimes my games got me in trouble, and once I was badly injured. On the “dog watches” from four to six and six to eight in the evenings, both watches were on deck and I didn’t have to keep quiet so they could sleep. It was then that I ran the decks, careless of the thudding noise my feet made; or I sang chanteys loud and long at the top of my voice. One night I persuaded Swede to play tag with me. Owing to the limited space there is on a ship to run around in, we made a rule that the person who was “it” had to catch the pursued by hitting him three hard swats in the middle of the back. There were no bases. The topmasts were the limit above and the hold the limit below. I was it. I chased Swede forward, through the galley, back to the mizzen, around the mizzen mast, over the hatchway and almost caught him when he leaped to the shrouds and started up the mizzen rigging. I went after him with a rush. He was about half way up the ratlines when I almost overtook him. Instead of continuing up and sliding down a halyard to the deck again from the crosstrees as I thought he would, he stopped short in the rigging.

“Get down or I’ll step on your hands,” he said with a grin.

“Step away and be damned,” I answered him, intent on catching him at any cost. Of course a huge Swede sailor is not the most gentle playmate there is for a child, but he was all that was available. In his clumsiness he was only playing, but he raised one foot as if to trample on my hands and said again:

“Get down or you get me hoof on your mitts.”

I didn’t believe he meant it, so instead of taking his warning I went up another rung of the rigging. He intended to step lightly but he slipped. I felt a stinging pain and then I was flying through space. I suppose my hands went out as protection instinctively for they struck the deck first. Something seemed to snap in both wrists and my face slapped against the planks of the deck.

The next thing I knew Swede had me in his arms lugging me aft and I was kicking and blubbering cross words through bloody lips. It was bad enough to be smashed up but to be carried like a helpless puppy was too much.

“Put me down,” I demanded and I wriggled from his arms. Mustering all the strength I could I walked up the poop. Father had come up the companionway to investigate the commotion. When he saw me he asked:

“Now what the hell have you been up to?”

My face evidently looked like a muffin that had spilled over lopsided in baking, for my nose was broken and two points off its course.

“Answer me. What happened?” Father repeated with force.

“I guess I’ve busted my flippers. Can you fix them?” was all I could reply.

He took my broken wrists in his hands and examined them, then sent the man at the wheel after a fruit box.

“Now you get below, Joan. I’ll make some splints out of slats of wood and set your arms. But about your nose, how in the hell can I do anything with that?”

Despite his doubts, Father made a good job of patching me up. He used a ruler broken in two pieces for a splint for my nose, and then put a finishing touch on his handiwork by giving me a big dose of salts. Father sincerely believed salts were a cure for everything from bad temper to a broken neck, and I became so inured to swallowing the darn stuff that I almost learned to like it.

8
We catch a female shark and I learn about women from her—

One of the earliest lessons that I learned from the sea was the importance of observation. Book learning is almost useless in a storm, and science an unknown quantity when the elements lash against a man-built ship. But observing the laws of the sea, watching it destroy or create, teaches much about life. All that I learned of philosophy, biology and astronomy came to me from my father and the sailors.

I often wondered where children came from, and in reply to my queries the sailors gave me no stork fable or yarn about being found in a cabbage patch. When I asked Father where I came from he replied:

“Don’t ask questions. Just keep your eyes open and you’ll find out everything you want to know.”

The first opportunity I had to find out about babies being born came when Father landed a shark. I was down on the main deck helping Stitches sew on a ripped sail. He was teaching me how to use the “palm” or sea-going thimble that sailors use when they sew canvas. The “palm” is a metal perforated disk set on a leather strap that fits the palm of the hand. In fair weather the sailors always brought the torn sails on deck and repaired them ready for emergency use in a storm. Stitches was very painstaking in his instruction to me because he wanted me to be a regular sailor some day.

Father was sitting on the taffrail, sextant in hand, waiting for the sun to come out from behind a cloud so that he could “shoot the sun,” or take a sight to figure out our position by navigation.

“Say, Joan,” he called, “come here and look at this shark.”

I dropped my sewing and ran up to the poop to the after rail. I looked over the stern and saw a greenish white shadow deep in the water. Slowly the shadow came closer to the surface and a grey fin stuck out of the water like a three-cornered sail. The shark was about ten feet long. It swam around in circles following in our wake, stalking us. It was the first time I had ever seen a man-eating shark.

“Don’t go too near the rail, Joan. If you fall overboard now you’ll be a nice dessert for that shark.”

“Do sharks eat people?” I asked.

“That kind of a shark does. All sharks that live on the surface of the water and follow sailing ships are man-eaters.”

I looked at the shark again. It looked harmless to me as it circled and played around in the wake from our rudder.

“How could a shark eat me? I can’t see any mouth on it,” I countered, still unconvinced.

“I’ll show you. Go ask the cook for a big chunk of salt pork, and we’ll put it on an iron hook, then watch the fun.”

I got the chunk of salt pork and Father baited a hook with it. Instead of lowering the hook overboard by a rope, he fastened a thin chain about twenty feet long onto it.

“Now get my rifle, and stand clear of the rail,” he ordered.

I brought the gun up, and Stitches and McLean came aft to help land the shark. Stitches tied a piece of board on the chain so that the pork and hook would float on the surface. The shark, led by its little vari-colored pilot fish, smelled at the bait—then it circled away. It came back again and after pushing the pork with its snout, the shark turned belly up, and opened its jaws on the meat. A shark can only bite when it is bottom up, as the lower part of its jaw is receding. As it turned up and snagged the hook Father shot at his throat with his rifle. The shark kicked out with its powerful tail and pulled away. McLean let out some slack as the shark started to bite viciously at the chain holding the hook. Again and again Father fired shots into its body, but still it fought. The pilot fish had disappeared—nothing remained but a bleeding, fighting shark pulling at the hook.

“Haul him up, head out of water,” Father called, and as Stitches and McLean pulled him out of the water Father slipped a running bowline around him.

“Get the hell out of the way now or you’ll get hurt,” he called to me as he hauled the heavy shark up by the bowline. Stitches had slipped another line around the shark’s pounding tail and was pulling him up by the stern. After a terrific struggle they landed him on the poop deck. It slapped and wallowed around the deck, its huge jaws with seven rows of saw-teeth gaping and trying to kill its attackers. Father ran a scantline down its throat and shot it again. McLean chopped its tail off, splintering its spine as he did so. Still the shark fought desperately. Nothing seemed to kill it.

“A shark don’t die until sundown,” said my father, “but we can cut him up so he can’t do any damage. Only don’t get too near him because he may only be foxing. A shark is the hardest deep sea thing to kill there is.”

Father told the men to haul the body of the shark down on the main deck and leave it in the lee scuppers until it died. The sailors were more than willing to comply because a shark has a lot of value to sailormen.

“When it’s dead, you men skin it. We’ll sell the skin in Australia for shoe leather. Whatever else you want of the shark you can have,” he told the men, and he went about his task of “shooting the sun.”

I forgot all about my sail sewing lesson in the excitement of carving up a man-eating shark. Stitches sharpened my knife for me on his marlin spike, and we set about carving up the shark.

“What part can I do?” I asked him.

“Well, seeing as this is the first man-eating shark you ever seen caught, you go through its guts. Some sailors tell as how sharks swallow pearls on the bottom of the ocean, and maybe if you was to carefully go through all its entrails you might find a pearl.”

It is true that sharks are the scavengers of the underseas, but Stitches gave me the job of looking through its guts to initiate me into the realm of sharkdom. “Nothing like learning the insides of things to be sure of your facts,” he said.

I am glad now that he made me go through that shark’s insides for it gave me first hand information that has backed me up when landlubbers doubt me when I tell them of the mammal shark.

It took about three hours to go carefully through the yards and yards of gut of that shark and I didn’t find any pearls. All I found was a rusty piece of tin and a small devil fish, or octopus, that spit indigo ink all over me when I freed it from the grip of the shark.

“I’m goin’ to cut out this backbone, Skipper, and make a walking stick out of it. I can sell it when I get ashore for a bottle of rum,” said Stitches, and he dug his knife into the back of the shark. The shark still quivered, hacked up as it was.

“And now let’s get his ugly mug off his body. His yawnin’ jaws look too hungry for comfort.” McLean got an ax and a saw, and the two of them sawed and hacked off the huge iron-like head.

“Now I’ll show you where the shark keeps his eyes.” You see, a shark is blind, it can only see about four inches in front of its snout. Every shark has two little parasite fish, pilot fish, that see for it, and in time of trouble the shark swallows its pilot fish for protection. Down in little sockets behind the shark’s gills, Stitches brought out two squirming, brightly colored fish, about three inches long.

People have often asked me how it is that natives seem to swim unharmed in shark-infested waters. They escape from death because they know a shark’s habits. A shark, by reason of its near-sightedness, depends upon its pilot fish to spot food for it. The tiny fish can see any animate object in the water and head for it. The bright color of their bodies shines in front of the shark who follows where they lead. A shark will not attack an inanimate object for it cannot notice it! A moving object in the water attracts attention and the natives, wise to this, let their bodies go limp when a shark circles too near them. Then, when a shark circles to turn around to attack, the native moves like lightning to dive under the animal and rip its throat with his sharp tortoise-shell knife.

“Now always remember, Skipper, if you ever are overboard and near a shark, keep your head and keep quiet until the shark circles from you. Don’t be a landlubber fool and try to fight because that just makes you a movin’ target fer the little pilot fish.” I have been laughed at when I have told about the pilot fish of a shark, and unbelievers have said it was just a good fish yarn, but nevertheless it is a fact.

“Do any other kind of fish eat you, too?” I asked, a bit worried.

“Hell, a shark ain’t a fish, it’s a mammal—just like a porpoise and a whale is a mammal.”

A shark not a fish? It had fins and a body and tail like one and it doesn’t have to come up to the surface to breathe like a porpoise and a whale.

“Now you take that shark jaw and hang it over the side in the water and in a week all the meat will rot off it; then you’ll have a pair of fine shark’s jaws to hang up in your cabin.”

No portion of that shark was to be wasted. McLean had taken the empty gut and had stretched it out in the sun to dry. “For shoelaces” he answered, when I asked him what he was keeping it for.

“But it stinks,” I protested.

“Well, it won’t when I cure it in salt,” he replied.

“Now we’ll cut its stomach open, Skipper,” said Stitches and he slit up the upper stomach of the mutilated shark. I bent over him, carefully watching everything he did, for wonders never ceased to come from it.

Stitches reached his hand and wrist into the opening and felt inside. Then he let forth a “Jesus!”

“What’s the matter, Stitches?”

“Skipper,” he replied, his face crestfallen, “this is a mother shark. Look, she has young ’uns in her.”

I looked, and there in a pouch in her stomach were six baby sharks, about eighteen inches long. He reached in deeper and brought out a second pouch with another litter of six young in it.

“Is it bad luck to kill a she-shark, Stitches?” I asked, puzzled at his sudden grief.

“Bad luck? No sailor ever kills a female thing, because they give life. Givin’ life is part of the Creator’s job, and no man would willingly kill a mother thing.”

There is an old superstition that to kill any female thing at sea will bring a curse on the ship. If a female bird is killed, its wing is nailed on the mast head as an offering against a curse. When Stitches saw we had killed a mother shark in young, he took the tail and nailed it on the end of the jib boom. That is the reason why ships returning from deep sea voyages are often decorated with parts of birds or fish.

After Stitches had put up the tail on the jib boom, he came back to the shark. “Maybe we can save these young ’uns, Skipper.” Carefully, and almost tenderly, he took the baby fish out of the pouch and broke the cords that bound them to the mother shark. Then he took some twine that he had been using to sew sails with, and tied up the end of each cord, and threw the little fish overboard. They probably never lived but Stitches did everything in his power to save them.

I didn’t know that sharks bore their young. I supposed they laid spawn as any other fish did, but Stitches explained to me that a shark bears her children like a human, and suckles them from a teat until they can forage for their own food. The reason that shark had fought so viciously was to protect the young in her. A male shark is much easier to land, and much more stupid than a female.

I asked Stitches if all children were born the way the sharks were and he answered, yes.

As there were eleven children in our family I thought that we came in batches of six like the sharks.

“But how do we get in the pouches?” I insisted.

“The guy that created you put the seed of you under your father’s and your mother’s heart, then when they fell in love you was born.”

I have since learned that some modern naturalists who evidently never have traveled further south than Sandy Hook, have expressed a doubt as to whether there really is such a beast as a man-eating shark and whether it will actually attack a man unprovoked. Evidence, they claim, has always been at second-hand and the testimony of seafaring men they reject. Well, without wishing to lock horns with the learned, you may be interested in firsthand evidence of man-eating sharks.

I saw a nurse shark, perhaps the deadliest species of the shark family, attack a sailor from our ship, one Eric Johanssen. Johanssen dived off the ship for a swim against the express command of my father that no member of the crew leave the vessel. We were anchored in Paramatta River in Sydney Harbor. Johanssen hadn’t been in the water five minutes before two sharks began circling about him.

“You bloody fool, swim for the ship,” called Swede to Johanssen. Johanssen turned to strike out for the Jacob’s ladder, but he wasn’t swift enough. The tri-cornered fin of the biggest shark followed in his wake. Johanssen struck out wildly with his arms and legs. He evidently thought that by making a big splash in the water he would confuse the shark, but the disturbance Johanssen kicked up only served to make an accurate target for the shark’s pilot fish.

The man had about reached the ship when the triangular fin following disappeared. Watching, the men on board knew what that meant. The brute was turning on its back. It came up below its prey and turned open its huge maw to bite.

There came a short shriek of pain; the water bloodied, and Johanssen’s body doubled up. The shark’s jaws had set about his stomach. With a sinuous motion of its tail the shark drew away taking in its jaws the middle of Johanssen’s body almost through to the backbone.

There had been no time to lower a boat, but Swede was on the Jacob’s ladder; Father and the mate above, all the boathooks fighting to save at least the body from the man-eaters. They caught the body with their hooks and brought it out, but not until another hunk of flesh had been torn from the thigh. Then the vicious monsters, balked of their complete meal, swam along the sides of the ship, scraping against it and slapping their tails against the hull as though in a frenzy of rage. Finally they drew off, but for hours they swam close by, waiting for another victim.

Father had Johanssen’s body sewn up in sailcloth and it was buried in the potter’s field in Sydney.

Stitches told me of a foolhardy sailor in the islands dragging his arm over the side of a dinghy going ashore. A nurse shark came up unexpectedly and caught the trailing arm. The sailor either was dragged, or in his fright fell out of the boat. There was a swirl of bloody water and the man was gone. Then, attracted by the blood another huge shark came alongside and scraped the dinghy trying to overturn it. Stitches and the remaining sailor had a hard time getting the boat safely ashore.

Such are the habits of man-eating sharks.

9
In which I learn to take a joke. Hoping you may do the same

We were nearing the Equator bound south from Puget Sound. Father, the mate, and I were eating our noon meal, “onion bouillon” (one bucket of water with one onion in it), rice with curry sauce and boiled tapioca with pale lavender cornstarch sauce. The Jap cook delighted in coloring the food to make it appear more appetizing than it was.

Father and the mate were discussing our position on the chart.

“We ought to make the crossing along about four bells this afternoon, Mr. Swanson. Better get the big hawser out and stretch it on deck in case we need it.”

The mate caught the twinkle in Father’s eye and raised his voice for the benefit of the greenhorn cabin-boy who was listening to the conversation, big-eyed, in the pantry.

“All right, Captain, and when Neptune comes aboard shall I tell him about Slops trespassing on his domain?”

“Yes. He’ll probably raise hell because he doesn’t like the uninitiated to cross the Equator.”

The cabin-boy came out of the pantry and made a pretense of passing the bread to me.

“I beg your pardon, sir,” he said to Father, “but what does the Equator look like?”

“It’s a white line about three feet under the water. I just told Mr. Swanson here to get out the hawser and have it ready. When we cross the Equator we begin goin’ down hill and slip south so fast we got to tie a line on to the Equator,” Father lied without blinking an eye.

Slops sniffed, pretending contempt.

“You can’t fool me, Captain,” he protested.

Father looked very stern.

“When you have washed up here I want you to lean overboard and look for the line and when you see it, call me,” he ordered the cabin-boy.

Slops’ eyes nearly popped out of his sallow face, but he claimed that he didn’t believe it.

When Father and the mate left the table and went on deck, Slops came to me.

“Does the Old Man mean that stuff about us going too fast when we cross the Equator?” he asked.

“Sure he does, and what’s more, Neptune knows you’ve never crossed the line before, and you’re going to be tarred and feathered,” I promised him. “Besides that, you’ll probably have to clean up all the mess they make tarring and feathering you.”

Slops didn’t think so much of me at that moment, and he turned back to his pantry with a sniff. An hour later Father asked me where Slops had disappeared to. I didn’t know, but I set about to find him. I looked in the pantry, in his cabin, up in the galley, under the fo’c’s’lehead, aloft in the rigging, down in the lazarette, everywhere, so I thought, and I couldn’t track him. We were just about to cross the Equator, and Slops’ presence was desired on deck for the initiation. Mr. Swanson stepped up to my father!

“Come with me, Captain, and I’ll show you where that cat-livered cabin-boy is.” I went with them, forward, and there we found Slops. He was leaning far out the hawse hole staring at the water below looking for the Equator! The mate planted his foot in the hind part of the cabin-boy and nearly sent him hurling into space through the hawse hole.

“Get amidships, you so and so ignoramus.” Poor Slops, quaking with fear, ambled aft. There on the mizzen hatch he saw a platform built of timber on which was a big wooden tub of “shaving lather.” The sailors were sitting around the tub on their haunches with treacherous innocence on their faces.

“Tie up the beggar,” ordered Swede, who had assumed charge of the activities. Slops was grabbed by Bulgar and McLean and bound hand and foot with rope. For a moment there was an ominous pause, and then slowly coming down off the fo’c’s’le head was old Neptune himself. One of the sailors had rigged himself up in a torn gunny sack, with long, straggly beard made of rope yarn and he carried a trident. It is the custom for the Captain of the ship to turn over all authority to Neptune when crossing the Line. Neptune took his stand on the wooden platform. He called for silence, and then his voice boomed out,

“Where is the son of a bitch that dares trespass my Equator without his passport?”

McLean and Swede shoved Slops in front of Neptune.

“This is the offender, sir,” said Swede.

Neptune looked at him condemningly. He took the old stubble paintbrush in his hand and dipped it into the lather. We all knew just what was in that lather!

“What is your name?” roared Neptune.

Slops opened his mouth to tell his name and Neptune put some of the lather off the brush into it. The sailors laughed heartily at Slops’ discomfiture. The tar in the lather stuck to his face, and when it was at the proper gluey stickiness to hold the “feather,” Neptune threw dried copra on him. It stuck fast and gave Slops the appearance of a wild ape. He tried to resist Neptune and that made his lot worse, for the sailors, as a punishment for his insubordination, fastened a long rope to his body and threw him overboard. They dragged him along until he was almost unconscious and then hauled him on deck.

“Let’s splice the mainbrace, Neptune,” said Father, and he opened a bottle of rum. Each man got a big swig out of it, but Slops got only a smell of the cork.

I was laughing so hard at the whole performance that I was oblivious of the preparations of Neptune to lather some one else. I was not to be kept in ignorance for long.

“Captain,” bawled Neptune, “has your daughter got her passport for crossing the Line?”

“Say, I crossed the Equator when I was a year old, and they never did anything to me because I was a baby,” I bragged, “and besides that, I’ve crossed about twenty times.” I swelled my chest out and bulged my muscles in true sailor-fashion, so cocky was I about being a regular old salt.

“You ain’t been initiated, huh? Well, Captain, it’s about time she was. What about it?” he asked. Father looked at me as if he was full of pity for my predicament, and then in a half-mocking, sad tone he said,

“Guess she’ll have to get tarred and feathered, too.”

“Hey, what the hell?” I piped up.

“This is the what,” said Neptune. “You’re next,” and he waved to the tub of lather.

“Just try and do it,” I challenged him, really getting sore. It had ceased to be funny to me, and the more excited I got the funnier it seemed to the sailors.

“You cock-eyed quart of bilgewater, you haven’t got a chance of tarring and keelhauling me,” I snorted and jumped for the rigging. I got no farther. Swede dragged me back by the foot. They bound me as they had the luckless Slops and applied the brush and lather to my face.

“What is your name, little girl?” cooed that damned Neptune. I was too wise to open my mouth, so I thought, for I had no intention of swallowing any of that concoction.

“Answer me,” he bellowed.

I closed my lips tighter. Huh, I was smarter than they were after all. I’d show them! “Smack” on my behind went a plank, heaved by the ape-like Slops. It was such a hard whack that I opened my mouth to holler, and no sooner had I done that than Neptune stuck a big gob of lather in the wide aperture of my jaws, and then I heard the whole crew and my father guffawing at me. Slops had been initiated, so he rated disciplining me. From head to foot they soaked me in that lather. The tar in it matted my long thick hair together and stuck my eyelashes so that I couldn’t open my eyes. I wouldn’t have minded it so much if I hadn’t heard them all laughing at me.

When no more lather would stick to me I heard Father say to Neptune:

“Let’s throw her over and give her a bath. She’s so dirty now that she’ll just love it.” What I thought of my father and the whole bunch at that moment cannot be written here, but it was very graphic!

Overboard I went, tied by the same rope that had been on Slops. The salt water has the interesting effect of making tar stick so that it will not come off without turpentine. When they thought I had had enough of a bath, they hauled me out and sprinkled me with some dried copra. I looked worse than Slops did. I sat in the scupper picking off the shreds of coconut husks that came in the copra, and I gave the appearance of a she-orang outang picking off fleas.

As they say in the movies, time passed, but not my temper. The copra I picked off stuck to my fingers. I picked that off with the other hand and it stuck to the other. It was a thankless job. And then there was my hair. Never in this world would the tar come out of it. I went to my ally, the cook, and asked him for some oil to rub on me. He wouldn’t give me any for he was afraid the sailors would jump on him if he helped me.

“Well, at least you might give me some turpentine,” I said to the mate.

“Sure, all you want,” and he gave me a five gallon tin of it. “Now go ahead and enjoy yourself,” he said. I rubbed turpentine on the tar and it came off, but with it large pieces of my own skin.

“How in the hell will I get this stuff out of my hair?” I wailed.

“That’s very simple, Joan; I guess I’ll have to shave your hair off,” said Father. He promptly set about to do it. With a carving knife he cut my long hair off, then he shaved my head with his razor. I was as sunburned as walnut juice, but my scalp was white, and the two-color tone of my face and head gave me the weird appearance of a native ready for a war dance.

I was not going to forget that little initiation party in a hurry. I didn’t overlook any opportunity to get even with the sailors, Slops, the mate and my father during the rest of the trip.

I lay for Slops near the poop deck ladder one day when he was to bring the dinner basket aft. As he started to mount the ladder, I tripped him and sent the basket and the dinner flying over the deck. I caught some bedbugs and put them in my father’s and the mate’s bunks, and to make sure the bugs would stay in them and bear millions of other little bedbugs, I stuck brown sugar in the ticking in their mattresses. It was not so easy for me to get even with the sailors, for I had no excuse to be in the fo’c’s’le. About a month after the Equator episode I got my chance. It was a Sunday. We were in the trade winds and there was no ship work to be done. The sailors had one of those rare days at sea, to loaf. I’d show them how long they could loaf. Taking my penknife, I sneaked to the mizzen boom and pretended I was just swinging on it. I was really ripping the stitching in the middle of the sail. The wind caught in the little hole, and I ran and hid below, when I heard it start to rip. The force of the wind tore the sail right up to the gaff, and before Father saw it in time to lower it, the sail was in ribbons.

“All hands on deck!” he shouted. Away from their naps and pipes came the sailors. The ruined sail put the ship out of control, so Father had to heave to. “All hands on deck until a new sail is made,” he ordered, and amid cursing and grumbling, far into the night, they sweated and slaved, getting up the new mizzen. That is, all hands, except me. I sat on the windward rail laughing at them.

10
A bucko Captain and his Bible chart for me the mysteries of sex

“Joan, when you’ve learned to take a licking without a squawk outta you, when you can lose something you’ve wanted for a long time and not be discouraged, when you can be becalmed for weeks in the doldrums without sight of the sun or a star to navigate by and not lose your faith in God Almighty because you can’t understand His wisdom in confusing you—then you can go.”

It was Father, for the dozenth time answering my question:

“Will I always have to be on a ship and never live in cities ashore?”

I am still, in my father’s eyes, his baby girl, but how he fought to keep maturity from catching up with me! He never in my life fondled me affectionately—never held me and kissed me as fathers of little girls ashore do. He was afraid of making me hungry for the tender attentions that women give, and as there was no woman on board to give those attentions, he hardened me against them. He has told me since that he often ached to crush me to him when some childish thing I did made him realize how utterly lonely I was. One day he saw Stitches stroking my dark curls lovingly, and it was only Stitches’ age that kept Father from beating him up. He sent Stitches to the fo’c’s’le on rations of bread and water for three days with the warning that if he ever got softhearted over me again he’d have to take his sea bag to some other ship! When Father showed me affection he usually did it with a good hard kick or a hearty punch on the back such as men use to express emotion to each other without detracting from their manliness.

If Father believed in the wisdom of a rope’s end on my southernmost portion to discipline me, he didn’t neglect my character building. In spite of his roughness—his bellowing voice to the sailors in a storm, his demand for obedience from his crew—he had a tender side to his nature that he showed me on rare occasions. He never trusted his own judgment in giving me advice. Every time I went to him with a question about life that puzzled my young mind he would turn to his old worn Bible and quote me a passage that satisfied my questioning.

When I confronted him with a bewildered question about the process of maturity, Father without a word, reached for his Bible. He turned its pages until he found a certain chapter in the Old Testament.

“Joan, listen to this passage. It will tell you better than I can what you should know. If only there was a woman on board, she could tell you better.”

Of course I then asked questions and he explained the meaning of the verse. In simple words Father revealed to me the mysteries of maturity. To me it was so beautiful that I pitied the sailors because they were not the chosen ones of God.

From that time on everything in Nature took on a different meaning to me. Ashore on the islands I sought out native women to play with. I was afraid to ask them questions but I wanted to watch them to see if I was just as they were. One day, on a little island about eighty miles south of Suva, I went ashore with four of our crew and Stitches to get some breadfruit and guavas. We took a sack of nails and rope to use as commodities of trade. Once ashore, Stitches and I left the sailors and wandered through the village streets. We hadn’t gone more than a quarter of a mile before we were attracted to a group of natives playing tom-toms. We pushed through the outer circle of natives to see what was happening. There in the center of the group I saw a native mother in childbirth. Unaided by any other woman, when her time came, she squatted on the sand. The tom-toms were being played in celebration of a child’s being born to their tribe. Just at the moment the baby came from the mother the natives broke into an ecstatic song of triumph. Apparently paying no attention to her audience, the native mother broke the navel cord that bound the infant to her and tied the end of it with a piece of coconut fiber. Then she took her baby down to the surf and washed it in the cold sea water which brought its first cry of life. The natives lost interest in her as soon as they heard the baby’s tiny voice, and they scattered, leaving her to her task of nurturing the little life.

“Your Old Man will get sore if he finds out I’m letting you watch this, Skipper,” observed Stitches. “But there’s no telling when you’ll ever see the likes of this again.”

I didn’t care what happened to me afterwards for I was so fascinated with the native mother that I didn’t want to leave her. She put the baby to her breast to suckle it. After it had its first meal she scraped a place in the sand under the warm sun for it to sleep in, then she lay beside it, full of pride and content. I thought it must be fun to have a baby and have a lot of natives singing and dancing to celebrate the event, but I was to learn years later that most civilized women didn’t agree with me.

When we returned to the ship I was full of my latest experience. But somehow life had turned from a simple thing into something so full of puzzling contradictions that I longed to leave the ship and live on shore where I thought I would find an answer to everything that bewildered me.

Within a year from that time I found out that sailors’ loves were not all beautiful. They talked of the women on the waterfront they gave their pay to for a night’s love; they remembered young sweethearts in the Old Country; and I heard them say they were sweet on the little native girls. But their affairs were confused in my mind. One day I asked Swede, while he was standing at the helm, if he had ever been in love.

“Sure, Skipper, all us sailormen are in love—with the same woman!”

“How do you mean, Swede?” I queried.

“Yep, the same woman satisfies us all. You know how the sails look at night, filled out in firm curves by the wind?”

“Yes,” I answered, but I failed to see the connection of sails with Swede’s sweetheart.

“Well,” he went on, “them sails are so pretty and round, that with the moon lighting them up they looks like a woman’s breasts and us sailormen stand aft at the helm just content to follow them wherever they lead.”

“I like the water better than sails, Swede,” I offered. “When I swim in the sea, with the waves lapping at my body, it feels like millions of little mouths were kissing me.”

Swede didn’t answer me, but he nearly swallowed his wad of tobacco in his astonishment. I decided not to tell him any more of my secrets if he was going to get so scared of them. That night I turned in my bunk early so that I could think of love. Just thinking about it made me feel funny, as if I was hungry and yet I wasn’t hungry. I woke up from a sound sleep feeling cold all over but my face was burning hot. The next morning I made up my mind I wasn’t going to think about love any more because it frightened me.

The first disillusion about sex came to me when the Chief of the little island we had visited south of Suva refused to let us land again.

The Chief felt to his tribe as a father feels to his family. There was bitterness in his voice, where a scant year before he had welcomed us.

“Last trip here, some your sailors bring sickness to my people. Many maidens die quickly. I cannot let your white man come on this island ever again.”

“How do you know it was some of my men?” Father asked the Chief.

“After white man make love, maidens get sick. One get so sick she throw herself in the sea.”

I loved the natives but I was more loyal to our crew.

“How the hell could any one of our crew hurt the native girls?” I demanded.

The Chief ignored me. His quarrel was with the white Chief, my father, and I had no place in the conversation. But after the Chief left, I sought out Father.

“What did the Chief mean about our sailors?” I asked. Father tried to explain to me that one or two of our men were sick—sick with something that was like living death and they had given that sickness to two native girls. The malady spread rapidly because the natives are so in-bred that their resistance is not strong enough to throw off disease. When the full purport of Father’s explanation came to me I experienced my first hate and intolerance of men. It wasn’t that I cared what the sailors did, but I resented their conduct keeping me from going ashore and being welcomed.

Father saw the hate in my eyes as I listened to him. Once more he fell back upon his Bible to explain to my child mind a problem too complex for his tongue. He read to me the parable of the Adulteress and then he attempted to explain it.

“The greatest Philosopher among men understood sex; it is in everyone’s life and in promiscuity alone is there evil. He was pretty wise, Joan, and He understood. Understandin’ is greater than forgiveness!” Such was the wise interpretation Father put on the parable to comfort me. I don’t think he realized that he had given me the great gift of tolerance.—Though I could understand I couldn’t get over the hate within me—Father watched me silently for a while and then spoke:—

“You shouldn’t be hatin’ anything, Joan,” he said, “hatin’s like a headwind—it won’t get you nowhere.”

“Didn’t you ever in your life hate anything?” I asked him.

My question landed home to him. Father started to answer No—then he paused and looking beyond me as if seeing his past, he said, bitterly:

“It’s the biggest mistake I ever made, Joan—carryin’ a festerin’ hate in my heart for fourteen years—hate of them that wrecked my ship and killed my men.”

Then, with a break in his voice he told me the story of the famous wreck of the _Star_. Father made me promise never to repeat it, for he wanted its memory lost forever. I would never have told it as long as he lived for his sake, but he is still alive, and when I wrote to him that I was going to write _The Cradle of the Deep_ he sent me the following letter:

My Dear Joan:

I take my pen in hand to reply to your letter advising me that
you are going to write a story of your early life at sea with
your old Daddy. There is something I wish you would write
of—the story of the wreck of my old full-rigged ship _Star_.

If it hadn’t been for that wreck I would never have steered my
course South to the Southern Cross and the Atoll Islands of the
Pacific. I loved the North, the Aurora Borealis and the
magnificent splendor of the icebound Arctic. I knew it as you
know your navigation. If I hadn’t left it you would never have
lived in the tropics and thrived on coconut milk and yarrow
root. Instead you might have chawed blubber with the Eskimos.

I would prefer to let sleeping dogs lie, for the memory of that
wreck is a bitter one for me, but I want you to tell it anyway
so that the world may have a glimpse into the realism of the sea
in fact.

Keep a strong hand on the helm and watch for squalls from
leeward.

Your affectionate

Father.

11
“The Sea gives up its dead”

San Francisco in April. High out of the network of masts and rigging of ships that made the waterfront look like a black spider web across the skyline, jerked the blue house flag, with its flying fish tails, of the famous _Star_, queen of the fleet of sailing ships in the Alaska salmon trade. The American flag fluttered no less proudly from her spanker gaff. It was Spring and sailing day!

The _Star_ was making ready to sail for Wrangel, Alaska. On board the crew, canners and fishermen, one hundred and thirty-eight in all, eagerly awaited the start. It was a strange conglomeration of humans gathered from the ends of the earth. Quartered in the forward hold the Chinese canners disputed the space with thousands of bitterly resentful rats. A Chinese cook prepared their native food for the canners, and over the crowded hold, filled with squealing rats and chattering Chinese, a brass Joss god, made fast to an under beam, looked calmly down. Him the Chinese worshipped believing he would bring them good luck. What the rats thought about the brass Joss no one knew or cared. Probably they respected him for he was the only thing in the hold they could not bite successfully!

The crew of all nations, Swedes, Yankees, Chinese, Irish, lived in the fo’c’s’le head.