girl swimming
7A runaway sea horse
Mydays at sea were divided up between work, study and play. In fair weather my schedule was crowded. At seven-thirty in the morning I got my breakfast. At eight bells, when the morning watch came on duty, I had to swab down the poop deck, polish the brass work and make up my bunk. My bunk was graced by a mattress of “donkey’s breakfast” or straw, which was the nearest thing to material luxury I ever knew. I never worked very hard at my duties; rather I made them into games whenever I could.
I had to haul up water in a canvas bucket to wash down the decks. I liked that because it gave me the chance to use the bucket to catch things that floated by. Sometimes this led to adventures I had not foreseen.
I’ll always remember the morning I tried to catch the sea horse. A sea horse sounds very formidable for a ten-year-old girl to go after with a canvas bucket because naturally when one says “sea horse” many people compare it to a huge clumsy sea animal weighing hundreds of pounds. But the sea horse is quite different. He is a funny fish from two or three inches to a foot long. I call him a funny fish because for a fish he can’t swim any more than a cockroach, but he has a tail that he wraps about a piece of seaweed or any drifting thing. So he meanders over the ocean with his head out of water at such an angle that from a short distance he looks like a horse’s head—hence his name.
It is only about once in a blue moon that any sailor catches a sea horse, so of course at ten it was the dream of my life to land one.
What a thrill it was that morning when leaning over the side, bucket in hand, I saw floating just beneath me a sea anemone on which was a tiny sea horse riding as if the sea flower was its throne, and the sea horse was king of the ocean. What an opportunity! The morning was calm, the flat sea like glass, and the lazy ship crawling along at scarcely three knots an hour made fishing conditions ideal. The sea horse was a transparent, gelatine-looking blue. I could see the tiny threads of blue veins in its insides. I lowered the bucket under the anemone and started to haul it up, but the water carried it floating off. I threw the bucket at it again. In the foam it had disappeared. I watched carefully and was rewarded by seeing it reappear again near the stern of the ship. I ran to the taffrail and plunged the bucket again after it, but missed it by about two feet. There was not time to pull up the bucket and make another cast. The stern of the moving ship would pass the drifting anemone. I saw my life’s ambition slipping away from me. I wouldn’t fail!
That miss gave me a wild desire to possess the sea horse or die in the attempt to get it. Without a thought as to the utter foolishness of what I was doing I jumped overboard after the sea horse! When I landed with a splash in the water I heard Stitches’ voice shout:
“The skipper’s overboard!”
Such a hullabaloo that started on deck. Father had come up, the cabin-boy, Bulgar and Axel Oleson. They were huddled at the stern rail. The mate and Swede were unfastening the leachings on the dinghy to lower it over after me.
“Keep your head up, Skipper,” called Stitches in a frantic voice. He couldn’t swim a stroke and his helplessness to aid me as he wanted to was funny. He kept calling instructions to me.
The wake of the vessel was washing the sea horse farther away from me. Instead of swimming back to the ship and grabbing hold of the life line that Father threw after me, I swam lickety-split astern after my prize—the ship going on in one direction and I in the other. I never got many opportunities to get off the ship and I was exhilarated at my freedom. I was free—my goal was the rapidly fleeing sea flower. I knew I would achieve my ambition!
“Tread water,” came the bellowing voice of my father through his cupped hands. “Don’t get scared and you’ll be all right.”
I turned my head to look at him, sent him a smile, waved my hand at him and plunged on after my flower. I would no sooner swim within easy reach of it, so I thought, than a gentle wave lapped it out of my grasp. I forgot the gang on the ship who were trying to call me back. With several swift strokes I overtook the sea horse on its flower chariot. I grabbed it in my fist. The anemone crushed in my hand. Triumphant at catching it I turned back to catch up with the ship. Father had hove to in the little wind that was wheezing out of some straggling clouds. The mate was in the lifeboat with Stitches and Bulgar. They were pulling for dear life after me. With the thrill of my success still tingling in my soul I decided to give the men in the lifeboat some work. I had jumped overboard with my overalls on, so stuffing my prize in my front pocket I turned about and began swimming away. I swam as fast as I could. The men in the lifeboat pulled with longer and swifter strokes. I plowed on a few yards and then turned and waved a hand to them to come and get me. I heard them begin to curse the air blue. I trod water until they almost got up with me, then I dived under the water, and came up a few yards behind them and started back to the ship. By the time they got the lifeboat turned around I was way ahead. It wasn’t every day in my life that I was important enough to get the whole crew off duty to chase me around the ocean and I was making the most of it!
When I got under the shadow of the stern, just far enough away to clear the suction of the rudder, I looked up to the deck and saw the crew laughing—that is, they were all laughing with the exception of my father.
“That damned old sea horse thought he could get away from me but I got him,” I called up, grinning in my success.
“Come up this rope at once,” roared Father.
Hand over hand I climbed up the piece of halyard he lowered over to me. My hair was streaked in wet strings over my face as I stood on deck dripping in front of Father. Before he could say a word I put my hand in my pocket to bring out my beautiful anemone when to my dismay the thing I brought forth in my fist was no dainty colored flower but a dirty piece of seaweed that looked like a hunk of rotten sponge. In the water in its bed of blue sea it had the beauty of a lace-like piece of coral, but in my hand it was a brutal disillusion—just ugly seaweed. My heart sank in disappointment—the thing I had wanted to possess for its loveliness didn’t exist. Whatever philosophic reflections this might have started were checked abruptly by my father’s voice.
“Turn over that skylight,” he said.
Obediently I draped my body over the skylight with my back part exposed heavenwards.
“This will teach you to run away from this ship,” and he gave me a whipping with the end of the rope he had thrown to me to climb aboard with. The licking didn’t really hurt. It took a pretty healthy whack to hurt me anywhere physically. But the comedown! The blow to my pride! To be turned over a skylight and licked on the pants before a circle of grinning sailors—and for what? Merely for jumping overboard in mid-ocean and stopping the ship. I could hear the mate who had chased me in the lifeboat laughing the loudest. Would I ever recover? As if the sea horse and the anemone hadn’t treated me badly enough.
“Now you get the Bible and copy a verse twenty times,” he added. It was the familiar finish to a licking. Father used the Bible as a text book for me—spelling, grammar and composition. If you’ve ever had to learn to spell all the words in the Bible you can see what I was up against. I had to copy verses out of the Bible every day, but Father could never make me do it voluntarily—so he gave it to me to do as punishment.
I got the Bible, and lying down on my stomach on the hot deck in the sun so my pants would dry, I began my penmanship lesson. I was darned if I was going to do Revelations again. I knew them by heart—all about roasting in Hell and being eaten by snakes and never being able to die and get out of it—besides which the verses in Revelations were too long. I wanted to get it over with. I thumbed the New Testament over until I found the shortest verse in it—“Jesus Wept.” That suited my frame of mind too, so I copied that one twenty times and turned my homework in to Father. He was so pleased at my promptness in doing my lesson that he looked as if he had forgotten my latest offense.
“Here it is,” I said to him, with the air of a martyr, and disdaining even to look at that bunch of sailors who were occupied doing various jobs around the deck. As I handed him the paper I began to make a discreet retreat to the main deck. I got as far as the poop deck ladder when I heard him explode like a firecracker. And then I got a real licking to “teach me to be funny again.”
Studying was the hardest thing I had to do. It wasn’t only because I didn’t want to study that I looked upon knowledge-getting as a curse, but I had so much physical energy that I just couldn’t sit still long enough. So Father used all sorts of schemes to make me work at my lessons. He had one that never failed, no matter how often he tried it. He would call me into his cabin and tell me with a grave face he had made a mistake in his navigation problem and would I work it over and catch his mistake, because otherwise the result might be very serious to all of us on the ship. I didn’t care a hang about the seriousness to all of us on the ship, but how I did want to catch him. So I would tie into that problem tooth and nail and at the end of half an hour or an hour be able to go to Father with a very superior air and tell him that no matter what he thought I knew he hadnotmade a mistake. Then he’d always thank me with an expression of great relief and I’d go away very proud—never realizing that I had done my arithmetic lesson.
There was always plenty of work for me to do, but nothing for me to play with that I didn’t invent myself. Father always said:
“I don’t have playthings—why should you?”
Left to my own resources I copied my few toys from the things I saw around me—sailors, ships and cargoes. I built a drydock under the ladder leading to the poop. In my drydock I had several types of ships in the making. My prize ship was a full-rigger in a whiskey bottle. The sailors had taught me to make long crochet hooks from bits of wire and to make my own glue from fish heads.
I worked for months making the parts of the ship to rig up. Then came the problem of getting it inside the narrow neck of the whiskey bottle and setting it up inside. That was where the crochet hooks came in. I put all the parts of the full-rigger in the bottle separately and then I put them into place with the use of the glue and hooks. I worked a little every day on my masterpiece for I wanted it to be superior to any bottle boat that could be produced in the fo’c’s’le. Eventually I had built a fleet of little ships. I made them to trade in English ports for candy.
My most spectacular vessel, however, was a boat that sailed on the deck on little wooden wheels. It was about two feet long with a mainsail, squaresail and two jibs. I made the diminutive blocks in its rigging from bits of sandalwood. The mainsail and squaresail were fashioned from an old cotton shirt, while its jibs had once been a pair of underdrawers which the cook cast off.
Stitches made a boat on the same model and on the day both were completed we were to have a race. My boat was called theNeversink. Stitches’ boat was theSonofabitch.
“I’ll wager you my boat’ll outsail yours, Skipper,” he said. “An’ if I lose you can embroider the name of your winner, theNeversink, in white twine on my pants’ seat, an’ I’ll wear the same for every man aboard to see.”
“That’s a bet, Stitches,” I said, taking his wager. Unfortunately I didn’t stop to consider that if his boat won he would embroider its name,Sonofabitch, on the back of me.
Came the day of the race. It was the rule that we had to man our boats with a crew—the owner having the sole pick of whatever kind of crew he desired. The captain of my boat was a fat cockroach. I tied him to his post aft with a piece of thread. However I never called much attention to him in my father’s hearing for fear Father would think there was something personal about it. You see, I learned early that a girl can’t be too careful with a man’s dignity. My “crew” was a kitten which I tied on just forward of midships to serve the double purpose of crew and ballast to hold theNeversinkon deck when the wind blew its sails. As in all well-regulated ships I had trouble with my crew.
We had our boats at the starting line on the main deck. The goal was the water tank abaft the mizzen.
“Shove off!” signalled Stitches and down the decks theNeversinkand theSonofabitchcareened along on their wheels. My boat took the lead and kept a couple of inches ahead of theSonofabitch, when my crew mutinied. The wind got under the kitten’s tail and he didn’t like it so he clawed at the sails and pulled the mast and rigging down, finally dumping theNeversinkover on her side in dismal defeat.
I didn’t wait for Stitches to gloat over his victory.
“You can have my overalls when I turn in tonight but don’t embroiderSonofabitchin too big letters,” I said.
Sometimes my games got me in trouble, and once I was badly injured. On the “dog watches” from four to six and six to eight in the evenings, both watches were on deck and I didn’t have to keep quiet so they could sleep. It was then that I ran the decks, careless of the thudding noise my feet made; or I sang chanteys loud and long at the top of my voice. One night I persuaded Swede to play tag with me. Owing to the limited space there is on a ship to run around in, we made a rule that the person who was “it” had to catch the pursued by hitting him three hard swats in the middle of the back. There were no bases. The topmasts were the limit above and the hold the limit below. I was it. I chased Swede forward, through the galley, back to the mizzen, around the mizzen mast, over the hatchway and almost caught him when he leaped to the shrouds and started up the mizzen rigging. I went after him with a rush. He was about half way up the ratlines when I almost overtook him. Instead of continuing up and sliding down a halyard to the deck again from the crosstrees as I thought he would, he stopped short in the rigging.
“Get down or I’ll step on your hands,” he said with a grin.
“Step away and be damned,” I answered him, intent on catching him at any cost. Of course a huge Swede sailor is not the most gentle playmate there is for a child, but he was all that was available. In his clumsiness he was only playing, but he raised one foot as if to trample on my hands and said again:
“Get down or you get me hoof on your mitts.”
I didn’t believe he meant it, so instead of taking his warning I went up another rung of the rigging. He intended to step lightly but he slipped. I felt a stinging pain and then I was flying through space. I suppose my hands went out as protection instinctively for they struck the deck first. Something seemed to snap in both wrists and my face slapped against the planks of the deck.
The next thing I knew Swede had me in his arms lugging me aft and I was kicking and blubbering cross words through bloody lips. It was bad enough to be smashed up but to be carried like a helpless puppy was too much.
“Put me down,” I demanded and I wriggled from his arms. Mustering all the strength I could I walked up the poop. Father had come up the companionway to investigate the commotion. When he saw me he asked:
“Now what the hell have you been up to?”
My face evidently looked like a muffin that had spilled over lopsided in baking, for my nose was broken and two points off its course.
“Answer me. What happened?” Father repeated with force.
“I guess I’ve busted my flippers. Can you fix them?” was all I could reply.
He took my broken wrists in his hands and examined them, then sent the man at the wheel after a fruit box.
“Now you get below, Joan. I’ll make some splints out of slats of wood and set your arms. But about your nose, how in the hell can I do anything with that?”
Despite his doubts, Father made a good job of patching me up. He used a ruler broken in two pieces for a splint for my nose, and then put a finishing touch on his handiwork by giving me a big dose of salts. Father sincerely believed salts were a cure for everything from bad temper to a broken neck, and I became so inured to swallowing the darn stuff that I almost learned to like it.
girl pulliing a kitten on a boat
sharks
8We catch a female shark and I learn about women from her—
Oneof the earliest lessons that I learned from the sea was the importance of observation. Book learning is almost useless in a storm, and science an unknown quantity when the elements lash against a man-built ship. But observing the laws of the sea, watching it destroy or create, teaches much about life. All that I learned of philosophy, biology and astronomy came to me from my father and the sailors.
I often wondered where children came from, and in reply to my queries the sailors gave me no stork fable or yarn about being found in a cabbage patch. When I asked Father where I came from he replied:
“Don’t ask questions. Just keep your eyes open and you’ll find out everything you want to know.”
The first opportunity I had to find out about babies being born came when Father landed a shark. I was down on the main deck helping Stitches sew on a ripped sail. He was teaching me how to use the “palm” or sea-going thimble that sailors use when they sew canvas. The “palm” is a metal perforated disk set on a leather strap that fits the palm of the hand. In fair weather the sailors always brought the torn sails on deck and repaired them ready for emergency use in a storm. Stitches was very painstaking in his instruction to me because he wanted me to be a regular sailor some day.
Father was sitting on the taffrail, sextant in hand, waiting for the sun to come out from behind a cloud so that he could “shoot the sun,” or take a sight to figure out our position by navigation.
“Say, Joan,” he called, “come here and look at this shark.”
I dropped my sewing and ran up to the poop to the after rail. I looked over the stern and saw a greenish white shadow deep in the water. Slowly the shadow came closer to the surface and a grey fin stuck out of the water like a three-cornered sail. The shark was about ten feet long. It swam around in circles following in our wake, stalking us. It was the first time I had ever seen a man-eating shark.
“Don’t go too near the rail, Joan. If you fall overboard now you’ll be a nice dessert for that shark.”
“Do sharks eat people?” I asked.
“That kind of a shark does. All sharks that live on the surface of the water and follow sailing ships are man-eaters.”
I looked at the shark again. It looked harmless to me as it circled and played around in the wake from our rudder.
“How could a shark eat me? I can’t see any mouth on it,” I countered, still unconvinced.
“I’ll show you. Go ask the cook for a big chunk of salt pork, and we’ll put it on an iron hook, then watch the fun.”
I got the chunk of salt pork and Father baited a hook with it. Instead of lowering the hook overboard by a rope, he fastened a thin chain about twenty feet long onto it.
“Now get my rifle, and stand clear of the rail,” he ordered.
I brought the gun up, and Stitches and McLean came aft to help land the shark. Stitches tied a piece of board on the chain so that the pork and hook would float on the surface. The shark, led by its little vari-colored pilot fish, smelled at the bait—then it circled away. It came back again and after pushing the pork with its snout, the shark turned belly up, and opened its jaws on the meat. A shark can only bite when it is bottom up, as the lower part of its jaw is receding. As it turned up and snagged the hook Father shot at his throat with his rifle. The shark kicked out with its powerful tail and pulled away. McLean let out some slack as the shark started to bite viciously at the chain holding the hook. Again and again Father fired shots into its body, but still it fought. The pilot fish had disappeared—nothing remained but a bleeding, fighting shark pulling at the hook.
“Haul him up, head out of water,” Father called, and as Stitches and McLean pulled him out of the water Father slipped a running bowline around him.
“Get the hell out of the way now or you’ll get hurt,” he called to me as he hauled the heavy shark up by the bowline. Stitches had slipped another line around the shark’s pounding tail and was pulling him up by the stern. After a terrific struggle they landed him on the poop deck. It slapped and wallowed around the deck, its huge jaws with seven rows of saw-teeth gaping and trying to kill its attackers. Father ran a scantline down its throat and shot it again. McLean chopped its tail off, splintering its spine as he did so. Still the shark fought desperately. Nothing seemed to kill it.
“A shark don’t die until sundown,” said my father, “but we can cut him up so he can’t do any damage. Only don’t get too near him because he may only be foxing. A shark is the hardest deep sea thing to kill there is.”
Father told the men to haul the body of the shark down on the main deck and leave it in the lee scuppers until it died. The sailors were more than willing to comply because a shark has a lot of value to sailormen.
“When it’s dead, you men skin it. We’ll sell the skin in Australia for shoe leather. Whatever else you want of the shark you can have,” he told the men, and he went about his task of “shooting the sun.”
I forgot all about my sail sewing lesson in the excitement of carving up a man-eating shark. Stitches sharpened my knife for me on his marlin spike, and we set about carving up the shark.
“What part can I do?” I asked him.
“Well, seeing as this is the first man-eating shark you ever seen caught, you go through its guts. Some sailors tell as how sharks swallow pearls on the bottom of the ocean, and maybe if you was to carefully go through all its entrails you might find a pearl.”
It is true that sharks are the scavengers of the underseas, but Stitches gave me the job of looking through its guts to initiate me into the realm of sharkdom. “Nothing like learning the insides of things to be sure of your facts,” he said.
I am glad now that he made me go through that shark’s insides for it gave me first hand information that has backed me up when landlubbers doubt me when I tell them of the mammal shark.
It took about three hours to go carefully through the yards and yards of gut of that shark and I didn’t find any pearls. All I found was a rusty piece of tin and a small devil fish, or octopus, that spit indigo ink all over me when I freed it from the grip of the shark.
“I’m goin’ to cut out this backbone, Skipper, and make a walking stick out of it. I can sell it when I get ashore for a bottle of rum,” said Stitches, and he dug his knife into the back of the shark. The shark still quivered, hacked up as it was.
“And now let’s get his ugly mug off his body. His yawnin’ jaws look too hungry for comfort.” McLean got an ax and a saw, and the two of them sawed and hacked off the huge iron-like head.
“Now I’ll show you where the shark keeps his eyes.” You see, a shark is blind, it can only see about four inches in front of its snout. Every shark has two little parasite fish, pilot fish, that see for it, and in time of trouble the shark swallows its pilot fish for protection. Down in little sockets behind the shark’s gills, Stitches brought out two squirming, brightly colored fish, about three inches long.
People have often asked me how it is that natives seem to swim unharmed in shark-infested waters. They escape from death because they know a shark’s habits. A shark, by reason of its near-sightedness, depends upon its pilot fish to spot food for it. The tiny fish can see any animate object in the water and head for it. The bright color of their bodies shines in front of the shark who follows where they lead. A shark will not attack an inanimate object for it cannot notice it! A moving object in the water attracts attention and the natives, wise to this, let their bodies go limp when a shark circles too near them. Then, when a shark circles to turn around to attack, the native moves like lightning to dive under the animal and rip its throat with his sharp tortoise-shell knife.
“Now always remember, Skipper, if you ever are overboard and near a shark, keep your head and keep quiet until the shark circles from you. Don’t be a landlubber fool and try to fight because that just makes you a movin’ target fer the little pilot fish.” I have been laughed at when I have told about the pilot fish of a shark, and unbelievers have said it was just a good fish yarn, but nevertheless it is a fact.
“Do any other kind of fish eat you, too?” I asked, a bit worried.
“Hell, a shark ain’t a fish, it’s a mammal—just like a porpoise and a whale is a mammal.”
A shark not a fish? It had fins and a body and tail like one and it doesn’t have to come up to the surface to breathe like a porpoise and a whale.
“Now you take that shark jaw and hang it over the side in the water and in a week all the meat will rot off it; then you’ll have a pair of fine shark’s jaws to hang up in your cabin.”
No portion of that shark was to be wasted. McLean had taken the empty gut and had stretched it out in the sun to dry. “For shoelaces” he answered, when I asked him what he was keeping it for.
“But it stinks,” I protested.
“Well, it won’t when I cure it in salt,” he replied.
“Now we’ll cut its stomach open, Skipper,” said Stitches and he slit up the upper stomach of the mutilated shark. I bent over him, carefully watching everything he did, for wonders never ceased to come from it.
Stitches reached his hand and wrist into the opening and felt inside. Then he let forth a “Jesus!”
“What’s the matter, Stitches?”
“Skipper,” he replied, his face crestfallen, “this is a mother shark. Look, she has young ’uns in her.”
I looked, and there in a pouch in her stomach were six baby sharks, about eighteen inches long. He reached in deeper and brought out a second pouch with another litter of six young in it.
“Is it bad luck to kill a she-shark, Stitches?” I asked, puzzled at his sudden grief.
“Bad luck? No sailor ever kills a female thing, because they give life. Givin’ life is part of the Creator’s job, and no man would willingly kill a mother thing.”
There is an old superstition that to kill any female thing at sea will bring a curse on the ship. If a female bird is killed, its wing is nailed on the mast head as an offering against a curse. When Stitches saw we had killed a mother shark in young, he took the tail and nailed it on the end of the jib boom. That is the reason why ships returning from deep sea voyages are often decorated with parts of birds or fish.
After Stitches had put up the tail on the jib boom, he came back to the shark. “Maybe we can save these young ’uns, Skipper.” Carefully, and almost tenderly, he took the baby fish out of the pouch and broke the cords that bound them to the mother shark. Then he took some twine that he had been using to sew sails with, and tied up the end of each cord, and threw the little fish overboard. They probably never lived but Stitches did everything in his power to save them.
I didn’t know that sharks bore their young. I supposed they laid spawn as any other fish did, but Stitches explained to me that a shark bears her children like a human, and suckles them from a teat until they can forage for their own food. The reason that shark had fought so viciously was to protect the young in her. A male shark is much easier to land, and much more stupid than a female.
I asked Stitches if all children were born the way the sharks were and he answered, yes.
As there were eleven children in our family I thought that we came in batches of six like the sharks.
“But how do we get in the pouches?” I insisted.
“The guy that created you put the seed of you under your father’s and your mother’s heart, then when they fell in love you was born.”
I have since learned that some modern naturalists who evidently never have traveled further south than Sandy Hook, have expressed a doubt as to whether there really is such a beast as a man-eating shark and whether it will actually attack a man unprovoked. Evidence, they claim, has always been at second-hand and the testimony of seafaring men they reject. Well, without wishing to lock horns with the learned, you may be interested in firsthand evidence of man-eating sharks.
I saw a nurse shark, perhaps the deadliest species of the shark family, attack a sailor from our ship, one Eric Johanssen. Johanssen dived off the ship for a swim against the express command of my father that no member of the crew leave the vessel. We were anchored in Paramatta River in Sydney Harbor. Johanssen hadn’t been in the water five minutes before two sharks began circling about him.
“You bloody fool, swim for the ship,” called Swede to Johanssen. Johanssen turned to strike out for the Jacob’s ladder, but he wasn’t swift enough. The tri-cornered fin of the biggest shark followed in his wake. Johanssen struck out wildly with his arms and legs. He evidently thought that by making a big splash in the water he would confuse the shark, but the disturbance Johanssen kicked up only served to make an accurate target for the shark’s pilot fish.
The man had about reached the ship when the triangular fin following disappeared. Watching, the men on board knew what that meant. The brute was turning on its back. It came up below its prey and turned open its huge maw to bite.
There came a short shriek of pain; the water bloodied, and Johanssen’s body doubled up. The shark’s jaws had set about his stomach. With a sinuous motion of its tail the shark drew away taking in its jaws the middle of Johanssen’s body almost through to the backbone.
There had been no time to lower a boat, but Swede was on the Jacob’s ladder; Father and the mate above, all the boathooks fighting to save at least the body from the man-eaters. They caught the body with their hooks and brought it out, but not until another hunk of flesh had been torn from the thigh. Then the vicious monsters, balked of their complete meal, swam along the sides of the ship, scraping against it and slapping their tails against the hull as though in a frenzy of rage. Finally they drew off, but for hours they swam close by, waiting for another victim.
Father had Johanssen’s body sewn up in sailcloth and it was buried in the potter’s field in Sydney.
Stitches told me of a foolhardy sailor in the islands dragging his arm over the side of a dinghy going ashore. A nurse shark came up unexpectedly and caught the trailing arm. The sailor either was dragged, or in his fright fell out of the boat. There was a swirl of bloody water and the man was gone. Then, attracted by the blood another huge shark came alongside and scraped the dinghy trying to overturn it. Stitches and the remaining sailor had a hard time getting the boat safely ashore.
Such are the habits of man-eating sharks.
shark with pilot fish
girl covered in tar with laughing men around her
9In which I learn to take a joke. Hoping you may do the same
Wewere nearing the Equator bound south from Puget Sound. Father, the mate, and I were eating our noon meal, “onion bouillon” (one bucket of water with one onion in it), rice with curry sauce and boiled tapioca with pale lavender cornstarch sauce. The Jap cook delighted in coloring the food to make it appear more appetizing than it was.
Father and the mate were discussing our position on the chart.
“We ought to make the crossing along about four bells this afternoon, Mr. Swanson. Better get the big hawser out and stretch it on deck in case we need it.”
The mate caught the twinkle in Father’s eye and raised his voice for the benefit of the greenhorn cabin-boy who was listening to the conversation, big-eyed, in the pantry.
“All right, Captain, and when Neptune comes aboard shall I tell him about Slops trespassing on his domain?”
“Yes. He’ll probably raise hell because he doesn’t like the uninitiated to cross the Equator.”
The cabin-boy came out of the pantry and made a pretense of passing the bread to me.
“I beg your pardon, sir,” he said to Father, “but what does the Equator look like?”
“It’s a white line about three feet under the water. I just told Mr. Swanson here to get out the hawser and have it ready. When we cross the Equator we begin goin’ down hill and slip south so fast we got to tie a line on to the Equator,” Father lied without blinking an eye.
Slops sniffed, pretending contempt.
“You can’t fool me, Captain,” he protested.
Father looked very stern.
“When you have washed up here I want you to lean overboard and look for the line and when you see it, call me,” he ordered the cabin-boy.
Slops’ eyes nearly popped out of his sallow face, but he claimed that he didn’t believe it.
When Father and the mate left the table and went on deck, Slops came to me.
“Does the Old Man mean that stuff about us going too fast when we cross the Equator?” he asked.
“Sure he does, and what’s more, Neptune knows you’ve never crossed the line before, and you’re going to be tarred and feathered,” I promised him. “Besides that, you’ll probably have to clean up all the mess they make tarring and feathering you.”
Slops didn’t think so much of me at that moment, and he turned back to his pantry with a sniff. An hour later Father asked me where Slops had disappeared to. I didn’t know, but I set about to find him. I looked in the pantry, in his cabin, up in the galley, under the fo’c’s’lehead, aloft in the rigging, down in the lazarette, everywhere, so I thought, and I couldn’t track him. We were just about to cross the Equator, and Slops’ presence was desired on deck for the initiation. Mr. Swanson stepped up to my father!
“Come with me, Captain, and I’ll show you where that cat-livered cabin-boy is.” I went with them, forward, and there we found Slops. He was leaning far out the hawse hole staring at the water below looking for the Equator! The mate planted his foot in the hind part of the cabin-boy and nearly sent him hurling into space through the hawse hole.
“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.