18 A Shanghaied Crew and Scurvy Are Poor Bunkmates in a White Squall
The following September we set sail for the Gilbert Islands with a load of trading articles to exchange for pearl shell. In our crew were just three old members: Bulgar, the Swede and Axel Oleson. The remaining men were shipped aboard at Sydney.
There was a labor strike on in Sydney at the time and to find a crew of non-union men willing to ship for the voyage was impossible. Father was up against it, but a crew he had to have and he was never a man to be balked by seeming impossibilities.
Now there is a widespread belief that “shanghaiing” as a common practice flourishes only in the stories of Jack London, Conrad and other writers of sea tales, but deep sea captains and sailors know better. So Father in his difficulty sought out a “sailors’ runner,” a ratty-faced little crimp familiar with the waterfront, and made his deal—five pounds a head for a crew.
“I’ll want them aboard ship by five o’clock flood tide. I’m goin’ to sail tonight without waitin’ for any goddamned pilot and tugboat,” he said to the crimp and returned to the vessel.
About four thirty that afternoon a launch sputtered alongside, and the mate and two sailors lowered a Jacob’s ladder over the side. The man on the launch yelled up at them:
“Put over a cargo boom. These beggars won’t come to until you hit the Equator.”
I looked over the side and saw eight lumps of flesh, eight dead men, so it seemed, sprawled over the bottom of the launch like so many sacks of wet wheat. With every roll of the launch the bodies pitched from side to side in grotesque rhythm. Our men rigged up a cargo boom and tackle and the man on the launch slipped a running bowline around one of the limp hunks of flesh.
“Take it away!” he grunted, and the sailors, with my help, pulled up the load.
It was a blond, husky Scandinavian. His body landed on the deck with a dull thud.
“Is he dead?”
The mate only looked at me contemptuously—as if anything could kill a Swede—and threw back the tackle for the next load of flesh. Over and over again they repeated that process until a row of eight bodies was on deck. The mate told me to call my father. I went below, almost sick, for I thought the men were dead. However, I was better trained in the code of the sea than to let anyone see I was affected by the sight of eight men laid out like corpses on the deck of the schooner.
I brought Father back with me. He reached down and picked up the foot of the first man and let it drop back with a lifeless thud on the deck.
“He’ll be a good man on a halyard,” he said, and passed on to the next one. He was a dirty, uncouth-looking person so black with coal dust that he looked negroid.
“What a hell of a mess this is to soak me five pounds for,” and he passed on to the next and the next until he had felt the muscles of each one. Satisfied that he had a good load of “beef” to pull on ropes in a storm or pump ship if a leak should spring, Father signalled the launch to cast off.
Turning to the mate, Father said:
“Take these so and so’s forrard to the fo’c’s’le and lock them in, then come aft and stand by. We’ll sail out tonight anyway and sign those” (indicating the unconscious sailors) “on the Ship’s Articles when they come out of it. You, Joan, take the wheel. I’ll lend a hand to set enough sail to get out of here.”
I was just short of sixteen at that time, husky and as strong as most men, and I felt myself to be as good a sailor as ever held a ship to a course. I went up on the poop deck to the helm, unleashed it and pulled with all my strength on its spokes.
“Hard over,” called Father, and I slowly turned the big wheel.
“Hard over” means to turn the wheel completely around. Under my hands the wheel didn’t turn as quickly as it should have, and Father let out a volley of curses at me that made the sky blue, but it also put vitality into me or scared some more strength into my arms, for I pulled the helm around as the wind caught the topsails and we glided out the Heads for the Gilbert Islands.
It was a hard week, that first one out, for the men were so drugged and beaten that they were slow in regaining consciousness. Three sailors, Father, the cook and myself navigated that big schooner, which in fair weather ordinarily required sixteen men to handle. I took the helm in the daytime, the sailors stood by the fore and main masts and the cook tended the jibs. Father slept in his clothes.
On the fourth day out we ran into the electrical storms off Lord Howe Island. Lord Howe is a barren island off the Australian coast, around which all the fury of the China Sea, Indian Ocean and South Pacific gathers. I’ll never forget it—lightning so blinding and near that it made our eyes blur with blue shadows! Thunder which rattled so loud and so close that it reverberated on the deck!
And then, right in the midst of the thunderstorm the wind suddenly veered from southeast to north—northwest and we had to tack ship to keep from running aground.
The mate went aloft to free a tangled block from the mizzen topsail. He had reached the crosstrees and was straddled on them to balance himself as he freed the rope from the block. The lightning rods on the tops of the mast were alive with fire—they looked like huge gas jets aflame on the top of each spar. I was at the wheel, tied there by two ropes to keep from washing overboard in the seas that were sweeping over the poop deck. Father looked up to see if it was all clear aloft so he could let go the mizzen boom to tack over, when a streak of lightning made him cover his eyes with his hands to keep from being blinded. At the wheel I put my face down in my overalls’ bib, and I guess the other men hid their eyes from the fiery onslaught of streak lightning, for not one of them saw just what happened. The mate aloft must have touched a ring bolt of steel on the mast and received the full shock! He dropped from the crosstrees to the deck, and his body was crushed into a mangled pulp by the fall. Before anyone could reach the spot where he fell a green sea swept across the deck and carried him overboard! It was too horrible—too gruesome! I crumbled inside. I don’t know what would have happened to me if a sea hadn’t washed over the poop and almost smothered me with water bringing me to.
The ship was “around” or tacked, and we were trying to hold her head up to the wind and keep her out of the belly of the swells to avoid capsizing. We couldn’t possibly hold out much longer as the terrific strain had told on her strength. There seemed only one thing to be done as a last resort—revive the shanghaied sailors.
Father went into the fo’c’s’le and attempted to rouse them. They only moaned and turned over and slept, or didn’t move at all. It was four days later, exactly eight days from the time they were sent aboard ship, that they regained consciousness. The crimp had made a good job of them. He had first drugged them and then his gang beat them to lifelessness. Of the eight only two were sailors; the others were not worth their beans at sea as a crew. One was a waiter, another a truck driver, another a coal passer, another a cattle man and still another a hopeless dope fiend. The crimp had had a hard time finding heads to make up his blood money of five pounds apiece, so he had raided a waterfront saloon and made a wholesale slaughter of the available men he had found standing at the bar. All of them except the two sailors were seasick and cowardly of the storm.
With the mate dead and a bunch of landlubbers for a crew in one of the worst storms of the South Pacific, Father turned into a savage. The men had to sign on the Ship’s Articles as seamen. It is maritime law that every man voluntarily sign his own name to the Articles, and in doing so, he becomes liable to obey the laws of the sea as dictated by the master of the ship. Once those men had put their signatures to the Articles, Father had them! They didn’t want to sign, but when he invited them to sign or get off and walk, they wrote their names willingly.
Immediately after signing, the coal passer and cattle man made the mistake of refusing to go aloft to shift the topsails in the storm. Father took his revolver and pointed it at them.
“You dirty blank so and so’s, you’re sailors now. Get aloft and make fast those sails or you’ll go over the side. Swimming isn’t crowded around here,” and he pointed to the seething ocean to windward. They went aloft.
The entire trip up through the islands was like that. Father was captain, mate and part of the crew and I was chief helmsman. The crew were unwilling prisoners, and they made life aboard a lively hell for us all.
As a result of poor seamanship and adverse winds, it took us ninety-three days to reach Papua. The ship was a mass of wreckage on deck—broken pieces of booms and rigging cluttered the scuppers. There was never any time during that trip that we had an uneventful day. Southerly busters, those vicious white squalls of the South Seas, smacked our schooner and tossed us around like a cockleshell on the water. Then we reached the doldrums, that great area of deadly calms. Even in the calms there was no respite from the slapping and smashing of the rigging which was useless for sailing purposes and its battered condition. Ground swells from some distant storms shook the Minnie A. Caine until she wallowed like a drunken sailor.
Most people think the real dangers of the sea are storms, but to the deep sea sailor there is a terror greater than wind or sea which stalks in the wake of sailing ships long overdue—scurvy. Scurvy is caused by lack of fresh food, unhealthy water and heat on salt foods. The disease acts insidiously; the victim doesn’t know he has it until terrific pains in his stomach make it impossible for him to eat anything. Then come headaches, blinding and maddening. The body appears dry and withered like the husk of a coconut. Fever and delirium follow, and in a short time, if medical relief or fresh food is not obtained—death!
Contrary to popular ideas and the maritime law of all countries, a ship’s medicine chest usually contains nothing but Friar’s Balsam, which is a sea-going iodine, salts, and blue ointment for vermin; none of which is a cure for scurvy.
Under the hardships of our voyage it was no wonder that we fell victim. For days at a time, while the decks were awash with swirling seas, the cook could prepare no meals. Time and again vainly he attempted to build a fire in the galley but no sooner would it begin to draw than the ship would list heavily to port, submerging the galley, cook and his pans in green seas. As a consequence we lived on dried salt fish and lime juice. The shanghaied men couldn’t even stomach that, and they were the first to be stricken with scurvy. The coal passer had the worst dose of all. His teeth dropped out one by one. His body withered. He seemed at the point of death. The cattleman, who was a sailor by circumstance, lost his eyesight. None of us could sleep.
We put up the distress signal at the masthead and took turns standing on look-out aloft for signs of another ship or tramp steamer to bring us relief. That red flag branded us as an outlaw, a crippled ship with a diseased, dying crew aboard. All around us lay the monotonous circle of horizon without a sign of life, except for an occasional whale or school of flying fish. And so we wallowed on, expecting—waiting for death.
I was the last to get the scurvy. I suppose that was because I was the youngest and healthiest on board. When it did hit me it was horrible. I felt I was dying from the outside in. I would sit for hours and peel dead skin off my body. When I look back on those days now I wonder how we ever lived through it. Scurvy seems to make savages of men at sea—they lose all sense of balance. There is nowhere to turn for help—nothing to do but suffer and wait for it to finish you. Only my father raved at the bad luck:
“It’s a goddamned shame. If I had anything but a bunch of vomitin’ landlubbers for a crew we’d be in Honolulu now.” He paced up and down the poop deck from the rail to the binnacle and back. I crouched on the hawser bit astern, picking dead skin off my arm.
“Porpoise!!”
The cry brought us all to our feet. There, close to us on the windward side was a school of about twenty porpoises diving and snorting in the spray of the bowsprit.
“All hands on deck! Man the capstan! Stand by the harpoon!”
Father rushed forward over the debris on deck. In less than five minutes every living man aboard was on the fo’c’s’le head standing by to help land a porpoise.
A porpoise is a mammal and its meat is very like that of beef. If we could land one it would furnish fresh food for a week. Father stood down on the martingale under the jibboom, harpoon in hand. We waited praying for the porpoise to come near. The thin leader line from the harpoon was fastened to a three-quarter inch rope made fast to the capstan.
So eager was I to help land the porpoise that, not realizing what I was doing, I twisted the leader line of the harpoon around my hands. A big porpoise dived under the bow. Father hurled the harpoon. It struck the porpoise amidships and sunk in deep. The porpoise let out a squeal like a stuck pig and dived.
“Play out the leader line,” called Father.
He was going to let the porpoise have plenty of rope for it couldn’t get away with a steel harpoon through it, and sooner or later that harpoon would take its life. Six fathoms of line played out quickly, and then suddenly I was jerked with a terrific force to the edge of the fo’c’s’le head. The porpoise, diving deep, had used up the slack, and I couldn’t let go of the rope twisted around my hands. Slowly it slipped as the porpoise, with its two tons of weight, pulled, and the slipped rope burned inches into my hands, cutting, burning the flesh off down to the bone. I was being dragged overboard with only my own strength against that of the maddened, dying porpoise.
Two sailors grabbed me, trying to hold me back. They nearly pulled my arms from their sockets, but the porpoise took us all closer and closer to the edge of the low rail. Father looked up from the martingale and saw what was happening. He reached out, grabbed the taut leader line, and with a jerk using all his strength, managed to slack it for a moment. The porpoise, under the water, changed its course, turning back underneath the keel. That saved my life. The leader line caught in the hawse hole and held until one of the men cut the line free. The porpoise was gone, taking that harpoon with it.
The line was twisted and cut into my hands so deeply that Father had to pull it out. He looked at the raw flesh hanging on the bone, and without wasting words, dashed for the galley. In a minute he was back with a handful of wet salt.
“Hold out your hands.”
I held them out and he spread that wet salt on the deep burns. The pain was so great I thought I couldn’t stand it. I suppose now if that happened to me I would cry or moan or faint, but then I took it like a sailor. I cursed until the air was blue, and cursing that way held back the tears, for I would rather have been drawn and quartered than have let a sailor see me bawl—even though those sailors were seasick, shanghaied landlubbers.
The men set about to harpoon another porpoise and got one on deck within an hour. As they hoisted it aboard it opened its long snout and squealed and hollered. Father shot it several times, then chopped its head off with an ax.
The men were like vultures, hovering around for the first taste of its blood to relieve their fevered throats. The Jap cook snatched the ax from Father’s hand and licked the raw blood off it. Then Father hacked off a piece of blubber and meat for each sailor. He gave me a piece of its bloody liver and the tragedy then was not my burned hands, but that I couldn’t hold anything in them to eat. I lay down on the fo’c’s’le head and lapped up the blood, chewing at the liver like a dog.
That fresh blood saved our lives. Five days later we dropped anchor in Papua, a “plague ship” manned by semi-delirious men.
It is such things as this that make me wonder why land folks think being the daughter of a sea captain is so romantic.
flag flying over an island
group of natives dancing