7 A Runaway Sea Horse
My days 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 had not made 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 the Neversink. Stitches’ boat was the Sonofabitch.
“I’ll wager you my boat’ll outsail yours, Skipper,” he said. “An’ if I lose you can embroider the name of your winner, the Neversink, 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 the Neversink on 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 the Neversink and the Sonofabitch careened along on their wheels. My boat took the lead and kept a couple of inches ahead of the Sonofabitch, 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 the Neversink over 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 embroider Sonofabitch in 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