XXIA. D. 1872THE SEA HUNTERS
TheJapanese have heroes and adventurers just as fine as our own, most valiant and worthy knights. Unhappily I am too stupid to remember their honorable names, to understand their motives, or to make out exactly what they were playing at. It is rather a pity they have to be left out, but at least we can deal with one very odd phase of adventure in the Japan seas.
The daring seamen of old Japan used to think nothing of crossing the Pacific to raid the American coast for slaves. But two or three hundred years ago the reigning shogun made up his mind that slaving was immoral. So he pronounced an edict by which the builders of junks were forbidden to fill in their stern frame with the usual panels. The junks were still good enough for coastwise trade at home, but if they dared the swell of the outer ocean a following sea would poop them and send them to the bottom. That put a stop to the slave trade; but no king can prevent storms, and law or no law, disabled junks were sometimes swept by the big black current and the westerly gales right across the Pacific Ocean.The law made only one difference, that the crippled junks never got back to Japan; and if their castaway seamen reached America the native tribes enslaved them. I find that during the first half of the nineteenth century the average was one junk in forty-two months cast away on the coasts of America.
Now let us turn to another effect of this strange law that disabled Japanese shipping. Northward of Japan are the Kuril Islands in a region of almost perpetual fog, bad storms and bitter cold, ice pack, strong currents and tide rips, combed by the fanged reefs, with plenty of earthquakes and eruptions to allay any sense of monotony. The large and hairy natives are called the Ainu, who live by fishing, and used to catch sea otter and fur seal. These furs found their way via Japan to China, where sea-otter fur was part of the costly official winter dress of the Chinese mandarins. As to the seal, their whiskers are worth two shillings a set for cleaning opium pipes, and one part of the carcass sells at a shilling a time for medicine, apart from the worth of the fur.
Now the law that disabled the junks made it impossible for Japan to do much trade in the Kurils, so that the Russians actually got there first as colonists.
But no law disabled the Americans, and when the supply of sea otter failed on the Californian coast in 1872 a schooner called theCygnetcrossed the Pacific to the Kuril Islands. There the sea-otters were plentiful in the kelp beds, tame as cats and eager to inspect the hunters’ boats. Their skins fetched from eighty to ninety dollars.
When news came to Japan of this new way of getting rich, a young Englishman, Mr. H. J. Snow,bought a schooner, a hog-backed relic called theSwallowin which he set out for the hunting. Three days out, a gale dismasted her, and putting in for shelter she was cast away in the Kuriles. Mr. Snow’s second venture was likewise cast away on a desert isle, where the crew wintered. “My vessels,” he says, “were appropriately named. TheSwallowswallowed up part of my finances, and theSnowdropcaused me to drop the rest.”
During the winter another crew of white men were in quarters on a distant headland of the same Island Yeturup, and were cooking their Christmas dinner when they met with an accident. A dispute had arisen between two rival cooks as to how to fry fritters, and during the argument a pan of boiling fat capsized into the stove and caught alight. The men escaped through the flames half dressed, their clothes on fire, into the snow-clad wilderness and a shrewd wind. Then they set up a shelter of driftwood with the burning ruin in front to keep them warm, while they gravely debated as to whether they ought to cremate the cooks upon the ashes of their home and of their Christmas dinner.
To understand the adventures of the sea hunters we must follow the story of the leased islands. The Alaska Commercial Company, of San Francisco, leased the best islands for seal and otter fishing. From the United States the company leased the Pribilof Islands in Bering Sea, a great fur-seal metropolis with a population of nearly four millions. They had armed native gamekeepers and the help of an American gunboat. From Russia the company leased Bering and Copper Islands off Kamchatka,and Cape Patience on Saghalian with its outlier Robber Island. There also they had native gamekeepers, a patrol ship, and the help of Russian troops and gunboats. The company had likewise tame newspapers to preach about the wickedness of the sea hunters and call them bad names. As a rule the sea hunters did their hunting far out at sea where it was perfectly lawful. At the worst they landed on the forbidden islands as poachers. The real difference between the two parties was that the sea hunters took all the risks, while the company had no risks and took all the profits.
In 1883 Snow made his first raid on Bering Island. Night fell while his crew were busy clubbing seals, and they had killed about six hundred when the garrison rushed them. Of course the hunters made haste to the boats, but Captain Snow missed his men who should have followed him, and as hundreds of seals were taking to the water he joined them until an outlying rock gave shelter behind which he squatted down, waist-deep. When the landscape became more peaceful he set off along the shore of boulders, stumbling, falling and molested by yapping foxes. He had to throw rocks to keep them off. When he found the going too bad he took to the hills, but sea boots reaching to the hips are not comfy for long walks, and when he pulled them off he found how surprisingly sharp are the stones in an Arctic tundra. He pulled them on again, and after a long time came abreast of his schooner, where he found one of the seamen. They hailed and a boat took them on board, where the shipkeeper was found to be drunk, and the Japanese bos’n much in need of a thrashing.Captain Snow supplied what was needed to the bos’n and had a big supper, but could not sail as the second mate was still missing. He turned in for a night’s rest.
Next morning bright and early came a company’s steamer with a Russian officer and two soldiers who searched the schooner. There was not a trace of evidence on board, but on general principles the vessel was seized and condemned, all her people suffering some months of imprisonment at Vladivostok.
In 1888, somewhat prejudiced against the virtuous company, Captain Snow came with the famous schoonerNemo, back to the scene of his misadventure. One morning with three boats he went prospecting for otter close along shore, shot four, and his hunters one, then gave the signal of return to the schooner. At that moment two shots rang out from behind the boulders ashore, and a third, which peeled some skin from his hand, followed by a fusillade like a hail storm. Of the Japanese seamen in Snow’s boat the boat steerer was shot through the backbone. A second man was hit first in one leg, then in the other, but went on pulling. The stroke oar, shot in the calf, fell and lay, seemingly dead, but really cautious. Then the other two men bent down and Snow was shot in the leg.
So rapid was the firing that the guns ashore must have heated partly melting the leaden bullets, for on board the boat there was a distinct perfume of molten lead. Three of the bullets which struck the captain seem to have been deflected by his woolen jersey, and one which got through happened to strike a fold. It had been noted in the Franco-Prussian War thatwoolen underclothes will sometimes turn leaden bullets.
“I remember,” says Captain Snow, “weighing the chances ... of swimming beside the boat, but decided that we should be just as liable to be drowned as shot, as no one could stand the cold water for long. For the greater part of the time I was vigorously plying my paddle ... and only presenting the edge of my body, the left side, to the enemy. This is how it was that the bullets which struck me all entered my clothing on the left side. I expected every moment to be shot through the body, and I could not help wondering how it would feel.”
With three dying men, and three wounded, he got the sinking boat under sail and brought her alongside the schooner.
Of course it was very good of the Alaska Commercial Company to preserve the wild game of the islands, but even gamekeepers may show excess of zeal when it comes to wholesale murder. To all of us who were in that trade it is a matter of keen regret that the officers ashore took such good cover. Their guards, and the Cossacks, were kindly souls enough, ready and willing—in the absence of the officers to sell skins to the raiders or even, after some refreshments, to help in clubbing a few hundred seals. It was rather awkward, though, for one of the schooners at Cape Patience when in the midst of these festivities a gunboat came round the corner.
The American and the Japanese schooners were not always quite good friends, and there is a queer story of a triangular duel between three vessels, fought in a fog. Mr. Kipling had theRhyme of the ThreeSealers, he told me, from Captain Lake in Yokohama. I had it from the mate of one of the three schooners,The Stella. She changed her name toAdele, and the mate became master, a little, round, fox-faced Norseman, Hans Hansen, of Christiania. In 1884 theAdelewas captured by an American gunboat and taken to San Francisco. Hansen said that he and his men were marched through the streets shackled, and great was the howl about pirates, but when the case came up for trial the court had no jurisdiction, and the ship was released. From that event dates the name “Yokohama Pirates,” and Hansen’s nickname as the Flying Dutchman. Because at the time of capture he had for once been a perfectly innocent deep sea sealer, he swore everlasting war against the United States, transferred his ship to the port of Victoria, British Columbia, and would hoist by turns the British, Japanese, German, Norwegian or even American flag, as suited his convenience.
Once when I asked him why not the Black Flag, he grinned, remarking that them old-fashioned pirates had no business sense. Year after year he raided the forbidden islands to subvert the garrisons, rob warehouses, or plunder the rookeries, while gunboats of four nations failed to effect his capture. In port he was a pattern of innocent virtue, at sea his superb seamanship made him as hard to catch as a ghost, and his adventures beat theArabian Nights. I was with him as an ordinary seaman in the voyage of 1889, a winter raid upon the Pribilof Islands. At the first attempt we clawed off a lee shore in a hurricane, the second resulted in a mutiny, and the third landing was not very successful,because the boats were swamped, and the garrison a little too prevalent ashore. On the voyage of 1890 theAdeletook four hundred skins, but in 1891 was cast away on the North Island of the Queen Charlotte group, without any loss of life. The Flying Dutchman took to mining on the outer coast of Vancouver, where he rescued a shipwrecked crew, but afterward perished in the attempt to save a drowning Indian.
Quite apart from the so-called Yokohama pirates, a large fleet of law-abiding Canadian schooners hunted the fur seal at sea, a matter which led to some slight unpleasantness between the American and the British governments. There was hunting also in the seas about Cape Horn; but the Yokohama schooners have left behind them by far the finest memories. Captain Snow says that from first to last some fifty white men’s schooners sailed out of Yokohama. Of five there is no record, two took to sealing when the sea otter no longer paid, and four were sold out of the business. The Russians sank one, captured and lost two, captured and condemned three, all six being a dead loss to their owners. For the rest, twenty-two were cast away, and twelve foundered with all hands at sea, so that the total loss was forty ships out of fifty. For daring seamanship and gallant adventure sea hunting made a school of manhood hard to match in this tame modern world, and war is a very tame affair to those who shared the fun.