The Lions of the Ship
Steamship Potsdam, July 19.
There are always "lions" on a ship, not the kind that roar and shake their manes, but those the other passengers point at and afterward recall with pride. I often speak carelessly of the time I crossed with Willie Vandergould, although he never left his room during the voyage and was probably sleeping off the effects of a long spree. Once I was a fellow-passenger with Julia Marlowe, a fact Julia never seemed to recognize. There are always a few counts and capitalists on an ocean steamer, and a ship without a lion is unfortunate. Our largest and finest specimen is Booth Tarkington, the head of the Indiana school of fiction, an author whose books have brought him fame and money, and a playwright whose dramatizations have won success. He is the tamest lion I ever crossed with. He is delightfully democratic, not a bit chesty, but rather modest, and as friendly to a traveling Jayhawker as he is to the distinguishedmembers of the company. In fact, he understands and speaks the Kansas language like a native. His ideal of life is to have a home on an island in the track of the ocean steamers so he can sit on the porch and watch the ships come and go. Not for me. It is too much like living in a Kansas town where No. 3 and No. 4 do not stop, and every day the locomotives snort and go by without even hesitating.
Tarkington is an honest man, so he says, and he tells good sea stories. His favorite true story is of Toboga Bill, a big shark which followed ships up and down the South-American coast, foraging off the scraps the cooks threw overboard. Tarkington’s friend, Captain Harvey, got to noticing that on every trip his boat was escorted by Toboga Bill, whose bald spot on top and a wart on the nose made him easily recognizable. Harvey got to feeding him regularly with the spoiled meat and vegetables, and Toboga Bill would come to the surface, flop his fin at the captain and thank him as plainly as a shark could do. After several years of this mutual acquaintance thecaptain happened to be in a small-boat going out to his ship at a Central-American port. The boat upset, and the captain and sailors were immediately surrounded by a herd of man-eating sharks. The shore was a mile away and the captain swam that distance, the only one who escaped; and all the way he could see Toboga Bill with his fin standing up straight, keeping the other sharks from his old friend. Occasionally Toboga would give the captain a gentle shove, and finally pushed him onto the beach.
This story Tarkington admitted sounded like a fish story, but he has a motor-boat named Toboga Bill, which verifies the tale.
That reminded me of a Kansas fish story which I introduced to the audience. Everybody in Kansas knows of the herd of hornless catfish which has been bred near the Bowersock dam at Lawrence. Some years ago Mr. Bowersock, who owns the dam that furnishes power for the mill and other factories, conceived the idea that big Kaw river catfish going through the mill-race and onto the water-wheel added much to the power generated.Then he read that fish are very sensitive to music. So he hired a man with an accordion to stand over the mill-race and play. The catfish came from up and down stream to hear the music, and almost inevitably drifted through the race, onto the wheel, and increased the power. The fishes’ horns used to get entangled in the wheel and injure the fish; so Mr. Bowersock, who is a kind-hearted man and very persistent, had a lot of the fish caught and dehorned, and in a year or two he had a large herd of hornless catfish. These fish not only turn out to hear the music, but they have learned to enjoy the trip through the mill-race and over the wheel, so that every Sunday or oftener whole families of catfish—and they have large families—come to Bowersock’s dam to shoot the chutes something as people go out to ride on the scenic railway. Whenever the water in the river gets low Mr. Bowersock has the band play: the catfish gather and go round and round over the wheel, furnishing power for the Bowersock mill when every other wheel on the river is idle from lack of water.
There were some skeptical folks who heardmy simple story and affected to disbelieve. But I assured them that it could be easily proven, and if they would go to Lawrence I would show them the Bowersock dam and the catfish. It is always a good idea to have the proofs for a fish story.
The next “lion” on board is Gov. Fook, returning from the Dutch West Indies, where he has been governing the islands and Dutch Guiana. The governor is a well-informed gentleman, and a splendid player of pinochle. The Dutch have the thrifty habit of making their colonies pay. They are not a “world power” and do not have to be experimenting with efforts to lift the white man’s burden. Their idea is that the West-Indian and the East-Indian who live under the Dutch flag shall work. The American idea is to educate and convert the heathen and pension them from labor. Our theory sounds all right, but it results in unhappy Filipinos and increased expense for Americans. The Dutch colonials pay their way whether they get an education or not.
One unfamiliar with modern steamship travel would think that the captain and his first and second officers were the important officials on board. They are not. The officers rank about as follows: 1st, the cook; 2nd, the engineer; 3rd, the barber, and after that the rest. The cook on an ocean steamer gets more pay than the captain, and is now ranked as an officer. The managing director of a big German company was accustomed on visiting any ship of their line, to first shake hands with the cook and then with the captain. When one of the officers suggested that he was not following etiquette he answered that there was no trouble getting captains and lieutenants but it was a darned hard job to find a cook. The cook has to buy, plan meals, supervise the kitchen and run it economically for the company and satisfactorily for the passengers, for over 2,000 people.
The barber is the man on the ship who knows everything for sure. Ask the captain when we will get to Rotterdam and he will qualify and trim his answer by referring to possible winds and tides, and he won’t say exactly. Ask the barber and he will tell youwe will get there at 10 o’clock on Friday night. He knows everything going on in the boat, from the kind of freight carried in the hold to the meaning of the colors painted on the smokestack. During this voyage I have had more numerous and interesting facts than anybody, because I have not fooled with talking to the captain or the purser or the steward, but gotten my information straight from the fountain of knowledge, the barber shop. However, this is not peculiar to ships. The same principle applies at Hutchinson and every other town.