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.
native woman bathing a baby
sailing ship in a storm