Chapter II: Part 2

And the awakener's task is not much better. He is forced to peg the tiller, even with a following wind, nip below to resuscitate somehow his log-like relief, and get back before the ship jibes. If there is time he may employ the proper and humane method of applying gradually increased pressure to the sleeper's arm until he awakes. If there is not, he must resort to any merciless method that proves effective. In either case, he is as unpopular as an alarm clock, which, by the way, we tried, but discarded on account of its waking everyone aboard.

The manner of our several wakings formed an interesting, if somewhat intimate, subject of discussion at breakfast one morning. Peter's was voted uninteresting because whatever means were employed to arouse her she merely opened her eyes, and meekly murmured: "All right." Steve, upon the other hand, was uncertain. If he happened to be dreaming at the time, which was usually the case, he either hit out the instant he was touched, or muttered something unintelligible, and tenderly covered the disturbing hand with his own.

As for me, I yawned cavernously, invariably said: "How's she going?" and almost as invariably fell asleep again. Or so runs the report, and one is not permitted to argue with reports. Verily, if man would discover himself--and others--let him have recourse to a dream ship and a crew of three!

It was during the passage from Vigo to Las Palmas that we first experienced that most aggravating of winds, the light, varying, following. I have heard schooner skippers declare that they prefer the "head" variety, and I can well believe it. At night, when it is exceedingly difficult to tell where such a wind is coming from, it is no more pleasant to jibe inadvertently than to have to do so sometimes thrice within the hour to keep the ship on her course. It wears out a short-handed, light-weight crew (Peter turned the scale at ninety-eight pounds, Steve at one hundred and forty-five, and myself at one hundred and forty), and conservation of energy, which makes for good health, is of prime importance on a voyage such as ours.

Finally, we lowered the mainsail, with its jolting, crashing boom, and carried on in blessed tranquillity under a squaresail, which proved to be the most useful sail we had aboard.

At the end of seven days' routine, and fair but light winds, we experienced the acute joy of finding land precisely where our frenzied calculations had placed it. As Madeira loomed on the starboard bow, Steve was seen to pace the deck with a quiet but new-born dignity--until hailed below to help wash dishes. But even this failed to quell the navigator's exuberance, and the dish-washer exchanged views on the subject with the helmsman through the skylight. This, then, was the navigation that master mariners made such a song and dance about! Well, we must be master mariners, that was all we had to say! We had summoned Madeira, and Madeira had appeared! We were not at all sure that we had not discovered Madeira!

Peter seemed strangely unimpressed. Perhaps she sensed what is indeed a fact, that luck in navigation, as in most things, favours the beginner. For instance, a mistake somewhere in our calculations brought us as near disaster in the next twenty-four hours as one cares to be. Taking Madeira as our point of departure, we shaped a course for Las Palmas, giving the intervening Salvage Islands a berth of ten miles to the westward. We reckoned this a safe distance, considering that according to "sailing directions" there was still more to the westward a strong current inclining toward the African coast. Well, that current failed to register in the particular case of the dream ship, and on top of it the "mistake somewhere" caused a cold shiver to traverse the spine of the helmsman when, at one o'clock of a pitch-black night, while doing a comfortable seven knots, a mass of rock reared itself out of the sea seemingly not more than a few hundred yards, though probably more nearly a mile, to starboard.

It was the westernmost island of the Salvages, uninhabited, unlighted, and this same helmsman who, as it happens, was myself, would like to know what prevented the "mistake somewhere" from being just that trifle bigger necessary to land us in splinters on the rocks, the fate of more than one good ship provided with a lookout and master mariner. Surely the luck of the beginner!

The incident gave us violently to think, and we thought again when, a few days later, on summoning the island of Grand Canary with the magic wand of sextant and logarithm, it failed to materialize. Had we overrun the entire Canary Group, and were we gaily heading for the African coast with its picturesque Riff pirates who specialize in becalmed ships, or were we even now heading for the iron-bound coast of Grand Canary? In the dense mist that so often shrouds this group we could not tell. Moreover, our dead reckoning said one thing and our observations another. They usually do.

"When in doubt, heave to," was a maxim of the Skipper's that we happened to remember, so we hove to and waited, though for what I am not quite clear. If it were for the mist to disperse, I am inclined to think we should be there still. Steve and I passed the time in heated discussions as to our whereabouts, which under the circumstances was as futile an occupation as any we could have indulged in, but what would you? After golf it is doubtful if there is anything more debatable than incipient navigation. We continued to talk, and the dream ship continued to rock idly on a heavy swell, until Peter broke the spell by emitting a well-known squeak of excitement and pointing heavenward.

"_That_ isn't a cloud," she announced with apparent irrelevance.

It was not. It was the peak of Teneriffe towering out of the mist, to port, like the great pyramid from the sands of Egypt.

"There you are," quoth Steve.

"Exactly," said I, though what either of us meant I have no notion.

"In the meantime," suggested Peter the practical, "don't you think we might be getting on with it?"

On this point the master and the mate of the dream ship were agreed, and the voyage continued.

*THE START ACROSS THE ATLANTIC*

_Visitations--pleasant, and the reverse_

*CHAPTER V*

_Visitations--pleasant, and the reverse_

Our entry into Las Palmas savoured of a circus come to town. We were the "act" where the music stops for effect. No one seemed to know who we were or why we were, which after all is not surprising, and the curious, consisting of gaping crowds on the breakwater and a heterogeneous fleet of anything from powerful launches to frowsy bumboats, seemed intent on finding out.

There is an immense and almost constant swell off Las Palmas, and the performance started when, in answer to our signal, a pilot stepped aboard, and came as near to measuring his dignified and bedizened length on the deck as was possible without actually doing it. He was evidently unused to dream ships in a swell. Regaining a certain amount of equilibrium, he tottered to the mast and clung there affectionately, until informed that we were from England, when he risked changing his grip to shake us all warmly by the hand, and point dramatically harbourward.

This last I took as a signal for the engine which, to my relief, "went," and we rounded the breakwater with the entire fleet of bumboats and their yelling occupants in our wake. Peter was at the tiller, in pyjamas she had not had time to change, frenziedly following the course indicated by the pilot's outstretched arm. Steve was attempting in halting Spanish to communicate the fact that our engine had no "reverse," and failing utterly. And I had made the distressing discovery that there was something amiss with our water circulation. Above all rose the clamour of the bum-boatmen:--"Hi, washing, Senor!" "Hi, hi, bananas!" "Hi, hi, hi...."

So the dream ship threaded the intricacies of Las Palmas's inner harbour, missing coal hulks by a bare foot, shaving schooners and, by means of the anchor dropped in sheer desperation, barely saving herself from ramming the Club Nautico.

Even then our troubles were by no means at an end. A boarding party of eternal bumboatmen broke through our defenses, and thronged the deck. In vain we pointed out that all we needed at the moment was sleep, and that if they had any for sale we would buy large quantities, otherwise they must go, or be pushed. They chose to be pushed, and there was something in the nature of a _melee_ afoot when a sleek launch came alongside and a short, corpulent gentleman, literally glittering with gold lace, and using a sword as a walking stick, stepped aboard. He was the chief of the harbour police, and the effect of his august presence was magical. The enemy retired in disorder, and our saviour, who honoured us with his company over a glass of rum, gave us the key to peace and quiet in a Spanish port. It consisted in presenting the law (embodied in himself) with a trifling donation, and running the international code flag "P" up to the mast head, after which one is at liberty to shoot any one who comes aboard without permission. It is worth knowing, for we of the dream ship did both these things, and from that hour suffered no further molestation.

Unless you are a coal magnate, a ship's chandler, a banana agent, or a consumptive, it is hard to find a reason for living at Las Palmas. It is a dreary sort of place built on, and occasionally smothered by, sand blown across the ocean from the Sahara, hundreds of miles distant, and the only diversion appears to be dances and roulette at the Club Nautico.

We of the dream ship promptly "fell" for the roulette, in company with most of the inhabitants, until it was borne in upon us that if we "fell" much further we should plumb the depths of our slender resources. It is a pathetic sight to see workers, not the leisured "profitocracy" one encounters at a place like Monte Carlo, handing over their hard-earned week's wage to a stony-faced _croupier_, and borrowing from any one who will lend for "just one more spin." No, we remained for the most part well out amongst the cooler breezes of the harbour, under the thrice-blessed squaresail which now did service as an awning--sleeping, swimming, fishing, and again sleeping, for we had some arrears to make up in this last respect.

Our splendid isolation, however, did not prevent us from meeting interesting people, foremost amongst whom was the skipper of the four-masted schooner _Dorothy_ of New York, a hard-bitten Yank if ever there was one. He caught us clinging to his anchor chain for a breather during the morning swim, and was treating us to an entirely new vocabulary of invective when suddenly, and with no apparent cause, he changed his mind and invited us aboard.

In his remarkably comfortable quarters, and standing in pools of our own making, we discussed things in general and a bottle of Madeira in particular.

"Waal," he observed, on learning that we were off "that funny bit of wood yonder," and had every intention of remaining on it across the Atlantic, "if you ain't got a gall!"

From that moment the _Dorothy_ and the dream ship became "matey craft," though a greater contrast than between a four-masted schooner and a twenty-three-ton cutter can scarcely be imagined. Our friend had several grievances, and aired them, though with such cheerful profanity as to cause us endless amusement. He had left the sea for good when he was lured out of retirement by a stupendous sum to command the _Dorothy_. The fact was they had no sailing masters in the States these days, and now that they had found wind to be cheaper than coal, and were building schooners so fast that half of them were green timber and opened up like sieves, they could get no one to take charge--no one, that is, but hairless boys who learnt navigation on a three-weeks' course, and knew as much about seamanship or handling the hoboes one ships these days as a dead-ripe lemon....

At this juncture Steve and I might have been seen to exchange guilty glances, but I don't think we were, and the diatribe continued.

... Another thing: here was he at a port like Las Palmas, with his entire crew, bar the mate, in a Spanish gaol through a few shore indiscretions of the previous evening, and no one to _do_ anything about it. There was no United States consul in Las Palmas, no, sir; what did we think of that? There was nothing against a bit of shore joy once in a while. It was to be expected. But when they took a man's _cook_.... He would have to see his very good friend the British Consul about it, that was all, though the idea was abhorrent to his independent spirit.

Amongst other things he treated us to a vivid and somewhat terrifying picture of present-day New York, and expressed the whole-souled wish never to return. It appeared that in this barbarous spot a mere man is at a discount. He can get nothing to drink. His pipe, cigar, or cigarette is in imminent peril of being snatched from his mouth, and if he chances to look sideways at a lady she arrests him on the spot. We shivered in unison, and refilled our glasses.

Our friend dined aboard the dream ship that evening, and showed himself to be the good fellow that he was by demonstrating short cuts in navigation, telling us of winds and weather we should be likely to encounter, giving us introductions to friends at distant ports, and--listening without flinching to a clarionet solo. It is such members of the vast fraternity of the sea that one hopes to meet again, and so rarely does.

Another of our guests was of a very different calibre, though none the less interesting in his way. We awoke one morning to find a sleek white yacht of about the dream ship's tonnage anchored hard by, and flying a silken flag of gorgeous but unknown design, which on book reference proved to be the now-extinct emblem of the Portuguese Royalist.

By noon her owner had paid us a formal call, and at four o'clock this amazing youth, in a natty naval uniform garnished with decorations for various heroic deeds, was laying bare his heart in excellent English over a cup of afternoon tea. It was good, he informed us, to see the Blue Ensign again after what he had been through. There was something stable about the Blue Ensign that was vastly refreshing to a homeless exile. During the present welter of world upheaval the Portuguese rebellions had been overlooked, but what he, a Royalist, had been through--_what_ he had been through!

His was the only yacht in Portuguese waters during the late rebellion. She lay in the bay of Funchal, Madeira, and in Madeira's gaol reposed, or at any rate contrived to live, two full-blown counts, a general, and various smaller fry, incarcerated for their political views. Could a fellow Royalist and a yacht owner stand by and do nothing under such circumstances? A thousand times, no! On a dark night, and in face of sentries armed to the teeth, he had rescued them, taken them aboard his ship, and set sail for Las Palmas without stores, water, or navigation instruments, fearing that any such preparations would arouse suspicion. Well, he had arrived. After incredible hardships, he had arrived, only to have his yacht and cargo of hungry counts interned by the rascally Spaniard! Another cup of tea? Ah, thanks ... to the CAUSE!

The Portuguese says: "A Spaniard is always a Spaniard." The Spaniard says: "A Portuguese is always a Portuguese." Or they do at Las Palmas, and the mere outsider can only take their respective words for it, and draw his own conclusions.

After two weeks of idling--and cooking--we became so heartily tired of the latter that we determined to indulge in the wild extravagance of a cook. The process of engagement was simplicity itself. We merely selected one of the almost constant stream of applicants for work that visited the dream ship, duly installed him in the fo'c's'le, and left him to it.

Our selection, or rather Peter's, as we left such things to a woman's alleged intuition, was a venerable Maltese with a sheaf of credentials the size of a pack of cards, and a winning if somewhat weak smile. Thereafter, for a week, real food, though doused in olive oil, emerged from the fo'c's'le, and we experienced the keen satisfaction after meals of being able to hold a cigarette in one hand without a dish cloth in the other.

This happy state of affairs continued until, following one of his "evenings off," our cook was stricken with an illness that he ascribed to bad meat, though the symptoms corresponded more to the effects of bad drink. In any case, he lay writhing in his bunk, clasping various portions of his anatomy, and declaring that he was about to die. Now, the dream ship had a medicine chest of which she was as proud as the eminent physician who had selected it. This personage believed in injection rather than internal application; and no doubt he was right, provided there was someone aboard who understood a hypodermic syringe. But there was not. I stood beside the bunk, looking up the unhappy man's symptoms in a ship's medical guide as they occurred, while Steve and Peter lifted from its bed of cotton wool a glass-and-steel instrument more like an overgrown mosquito than anything I can call to mind. The look of it appalled me, but not so Steve. He pumped our wretched cook so full of laudanum that he never moved an eyelid for fifteen hours. We called his state one of merciful oblivion, and rather prided ourselves on the achievement until it occurred to someone that we might have killed him. Followed frantic tests with a looking-glass, and much listening for heart-beats, until our victim was resuscitated--and left the next day.

No, in future, and in spite of expert advice to the contrary, which perhaps does not take the limitations of dream ships into account, I shall in future only take the trusted remedies endeared by experience: iodine, a good aperient and astringent, asperin, plenty of boracic lint and bandages, and a lancet.

As though in judgment, there descended upon us in turn a plague of these islands called Canary fever. It was our first and last illness throughout the cruise, but it pulled us down to such an extent that Peter and I decided to try the hills of Grand Canary as a recuperative.

A quiet little _fonda_ amongst the vines and purer airs of the highlands was the vision that lured us into a lurching motor, and up through the sand and cactus landscape to Fergus, where our vision was shattered as promptly and effectually as visions usually are. There was a _fonda_, and there were cacti, these last covered for the most part with the cochineal beetle, the raising of which as a food dyestuff is still an industry on Grand Canary, though chemical substitutes have almost run the genuine article off the market. But the _fonda_ was more crowded with guests than the cacti with cochineal, and there was no doubt as to which were the more disturbing.

Peter and I shared a room nine by twelve, with an apology for privacy in the form of a riddled screen between us, and mosquitoes took full advantage of our netless beds. The _salon_ at our very door seethed with dancing and shrill-voiced senoritas until two o'clock in the morning, and---- But why prolong the agony? We caught the next lurching motor back to Las Palmas, and sank gasping but grateful into deck chairs under the awning of the dream ship.

Such a home as ours spoils one for roughing it. The infinite peace and quiet and privacy of it make one detest all the more the bustle and turmoil of ordinary travel. People have said to me: "But how can you live in such restricted quarters?" My answer is: "Very easily, thank you."

For six mortal weeks we waited at Las Palmas, that it might be fulfilled which was spoken by the weather-prophets concerning the West Indian hurricane season:

June, too soon.
July, stand by.
August, if you must.
September, remember.
October, all over.

And on the third of this last, reassuring month we set sail across the Atlantic.

*THE ARRIVAL AT BRITISH WEST INDIES*

_Deep-sea thoughts--Concerning Calms--Visitors in
mid-Atlantic--Barbados and beyond_

*CHAPTER VI*

_Deep-sea thoughts--Concerning Calms--Visitors in
mid-Atlantic--Barbados and beyond_

The great adventure had now begun in earnest. Three thousand miles of Atlantic Ocean lay ahead of us, holding we knew not what of new experience, and for the third time since setting sail our undertaking imbued us with a certain amount of awe.

At night, alone in the cockpit, one began to think. Would the drinking water hold out? What if the chronometer broke down? Supposing---- It is as well not to think too deeply on occasion, and the crossing of the Atlantic in a small boat is one.

Someone has said that it is the routine of life that keeps us sane, and I am inclined to agree. On shore, one is apt to inveigh against "the little things that must be done"--the countless, almost mechanical actions of a day's civilized existence--but at sea life is composed of such details, and one is thankful for them. Making a long-splice or an "eye," filling and trimming the lamps, washing down deck, or even washing up dishes, all serve to keep the mind from unhealthy conjecture.

Sleep was again our worst enemy at the tiller. Staring into the lighted binnacle with its swaying compass card, or down at the phosphorescent water swirling and hissing past the ship's stern, the helmsman became as one hypnotized. It seemed that he was not of this world, but an atom hurtling through space. The temptation was to surrender himself to the sensuous joy of it, a temptation resisted only by an almost painful effort, and the knowledge that the lives of all aboard depend on his keeping his leaden eyelids from closing down.

A four-hour watch as helmsman is too long. They do not allow it in the mercantile marine; but what were we to do? Steve confessed to recalling all the poetry that he knew, consisting of most of Kipling, the whole of Omar Khayyam, and sundry doubtful limericks; then attempting to say them backward. Peter hummed over her repertoire of songs, or thought out new dishes for her week's cookment. As for me, I kept a marlinspike handy, and when oblivion threatened used it.

It will be seen that a dream ship is not all dream. If it were, such is the perversity of human nature, the dreamer would probably be tired of it within a month.

"I can promise you the northeast 'trades' the whole way across," said our friend of the five-masted schooner at Las Palmas, turning the pages of his log. Also, the wind chart sported a reassuring number of long-shafted arrows pointing from that quarter for the month of October. These things may account for the fact that not one day's northeast wind did we encounter on the Atlantic passage. It seems that the elements have a rooted objection to being anticipated. We could have crossed in an open boat for all of the weather, and three becalmed days in mid-ocean we occupied in swimming round the ship, or diving to scrape the barnacles off her copper.

But stark calms are a wearisome business. Every function of a ship has ceased. It is as though she lay dead in a stagnant pool, and any movement of spars or canvas were the rattling of her bones. Also, it is an aggravation to the restless insect called man, adrift in a breathless waste of waters, to know that leagues lie ahead of which he is incapable of covering a yard.

An auxiliary engine is useless under such circumstances. To use it is like hurrying on to catch a tram that is bound to overtake one in the long run. What is a steaming radius of four hundred miles in a stretch of three thousand? No, all one can do after satisfying himself that his vessel is "as idle as a painted ship upon a painted sea," is to pass the time as pleasantly as may be. We of the dream ship turned in and slept, or broke the uncanny silence with fearsome noises on clarionet and piano. Also, we fished, though with a lack of success that leads me to believe that fish do not bite in mid-ocean. At night flying fish struck the mainsail, and fell to the deck with a resounding thwack and a flutter of "wings," but for the most part on occasions when we had failed to hang a lantern in the rigging to attract them, which, as far as I am concerned, explodes another fallacy.

As day succeeded day, and there was no sign of a change in our inert condition, our thoughts turned again in the direction of the drinking water. True, we had two hundred gallons aboard, but what was to prevent us from being becalmed for a month, or being carried hundreds of miles out of our course by a gale, according to the mood of the capricious elements? We cut our daily allowance from a gallon to half a gallon per head for all purposes and, as though in response to our frugality, a breath came out of the southeast.

At the moment of its arrival Steve and I happened to be testing our sense of direction by diving overboard, and trying to come up through a lifebelt floating about ten yards distant. Steve had just conceived the brilliant idea of moving the belt after the diver had taken the plunge, and I had emerged from a lung-racking effort to locate it, when we realized that the dream ship had moved, in fact was still moving, with a noticeable wake in the direction of the horizon. The tiller was pegged amidships, and there was nothing to stop her continuing the motion indefinitely--except Peter, who was below. We prayed in that hour that she was not asleep.

I have often left home--perhaps too often--but this was the first occasion on which home looked as if it were leaving _me_, and in mid-Atlantic at that. Alternately we yelled and swam, but without gaining a foot until to our infinite relief a small, pyjamaed figure appeared on deck, threw up its arms in horror, and brought the dream ship into the wind.

An hour later we were bowling along at seven knots, revelling in the blessed motion of air, and planning what we should do when we reached Barbados, a mere fifteen hundred miles distant.

It was in mid-Atlantic, too, that we received visitors. The first were Mr. and Mrs. Smith, a devoted couple of fish about the size of a sprat, each decorated similarly with vivid green bands on an electric blue background. For four days they remained with us, swimming closely side by side under our idle propeller, presumably for shade. To lie on deck looking down into the limitless blue depths and watching our companions became the king of pastimes aboard the dream ship. We even tried to catch them with a minute hook and the tastiest of baits, but they would suffer no nearer acquaintance. They were too busy getting somewhere for some reason to swerve an iota from their course. During a squall we lost them, or they lost us; in any case, we never saw them again, and I have often wondered since what Mr. and Mrs. Smith are doing now.

The next guest was a black bird about the size of a crow, with webbed feet, a wicked-looking beak, and white circles round the eyes. He was a sick and sorry bird when he fluttered on to the rudder top during a rain squall, edged slowly along the tiller, and over Peter's hand into her lap, where she covered him with her oilskin and he lay content. But his was a flying visit in more than one sense of the word, for he refused to eat. Bread crumbs, morsels of flying fish, and meat were offered him, but he spurned them all, and grew so weak that when carried into the scuppers by the ship's lurching two days later, he rose in the air and was carried off into the turmoil of wind and wave. The last we saw of him was a bunch of black feathers on the face of a comber, still struggling to rise.

What with weather ranging all the way from stark calms to vicious squalls, and a correspondingly varied progress of anything from ten to two hundred miles in the twenty-four hours, it took us thirty days to cross the Atlantic, and when it was done we spent the best part of a day trying to find the proof of our accomplishment in the island of Barbados. Faulty navigation again? Yes, but it is not the easiest thing in life to make a "bow on" landfall of a clod of earth twenty-one miles by twelve after a three-thousand-mile jaunt to reach it. Also, we suspected our chronometer.

When Barbados, after the fashion of Grand Canary, failed to materialize, we of the dream ship held one of our now familiar board meetings. There were two courses open: to emulate the mariner of old who knew nothing of longitude, and cruise along our latitude until Barbados appeared; or to head for Trinidad instead, and so have the coastline of South America as a buffer if we failed to make it.

We had decided on the latter course, and were actually standing away for Trinidad, when Barbados, a mere wraith of land that we scarce dared to believe in, beckoned us from the southern horizon. We accepted the invitation.

The first human face other than our own that we had seen for a solid month was that of the "outside man" of Messrs. ---- & Co., and as a change we welcomed it. He came to us in a natty whaleboat propelled by a crew of hefty Negro oarsmen, showed us the best anchorage, and saw us safely berthed before allowing the fact to emerge that he was an "outside man," that his particular firm could do anything for a ship cheaper, quicker, and better than any in Bridgetown, and that our patronage was the one thing he had been craving ever since our approach had been made known from the signal station. I shall be surprised on my next visit to Barbados, which I hope will not be long delayed, if that "outside man" is not a director of Messrs. ---- & Co.

I may add that our first care was to take our erring chronometer to be readjusted, and the mainspring broke the next day. That is how near we had been to disaster in the Atlantic.

While a new mainspring was being fitted and rated, we gladly surrendered ourselves to the tender mercies of the most charming, hospitable people one could wish to meet. My recollections of our two-weeks' sojourn are a trifle vague owing to the rapidity with which one pleasure succeeded another. I remember lying at anchor with awnings up in the most beautiful bay it is possible to imagine, and sleeping twenty-four hours on end. From then onward life consisted of "swizzles," car rides over a fairy-island, and more swizzles, pony races to the accompaniment of swizzles, surf bathing followed by swizzles, and evenings at the Savannah Club, where conversation was punctuated and sometimes drowned by the concoction of yet more swizzles by a hard-worked army of coloured folk behind a gleaming mahogany bar.

There is no escaping the "swizzle" in Barbados--even if one wished to, which personally I did not. It is a delightful, healthful drink composed of the very best rum, angostura bitters, syrup, fresh lime, nutmeg, and ice--the whole "swizzled" to the creamy consistency of---- But I forget that I may be addressing a country in the grip of total abstinence, and whatever my faults I have never been accused of making a man's mouth water without supplying the deficiency.

Before the war the Barbados estate owner was on the verge of bankruptcy. Now he is probably the most prosperous landed proprietor in the world. It matters not whether he be white or black, or any one of the intermediary shades, he is keeping up a luxurious establishment, driving his car in a cloud of dust and dignity from one end of the island to the other, or installing a manager (usually some hopeless wight who was absent on duty during the war) and taking up residence in Park Lane or Fifth Avenue according to taste. And "sugar" is the answer. Sugar is king of Barbados, and it were easier for the proverbial camel to pass through the needle's eye than for the outsider to buy, beg, borrow, or steal a square foot of his domain.

It is difficult to see just what will happen to Barbados in the future unless some outlet is found for the Negro population. Already this minute island is the second most densely populated spot in the world--the first being a certain district of China--and there seems no other alternative than for it to populate itself into the sea. The United States is imposing drastic restrictions on Negro immigration, as evidenced by the surging and expectant, though mostly disappointed, crowds that assemble outside the American Consulate in Bridgetown daily. The self-governing British Dominions will have none of them. Where are they to go? Meantime, they grow--Lord, how they grow!--in numbers and insolence.

Hot foot from a ball at one of the hotels, we literally fled aboard ship and sailed by stealth; otherwise I am convinced that we should be at Barbados tennising, surfing, dancing, pony racing, and "swizzling" to this day.

Even then we weighed anchor one evening only to drop it the next off Soutrier, a town on the fairy island of St. Lucia where we had been invited to stay on a plantation. Our host, as kindly a soul as ever lived, insisted that it would do us all a power of good to leave the dream ship in charge of one of his boys--or a dozen of them if we preferred--and have a real rest and change at his house. And a rest and change it undoubtedly was. From doing everything for ourselves, our regime changed abruptly to one of being prevented by an army of well-trained house-boys from so much as turning a hand.

The West Indian planter is a man to be envied. He lives in one of the beauty spots of the world, and neither the servant problem nor "high cost of living" affects him to anything like the same extent as others. This home that we of the dream ship had invaded was a miracle of cool, well-ordered comfort, set high on the wooded hillside, commanding by day an endless vista of palm-clad mountain and sparkling Caribbean, and by night encompassed with perfumed darkness, the glint of fireflies, and the vocal efforts of the whistling frog--a nimble little fellow, green as an emerald and no larger than a pea.

The plantation, which only five years previously had been virgin jungle, was devoted to limes and cocoa, both of which grow to perfection in the West Indies, and as a commercial enterprise threaten in time to dethrone King Sugar. Here on St. Lucia, as elsewhere in the West Indies, there is unlimited scope for the smaller man who stands no chance on Barbados and the more thickly settled islands. Indeed, after having spent most of my life roaming about the world, I can never understand why a man with strictly limited capital will buy or lease land, however cheap, in the furthermost corners of the earth, thousands of costly miles from his market, and where he will most certainly have to pay anything from a dollar to five dollars a day for indifferent labour, while in the West Indies there is still land to be had as rich as any in the world, plantation labour--and good labour at that--is a shilling per day per head, and New York is five, and London ten days distant. I can only attribute it to the lure of "green fields that are ever far off."

*THROUGH THE PANAMA CANAL*

_From Atlantic to Pacific, and the strange happenings
that intervened_

*CHAPTER VII*

_From Atlantic to Pacific, and the strange happenings
that intervened_

"Look out for the Caribbean Sea toward December," was another axiom of our five-masted-schooner friend at Las Palmas, but he proved no less fallible over the passage from Barbados to Colon than he had concerning the Atlantic. In fact, I am thinking of in future asking advice of weather prophets in order to anticipate the reverse.

A spanking wind on the quarter, with mainsail and squaresail set, and a mighty following sea that flung the dream ship before it in a series of exhilarating swoops, brought us within sight of land in seven days, a distance of twelve hundred miles. But what land? For a time we were at a loss. Comparing it with the chart and descriptions in "sailing directions" revealed nothing. It was a low-lying, mist-enshrouded, sinister-looking land, and we sailed along its coast for a day and a night before we could tell whether we had passed Colon or hit the coast to the eastward.

Ultimately, a lighthouse gave us the clue, and we found that owing to a current that has the unpleasant knack of running at anything from a half to three knots we were still fifty miles from our objective, so we headed for sea and hove to until daylight.

All night as we lay rolling in a heavy swell steamers passed us by, floating palaces of light, and with the dawn we joined the procession of giants making for the Panama Canal.

We wished to go through the canal? Very well; a measurer would be sent off to decide our tonnage, and we must be ready to take the pilot aboard at five o'clock the next morning.

That, in effect, is what the canal authorities said, and I answered it with a smile that I trust was sufficiently engaging to hide the fact that I was not at all sure we had enough money between us to pay the tolls. It must be an expensive business, this passing from Atlantic to Pacific. I had never thought of that. There was quite a lot I had not thought about. What if the charges were altogether beyond us? It would mean Cape Horn! Cape Horn or the abandonment of the dream! Which was worse for one who, after sixty below zero on the Canadian prairie, four below zero in France and Belgium, and something far worse in coalless London, had taken a solemn oath never again to leave the forties of latitude!

These terrifying reflections were cut short by a voice.

"I can't make it more than twelve tons."

"Twelve tons?"

The canal official deigned to exhibit surprise by a slight elevation of the eyebrows, then smiled.

"The measurer has been aboard," he told me, "and you are twelve tons net. The tolls will be fifteen dollars. Will you pay now, or at the other end?"

Such was my relief that I paid on the spot, thereby reducing our united capital to L20--or, at the then-prevailing rate of exchange, seventy-eight dollars.

This brief interview with officialdom is typical of Panama Canal methods. Speed, silence, efficiency; nothing else "goes" in "the Zone." Things are done in a few seconds and utter silence here that would take hours and pandemonium elsewhere. The entire miracle of passing a ten-thousand-ton liner from Atlantic to Pacific through seven locks and forty miles of tortuous, ever-threatening channels has been performed in six and a half hours, and with a lack of fuss that is almost uncanny.

But the dream ship was twelve tons, and not ten thousand, and for that reason it is probable that she gave more trouble than any craft since the canal was opened. Yet on every hand we received the utmost courtesy and kindness. Such treatment made us feel like pestiferous mosquitoes being politely conducted to the door instead of squashed flat on the spot as we deserved. But you shall see.

Punctually at five A.M., the pilot came aboard in his immaculate white drill uniform and, without a smile at his surroundings, including ourselves in variegated costume, took up his position in the bows. I went below, and after a ten-minutes' wrestle with the auxiliary, contrived to make three out of the four cylinders "go" sufficiently to propel us at the dignified speed of three knots in the direction of the canal.

"Is that the best she can do?" enquired the pilot.

I lifted an apologetic, perspiring, and begrimed face to him and admitted that it was. Moreover, that we were very lucky to be doing that.

"Ah, well, the day is young," he commented, cheerfully. "What about an awning? We shall be baked alive before we've done."

Did I tell him that the reason we had not rigged an awning was that I was more than half expecting the engine to break down, and that we should have to hoist sail? I did not. Whoever heard of sailing through the Panama Canal? An awning was rigged, and we entered Gatun Lock in style, followed by two more liners.

The giant gates closed. There was an eruption of water seemingly under our stern that caused the tiller to fly over and extract a groan of anguish from Steve as it crushed him against the cock-pit wall; the aft warp snapped, and the dream ship commenced to rise, more like an elevator than a ship in a lock, until the blank, greasy wall ended, and above it appeared a row of grinning faces.

"That's that," said the pilot; and it was.

By some miracle the engine carried us to the next lock, where the same performance was gone through, with such slight variations as the loss of a hat, three fenders, and the remainder of the port covering-board.

We passed out into Gatun Lake, a fairy place of verdure-clad islets and mist-enshrouded reaches, where cranes flew low over the water, and strange, wild cries came out of the bush.

It was also the place where our engine refused its office peremptorily, irrevocably. I was engineer of the dream ship, probably the worst on earth, but still, the engineer, and for an agonized hour I wrestled with lifeless scrap-iron. How the profession of marine motor engineering ever attracts adherents it is beyond me to imagine. I know one man it has sent to an asylum, and many others who to this day bear the marks of having trifled with it--finger-nails that nothing short of cutting to the quick and gouging with a shovel will render clean; hands, clothes, and for some unknown reason face ingrained with ineradicable grime; a permanently furrowed brow; and a wistful expression that goes to the heart of the beholder.

In order to avoid such a fate I have made it a practice to try hard for one solid hour and, failing to gain a response from the atrocity, leave the matter in other, and perhaps more capable, hands. I communicated this information to the pilot, and there and then the man's more human side came to the surface. It was raining as it knows how to rain on the Isthmus, he was soaked to the hide, his natty uniform resembled nothing more closely than a dish rag, yet he smiled, and proceeded to remove his jacket.

"Guess we'd better sail," he said.

Behold once more the dream ship sailing through the Panama Canal; alternately scudding before rain squalls, lying becalmed, and making tacks of fifty yards and less, a passage surely unique in the annals of "the Zone." The pilot said he enjoyed it, and by the way he swigged on halyards and gave us an old-time chanty to work by, I am inclined to believe him. We were lucky in our pilot.

Toward evening, and during a stark calm, Steve dived overboard and made us fast to a light-buoy, his jaw dropping perhaps half an inch, and a thoughtful expression coming into his eyes, when a little later a log on the muddy shore was suddenly imbued with life, and slipped into the water with a whisk of a horny tail.

So it was that we had afternoon tea in comfort, some alleged music on piano and clarionet, and a pleasant chat with the pilot concerning the older and better days of the wind-jammer, while dainty egrettes watched us from a tree fern, ungainly pelicans swooped and dived, and somewhere ten-thousand-ton liners were being hustled through the Panama Canal.

We had no wireless, that was why it was impossible to summon a tug to take us on our way, but finally a monstrous steamer passed so close that it was possible to hail her, and a few hours later we were taken in tow by an apparition of noiseless engines, shining varnish, and gleaming brass.

It would cost us six dollars an hour, the pilot told us, and I sat back to figure out just how long seventy-eight dollars would last under such an onslaught. The result was alarming. We held a board meeting about it in the bows, and decided there was nothing for it but to go on, and keep going on, until we stopped. We had hoped to reach lands where money was of secondary importance, but we were not there yet, that was evident.

So we continued to race through the canal at the rate of six dollars an hour until we reached the approaches to Pedro Miguel lock, where the apparition tied us up and steamed off, still at six dollars an hour.

Something happened to us that night at Pedro Miguel. Looking back on it all I can hardly persuade myself that it was not a dream. We met some canal officials, tall, sun-burned youths with the mark of efficiency upon them yet with a merry twinkle in the eye. We asked them aboard, and they came and marvelled at what they saw. Their verdict was, as far as I remember: "Some novelty!" Then they asked us ashore, and it was our turn to marvel. One of our hosts was the chief operator of a lock, and we saw the miracle of the Isthmus of Panama from behind. Futility overwhelms me at the thought of trying to describe what we saw that night, over the lock, under the lock, at the sides of the lock; besides, you will find it all reduced to cold figures in technical journals if you are that way inclined. It was the spirit of the thing that took hold of me: a pigmy man sitting at a lever! What was not possible after this?

We returned to the ship almost stupefied. One feels much the same when he attempts to think in Westminster Abbey. We were in the process of turning in when a cheerful head appeared through the skylight.

"We await your pleasure," quoth a voice.

I explained that the owner of the head was no doubt unconsciously violating, but still violating, the sanctity of my sister's bedroom. It made no difference. I protested that at that moment my sister's costume consisted of a pair of ill-fitting pyjamas and a kimono; that Steve and I had nothing to our backs but what we had worn all day--an undershirt and a pair of football shorts; that we were all tired to death and literally ached for our pillows; that his kindness was overwhelming but that---- Nothing made any difference.

Somehow we found ourselves in a car, the chief operator's first car that he had learnt to drive during the dinner hour the previous day. Out into the moonlight we sped, or rather zigzagged, at the rate of forty, while between Peter and myself a youth named Bill--I shall never forget Bill--kept up a running flow of informative rhetoric: "_On_ the left we have the famous Isthmus of Panama, intersected by the still more famous canal, a miracle of modern engineering, as it has been aptly termed. Fear not, lady!" [this in an aside to Peter] "the man at the wheel values his life as much as yours, perhaps more. _And now_ we approach the historic city of Panama, passing on our left the Union Club, otherwise known as the Onion Club, frequented solely by the nobility and gentry of the neighbourhood, hence our exclusion. _And on the right_----"

On the right was the blazing portico of a cabaret, and the car had come to a jarring full stop.

In vain we pleaded our costume, the hour of night the utter degradation of exposing ourselves to the public gaze in such a condition. We literally found ourselves at a table drinking imitation lager beer and grape juice, and listening to raucous-voiced imported ladies rendering washy ballads to the accompaniment of tinkling ice and tobacco smoke.

It all sounds sordid enough, but it was vastly amusing to sea-weary wanderers, and will remain with us a memory of kindness and good-fellowship.

So, at last, we lay at anchor off Balboa on the Pacific Ocean. We had come far adown the vista of our dream, and hoped to go a great deal farther. To do so, we came to the conclusion that it would be necessary to make some money. How? Well, we had a dream ship, a group of pearling islands lay thirty miles to the eastward, and----

A strange life, my masters, but one that I would not exchange with any man on earth.

*THE GALAPAGOS ISLANDS*

_The ash heap_

*CHAPTER VIII*

_The ash heap_

When Balboa came to Balboa, it is safe to say that no ice cream awaited him there. Indeed, according to history the place was little more than a mosquito-infested swamp, and that is where we of the dream ship had the pull over Senor Balboa.

The town is in the Canal Zone, which is United States territory, though cutting clean through the Republic of Panama, and in this particular sample of United States territory, though founded upon a swamp, you will encounter--among other such amazing things as an entire absence of mosquitoes, charming residences set in park-like surroundings, and a well-conducted club free to all--an assortment of ice-cream creations warranted to hypnotize the uninitiated.

I have to mention this seemingly trivial detail because our lives at Balboa appeared to consist in rowing ashore to transact important business in Panama, and being waylaid en route and held captive by insidious messes.

Besides, it was over a Something Sundae that I met the man who came very near to shaping our destiny. True, there were pearling islands to the eastward, he informed me; he had fished there himself in the past with varying success, and would like nothing better than to try again aboard the dream ship. He would make enquiries.

The fruits of these were imparted the next day over a Peach Something Else. The group had been done to death, and was "closed" for a term of three years, but--this over an Orange Orangoutang--if we cared to go a little farther afield, and divert our attention from pearl shell to gold, he knew of a spot not far south where the natives were in the habit of washing the stuff out of clods of earth from their backyards, held under the eaves of the houses during a rain storm. What about it? The answer at the moment, and as far as I can remember, was a Strawberry Slush.

But we had decided to go. Preparations for making the wherewithal we so sorely needed were already afoot when a miracle intervened. On succeeding one afternoon in getting clean past temptation and into the city of Panama, I found a letter awaiting me from a certain magician who dwells in a place called New York. To hide the truth no longer, he had sold a story of mine to the "movies" at a figure that to our starved gaze looked like the war indemnity, and inside of a week the amount, in beautiful, round, twenty-dollar gold pieces, littered the cabin table of the dream ship.

I am aware that in most accounts of travel such sordid details as the financial difficulties encountered are invariably omitted, either because there were none, or because the writer considers it in the light of bad form to mention them. In our particular case they certainly existed, and personally I am not very strong on form. After all, money is a means to an end--even to the realization of a dream, and I can only say that ours would have evaporated into thin air at Balboa but for the miracle performed by the magician in New York.