The Cruise of the Snark (39 page)

One last link of our South Sea chain we picked up one morning at sunrise, when a squall-curtain lifted and parted over Pitcairn Island, high and sheer, green and gold and unreal in the rainbow shimmer. I looked out of my porthole with sick eyes of disappointment as my fancy wandered northwest over a thousand miles of the Paumotus, of which Pitcairn is the one high, last, southern sentinel. Then in the fever I slept and dreamed we put out in a boat from the
Tymeric
and found a bay (that does not exist) inside the breakers, and went in and landed. Awakening with a start, I turned quickly to the porthole. It was still there—I had dozed but a moment—a sun-shot emerald, with the grey velvet pall of mist falling, falling, until it was blotted out. Isle of my dreams, waking, and sleeping—when shall I see you, or any one of you, again!

 

 

We crossed the Andes, on the side of old Chimborazo itself, at an altitude of 12,000 feet, the summit white and stark 10,000 feet above, to Quito, 10,000 feet in the air. After a month altogether in Ecuador, in which we escaped the rampant yellow fever, malaria, pneumonia, smallpox, bubonic plague, bacillary dysentery, and several other perils (not the least of which was an accident on the wonderful railway, of which we saw two frightful examples), we sailed for New Orleans, per Canal Zone, celebrating the Fourth of July, 1909, in true American fashion at Panama.

Nakata, our little rock of ages in all sickness and stress, was in due time safely entered into the United States, with less pow-wow than we had expected, to our mutual rejoicing.

Steadily, rapidly, Jack won back to health in his California environment. In a very few months not a trace of any of his curious maladies remained, glory be. But to his analytical mind the greatest cause for congratulation is that he found out what was the matter with his hands. He came across a book by Lieutenant Colonel Charles E. Woodruff of the United States Army, entitled
Effects of Tropical Light on White Men.
We later met Colonel Woodruff in San Francisco, and he told us he had been similarly afflicted, and had had the same experience with physicians. They sat on his case, and could come to no conclusion. It is very simple. Both he and Jack, and there must be many others whom we have not met, have a strong predisposition toward the tissue-destructiveness of tropical light. The ultra-violet rays tear them to pieces, just as so many experimenters with the X-ray were torn to pieces before they learned to protect themselves.

I continued to suffer severe but lessening attacks of fever for nearly a year, and it took almost as long to recover my balance of nerves. The last touch of fever I ever felt was when, in June, 1910, after fulfilling the godspeed of the sweet vahines of Polynesia, I lost my girl baby, Joy.

 

The
Snark
was sold long afterward, for a mere fraction of her cost, to an English syndicate which operated her, trading and recruiting, in the New Hebrides. The next we heard, she was sealing in Bering Sea, and later on we met several persons who had been aboard of her at Kodiak, Alaska, in 1911, while one told us he had subsequently seen her at Seattle, in August, 1912—painted green! Jack and I, landing in Seattle the month previous, from a five-months' wind-jamming voyage from Baltimore around Cape Horn on the Sewall ship
Dirigo,
thus narrowly missed meeting up with our little old boat of dreams. I dare not think how it would have affected me.

It was not until we had returned to California, after the voyage of the
Snark
was over, that we learned that the much sinned-against craft had been built two feet shorter than her specifications called for—this in addition to the extra two feet draft. The marvel is that she sailed as well as she did.

Now, one word: Jack has been severely and ignorantly criticised by untravelled book reviewers for the unreality and un-veracity of his tales of the cannibal countries we visited, such as his novel
Adventure.
And yet, in this Year of Our Lord, 1915, quite fresh in our minds is the report lately come to hand that Captain Keller of the
Eugénie,
who came to our rescue on the Malaita coast, and Claude Bernays of Pennduffryn Plantation, both lost their bonnie handsome heads in the Solomons, the former aboard his vessel, the second on his own plantation. Poor Darbishire died of dysentery in the Gilbert Group only last year, leaving a young English wife and a fine boy.

It is all a sweet memory to Jack and me, our life on the
Snark,
and Martin and Nakata swear allegiance to any new venture we may pursue. There is now a little Mrs. Martin who also wishes to be counted in.

And, believe it or not, ye of little faith in the joy that was ours on the voyage, our one ultimate hope of earthly bliss is to fit out another and larger boat, and do it all over again, and more—and do it more leisurely, more wisely under the tropic sun.

“That Dead Men Rise Up Never” (1909)

 

 

 

The month in which my seventeenth birthday arrived I signed on before the mast on the
Sophie Sutherland
, a three-topmast schooner bound on a seven-months' seal-hunting cruise to the coast of Japan. We sailed from San Francisco, and immediately I found confronting me a problem of no inconsiderable proportions. There were twelve men of us in the forecastle, ten of whom were hardened, tarry-thumbed sailors. Not alone was I a youth and on my first voyage, but I had for shipmates men who had come through the hard school of the merchant service of Europe. As boys, they had had to perform their ship's duty, and, in addition, by immemorial sea custom, they had had to be the slaves of the ordinary and able-bodied seamen. When they became ordinary seamen they were still the slaves of the able-bodied. Thus, in the forecastle, with the watch below, an able seaman, lying in his bunk, will order an ordinary seaman to fetch him his shoes or bring him a drink of water. Now the ordinary seaman may be lying in HIS bunk. He is just as tired as the able seaman. Yet he must get out of his bunk and fetch and carry. If he refuses, he will be beaten. If, perchance, he is so strong that he can whip the able seaman, then all the able seamen, or as many as may be necessary, pitch upon the luckless devil and administer the beating.

My problem now becomes apparent. These hard-bit Scandinavian sailors had come through a hard school. As boys they had served their mates, and as able seamen they looked to be served by other boys. I was a boy—withal with a man's body. I had never been to sea before—withal I was a good sailor and knew my business. It was either a case of holding my own with them or of going under. I had signed on as an equal, and an equal I must maintain myself, or else endure seven months of hell at their hands. And it was this very equality they resented. By what right was I an equal? I had not earned that high privilege. I had not endured the miseries they had endured as maltreated boys or bullied ordinaries. Worse than that, I was a land-lubber making his first voyage. And yet, by the injustice of fate, on the ship's articles I was their equal.

My method was deliberate, and simple, and drastic. In the first place, I resolved to do my work, no matter how hard or dangerous it might be, so well that no man would be called upon to do it for me. Further, I put ginger in my muscles. I never malingered when pulling on a rope, for I knew the eagle eyes of my forecastle mates were squinting for just such evidences of my inferiority. I made it a point to be among the first of the watch going on deck, among the last going below, never leaving a sheet or tackle for some one else to coil over a pin. I was always eager for the run aloft for the shifting of topsail sheets and tacks, or for the setting or taking in of topsails; and in these matters I did more than my share.

Furthermore, I was on a hair-trigger of resentment myself. I knew better than to accept any abuse or the slightest patronizing. At the first hint of such, I went off—I exploded. I might be beaten in the subsequent fight, but I left the impression that I was a wild-cat and that I would just as willingly fight again. My intention was to demonstrate that I would tolerate no imposition. I proved that the man who imposed on me must have a fight on his hands. And doing my work well, the innate justice of the men, assisted by their wholesome dislike for a clawing and rending wild-cat ruction, soon led them to give over their hectoring. After a bit of strife, my attitude was accepted, and it was my pride that I was taken in as an equal in spirit as well as in fact. From then on, everything was beautiful, and the voyage promised to be a happy one.

But there was one other man in the forecastle. Counting the Scandinavians as ten, and myself as the eleventh, this man was the twelfth and last. We never knew his name, contenting ourselves with calling him the “Bricklayer.” He was from Missouri—at least he so informed us in the one meagre confidence he was guilty of in the early days of the voyage. Also, at that time, we learned several other things. He was a brick-layer by trade. He had never even seen salt water until the week before he joined us, at which time he had arrived in San Francisco and looked upon San Francisco Bay. Why he, of all men, at forty years of age, should have felt the prod to go to sea, was beyond all of us; for it was our unanimous conviction that no man less fitted for the sea had ever embarked on it. But to sea he had come. After a week's stay in a sailors' boarding-house, he had been shoved aboard of us as an able seaman.

All hands had to do his work for him. Not only did he know nothing, but he proved himself unable to learn anything. Try as they would, they could never teach him to steer. To him the compass must have been a profound and awful whirligig. He never mastered its cardinal points, much less the checking and steadying of the ship on her course. He never did come to know whether ropes should be coiled from left to right or from right to left. It was mentally impossible for him to learn the easy muscular trick of throwing his weight on a rope in pulling and hauling. The simplest knots and turns were beyond his comprehension, while he was mortally afraid of going aloft. Bullied by captain and mate, he was one day forced aloft. He managed to get underneath the crosstrees, and there he froze to the ratlines. Two sailors had to go after him to help him down.

All of which was bad enough had there been no worse. But he was vicious, malignant, dirty, and without common decency. He was a tall, powerful man, and he fought with everybody. And there was no fairness in his fighting. His first fight on board, the first day out, was with me, when he, desiring to cut a plug of chewing tobacco, took my personal table-knife for the purpose, and whereupon, I, on a hair-trigger, promptly exploded. After that he fought with nearly every member of the crew. When his clothing became too filthy to be bearable by the rest of us, we put it to soak and stood over him while he washed it. In short, the Bricklayer was one of those horrible and monstrous things that one must see in order to be convinced that they exist.

I will only say that he was a beast, and that we treated him like a beast. It is only by looking back through the years that I realise how heartless we were to him. He was without sin. He could not, by the very nature of things, have been anything else than he was. He had not made himself, and for his making he was not responsible. Yet we treated him as a free agent and held him personally responsible for all that he was and that he should not have been. As a result, our treatment of him was as terrible as he was himself terrible. Finally we gave him the silent treatment, and for weeks before he died we neither spoke to him nor did he speak to us. And for weeks he moved among us, or lay in his bunk in our crowded house, grinning at us his hatred and malignancy. He was a dying man, and he knew it, and we knew it. And furthermore, he knew that we wanted him to die. He cumbered our life with his presence, and ours was a rough life that made rough men of us. And so he died, in a small space crowded by twelve men and as much alone as if he had died on some desolate mountain peak. No kindly word, no last word, was passed between. He died as he had lived, a beast, and he died hating us and hated by us.

And now I come to the most startling moment of my life. No sooner was he dead than he was flung overboard. He died in a night of wind, drawing his last breath as the men tumbled into their oilskins to the cry of “All hands!” And he was flung overboard, several hours later, on a day of wind. Not even a canvas wrapping graced his mortal remains; nor was he deemed worthy of bars of iron at his feet. We sewed him up in the blankets in which he died and laid him on a hatch-cover for'ard of the main-hatch on the port side. A gunnysack, half full of galley coal, was fastened to his feet.

It was bitter cold. The weather-side of every rope, spar, and stay was coated with ice, while all the rigging was a harp, singing and shouting under the fierce hand of the wind. The schooner, hove to, lurched and floundered through the sea, rolling her scuppers under and perpetually flooding the deck with icy salt water. We of the forecastle stood in sea-boots and oilskins. Our hands were mittened, but our heads were bared in the presence of the death we did not respect. Our ears stung and numbed and whitened, and we yearned for the body to be gone. But the interminable reading of the burial service went on. The captain had mistaken his place, and while he read on without purpose we froze our ears and resented this final hardship thrust upon us by the helpless cadaver. As from the beginning, so to the end, everything had gone wrong with the Bricklayer. Finally, the captain's son, irritated beyond measure, jerked the book from the palsied fingers of the old man and found the place. Again the quavering voice of the captain arose. Then came the cue: “And the body shall be cast into the sea.” We elevated one end of the hatch-cover, and the Bricklayer plunged outboard and was gone.

Back into the forecastle we cleaned house, washing out the dead man's bunk and removing every vestige of him. By sea law and sea custom, we should have gathered his effects together and turned them over to the captain, who, later, would have held an auction in which we should have bid for the various articles. But no man wanted them, so we tossed them up on deck and overboard in the wake of the departed body—the last ill-treatment we could devise to wreak upon the one we had hated so. Oh, it was raw, believe me; but the life we lived was raw, and we were as raw as the life.