17 Strip Poker and Female Struck — Which of Course Have Nothing to Do With Each Other
When I was about sixteen, we took a trip to the Line Islands to get a cargo of guano.
“What in the hell is the use of getting a ship full of bird dirt?” I asked my father as we neared our destination.
He was balanced on the taffrail cleaning and oiling his sextant when I approached him.
“Well, besides stinkin’ worse than copra and bein’ a rotten cargo to carry through the heat of the tropics, it’s used for fertilizer and ammonia. Land folks ain’t so particular what they use to make their food grow,” he said.
I was keenly interested, for we were going to a part of the South Seas that was unknown to me. So much has been written about the colorful atmosphere of the South Sea islands, but little has been said about the tragedy that inhabits some of the desert rocks along the Equator known on the charts as the Line Islands.
No tropical foliage flourishes there, no sea blue lagoons, no fruits, flowers and long golden beaches enhance their nakedness. They are barren reefs, spewed up out of the sea by submarine volcanoes. As you approach them they look like snow-capped rocks with a fringe of white foam edging them from the breakers that crash against their cliffs. The screech of white gulls fills the air for miles around. The guano islands are the home of the sea fowl. There they lay their eggs in mating season. Millions of birds find those rock islands every year. The rocks are hardly fit for human habitation, yet a few men survive on them.
The French government owns the greatest number of those guano islands, and the income from them amounts to a small fortune every year.
I’ll always remember my trip to those places for two reasons. First, it was on that voyage that I was introduced to the mysteries of strip poker and second, I saw a man so “female struck” that he swam a mile through a rough sea to get away from me.
The night before we sighted the Islands, Fred Nelson, Swede, Bulgar and Oleson were sitting in the lee scupper under the fo’c’s’le head playing poker by the dim green glow of the starboard running light. I wasn’t allowed forward of the mizzen mast unless my Father was with me, for that was the sacred domain of the crew. However, I went forward every time I got a chance, when Father wasn’t looking. This particular night I waited until I heard him snoring on his settee before I tried it. Running along in the shadow of the sails on the leeward side I came upon the four men in the midst of the game.
They didn’t pay the least attention to me. I stood by and watched them for about five minutes and then I butted in.
“Deal me a hand, will you?” I asked.
Swede looked up at me and then spat a big stream of amber juice over the rail. Oleson pretended he hadn’t heard me, and Bulgar just scowled his disapproval of my presence. However, Fred Nelson was more sociable.
“Sure, Skipper, you can play next hand—but I advise you not to. This is strip poker we’re playing.”
For the first time I noticed certain oddities in the men’s appearance. Swede had on nothing but his underdrawers. His shirt and dungarees were piled beside Oleson. Bulgar’s pipe and leather belt were in front of Nelson. When the hand was finished Oleson handed over his clasp knife to Nelson also.
“See what it is? Now do you want to sit in?” asked Swede.
All I had on was a pair of overalls and a faded blue cotton blouse and me “as-is” underneath. With such a slim margin of safety to go on I probably would have withdrawn but for Nelson.
“Don’t think you’d better try, Skipper,” he said.
As usual, opposition made me stubborn.
“What’s the reason I hadn’t? Gimme cards!” and I plumped myself down.
Swede dealt me a hand. The cards were so dirty and worn and sticky with tobacco juice that it was hard to keep them separate in my hand.
“Ante up, Skipper,” said Oleson.
I looked at my hand; I didn’t even have a pair, but I wasn’t going to let them bluff me out.
“One leg of my overalls,” I piped up.
All except Swede laid down their cards.
“Ain’t you takin’ a chance?” said Nelson, looking at Swede’s drawers.
“No more than she is,” said Swede. “Raise you a whole bloomin’ pair of pants,” he bet, “and I better not lose!”
I could feel my face looked the picture of guilt.
“Two legs of my pants,” was my come-back.
“Call you,” grinned Swede. He showed a pair of jacks and a king, and I showed him a six, seven, a ten, and a queen and threespot.
“Hand over the wardrobe,” he said.
I stared at him. There was nothing under my pants but me. And my pants now belonged to Swede.
“Hand ’em over, Skipper,” he grinned.
Strip poker suddenly had become very unattractive.
“But—but—that’s all I got on,” I stuttered.
“What are you going to do, welsh?”
He stuck his chin out at me and his voice was the essence of contempt as he taunted:
“’Tain’t my fault if you force yourself into a strip poker game on just a pair of pants. What are you goin’ to do?”
I don’t know just what I would have done. Probably I would have taken off the overalls rather than fail to live up to the code of a true sailor, but Fred Nelson intervened.
“Skipper is a girl,” he said, “and she don’t take off nothin’.”
“I’d ’a’ give her my drawers if I’d lost,” protested Swede.
“All right, I’ll give you my pants,” snapped Nelson.
“It’s her pants I won!”
Nelson jumped to his feet.
“Do you take my pants or a punch in the guzzler?” he asked, very quiet, for that was the way he always was when he fought. He could whip any man on the ship except Father and they all knew it. Swede looked up at him and grinned.
“Gimme your pants, Nelson.”
Nelson yanked off his pants, threw them at Swede and sat down beside me in his underdrawers.
“I’m through with this game and so are you,” he said.
“But I want to win back your pants for you,” I pleaded with him. Bulgar, the sly bully of the lot, spoke up. “I know how you can stay in the game without taking off anything, Skipper.”
“How?”
He smiled craftily: “Pay your losses out of the slop chest.”
The slop chest is the sea-going term applied to the Captain’s ship store of gumboots, sailors’ overalls, shirts, socks, sou’westers and shoes, and tobacco. Father invested some of his own money each trip to stock up with supplies and the expenditure was often a big sacrifice for him to make, for money was as scarce as hen’s teeth. There was always something to eat up his profits: the ship had to go into drydock, then there were new canvas, ropes, and paint to be bought, bail for drunken sailors in foreign ports, to say nothing of cargo lost or damaged by storms. As a result Father kept a jealous eye on his slop chest. At sea when a sailor wanted to buy something the cost of the article was deducted from his pay at the end of the voyage.
This precious slop chest was stowed under the bunk in my cabin, and many a time in the night when a sailor had to get a sou’wester or warm socks or something because of sudden inclement weather, I would be routed from my bunk while Father dug under my mattress to get it for him. I had absolutely no sense of the economic value of things, for I never saw any money. Everything to me was an article of trade, and I would just as soon have given a fifteen dollar pair of rubber sea boots in exchange for a pineapple as a three cent piece of calico. The idea that the things in the slop chest were Father’s stores and important never occurred to me.
Naturally, therefore, I hailed Bulgar’s suggestion with delight. Nelson wouldn’t play but the others agreed I could stay in the game and pay my losses from the slop chest. But the next hand was no better for me. I got a pair of kings and I was so delighted with them that I grinned like a full moon as I bet. With one accord Swede, Oleson and Bulgar folded up their hands and wouldn’t bet with me. I was licked either way—if I bluffed they called me, or if I had them they wouldn’t come in, and in an hour of playing I lost three pairs of sea boots, one jersey sweater, ten pairs of socks, four shirts and eleven plugs of chewing tobacco.
“We want our winnings NOW!” they warned me, and I knew it wouldn’t be healthy to hold out on them. Nelson made no further attempt to help. He was evidently disgusted with me.
I went aft to raid the slop chest, but I didn’t trouble to let Father know I was doing it. I lugged my losings forward and paid them to the sailors and sneaked back into my bunk, where I fell asleep with no twinge of conscience.
The next morning Swede came to the wheel in new dungarees, jersey and shoes, Bulgar went about cleaning brass in a brand new shirt and socks and Oleson had two plugs of tobacco sticking out of his back pants pocket. Swede’s outfit caught Father’s eye of suspicion and I held my breath for fear he’d start an investigation. When Bulgar walked right past him I knew I was sunk.
“Where in the hell did you guys get the new outfits—have you been stealing out of the slop chest?” Father inquired. His question made me wonder where I would be the most comfortable, up in the crosstrees of the foremast, or hid down in the lazarette underneath a bale of rope.
“No, sir,” spoke up Bulgar. “We just had a bit of luck, sir.”
Father went below and I knew he was going to take an inventory—so I went aloft and got very busy with a bucket of grease oiling down the topmast. I figured that if I was doing some useful ship’s work when he caught me I would fare better. I hardly had time to get up to the crosstrees, swing into a bosun’s chair and start swabbing grease on when I heard Father’s voice booming out on the deck below:
“Call both watches on deck.”
Keeping one eye on my grease rag and the other on the scene below I didn’t miss a thing. Father made every man on board haul everything out of the fo’c’s’le on the deck where he rummaged through everything looking for the things that had disappeared out of the slop chest. Father yanked the shirt and sweater off Swede and Bulgar and made them strip. I heard the sailors trying to explain that they had bought those articles of clothing ashore before sailing—and Father’s answer to their alibis:
“Any louse that steals on the high seas ain’t worth killin’,” and he landed on Bulgar and knocked him head over heels. They took their medicine sailor-fashion without squealing and Father took their honest winnings back to his cabin—satisfied that he had taught his crew a lesson in honesty!
Swede and Oleson looked up at me in the rigging. I couldn’t hear what they called me but I was sure it was no term of affection, so I decided to remain aloft. I don’t know what they would have done to me but for Nelson and Stitches, who of course knew the story.
“Skipper is a kid and she never had a chance in a poker game with you robbers. It was honest stealin’ on her part and dirty stealin’ on yours and you got what was comin’ to you,” declared Stitches.
“And if you ain’t satisfied and wants to get even, I’m glad to give you some more,” added Nelson and then the cry from the look-out, “Land Ho!” ended the argument.
Our destination, the Line Islands, was in sight.
“You can’t go ashore here, Joan. There’s no tellin’ what kind of riffraff is livin’ on the island.”
Father sailed the ship in as near as he dared without striking any sunken reefs. There was no sign of life that we could see, nothing except myriads of seagulls circling overhead.
“Where do the guano gatherers live?” I inquired.
“In a rocky cave, near the water. They can’t live too high on the island because the fumes of the guano make poisonous gases.”
I climbed the rigging of the mizzen mast so that I could get a better view of the island. I hung on with my toes to the ratlines to keep from falling off, for the swells and backwash from the shore were rolling the ship like a pendulum. I watched carefully for about twenty minutes, and then I saw a tiny black speck splashing in the water. As it came nearer, I saw it was the figure of a naked man, swimming out towards us. He was so burned by the sun that he was almost black.
“On deck,” I called.
Father called back: “Hello?”
“Look at the native swimming out to us. He is just a quarter point off the stern,” and I indicated with my hand to the spot where I saw the man swimming.
“He’s comin’ out to make a bargain with us for a load of guano,” Father answered, megaphoning through his hands. I descended from my perch in the rigging by sliding hand over hand down a halyard. By the time I reached the poop deck, the “native” was within a hundred yards of us. We waved and called to him, and he raised a brown arm in answer. I was dressed in old faded overalls, and wore no blouse. My hair blew away from my face.
“What dialect does he speak?” I asked Father.
“One that you don’t know, so for once you won’t be able to hog the conversation—French!” I had never heard of a French dialect. I knew all the easy languages,—Samoan, Marquesan, Gilbertina, etc. but French was some savage language foreign to me. I wasn’t going to be left out of the greetings, so I hollered as loud as I could: “Hello you!”
The native was right under the stern. At the sound of my voice he looked up. I smiled down at him. “Hello again to you,” I said, and I smiled my best native trading smile. The native, who was a white Frenchman, stared up at me as if I were an apparition. He opened his lips as if to speak, his face flushed under its brown and he turned in the water as if struck by a bullet and swam back for the shore. Father called to him to stop. On he plunged back towards the island, and never once looked back.
“What in hell’s the matter with him?” asked Father of no one in particular.
“Female struck,” spoke up the mate. “These guys spend a lifetime on the islands alone and the sight of Joan with her exposed neck and shoulders and the curves around her hips set him nutty.”
“What was he afraid of me for?” I wanted to know. “I didn’t say anything except hello to him.”
“There’s a lot of things you got to learn about men, Skipper. I seen cases like this before. Sometimes the sight of a female drives them so crazy they kill themselves.”
At that time I couldn’t understand the mate’s explanation. Why should a man be afraid of me? Father sent the mate and three sailors ashore to make the dicker for the cargo. When they returned the mate asked to speak to Father alone. It was obvious that he did not intend for me to know what he had to tell.
I was determined to know, however, so Father took me down into the cabin and explained:
“A man isn’t complete without the love of a woman, some time in his life, Joan. A seagull can’t fly with one wing, and neither can human beings really live alone by themselves and be whole. That man was convicted of a crime in France when he was a young boy about nineteen. The French Government, instead of sendin’ him to Devil’s Island for life, gave him the choice of workin’ for a lifetime on this island. He lives worse than an animal in the foul atmosphere of bird manure. He eats nothin’ but bird eggs and raw fish, and him just catchin’ the sight of you made the man in him realize his aloneness.”
I had never been conscious of my sex before that time. Father’s words impressed me so deeply that I began to wonder about myself.
For three days we hove to while the crew made trips back and forth to the island in our boat with loads of guano. I had lost interest in the loading—I could only think of the derelict on that barren island.
two seagulls flying
group of men laying on the ground