Part 7

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

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

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

McLean and Swede shoved Slops in front of Neptune.

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

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

“What is your name?” roared Neptune.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Hey, what the hell?” I piped up.

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

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

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

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

“Answer me,” he bellowed.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Illustration]

[Illustration]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“How do you mean, Swede?” I queried.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

My Dear Joan:

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

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

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

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

Your affectionate

Father. [Illustration]

[Illustration]

11 “The Sea gives up its dead”

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

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

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

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.