Chapter XXI (4)

Amidships was a veritable little Italy. The Italian fishermen were housed in cabins on deck. They too carried their native Italian cook who prepared rich-smelling Italian foods. The aromas of their cooking, when wafted forward and merged with the smell of boiling rice and herbs from the Chinese hold, made a queer combination of Latin and Oriental odors.

Then, maintaining the peculiar social distinctions of the sea, the white tradesmen and officers of the ship and cannery lived aft in luxurious quarters. The walls of the cabins were of bird’s eye maple. In the dining salon hung a six foot oil painting of the _Star_ under full sail outriding a hurricane. The swinging lamps were brass, ornately decorated with whales’ teeth and carved ivories. In my father’s cabin, curtains of red plush proclaimed the captain’s aloofness. A “telltale” compass over his bunk and a rack of rifles within easy reach were additional furnishings.

On April 8th, my father stood at the taffrail watching the finishing of the loading of great pieces of steel machinery for the cannery, barrels of oils and salt, and lumber to rebuild some of the warehouses of the company in far distant Wrangel. At his side stood my mother, fighting back, as she had done every year for fifteen years, the quiver of sorrow that sailing day always brought her. Father would be gone for six months. He would sail up past Nome into the frozen Arctic, and if luck was with him, sail back the following fall before the ice froze him in.

Father looked at her with a twinkle in his eye.

“What’s the matter, Mother?”

“Nothing,” she answered, “only I wish Joan was old enough so that I could go with you this trip. I feel you are in danger.” She forced a smile she was far from feeling. A deadly foreboding that seems to be instinctive with the womenfolk of deep sea sailors came upon her.

“Shame on you, Mother. Why I’ll outsail the _Star of Alaska_ and the _Star of Nome_ and the _Star of the North_ by a month. Don’t let the crew see you weakening.” The mate interrupted them:

“Beg pardon, sir. It’s time to let the men knock off for lunch and their last mug of beer. It always makes them sail happier if they have an hour on sailing day to get drunk and kiss their sweethearts good-bye.”

“Let them knock off now and come back at four o’clock,” instructed Father, “I was a young fellow myself once.”

No sooner had the men left their stations on the deck and were ashore than a ripping, tearing roar brought Father rushing to the poop deck. The main yard had broken from the spar and had crashed through the rigging down to the deck as if cut by an invisible hand! It broke into three pieces, but miraculously injured no one. That ill omen was to be remembered later. A mast breaking in three pieces is a sign that before the trip is completed the vessel itself will break into as many parts. Folk laugh at the superstitions of sailormen, but few who have lived at sea will dispute their justification.

Instead of sailing, the _Star_ went back to the drydock where the new yard was rigged on. It took three days, and on April 11th, at the five o’clock flood tide, the _Star_ was once more ready to go. The crowd jostled on the docks. Chinese women in their quaint native costumes of pants and jackets stood on the wharf near the fo’c’s’le head, their waxen faces immobile beneath their shining black hair ornamented with jades and corals. The Italian women were most demonstrative. Their shawls were torn from their heads as they jumbled against each other, pushing for the extreme edge of the dock. Tears and laughter fought for supremacy as they waved good-bye to the Italian fishermen amidships. One young wife with two babies tugging at her skirts was praying, and here and there a rosary was thrust into the hands of the departing fishermen. The American friends of the officers and traders were on the dock nearest the stern, and handkerchiefs and jokes of bravado sent the _Star_ off to the Arctic.

My father stood at the helm and with a bellow ordered,

“Let go the hawsers!”

“Let go the hawsers,” echoed back at him from the fo’c’s’le head, and the cobra-like ropes that held the _Star_ to her mooring splashed limp into the bay as the men hauled in their slack on the capstan to the accompaniment of a chantey. The Chinese on board set off thousands of firecrackers to foil off the devil, and threw countless red streamers into the air. The Italians sang and gesticulated with their arms as the tug _Dundee_ pulled the _Star_ out into the harbor. My father is a registered pilot of San Francisco harbor, so he directed the course of the _Star_ as they set her sails just off Alcatraz Island, and sailed majestically out of the Golden Gate and nosed her way north.

A quick trip of twenty-seven days brought the _Star_ to Wrangel. In five months her mission was completed. She was loaded with fifty-four thousand cases of fine Alaska salmon to take back to San Francisco. It was a dull, thick daybreak as the tugs steamed alongside. All hands were aboard, glad their hard work was done, and jubilant at being homeward bound. The last to come down to the ship was my father. As he walked down the dock, little Arvis Babler, the nine year old daughter of the cannery superintendent, ran along beside him holding his hand. She chattered gaily about his ship. She even suggested that some day he would bring his little girl to Alaska to play with her. None of her light spirit infected my father. He only stared gloomily and silently at the loaded vessel.

“What’s the matter, Captain?” she asked, when Father didn’t respond to her. “I should think you would be happy today when you are going home.”

“I feel as if I were going to my grave,” he answered.

The tugs _Hattie H._ and _Kyak_ were to tow the _Star_ out. Nearly all the crew of these two tugs were drunk before they left the dock. In that alone they violated the code of the sea, but in Alaska at that time there was but one tugboat company and no competition to make a high standard of seamanship necessary. To make matters worse, the rival captains of the two tugs were fighting over which was to be the leading boat. Finally they settled their dispute, apparently to the satisfaction of neither, and the tugs started to pull the _Star_ down the Wrangel Narrows, a distance of one hundred and twenty-five miles to the sea. In that dangerous passage there was only room for one ship to pass. At the mouth of the Narrows the _Star_ was to set her sails and steer a course off shore for home. All day long the tugs towed her slowly. Meantime those on board the leading tug had celebrated their victory over the crew of the rival tug so thoroughly that the boat was left in charge of a boy mate—while the engineer, to put it mildly, was far from at his best.

Toward night the sky became overcast and the wind increased with the coming darkness. By eight o’clock a gale had arisen. It was off Coronation Island that my father noticed that the tugs were dragging his ship over to the north or dangerous side of the channel. He could hear, above the moaning of the gale, breakers crashing on the rocks! Father tried to signal the tugs of the danger, for their crews evidently had not realized it. Vainly he called through his megaphone, and vainly he sent up flares to attract the attention of the captain of the first tugboat. The condition of the men on those tugs must have kept them from recognizing the warning calls for they pulled on and on towards the shore in the face of the rising gale. Finally at the tugboat end of the forward hawser, some deck hand on the _Hattie H._ saw the cable slacken. They had towed the _Star_ into a dangerous bight or indenture in the cliffs. Panic-stricken, the _Hattie H._ pulled off to one side leaving the _Star_ in a straddled position between the two tugs. Neither tug was very powerful, but together and properly handled they could have dragged the ship out of danger. Instead the tugs see-sawed against each other doing nothing. Apparently those supposed to be in command did not know what to do.

Nearer and nearer the treacherous rocks the _Star_ was driven by the wind. In desperation Father dropped both anchors to hold her. No sooner had he dropped the anchors than the tugboats, instead of fighting for the ship and the lives of the men on board, cut their towing hawsers and ran for it—deliberately steaming away at full speed, presumably for Wrangel. They didn’t even heave to long enough to see what the _Star’s_ fate was. Later the master of the _Hattie H._ said he thought the _Star_ was pounding to pieces on the rocks. (He had heard the anchor chain running out of the hawse pipe!) The _Kyak_ steamed to shelter in the lee of an adjacent island. The _Hattie H._ returned to Wrangel, arriving the following Sunday morning. Her master, after the disaster, was asked why he did not stand by to assist the ship.

“What the hell could I do? She was wrecked anyway,” he went on record as saying. But had those tugs stood by what followed would never have happened.

On the _Star_ the crew huddled on deck all night through, listening to the menacing hissing of the hidden surf crashing against the rocky cliffs. Would the anchors hold? That was fate—there was nothing they could do.

Dawn brought no hope. Scarce five hundred yards off loomed precipitous cliffs with huge waves dashing against them.

Only the anchors still held. If they should slip! But the men fought back that picture of inevitable destruction. Those tugs were surely coming back! They had only disappeared in the night to go for help! Waiting was torture. If only the tugs came back in time.

Hours passed. No tugs appeared. Then the anchors began to slip. The terrific strain of the huge waves was too great for the hooks to hold. Hours on hours! Waiting was gruesome now, as the anchors dragged and the men on board watched the jagged-toothed rocks come nearer. The heavy load of salmon in the holds shifted, and the _Star_ listed first to starboard and then to port as each ground swell that rose lifted her high and carried her nearer the barren cliffs.

Father gave instructions to the men to make preparations for getting ashore when the ship struck. Life preservers were fastened on the Chinese who had become panic-stricken. The white officers and officials of the cannery company, realizing the added danger of a hundred crazed Chinese rioting, begged my father to batten them down in the hold like so much cattle to keep them off the decks. Father called the Boss Chinaman to him.

“Boss, you guarantee that your men not riot?” he began. “I won’t lock them down in hold. You tell them if danger come Captain tell you.”

That old Boss Chinaman had been with Father for fourteen years and he trusted him almost as he trusted his Joss god. He went back to his Chinamen in the hold and told them of my father’s promise, and they were calmed to a degree. They cramped together in their hold paralyzed with fear, but they kept off the decks.

After Father had seen to the Chinamen and Italian fishermen, he returned aft to the officers’ quarters and told them to be prepared for the worst as the anchors were useless now. Down in the stuffy red plush cabin the men sat around the chart table. They were all silent and depressed. They all had a look of finality on their faces. It was small choice—on deck they could see sure death looming up; in the cabin they could shut their eyes to it and wait! In the last few moments of their lives strange reactions took place in them. The clerk of the cannery, a man about thirty-three years of age, pale and husky-voiced, asked my father to take the money he had, nine hundred dollars, and give it to his family, when my father reached San Francisco. Another man asked Father to take a message to his wife, and still another broke out into vile profanity. A huge man, one of the wealthy owners of the cannery, forgot his pose of dignity and knelt down on the cabin floor and prayed like a frightened child.

“You all have the same chances, men, and each one of you will bear your own responsibility,” Father told them in answer to their pleas.

He set about to have a trunk packed with medicines and stimulants which was taken on deck. Later that trunk was picked up in the wreckage ashore and the contents helped revive some of the men and dress their injuries. Only four lived of the white men who sat around the table in the cabin awaiting the verdict of the storm.

On deck the flying spray from the mountainous seas was like a white blinding screen, but Father could see Ole Swenson, a Norse man, powerful and gigantic, standing on the fo’c’s’le head scanning the horizon for the return of the tugs. Swenson saw nothing but the storm rising in velocity, and the cliffs looming blacker on shore. Roaring and cursing against the fate that was murdering his beloved ship, Ole Swenson jumped into the sea to end his agony.

It was only a matter of minutes before sure death would claim the hundred and thirty-eight men on the _Star_. Father called for volunteers to man a boat and take a line ashore so that a breeches buoy could be rigged. A breeches buoy is a little buoy on a rope, made fast to the mast and on some point on shore, much like a big pulley line, by which shipwrecked men can slide to the mainland high above a pounding surf. Four young men responded to his call for volunteers. Among them were two brothers, Hasen by name. One of them, the younger, couldn’t swim. His older brother urged him not to go. He, the older one would go, for he was a strong swimmer. The younger boy would not hear his pleading and went first. The good swimmer was drowned just out of reach of help a few moments later.

With great difficulty the crew swung a lifeboat off its davits with the four young men in it fighting for their lives against the running sea. The men on the _Star_ watched them pull for the shore—watched them almost get in—and then saw their shell of a boat dashed on the rocks of the narrow beach. Three of them jumped to safety and were cheered by the crew on board whose lives they would save.

The three men dragged the rope up and fastened it on a tree trunk high out of reach of the waves. This done, they turned their attention to fastening the running rope which would propel the breeches buoy, but that line had broken loose and was lost in the sea. Father called for another volunteer to go ashore with another line to replace it. The ship’s carpenter stepped forward. He tied the rope to his body and ascended the rigging, then hand over hand he slid along the rope which the men had stretched to the shore. The _Star_ was toppling like a drunken sailor from side to side. The men on board watched the carpenter get caught in a green comber which first sucked him under and then threw him high in the air. When he was almost ashore an extra hard strain flipped him off like a fly from a rubber band. He struck the water with a terrific blow on his back. He was close enough to shore for the three surviving young men to pull him in to safety.

Then the end came! The _Star_ crashed on the saw-toothed rocks. The forward part of her, the fo’c’s’le head and the foremast broke off just before the crew fled aft. They hung on like leeches to the after railing and deck houses. The force of the relentless pounding sea was so great that the _Star_ quivered and broke into three pieces, just as her yard arm had broken on that ominous day in San Francisco. The stern of the ship was all that was afloat and that was covered by screaming, frightened men. The sea around was a seething mass of salmon cases, dead Chinamen, screaming Italians and Americans being smothered in the spray. The waves licked up viciously as if to devour the few hanging on for life on the stern. Clinging to the wheelhouse and after railing, a small group of officials and white men held their balance. A sea lifted a piece of wreckage to windward as if to capsize it and most of the men jumped in the opposite direction to avoid being pinned beneath. Three remained with my father. The piece of wreckage, instead of turning turtle to windward, was caught in the backwash of a wave and capsized with all remaining hands to leeward! They came up into a seething maelstrom of pitching wreckage, packing-cases swirling, outstretched arms and kicking legs of drowning men, shrieks of fear and the terrible seas breaking with a roar over all. And on the shore, only two hundred yards away, four of the five men who had taken the first desperate chances, waited helpless. They scanned the incoming combers for bodies, Chinese or white, that might wash in close enough to fish out, but the shore was abrupt and it had become piled with the cargo and wreckage from the _Star_. The men could reach only a few and yank them out of the jaws of the sea as they washed in.

When the last man had left the wreck my father jumped overboard. He said it took about a half a minute for him to reach the surface. He felt a heavy bulk above his head when he was under the water. He thought it was the keel of his ship and that he was pinned beneath it. Holding his breath, he made one herculean effort to rise to the surface. The “bulk” over his head was the top of one of the hatchings which had broken loose from the ship and was floating on the sea. Father struck out for the shore. The icy water numbed his senses. He remembered nothing more. A big green roller crested with salmon cases overtook him and one of them struck him on the head and mercifully knocked him unconscious. The backwash of the surf carried his inert body to the beach.

Of the one hundred and thirty-eight men on board, only twenty-seven survived. Those that reached the shore before my father set about to rescue the others. Two of them, the carpenter and a Scotch sailor named Frank Muir, pulled my father’s body out of the water.

“The Old Man’s drowned. Let’s pull out the living ones,” spoke up the carpenter and he went down the beach to salvage more of the men. Frank Muir was as devoted to my father as a son. He didn’t heed the carpenter, but dragged the apparently dead body to the shelter of a rock and tried to revive him. It seemed a thankless task. The Captain was gone. If he couldn’t save him he would at least bury him away from the others, and Frank Muir carried Father higher up to a little table of rock in the cliff. There he rolled him and pounded him until a glow of life came into his battered, frozen body.

By late afternoon no life could be seen in the surf. My father was so crippled and frozen that he couldn’t walk. He crawled around on all fours directing his men in reviving the others. No rest for any until, beyond any doubt, all were rescued that it was possible to rescue.

“We won’t give up until we find all of us,” said my father, and the twenty-seven survivors agreed to a man.

They set about to search the wreckage that was piled high on the beach for bodies. They found several groups of men, dead men, so entangled and twisted together by the churning of the sea that they couldn’t be pulled apart. Dismembered bodies were strewn on the rocky coast like driftwood. Arms and legs and headless trunks washed back and forth in the foam. One living being was found in the mess, a Japanese. He was buried in a hill of salmon cases. The men had to burrow to get into it. He was very weak through loss of blood from a gash extending from his temple the length of his chin!

By dragging wreckage together the men built a huge fire around which they snuggled for warmth. Instead of relief the fire was only an added torture, a Dante’s Inferno, for the thick smoke from the damp wood blinded them.

In the morning the bodies of the white men were gathered, and shallow graves dug for them in the rocky shore to keep the wolves from eating them. Over the graves Father ordered the men to pile heavy debris so that the sea washing up couldn’t snatch them back to a watery grave.

The lot of the survivors was almost as bad as that of the lost men, for there was no sign of rescue, and the coast was barren of habitation for hundreds of miles around. The icy wind made existence almost impossible.

The next day one of the tugs returned. Her captain was surprised to see the men ashore for he had not dreamed that supposedly dead men could live to tell the tale. It was too rough to send a boat in, but the tug hove to until the following day, when the crew took aboard the survivors and returned to Wrangel. The survivors were so incensed against the tug crew for cutting the hawser and sending one hundred and eleven men to their death that they started to murder them. Father stopped the violence. He said the law would deal with the tug people when the facts were made known. At Wrangel the survivors were furnished clothing from the cannery store and sent by steamers to San Francisco.

Several days after the wreck, the company’s tugs were sent with a crew to dispose of the bodies on Coronation Island. They found an indescribable confusion of corpses, provisions and debris covering the shore for a depth of many feet. Pieces of human bodies were mingled with the sides of hams and bacons and canned goods which the sea spewed up from the ship’s holds. Instead of segregating the bodies, the rescue crew drove picks into them and dragged them into heaps. After they had made piles of human wreckage they poured oil over them and set them afire like so much rubbish. Then they did something that is almost beyond human comprehension. After they had burned the bodies, they salvaged the hams and bacons and other foods they found mixed with the dead men and took them back to Wrangel where they sold them to the Eskimos.

What became of the few survivors? They were scattered by the company that owned the tugboats so that they couldn’t be used to witness against them. Those whose injuries prevented employment were treated in hospitals—the others were placed on various ships.

My mother was in San Francisco waiting for any bit of news of the survivors. The report came to her that my father’s dead body had been found, mangled almost beyond recognition, and then the report was confirmed. I was only six months old at the time. The shock to my mother brought her an illness from which she has never recovered. It was through this illness that I came to be raised by my father.

Father was retained on full salary during the official investigation of the wreck. Then he learned how much law, justice or right mean to greedy and selfish men. The tugs belonged to the same company that owned the _Star_. If the responsibility for the wreck was fastened on the two captains of the tugboats, the corporation faced enormous damage suits from the families and dependents of the hundred and eleven dead men. So the owners used every bit of their influence and resources to protect the guilty tugboat captains. The verdict acquitted them—the blame rested on the gale! And thus they settled the most famous and most unnecessary wreck in American maritime history. My father was fired in disgrace with the remark: “We have no ship for you now.”

That was the way he was rewarded for his effort to procure the “justice” he had promised his men when they wanted to avenge the murder done by the crews of the tugboats. The slogan went from Alaska to Seattle after the verdict: “Don’t kick Power.”

Fifteen years of faithful and intelligent service in the Arctic swept away in a night! Father could never go North again. The bodies of a hundred and eleven men on the rocks of Coronation Island would drive him to murder. He bought an old schooner and turned to the opposite end of the world, the South Seas, warmth and maybe forgetfulness!—But he still carries the bitterness and hate in his heart!

12
A cursing contest and a hangman’s noose

Most of the men I knew were typical old shellback sailors, a species of human that began to go out with the increase of steam vessels until now the type is almost extinct. The shellback was unlike any other human, a law unto himself, with few wants and a large philosophy of content that was none the less real because he grumbled all the time. His ration of tobacco, enough money for grog, and a few days in port at the end of a long sea trip to blow his pay on some skirt, satisfied his creature desires. For mental relaxation he cursed the ship, cursed his officers, cursed the grub and cursed the cook, and withal, he wouldn’t have traded places with any king on his throne.

The shellback’s attitude toward the sea was all his own, and quite typical of the breed. He loved it—he lived on it. He expected to be on top of the waves all his life and beneath them when he died. And so fatalistic was he, that half of the deep sea sailors never learned to swim! Stitches expressed the attitude best.

“What’s the use of learnin’ to swim?” he argued. “Any sailor dumb enough to fall overboard oughta drown and if he’s washed overboard he couldn’t swim anyhow—so what’s the use?”

“But Father made me learn to swim,” I protested.

“That’s different,” grinned Stitches. “You see, Skipper, the Captain knows a woman ain’t got sense enough not to fall overboard. Now if you was to fall overboard and couldn’t swim, some dumb sailor, whether he could swim or not, would jump in and get drowned trying to save you; but bein’ as you kin swim, if _you_ fall overboard, nobody don’t worry—they just toss you a rope and you pull out by yourself and the Captain don’t lose no good sailor. All that happens is you come back aboard and you get your stern tanned with a rope’s end to warm up the chill. No ma’am! Captain ain’t goin’ to let no good sailor go dead tryin’ to save a woman.”

Quite unconvinced, I puzzled and puzzled over Stitches’ point of view, but it was not until some years later, in one tragic moment, that I learned how wide can be the difference between a man’s philosophy and his action in a crisis.

Next to Stitches the most interesting shellback I ever knew was John Henry, a withered old seaman close to seventy, with a cracked whiskey voice and a face so furrowed that it looked like the relief map of a mountain range. He chawed a hunk of tobacco incessantly and the juice drooled down his chin, leaving a little yellow rut marked in his whiskers. He had sailed the Horn a hundred times, to hear him tell it, and he would have been a captain long ago instead of a common seaman, only a captain couldn’t get drunk in public on the waterfront—so John Henry preferred not to be a captain. But for all his shortcomings, John Henry was a real seaman. An ordinary gale was music to his soul and a hurricane seemed to take off thirty years—for no young man could hold to the foot ropes aloft better than he and few could steer a dangerous course as well.

We shipped John Henry at Frisco and in a week Stitches’ nose was out of joint, for John Henry had quite won me. He would sit for hours, on his watch below, and teach me to tie intricate sailor knots—everything from splices, monkey fists, running bowlines, Turk’s heads, true lover’s knots to a hangman’s noose.

“I bin in every jail from Seattle to Port Said,” he confided, “an’ I can learn you every kind of a knot they use for killin’ off undesirables.”

Stitches was disgusted.

“Damned old shellback! Teaching you how to tie knots to get rid of undesirables, is he? I dunno nobody as undesirable as he is. If he had what was comin’ to him, somebody’d tie a knot for him long ago. Mebbe they will yet.”

On the end of a halyard John Henry was chief chanteyman. One day I was helping haul in the slack of the fore topsail and he said:

“You gotta eat more beans before you can pull like a regular sailor. Women ain’t no use on a ship except to eat up grub.”

Then he burst into a chantey that sailors sing about “Womenfolk on Ships,” and put my name in it.

This is the song:

“Sweet Joan, a maiden of fourteen years old,
Not once in her life had been kissed.
Except by her cats and her dogs, I been told,
And the beauties of life she had missed.

“And OH! how she longed for the love of a man
But all seemed to turn her away.
Till one day she set on a capital plan
And put it in form this way.

“Now sailors are jolly good fellows, thought she,
To take a trip she’d a notion,
For sailors oft get very blue out at sea,
And—girls are scarce on the ocean!”

“Aw, what the hell do you mean by that?” I asked. “I can do something that nobody in the fo’c’s’le can do and that is, I can navigate. Father’s taught me how to find our position by the Southern Cross at night,” I boasted.

“Yeh? Well, I still says women ain’t got no place on shipboard. Why, they can’t even talk like sailors,” and he spat a juicy stream with unerring accuracy through the hawse hole on the port side of the ship.

He had thrown down the challenge to me to make good as a sailor. I was no frail little Captain’s daughter that the sailors slew each other to get. I had to win them! From that day on I never lost an opportunity to emulate a deep sea sailor in every way.

At night in my cabin I rubbed my hands over rough rope to make callouses. I began to practise every swear word I heard the sailors use. After a month of careful observation I was able to curse four minutes in succession and never repeat a word. When I had them all down glibly I waylaid John Henry.

“Listen, you bastard,” I started, and then I traced his ancestors from several kinds of animals down to biological defects in himself and compared him with every known form of low life and waste products imaginable. When I finished my four minute tirade I stood on guard, thinking he would make a pass at me. Instead he listened intently, then his face broke into a grin:

“You’re improvin’, Skipper,” he complimented me. I was so elated at winning his approval that I thought I would try my vocabulary out on my father. I went up on the poop deck where Father was sitting, smoking his pipe.

“Tell me to do something,” I invited him.

“Now, what are you up to?” he asked suspiciously.

“Just you tell me to do something as if I was a sailor in the fo’c’s’le,” I repeated.

“All right,” he replied, pleased at what appeared to be my desire to work. “You get a chip-hammer and chip the rust off the anchor chains. They got to be given a coat of red lead to keep them from rusting away.”

Then I let fly with my newly acquired sea language. I got as far as one-half minute of it when I felt myself going through space toward the cabin below with my father attached to my collar and the seat of my pants.

“Where in the so and so did you hear any such language as that?” he shouted.

“From you when you’re tacking ship and the wind won’t catch the sails,” I answered, wishing I had never learned them.

“I’ll be goddamned if you ever heard your father curse,” he yelled. “I’ll break your damned neck if I ever hear you curse again—do you hear?”

I heard him. The whole ship heard him with glee. Stitches said he embarrassed the flying fish! Father went on:

“Your mouth ain’t fit to put grub in after such language,” he roared, “so you don’t get no meals until you forget every curse word you know!” and with that he tied a rag over my mouth and went after a piece of rope to warm my posterior.

I was in my bunk, my mouth tied up and my behind too sore to sit on. What I thought of John Henry was worse than the words I had memorized to impress him. I’d get even with him if I died in the attempt. Lying down there on my stomach I couldn’t understand where the justice of it came in. I had tried to be a regular sailor and had got the worst of it. However, I was far from licked—I mean in spirit.

I amused myself by watching some bedbugs parading on my straw mattress. Then they gave me an idea. I caught a few and put them on me. At least I could be lousy, and so that much nearer to perfection as a seaman!

At twenty minutes past five the cabin-boy rang the supper bell. I was hungry, but I didn’t dare to leave my cabin. I stuck my head out of my porthole and watched the foam making pictures on the water. From experience I knew that was the easiest and surest way to make myself sleepy. Next morning I awoke, ravenously hungry and oh, how repentant my empty insides made me!

I found Father behind a rapidly disappearing bowl of oatmeal in the dining saloon.

“Hey, I’ll never curse any more if I can eat,” I promised him. He grunted his forgiveness, then added:

“We’ll be in Brisbane along about noon today. Don’t you dare leave the ship.”

“Can’t I be the watchman in port and save you the wages?” I inquired, eager to get back in his good graces again.

“That wouldn’t be such a bad idea. I don’t want none of the crew ashore in this port. I’ll have to bail them out of jail for drunkenness, and I haven’t got the time nor the money to do that.”

“I won’t let any of them get away,” I assured him.

At about two o’clock we pulled into the harbor after sailing up the long Brisbane River. The Customs officials came aboard and sealed up our stores and tobacco. Then came the port doctors to examine the crew.

“Have the crew strip and line up on deck for examinations, Captain,” instructed one of the doctors. “Everyone of them has to be vaccinated before you can land here. We’ve got some smallpox ashore started by sailors off a ship from China and the Philippines and the harbor is under quarantine.”

I hurried down to the main deck to take my place in the line-up of the crew. I was the last in the line. The doctor looked at me curiously, and then said,

“Well, well, little one, if you aren’t the very picture of health,” and he pinched my muscles, admiringly.

“No, I’m not,” I assured him, “I have had everything that sailors have, worse than they get it. You better vaccinate me good,” I advised. “I even have bedbugs on me.”

That doctor looked horrified, but he dug into my arm with three long scratches even deeper than the men’s. It hurt like the devil, but I was very proud at that moment because I had as many as John Henry and just as deep. To this day I carry those scars—proud proof of my equality with sailors.

Before Father went ashore with the Customs officials he admonished me again to let no sailor have shore leave.

“The mate will be busy discharging cargo, and I may not be back before late tonight, so you keep your eye on the gangway.”

I took up my station at the gangway and chawed on some dried prunes. They were as close to seamen’s tobacco as I dared attempt. The cabin-boy tried to go ashore, but I pushed him back. One or two of the sailors made a bluff at sneaking past but I stood in the middle of the gangway with a belaying pin and forgetting Father’s lesson, I laid down the law in language to make John Henry proud. Each time they retired, defeated, but chuckling.

I was hot in the sun, but I didn’t care. Proudly I stood my post until six o’clock, when the crew knocked off discharging. Then came the supper bell, and of course, no one could expect me to stay on guard at grub time. In my father’s absence I sat in his place opposite the two mates. After I had finished my meal I picked my teeth with a fork just as I had watched the second mate do so many times before. I wouldn’t have dared to do that with Father present.

I strolled up on deck to take up my gangway watch again. If any sailor got ashore it would be over my dead body, I promised myself. I sat there for fully two hours.

There was no sign of life from the fo’c’s’le. Not one man came out to cross that gangway and go ashore.

“Huh!” I gloated to myself, “they’re afraid of me. They know they can’t get away with anything with me here watching.”

I was so full of my own sense of importance and authority that I didn’t suspect anything queer in the silence forward, until the cabin-boy came aft, after taking the dinner basket back to the galley.

“All them guys forrard is ashore and I’m going to go ashore too,” he sniffed at me contemptuously.

“What?” I asked, too surprised to believe I had heard him aright.

“Sure, they all went ashore while you was eating your grub. Nobody left for’ard except the cook.”

What could I do? I had gained Father’s respect only to lose it when his back was turned. I thought at first I’d go ashore and find the sailors in the saloons and bring them back on board before Father got back. That plan wasn’t wise, though, for, if I left, the cabin-boy and the two mates might go ashore in my absence and I would be a complete failure.

I took up the belaying pin and perched myself on the top of the gangway, and waited. I waited until long past midnight before I heard a human sound on the dock. Suddenly my ear caught a thick, throaty song dimly coming from among the cargo piles on the dock:

“McGinty’s back again;
He’s dressed up like a dandy,
He’s down at Mike’s saloon,
He’s drinkin’ wine and brandy . . .”

It was the voice of John Henry singing the old sailors’ funeral dirge “McGinty.” McGinty is the legendary sea captain who sank to the bottom of the sea, and when sailors get drunk their favorite vision is of McGinty arisen from the dead and drinking in waterfront saloons.

“John Henry!” I called as loud as I could.

I got no answer, except his drunken voice rising in the old song.

Then he weaved out from the shadow of the cargo piled on the wharf to stand at the foot of the gangway. He was so drunk he could hardly keep his balance. He made three gallant efforts to place his foot on the bottom of the gangway; finally, by grabbing the hand ropes he pulled himself aboard and toppled over on the deck. I lifted him up and shook him violently.

“John Henry, stand up!” I shouted at him.

He babbled something unintelligible and drooled down his shirt front as I shook him. His bloodshot eyes focused on me and held there.

“Get your Ole Man give me money for whiskey. Got to have whiskey.”

“You’ll get a kick in the seat of the pants, that’s what you’ll get,” I answered him.

“Got to have money for whiskey—only want whiskey,” he insisted, and he started to sob pathetically.

“You’re drunk, John Henry. Come on and get forrard into your bunk.”

He pulled away from me and demanded through his sobs:

“You going to get Ole Man to give me some more money?”

“He isn’t here, John Henry. Come on and get forrard and turn in,” I coaxed him.

“You get me money for whiskey or I’ll croak.”

His body began to tremble. His lips were blue, his eyes fiery and bloodshot.

“I don’t care if you croak or not,” I answered, for I had heard threats like that before.

“All right, gonna croak. You watch me. I’m gonna croak,” and he started forward. I followed, hoping to get him safely to his bunk. Just beneath the fo’c’s’le head he picked up a long piece of rope that was coiled there on a stanchion.

“See this rope? Gonna croak if you don’t get Ole Man get me money, see?” and he burst out crying again. He tied the piece of rope into a hangman’s noose, nine slip knots on a loop, just as he had once taught me to tie it months before. He held the noose up to my face and said once more:

“I’ll croak if you don’t.”

Of course I didn’t believe him, so I just answered:

“All right, John Henry, you’ll feel better when you do!”

Instead of quieting, that seemed to set him off again. He slipped the noose over his head and thrust his face right up against mine.

“Do I get the money?” he half shrieked in his cracked whiskey voice.

Scenes with drunken sailors were no novelty to me. They always made dire threats against themselves, or the captain or their mates, and then they stumbled to bed and forgot it. Now I lost patience.

“You don’t get a damned cent,” I yelled back at John Henry.

It seemed almost to sober him. He straightened.

“You’ll be sorry,” he said, and turning with great dignity he marched out of sight forward with the hangman’s noose around his neck and the rope trailing on the deck after him.

I turned and with what I conceived to be equal dignity marched back toward the gangway. Duty called me. There would be more drunken sailors to drive to their bunks.

I don’t know why I left the gangway after a short ten minutes except that I loved John Henry and felt a vague desire to see that he was all right. But of course I wouldn’t let him know that. I couldn’t sacrifice my dignity as watchman in charge of the ship. So I marched forward very importantly, past the mizzen, past the mainmast and around the cook’s galley and there I found John Henry!

He had tied the rope around the capstan on the fo’c’s’le head and jumped down toward the main deck. There he hung, with his feet scarce six inches from the main deck and the hangman’s knot under his left ear canting his head rakishly to one side. His body was turning slowly on the rope and as I stared his face came around so his popped eyes stared back at me and his wide opened mouth seemed to sneer, “I told you I’d do it.”

Staring into those popped eyes I couldn’t cry out—I couldn’t move; and then after what seemed a million years the body turned on the rope and the face went away from me, releasing me from my speechless terror. I shrieked, and whirling away I ran aft, down into the lazarette and hid underneath a pile of old canvas. I heard the rats running to safety at my approach to their domains in the dark. I had killed John Henry! I had killed John Henry! Over and over in a numbing pain the words rushed to my brain!

I don’t know exactly how long I stayed there before I heard voices on the deck above me. I was afraid to come out of hiding. I could tell by the excitement that John Henry’s body had been found. A few hours before in the afternoon I had been sore at him for encouraging me to curse and now he was dead!

Weak, and still shaking with fright I found my way on deck. I saw Father and a group of strange men on deck surrounding a figure covered with canvas.

I called to Father:

“Here I am. I didn’t do it—honest I didn’t.” And I crumpled over crying.

Father picked me up and held me in his arms.

“What makes you think you did it, Joan?” he asked, so quietly and tenderly that I told him the whole story.

Johnny was buried in Brisbane, but I have never to this day wanted to tie a hangman’s noose.

13
Ideas about Women

“Women ain’t going to do you no good, Joan. Takin’ them by and large they’re mostly liars anyhow, and the ones you find around the waterfront is just plain head winds.”

We were tied up at the dock in Brisbane, Australia, when Father delivered his dictum. I knew he meant by “women” the gold-toothed, plump barmaids and the laughing sweethearts that swarmed around every arriving ship to get the sailors’ pay, or beg curios from them. Those women had always been objects of curiosity to me and Father knew it.

“If any of them women try to talk to you, you go below and don’t have anything to do with them, understand?”

I understood and promised to obey. I did not imagine that there was any danger of my not obeying, for two reasons. First, I was afraid of women. Second, they were all much too grand and beautiful ever to pay attention to me. Father had planted that fear of my own sex in me to keep me from picking up with chance women. He was afraid I would learn things from them that would destroy his years of careful protection of my ideals. He never let me look at myself in a mirror.

“You’re an ugly kid, Joan, so you won’t gain anything from looking at yourself in a mirror.”

It would have been worth a sailor’s life to offer a mirror to me and in all the years I was on board I don’t believe it occurred to any of the men forward. Aft, there was only one looking-glass, a small cracked one used by Father when he shaved in port, and even that he kept carefully hidden from me. My only chance to see myself was in the rain barrels on deck. If you think you can get a good idea of your personal appearance by looking into a rain barrel on a swaying, rolling ship, try it. My face used to ripple back at me like a blurred cabbage. As far as I knew I looked exactly like that image reflected in the rain barrel, so of course I believed Father when he told me I was so ugly that women ashore looking at my face would laugh at me.

Since then Father has confessed he made me think myself hopelessly ugly so that I should never be conceited. He said it was one of his dreams for me that I should be unspoiled and be beautiful inside. But, I did not know that then, and I believed all he said about my personal appearance.

How I used to envy the barmaids and the sweethearts about the docks! To me they seemed so beautiful and the sailors were always so glad to see them. No sailor, save old Stitches, ever seemed really glad to see me. The crew all thought I was a nuisance. Father’s warning was unnecessary. I would not have dared to speak to those beautiful land women.

The day after he so put me on my guard I was sitting on the skylight aft, watching the cargo boom dip down in the hold and bring up a rope-net full of copra and swing it over to the dock where the stevedores dumped it into a big dory. McLean and Axel Oleson were on duty at the mizzen hatch where they bellowed orders to the crew below to get the “barnacles off their sterns and load up the nets quicker.” The men below seemed in no mood to hurry, judging by Oleson’s remarks to them, for he traced their ancestors to dubious origins in English and Scandinavian. It was no novelty to me to hear such talk—it wasn’t even varied enough to keep me interested.

I was beginning to get tired of watching when from my perch on the skylight I saw a pretty woman coming down the dock. She walked slowly as if she wasn’t sure of her destination, but when she drew close enough to the ship to be noticed she became all smiles. She pretended she didn’t see McLean and Axel on deck, but I could tell she did see them by the careful way she avoided looking at them. She came up the gangway, which was just forward of the poop deck and spoke to me.

“Hello, little girl,” she said.

I got all goose flesh, I was so thrilled at being noticed. All thought of Father’s warning vanished.

“Hello,” I answered. “Where the hell are you going? Have you got business on this ship?” I was being very nautical, as it was my one chance to show off my authority.

She was so fluffy and soft-looking, surely she couldn’t hurt me. Now she was staring at me—at my overalls and my bare feet sticking out beneath them.

“You know you’re a bloody pretty kid,” she said. I flushed to the roots of my hair. It was the first time I had ever been paid a compliment. I studied her face closely to see if she was just making fun of me, but she seemed sincere.

“Aw, hell, I’m not as pretty as you, Miss!” I replied, taking in her high heel buttoned shoes and her hat with flowers and ribbons on it. “And you smell good, too.” That vision of loveliness was bathed in cheap perfume, but to me it was divine compared to the stink of the rotten copra being hauled out of the hold.

I had no way of judging women except from the conversation among the sailors that I had caught. I thought every woman’s character was measured by her ankles and her hips, for often I had heard the sailors say: “a good pair of hips and little ankles is worth nine months’ pay.” So, using their standard of perfection of womanhood, I measured the woman who stood before me. She was perfect.

“Got any glad rags, Kid?” she asked.

“No, but I’ve got some tapa cloth and two tortoise-shell bracelets with pearl in them,” I answered, hoping to impress her.

“I mean, haven’t you got any pretties to go around with gents? I bet all the sailors aboard here are nuts about you.”

“No, they ain’t,” I answered hastily. “If I ever lay down on the job of pulling on ropes when I’m needed, or get in their way when they unload a cargo, they kick my pants for me.”

She became very much interested in me.

“Say, what do you stick on this bloody barge for? You ought to be down with me and the girls where you’d be appreciated.”

“You mean leave the ship?”

“Sure, I’ll get you a swell job with me and the girls down at the Union Hotel.”