“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:

San Francisco in April. High out of the network of masts and rigging of ships that made the waterfront look like a black spider web across the skyline, jerked the blue house flag, with its flying fish tails, of the famous Star, queen of the fleet of sailing ships in the Alaska salmon trade. The American flag fluttered no less proudly from her spanker gaff. It was Spring and sailing day!

The Star was making ready to sail for Wrangel, Alaska. On board the crew, canners and fishermen, one hundred and thirty-eight in all, eagerly awaited the start. It was a strange conglomeration of humans gathered from the ends of the earth. Quartered in the forward hold the Chinese canners disputed the space with thousands of bitterly resentful rats. A Chinese cook prepared their native food for the canners, and over the crowded hold, filled with squealing rats and chattering Chinese, a brass Joss god, made fast to an under beam, looked calmly down. Him the Chinese worshipped believing he would bring them good luck. What the rats thought about the brass Joss no one knew or cared. Probably they respected him for he was the only thing in the hold they could not bite successfully!

The crew of all nations, Swedes, Yankees, Chinese, Irish, lived in the fo’c’s’le head.

Amidships was a veritable little Italy. The Italian fishermen were housed in cabins on deck. They too carried their native Italian cook who prepared rich-smelling Italian foods. The aromas of their cooking, when wafted forward and merged with the smell of boiling rice and herbs from the Chinese hold, made a queer combination of Latin and Oriental odors.

Then, maintaining the peculiar social distinctions of the sea, the white tradesmen and officers of the ship and cannery lived aft in luxurious quarters. The walls of the cabins were of bird’s eye maple. In the dining salon hung a six foot oil painting of the Star under full sail outriding a hurricane. The swinging lamps were brass, ornately decorated with whales’ teeth and carved ivories. In my father’s cabin, curtains of red plush proclaimed the captain’s aloofness. A “telltale” compass over his bunk and a rack of rifles within easy reach were additional furnishings.

On April 8th, my father stood at the taffrail watching the finishing of the loading of great pieces of steel machinery for the cannery, barrels of oils and salt, and lumber to rebuild some of the warehouses of the company in far distant Wrangel. At his side stood my mother, fighting back, as she had done every year for fifteen years, the quiver of sorrow that sailing day always brought her. Father would be gone for six months. He would sail up past Nome into the frozen Arctic, and if luck was with him, sail back the following fall before the ice froze him in.

Father looked at her with a twinkle in his eye.

“What’s the matter, Mother?”

“Nothing,” she answered, “only I wish Joan was old enough so that I could go with you this trip. I feel you are in danger.” She forced a smile she was far from feeling. A deadly foreboding that seems to be instinctive with the womenfolk of deep sea sailors came upon her.

“Shame on you, Mother. Why I’ll outsail the Star of Alaska and the Star of Nome and the Star of the North by a month. Don’t let the crew see you weakening.” The mate interrupted them:

“Beg pardon, sir. It’s time to let the men knock off for lunch and their last mug of beer. It always makes them sail happier if they have an hour on sailing day to get drunk and kiss their sweethearts good-bye.”

“Let them knock off now and come back at four o’clock,” instructed Father, “I was a young fellow myself once.”

No sooner had the men left their stations on the deck and were ashore than a ripping, tearing roar brought Father rushing to the poop deck. The main yard had broken from the spar and had crashed through the rigging down to the deck as if cut by an invisible hand! It broke into three pieces, but miraculously injured no one. That ill omen was to be remembered later. A mast breaking in three pieces is a sign that before the trip is completed the vessel itself will break into as many parts. Folk laugh at the superstitions of sailormen, but few who have lived at sea will dispute their justification.

Instead of sailing, the Star went back to the drydock where the new yard was rigged on. It took three days, and on April 11th, at the five o’clock flood tide, the Star was once more ready to go. The crowd jostled on the docks. Chinese women in their quaint native costumes of pants and jackets stood on the wharf near the fo’c’s’le head, their waxen faces immobile beneath their shining black hair ornamented with jades and corals. The Italian women were most demonstrative. Their shawls were torn from their heads as they jumbled against each other, pushing for the extreme edge of the dock. Tears and laughter fought for supremacy as they waved good-bye to the Italian fishermen amidships. One young wife with two babies tugging at her skirts was praying, and here and there a rosary was thrust into the hands of the departing fishermen. The American friends of the officers and traders were on the dock nearest the stern, and handkerchiefs and jokes of bravado sent the Star off to the Arctic.

My father stood at the helm and with a bellow ordered,

“Let go the hawsers!”

“Let go the hawsers,” echoed back at him from the fo’c’s’le head, and the cobra-like ropes that held the Star to her mooring splashed limp into the bay as the men hauled in their slack on the capstan to the accompaniment of a chantey. The Chinese on board set off thousands of firecrackers to foil off the devil, and threw countless red streamers into the air. The Italians sang and gesticulated with their arms as the tug Dundee pulled the Star out into the harbor. My father is a registered pilot of San Francisco harbor, so he directed the course of the Star as they set her sails just off Alcatraz Island, and sailed majestically out of the Golden Gate and nosed her way north.

A quick trip of twenty-seven days brought the Star to Wrangel. In five months her mission was completed. She was loaded with fifty-four thousand cases of fine Alaska salmon to take back to San Francisco. It was a dull, thick daybreak as the tugs steamed alongside. All hands were aboard, glad their hard work was done, and jubilant at being homeward bound. The last to come down to the ship was my father. As he walked down the dock, little Arvis Babler, the nine year old daughter of the cannery superintendent, ran along beside him holding his hand. She chattered gaily about his ship. She even suggested that some day he would bring his little girl to Alaska to play with her. None of her light spirit infected my father. He only stared gloomily and silently at the loaded vessel.

“What’s the matter, Captain?” she asked, when Father didn’t respond to her. “I should think you would be happy today when you are going home.”

“I feel as if I were going to my grave,” he answered.

The tugs Hattie H. and Kyak were to tow the Star out. Nearly all the crew of these two tugs were drunk before they left the dock. In that alone they violated the code of the sea, but in Alaska at that time there was but one tugboat company and no competition to make a high standard of seamanship necessary. To make matters worse, the rival captains of the two tugs were fighting over which was to be the leading boat. Finally they settled their dispute, apparently to the satisfaction of neither, and the tugs started to pull the Star down the Wrangel Narrows, a distance of one hundred and twenty-five miles to the sea. In that dangerous passage there was only room for one ship to pass. At the mouth of the Narrows the Star was to set her sails and steer a course off shore for home. All day long the tugs towed her slowly. Meantime those on board the leading tug had celebrated their victory over the crew of the rival tug so thoroughly that the boat was left in charge of a boy mate—while the engineer, to put it mildly, was far from at his best.

Toward night the sky became overcast and the wind increased with the coming darkness. By eight o’clock a gale had arisen. It was off Coronation Island that my father noticed that the tugs were dragging his ship over to the north or dangerous side of the channel. He could hear, above the moaning of the gale, breakers crashing on the rocks! Father tried to signal the tugs of the danger, for their crews evidently had not realized it. Vainly he called through his megaphone, and vainly he sent up flares to attract the attention of the captain of the first tugboat. The condition of the men on those tugs must have kept them from recognizing the warning calls for they pulled on and on towards the shore in the face of the rising gale. Finally at the tugboat end of the forward hawser, some deck hand on the Hattie H. saw the cable slacken. They had towed the Star into a dangerous bight or indenture in the cliffs. Panic-stricken, the Hattie H. pulled off to one side leaving the Star in a straddled position between the two tugs. Neither tug was very powerful, but together and properly handled they could have dragged the ship out of danger. Instead the tugs see-sawed against each other doing nothing. Apparently those supposed to be in command did not know what to do.

Nearer and nearer the treacherous rocks the Star was driven by the wind. In desperation Father dropped both anchors to hold her. No sooner had he dropped the anchors than the tugboats, instead of fighting for the ship and the lives of the men on board, cut their towing hawsers and ran for it—deliberately steaming away at full speed, presumably for Wrangel. They didn’t even heave to long enough to see what the Star’s fate was. Later the master of the Hattie H. said he thought the Star was pounding to pieces on the rocks. (He had heard the anchor chain running out of the hawse pipe!) The Kyak steamed to shelter in the lee of an adjacent island. The Hattie H. returned to Wrangel, arriving the following Sunday morning. Her master, after the disaster, was asked why he did not stand by to assist the ship.

“What the hell could I do? She was wrecked anyway,” he went on record as saying. But had those tugs stood by what followed would never have happened.

On the Star the crew huddled on deck all night through, listening to the menacing hissing of the hidden surf crashing against the rocky cliffs. Would the anchors hold? That was fate—there was nothing they could do.

Dawn brought no hope. Scarce five hundred yards off loomed precipitous cliffs with huge waves dashing against them.

Only the anchors still held. If they should slip! But the men fought back that picture of inevitable destruction. Those tugs were surely coming back! They had only disappeared in the night to go for help! Waiting was torture. If only the tugs came back in time.

Hours passed. No tugs appeared. Then the anchors began to slip. The terrific strain of the huge waves was too great for the hooks to hold. Hours on hours! Waiting was gruesome now, as the anchors dragged and the men on board watched the jagged-toothed rocks come nearer. The heavy load of salmon in the holds shifted, and the Star listed first to starboard and then to port as each ground swell that rose lifted her high and carried her nearer the barren cliffs.

Father gave instructions to the men to make preparations for getting ashore when the ship struck. Life preservers were fastened on the Chinese who had become panic-stricken. The white officers and officials of the cannery company, realizing the added danger of a hundred crazed Chinese rioting, begged my father to batten them down in the hold like so much cattle to keep them off the decks. Father called the Boss Chinaman to him.

“Boss, you guarantee that your men not riot?” he began. “I won’t lock them down in hold. You tell them if danger come Captain tell you.”

That old Boss Chinaman had been with Father for fourteen years and he trusted him almost as he trusted his Joss god. He went back to his Chinamen in the hold and told them of my father’s promise, and they were calmed to a degree. They cramped together in their hold paralyzed with fear, but they kept off the decks.

After Father had seen to the Chinamen and Italian fishermen, he returned aft to the officers’ quarters and told them to be prepared for the worst as the anchors were useless now. Down in the stuffy red plush cabin the men sat around the chart table. They were all silent and depressed. They all had a look of finality on their faces. It was small choice—on deck they could see sure death looming up; in the cabin they could shut their eyes to it and wait! In the last few moments of their lives strange reactions took place in them. The clerk of the cannery, a man about thirty-three years of age, pale and husky-voiced, asked my father to take the money he had, nine hundred dollars, and give it to his family, when my father reached San Francisco. Another man asked Father to take a message to his wife, and still another broke out into vile profanity. A huge man, one of the wealthy owners of the cannery, forgot his pose of dignity and knelt down on the cabin floor and prayed like a frightened child.

“You all have the same chances, men, and each one of you will bear your own responsibility,” Father told them in answer to their pleas.

He set about to have a trunk packed with medicines and stimulants which was taken on deck. Later that trunk was picked up in the wreckage ashore and the contents helped revive some of the men and dress their injuries. Only four lived of the white men who sat around the table in the cabin awaiting the verdict of the storm.

On deck the flying spray from the mountainous seas was like a white blinding screen, but Father could see Ole Swenson, a Norse man, powerful and gigantic, standing on the fo’c’s’le head scanning the horizon for the return of the tugs. Swenson saw nothing but the storm rising in velocity, and the cliffs looming blacker on shore. Roaring and cursing against the fate that was murdering his beloved ship, Ole Swenson jumped into the sea to end his agony.

It was only a matter of minutes before sure death would claim the hundred and thirty-eight men on the Star. Father called for volunteers to man a boat and take a line ashore so that a breeches buoy could be rigged. A breeches buoy is a little buoy on a rope, made fast to the mast and on some point on shore, much like a big pulley line, by which shipwrecked men can slide to the mainland high above a pounding surf. Four young men responded to his call for volunteers. Among them were two brothers, Hasen by name. One of them, the younger, couldn’t swim. His older brother urged him not to go. He, the older one would go, for he was a strong swimmer. The younger boy would not hear his pleading and went first. The good swimmer was drowned just out of reach of help a few moments later.

With great difficulty the crew swung a lifeboat off its davits with the four young men in it fighting for their lives against the running sea. The men on the Star watched them pull for the shore—watched them almost get in—and then saw their shell of a boat dashed on the rocks of the narrow beach. Three of them jumped to safety and were cheered by the crew on board whose lives they would save.

The three men dragged the rope up and fastened it on a tree trunk high out of reach of the waves. This done, they turned their attention to fastening the running rope which would propel the breeches buoy, but that line had broken loose and was lost in the sea. Father called for another volunteer to go ashore with another line to replace it. The ship’s carpenter stepped forward. He tied the rope to his body and ascended the rigging, then hand over hand he slid along the rope which the men had stretched to the shore. The Star was toppling like a drunken sailor from side to side. The men on board watched the carpenter get caught in a green comber which first sucked him under and then threw him high in the air. When he was almost ashore an extra hard strain flipped him off like a fly from a rubber band. He struck the water with a terrific blow on his back. He was close enough to shore for the three surviving young men to pull him in to safety.

Then the end came! The Star crashed on the saw-toothed rocks. The forward part of her, the fo’c’s’le head and the foremast broke off just before the crew fled aft. They hung on like leeches to the after railing and deck houses. The force of the relentless pounding sea was so great that the Star quivered and broke into three pieces, just as her yard arm had broken on that ominous day in San Francisco. The stern of the ship was all that was afloat and that was covered by screaming, frightened men. The sea around was a seething mass of salmon cases, dead Chinamen, screaming Italians and Americans being smothered in the spray. The waves licked up viciously as if to devour the few hanging on for life on the stern. Clinging to the wheelhouse and after railing, a small group of officials and white men held their balance. A sea lifted a piece of wreckage to windward as if to capsize it and most of the men jumped in the opposite direction to avoid being pinned beneath. Three remained with my father. The piece of wreckage, instead of turning turtle to windward, was caught in the backwash of a wave and capsized with all remaining hands to leeward! They came up into a seething maelstrom of pitching wreckage, packing-cases swirling, outstretched arms and kicking legs of drowning men, shrieks of fear and the terrible seas breaking with a roar over all. And on the shore, only two hundred yards away, four of the five men who had taken the first desperate chances, waited helpless. They scanned the incoming combers for bodies, Chinese or white, that might wash in close enough to fish out, but the shore was abrupt and it had become piled with the cargo and wreckage from the Star. The men could reach only a few and yank them out of the jaws of the sea as they washed in.

When the last man had left the wreck my father jumped overboard. He said it took about a half a minute for him to reach the surface. He felt a heavy bulk above his head when he was under the water. He thought it was the keel of his ship and that he was pinned beneath it. Holding his breath, he made one herculean effort to rise to the surface. The “bulk” over his head was the top of one of the hatchings which had broken loose from the ship and was floating on the sea. Father struck out for the shore. The icy water numbed his senses. He remembered nothing more. A big green roller crested with salmon cases overtook him and one of them struck him on the head and mercifully knocked him unconscious. The backwash of the surf carried his inert body to the beach.

Of the one hundred and thirty-eight men on board, only twenty-seven survived. Those that reached the shore before my father set about to rescue the others. Two of them, the carpenter and a Scotch sailor named Frank Muir, pulled my father’s body out of the water.

“The Old Man’s drowned. Let’s pull out the living ones,” spoke up the carpenter and he went down the beach to salvage more of the men. Frank Muir was as devoted to my father as a son. He didn’t heed the carpenter, but dragged the apparently dead body to the shelter of a rock and tried to revive him. It seemed a thankless task. The Captain was gone. If he couldn’t save him he would at least bury him away from the others, and Frank Muir carried Father higher up to a little table of rock in the cliff. There he rolled him and pounded him until a glow of life came into his battered, frozen body.

By late afternoon no life could be seen in the surf. My father was so crippled and frozen that he couldn’t walk. He crawled around on all fours directing his men in reviving the others. No rest for any until, beyond any doubt, all were rescued that it was possible to rescue.

“We won’t give up until we find all of us,” said my father, and the twenty-seven survivors agreed to a man.

They set about to search the wreckage that was piled high on the beach for bodies. They found several groups of men, dead men, so entangled and twisted together by the churning of the sea that they couldn’t be pulled apart. Dismembered bodies were strewn on the rocky coast like driftwood. Arms and legs and headless trunks washed back and forth in the foam. One living being was found in the mess, a Japanese. He was buried in a hill of salmon cases. The men had to burrow to get into it. He was very weak through loss of blood from a gash extending from his temple the length of his chin!

By dragging wreckage together the men built a huge fire around which they snuggled for warmth. Instead of relief the fire was only an added torture, a Dante’s Inferno, for the thick smoke from the damp wood blinded them.

In the morning the bodies of the white men were gathered, and shallow graves dug for them in the rocky shore to keep the wolves from eating them. Over the graves Father ordered the men to pile heavy debris so that the sea washing up couldn’t snatch them back to a watery grave.

The lot of the survivors was almost as bad as that of the lost men, for there was no sign of rescue, and the coast was barren of habitation for hundreds of miles around. The icy wind made existence almost impossible.

The next day one of the tugs returned. Her captain was surprised to see the men ashore for he had not dreamed that supposedly dead men could live to tell the tale. It was too rough to send a boat in, but the tug hove to until the following day, when the crew took aboard the survivors and returned to Wrangel. The survivors were so incensed against the tug crew for cutting the hawser and sending one hundred and eleven men to their death that they started to murder them. Father stopped the violence. He said the law would deal with the tug people when the facts were made known. At Wrangel the survivors were furnished clothing from the cannery store and sent by steamers to San Francisco.

Several days after the wreck, the company’s tugs were sent with a crew to dispose of the bodies on Coronation Island. They found an indescribable confusion of corpses, provisions and debris covering the shore for a depth of many feet. Pieces of human bodies were mingled with the sides of hams and bacons and canned goods which the sea spewed up from the ship’s holds. Instead of segregating the bodies, the rescue crew drove picks into them and dragged them into heaps. After they had made piles of human wreckage they poured oil over them and set them afire like so much rubbish. Then they did something that is almost beyond human comprehension. After they had burned the bodies, they salvaged the hams and bacons and other foods they found mixed with the dead men and took them back to Wrangel where they sold them to the Eskimos.

What became of the few survivors? They were scattered by the company that owned the tugboats so that they couldn’t be used to witness against them. Those whose injuries prevented employment were treated in hospitals—the others were placed on various ships.

My mother was in San Francisco waiting for any bit of news of the survivors. The report came to her that my father’s dead body had been found, mangled almost beyond recognition, and then the report was confirmed. I was only six months old at the time. The shock to my mother brought her an illness from which she has never recovered. It was through this illness that I came to be raised by my father.

Father was retained on full salary during the official investigation of the wreck. Then he learned how much law, justice or right mean to greedy and selfish men. The tugs belonged to the same company that owned the Star. If the responsibility for the wreck was fastened on the two captains of the tugboats, the corporation faced enormous damage suits from the families and dependents of the hundred and eleven dead men. So the owners used every bit of their influence and resources to protect the guilty tugboat captains. The verdict acquitted them—the blame rested on the gale! And thus they settled the most famous and most unnecessary wreck in American maritime history. My father was fired in disgrace with the remark: “We have no ship for you now.”

That was the way he was rewarded for his effort to procure the “justice” he had promised his men when they wanted to avenge the murder done by the crews of the tugboats. The slogan went from Alaska to Seattle after the verdict: “Don’t kick Power.”

Fifteen years of faithful and intelligent service in the Arctic swept away in a night! Father could never go North again. The bodies of a hundred and eleven men on the rocks of Coronation Island would drive him to murder. He bought an old schooner and turned to the opposite end of the world, the South Seas, warmth and maybe forgetfulness!—But he still carries the bitterness and hate in his heart!

Most of the men I knew were typical old shellback sailors, a species of human that began to go out with the increase of steam vessels until now the type is almost extinct. The shellback was unlike any other human, a law unto himself, with few wants and a large philosophy of content that was none the less real because he grumbled all the time. His ration of tobacco, enough money for grog, and a few days in port at the end of a long sea trip to blow his pay on some skirt, satisfied his creature desires. For mental relaxation he cursed the ship, cursed his officers, cursed the grub and cursed the cook, and withal, he wouldn’t have traded places with any king on his throne.

The shellback’s attitude toward the sea was all his own, and quite typical of the breed. He loved it—he lived on it. He expected to be on top of the waves all his life and beneath them when he died. And so fatalistic was he, that half of the deep sea sailors never learned to swim! Stitches expressed the attitude best.

“What’s the use of learnin’ to swim?” he argued. “Any sailor dumb enough to fall overboard oughta drown and if he’s washed overboard he couldn’t swim anyhow—so what’s the use?”

“But Father made me learn to swim,” I protested.

“That’s different,” grinned Stitches. “You see, Skipper, the Captain knows a woman ain’t got sense enough not to fall overboard. Now if you was to fall overboard and couldn’t swim, some dumb sailor, whether he could swim or not, would jump in and get drowned trying to save you; but bein’ as you kin swim, if you fall overboard, nobody don’t worry—they just toss you a rope and you pull out by yourself and the Captain don’t lose no good sailor. All that happens is you come back aboard and you get your stern tanned with a rope’s end to warm up the chill. No ma’am! Captain ain’t goin’ to let no good sailor go dead tryin’ to save a woman.”

Quite unconvinced, I puzzled and puzzled over Stitches’ point of view, but it was not until some years later, in one tragic moment, that I learned how wide can be the difference between a man’s philosophy and his action in a crisis.

Next to Stitches the most interesting shellback I ever knew was John Henry, a withered old seaman close to seventy, with a cracked whiskey voice and a face so furrowed that it looked like the relief map of a mountain range. He chawed a hunk of tobacco incessantly and the juice drooled down his chin, leaving a little yellow rut marked in his whiskers. He had sailed the Horn a hundred times, to hear him tell it, and he would have been a captain long ago instead of a common seaman, only a captain couldn’t get drunk in public on the waterfront—so John Henry preferred not to be a captain. But for all his shortcomings, John Henry was a real seaman. An ordinary gale was music to his soul and a hurricane seemed to take off thirty years—for no young man could hold to the foot ropes aloft better than he and few could steer a dangerous course as well.

We shipped John Henry at Frisco and in a week Stitches’ nose was out of joint, for John Henry had quite won me. He would sit for hours, on his watch below, and teach me to tie intricate sailor knots—everything from splices, monkey fists, running bowlines, Turk’s heads, true lover’s knots to a hangman’s noose.

“I bin in every jail from Seattle to Port Said,” he confided, “an’ I can learn you every kind of a knot they use for killin’ off undesirables.”

Stitches was disgusted.

“Damned old shellback! Teaching you how to tie knots to get rid of undesirables, is he? I dunno nobody as undesirable as he is. If he had what was comin’ to him, somebody’d tie a knot for him long ago. Mebbe they will yet.”

On the end of a halyard John Henry was chief chanteyman. One day I was helping haul in the slack of the fore topsail and he said:

“You gotta eat more beans before you can pull like a regular sailor. Women ain’t no use on a ship except to eat up grub.”

Then he burst into a chantey that sailors sing about “Womenfolk on Ships,” and put my name in it.

This is the song:

“Aw, what the hell do you mean by that?” I asked. “I can do something that nobody in the fo’c’s’le can do and that is, I can navigate. Father’s taught me how to find our position by the Southern Cross at night,” I boasted.

“Yeh? Well, I still says women ain’t got no place on shipboard. Why, they can’t even talk like sailors,” and he spat a juicy stream with unerring accuracy through the hawse hole on the port side of the ship.

He had thrown down the challenge to me to make good as a sailor. I was no frail little Captain’s daughter that the sailors slew each other to get. I had to win them! From that day on I never lost an opportunity to emulate a deep sea sailor in every way.

At night in my cabin I rubbed my hands over rough rope to make callouses. I began to practise every swear word I heard the sailors use. After a month of careful observation I was able to curse four minutes in succession and never repeat a word. When I had them all down glibly I waylaid John Henry.

“Listen, you bastard,” I started, and then I traced his ancestors from several kinds of animals down to biological defects in himself and compared him with every known form of low life and waste products imaginable. When I finished my four minute tirade I stood on guard, thinking he would make a pass at me. Instead he listened intently, then his face broke into a grin:

“You’re improvin’, Skipper,” he complimented me. I was so elated at winning his approval that I thought I would try my vocabulary out on my father. I went up on the poop deck where Father was sitting, smoking his pipe.

“Tell me to do something,” I invited him.

“Now, what are you up to?” he asked suspiciously.

“Just you tell me to do something as if I was a sailor in the fo’c’s’le,” I repeated.

“All right,” he replied, pleased at what appeared to be my desire to work. “You get a chip-hammer and chip the rust off the anchor chains. They got to be given a coat of red lead to keep them from rusting away.”

Then I let fly with my newly acquired sea language. I got as far as one-half minute of it when I felt myself going through space toward the cabin below with my father attached to my collar and the seat of my pants.

“Where in the so and so did you hear any such language as that?” he shouted.

“From you when you’re tacking ship and the wind won’t catch the sails,” I answered, wishing I had never learned them.

“I’ll be goddamned if you ever heard your father curse,” he yelled. “I’ll break your damned neck if I ever hear you curse again—do you hear?”

I heard him. The whole ship heard him with glee. Stitches said he embarrassed the flying fish! Father went on:

“Your mouth ain’t fit to put grub in after such language,” he roared, “so you don’t get no meals until you forget every curse word you know!” and with that he tied a rag over my mouth and went after a piece of rope to warm my posterior.

I was in my bunk, my mouth tied up and my behind too sore to sit on. What I thought of John Henry was worse than the words I had memorized to impress him. I’d get even with him if I died in the attempt. Lying down there on my stomach I couldn’t understand where the justice of it came in. I had tried to be a regular sailor and had got the worst of it. However, I was far from licked—I mean in spirit.

I amused myself by watching some bedbugs parading on my straw mattress. Then they gave me an idea. I caught a few and put them on me. At least I could be lousy, and so that much nearer to perfection as a seaman!

At twenty minutes past five the cabin-boy rang the supper bell. I was hungry, but I didn’t dare to leave my cabin. I stuck my head out of my porthole and watched the foam making pictures on the water. From experience I knew that was the easiest and surest way to make myself sleepy. Next morning I awoke, ravenously hungry and oh, how repentant my empty insides made me!

I found Father behind a rapidly disappearing bowl of oatmeal in the dining saloon.

“Hey, I’ll never curse any more if I can eat,” I promised him. He grunted his forgiveness, then added:

“We’ll be in Brisbane along about noon today. Don’t you dare leave the ship.”

“Can’t I be the watchman in port and save you the wages?” I inquired, eager to get back in his good graces again.

“That wouldn’t be such a bad idea. I don’t want none of the crew ashore in this port. I’ll have to bail them out of jail for drunkenness, and I haven’t got the time nor the money to do that.”

“I won’t let any of them get away,” I assured him.

At about two o’clock we pulled into the harbor after sailing up the long Brisbane River. The Customs officials came aboard and sealed up our stores and tobacco. Then came the port doctors to examine the crew.

“Have the crew strip and line up on deck for examinations, Captain,” instructed one of the doctors. “Everyone of them has to be vaccinated before you can land here. We’ve got some smallpox ashore started by sailors off a ship from China and the Philippines and the harbor is under quarantine.”

I hurried down to the main deck to take my place in the line-up of the crew. I was the last in the line. The doctor looked at me curiously, and then said,

“Well, well, little one, if you aren’t the very picture of health,” and he pinched my muscles, admiringly.

“No, I’m not,” I assured him, “I have had everything that sailors have, worse than they get it. You better vaccinate me good,” I advised. “I even have bedbugs on me.”

That doctor looked horrified, but he dug into my arm with three long scratches even deeper than the men’s. It hurt like the devil, but I was very proud at that moment because I had as many as John Henry and just as deep. To this day I carry those scars—proud proof of my equality with sailors.

Before Father went ashore with the Customs officials he admonished me again to let no sailor have shore leave.

“The mate will be busy discharging cargo, and I may not be back before late tonight, so you keep your eye on the gangway.”

I took up my station at the gangway and chawed on some dried prunes. They were as close to seamen’s tobacco as I dared attempt. The cabin-boy tried to go ashore, but I pushed him back. One or two of the sailors made a bluff at sneaking past but I stood in the middle of the gangway with a belaying pin and forgetting Father’s lesson, I laid down the law in language to make John Henry proud. Each time they retired, defeated, but chuckling.

I was hot in the sun, but I didn’t care. Proudly I stood my post until six o’clock, when the crew knocked off discharging. Then came the supper bell, and of course, no one could expect me to stay on guard at grub time. In my father’s absence I sat in his place opposite the two mates. After I had finished my meal I picked my teeth with a fork just as I had watched the second mate do so many times before. I wouldn’t have dared to do that with Father present.

I strolled up on deck to take up my gangway watch again. If any sailor got ashore it would be over my dead body, I promised myself. I sat there for fully two hours.

There was no sign of life from the fo’c’s’le. Not one man came out to cross that gangway and go ashore.

“Huh!” I gloated to myself, “they’re afraid of me. They know they can’t get away with anything with me here watching.”

I was so full of my own sense of importance and authority that I didn’t suspect anything queer in the silence forward, until the cabin-boy came aft, after taking the dinner basket back to the galley.

“All them guys forrard is ashore and I’m going to go ashore too,” he sniffed at me contemptuously.

“What?” I asked, too surprised to believe I had heard him aright.

“Sure, they all went ashore while you was eating your grub. Nobody left for’ard except the cook.”

What could I do? I had gained Father’s respect only to lose it when his back was turned. I thought at first I’d go ashore and find the sailors in the saloons and bring them back on board before Father got back. That plan wasn’t wise, though, for, if I left, the cabin-boy and the two mates might go ashore in my absence and I would be a complete failure.

I took up the belaying pin and perched myself on the top of the gangway, and waited. I waited until long past midnight before I heard a human sound on the dock. Suddenly my ear caught a thick, throaty song dimly coming from among the cargo piles on the dock: