“We’ll have to dodge the hurricanes south of the Equator this trip,” said my father to the mate, as we sailed out of Adelaide, South Australia, with a load of salt for the States. “With a dead weight on board of wet salt it’ll be too dangerous to try to outride the storms at this time of the year.”

It was April—just the beginning of tropic winter time. By the time we had sailed south of Tasmania and had circled the South Island of New Zealand, which would take about two months, we would be right in the midst of the worst weather of the year.

“We better get the fog horn out and the riding lights trimmed if you’re going to take that south passage, Captain,” observed the mate. “Them fogs and mists from the Antarctic are mean beggars.”

I was soon to find out why the mate referred to the Antarctic as mean. Father had set a course around to the southward of Tasmania. For three weeks we sailed with fair wind and clear skies, and then the fair wind gradually changed to a stinging sharpness. The skies misted up in a sort of transparent fog, and mirages appeared on the horizon. Mirrored against the indefinite horizon were two islands with tropical foliage seemingly floating in space. The mirage is a dangerous thing to mariners, for it confuses even the most careful navigation.

“Joan, you ain’t much use, you go on the fo’c’s’le head and turn the foghorn, three short blasts a minute, then one long one,” said my father.

“Are you afraid of running into another vessel down here?” I asked.

“Not a chance of sighting even a hunk of driftwood, but the marine law says we have to squawk a foghorn when we get in the iceberg region.”

I had never seen an iceberg, and I was over-eager to be on the lookout on the fo’c’s’le head to sight the first one. Our foghorn was a contraption that looked like a big coffee grinder. It was green with tarnish and thick with rust. I took my position just port of the capstan and ground away. I was rewarded by a rasping grunt. It took all my strength to spin the handle around just to make one blast. In spite of the cold I soon got very warm trying to make the three short and one long blasts come. Father came forward and watched me straining away on it. He grinned at my exhaustion and said he thought that would keep me out of deviltry for a while, or make me so tired that I’d be willing to sleep and give him a respite from watching me.

The noise of the horn began to echo back at me in an eerie tone. I called to Father:

“We must be near land. The echo is coming back at me strong.”

He dashed to the fo’c’s’le head, and peered into the thickening mush of fog. The sea was so still that every sound became magnified. In a few minutes the suck-suck sound of water washing against some bulk came to our ears.

“Drop the topsails,” he bellowed, “bring her around.” With a violent jerk, the ship came up in the wind and stopped. Ahead of us, not more than five hundred yards away, loomed a giant iceberg. As we watched it, it sank deep in the black water and then, as if it were some living beast, it heaved high out of the sea. The swish of the water around it, the suction of its movements, made a dangerous current. We began to drift nearer to it. Our ship had no power except that of the sails, and the wind had dropped and left them limp and powerless.

“Throw over the kedge anchors,” Father ordered. Kedge anchors are small, and used for emergency cases. The men rushed aft and threw one over each side the vessel. They gave weight and pulled us back from drifting head on to the iceberg. For a few minutes they held, but the water around us was a seething mass of cross currents. Other bergs, larger and deeper, were in the offing. We had run into a whole nest of them. A steamer could have backed away, turned around, and left the place of danger, but our ship was helpless to move. The bergs made deep valleys, and whatever wind there was was cut off by their height. The water sounded as if it were boiling around us. The mate threw over a chip of wood to see which way we were drifting, but the chip just whirled around and went down. A typhoon would have been a welcome visitor then, for at least its wind would have carried us away—but just being becalmed, waiting for the jaws of the iceberg to finish us, was like a terrible nightmare.

The cabin-boy and the Jap cook crouched behind the galley, pale and shaking with fright. Father’s face was set grimly. A frozen death awaited us. Things at sea seem to take on human qualities. The perversity of the wind was the curse of some dead sea captain, and baffling calms were from the souls of lost sailors. That nearest iceberg was like a sea beast gloating over us as its prey.

“All hands on deck!” went the cry from Father, and it was repeated down the fo’c’s’le. The men came scrambling up, buttoning their oilskins and sou’westers around themselves closely. When they were all ready Father turned to them:

“You’ve got one chance in a thousand to get out of here with your lives. Throw overboard the cargo.”

In a flash the crew were tearing away the battens off the hatches. If the heavy cargo was thrown overboard, the ship would ride lighter and higher on the waves, and the impact from a smash would be lessened. The curses of the men in the hold as they chucked up sacks of salt beat a staccato on the still air.

“Joan, you and the cook and cabin-boy load up the lifeboat. Put tins of hardtack, a keg of water and a tarpaulin in it.” With those instructions he took his post at the fo’c’s’le head and watched our ship go nearer the bergs. Two frigate birds with long spiked tails hovered above. A frantic little mother-carries-her-chicken bird flew around and around in a dizzy circle near the stern. And Father just waited! With each roll of the ship we came nearer. The crew worked throwing out the sacks of salt like men possessed, and the ship lightened.

Father ordered the rope bumpers put out, and two cork buoys lowered over the bowsprit to break the crash if we hit the iceberg. The ship wouldn’t answer to the rudder, for the currents were more powerful. Just as we braced ourselves for the destroying collision we were caught in an eddy that lifted us high on the water and sent our ship dizzily about one hundred yards past the iceberg. Our relief was so great that we didn’t mind the loss of cargo.

All night long we drifted in the ice floes, miraculously avoiding being crushed by them.

The following morning we found ourselves afloat in a world of white icebergs and thick mist. It seemed as though we were at the end of the world. It was difficult for Father to figure out our position, as there was no sun, and to navigate by dead reckoning was useless as the log line couldn’t register how much we had drifted in the cross currents. For a week that continued—breathless days and nights that were ghostly in those white canyons of frozen water.

Sometimes in the night we could hear the screech of sea birds leaving the ice, and then silence again.

Whenever any real danger was upon us my father used to whistle or sing, or play his old water-soaked violin. I asked him how he could be so gay when death was staring us all in the face, and he said:

“What the hell do you expect me to do, bawl about it? Besides, if the crew hear me singin’ they’ll think there’s nothin’ to be afraid of and it keeps their guts from freezin’ inside of them.”

He sang often in the two weeks that followed as we blindly picked our way out of the iceberg region. The first time the sun shone after that was about three hundred miles southeast of New Zealand. A stiff breeze cleared the sky, and our sails bellied out tautly under it.

“We’ll sail due East, Mr. Swanson,” Father said to the mate, “and try and make Pitcairn. I haven’t been there for years and I want Joan to see it.”

I had heard the name of Pitcairn Island all my life. Every sailor looks upon it as the haven for seafarers. From their descriptions it was the one perfect spot on earth, free from worries, money, and work.

Old Stitches used to tell me about Pitcairn and its qualities of a paradise, but I thought it was the ravings of a mind that had had too much liquor and too many girls in port.

“What are we going to see on Pitcairn?” I asked my father.

“White natives. It’s the only South Sea island that has a tribe of English-speaking, light-skinned inhabitants.”

I was thrilled at the prospect of visiting Pitcairn—for white people were more of a curiosity to me than natives. As our ship nosed her way across the sea towards Pitcairn, I spent many hours listening to tales about that strange island from my father and two old sailors who had been there often.

When Kipling gave to the world his much overquoted lines, “East is East and West is West and never the twain shall meet,” he probably forgot that in the most remote part of the South Seas, East and West had met and had formed a race of people, living in a high degree of civilization and in a community almost free from sin—to disprove his theory.

I looked up the island on the chart, and found it marked there with an inconsequential dot, and flaunting the austere name of “Pitcairn, 23 degrees S. latitude, 120 W. longitude.” By latitude and longitude I can locate a spot on the ocean as accurately as a landlubber can find 42nd Street and Broadway.

Father saw me studying the chart, and observed:

“On the approach from the southeast the island looks like a cone of rock juttin’ out of the sea. Some times mariners call it ‘Neptune’s Thimble’ because of its resemblance to a thimble in shape.”

“How did anybody get on a rock island so far away from the big island groups?” I asked.

“I’ll tell you, Joan, because I think you ought to know the whole romance of Pitcairn. Lots of folks has written about it, but none of them know all the facts like we sailormen know.”

“Have the islanders been there forever?” I wanted to know.

“Nope. You see in the year 1789 His Majesty’s Ship Bounty was sent out from England to the South Seas to gather breadfruit trees for the purpose of transplantin’ the same in the British West Indies. In command of the Bounty was a tyrannical, overbearin’ taskmaster, a regular s.o.b. His name was Lieutenant William Bligh, and the crew was afraid of him, and at the same time they hated his guts.

“For months there had been a seething undercurrent of revolt brewing in the fo’c’s’le, and it was led by the ship’s carpenter, a Mr. Christian. They laid their plans carefully for mutiny—but they bided their time until the Bounty sailed into the vicinity of Tahiti.”

“What good would it do to mutiny in the South Seas?” I asked, for I knew that escape in the islands was almost impossible for a white man fugitive on English possessions.

“Huh,” snorted Father, “those bastards were so sore on Old Man Bligh they didn’t give a damn what became of them just so as they got rid of him and his officers.” And from Father I learned how the “white native island” was founded.

When Mr. Christian learned from one of the officers that the Bounty was about two hundred miles off Tahiti he gave the signal for the mutiny. With more daring than the pirates of the Arabian Nights the crew mutinied. They bound and gagged the captain and those officers that were loyal to him, and set them adrift in the open sea in the ship’s cutter which they had provisioned and watered. Christian assumed command of the Bounty and her mutineers.

The abandoned captain and officers drifted for weeks through uncharted, shark-infested waters. They circumvented a dangerous coral shoal to land on what appeared to be a fertile uncharted island, only to be driven from there by the cannibalistic inhabitants. After a time their supplies ran short, and they subsisted on turtle, sun-dried fish—and saved the raindrops for water.

Bligh was stricken with a peculiar malady from the strain and exposure. His officers had to save his life because he alone knew how to navigate, and that little cutter had to make some port soon, or their goose was cooked. They didn’t dare land on any of the islands that weren’t charted because they might run into a nest of cannibals again.

Nowadays we have charts and surveys of the islands, but in 1789 a lot of these atolls were never heard of.

They had to get some fresh water and food for Bligh or he’d die on them, so one night the officers put into an atoll island and stole fresh fruits and coconuts to nourish him. Weeks drifted into months and at the end of five months they reached New Guinea, a distance of three thousand five hundred miles from where they were set adrift. From New Guinea they secured passage on a trading schooner to Australia. Lieutenant Bligh lost no time in informing His Majesty of their predicament. Some time later he was rewarded by being appointed Governor of New South Wales.

Indignant upon learning of the mutiny of his sailors, King George ordered H.M.S. Pandora sent to the scene of the rebellion.

In the meantime the Bounty was cruising around the South Seas looking for a place to land and at the same time avoid capture. Fourteen of the Bounty crew who had mutinied went ashore at Tahiti and took up native lives in preference to being “stretched by the neck” by His Majesty’s officers if they were caught. Besides, those fourteen men preferred a life among beautiful native girls to that of hard work on shipboard. They used poor judgment, however, for the officers of the Pandora found them and took them prisoners. They were chained like dogs to the stanchions of the ship, and put on rations of bread and water. The Pandora set sail for England where a death penalty would have been dealt to the mutineers, but she struck a submerged coral reef and became a total wreck. That reef is now known as Pandora Reef on the charts. While the Pandora was smashing to pieces on the sharp reef, the officers tried to get away, but they made no attempt to free the prisoners from their chains and they left them to a miserable slow death. They didn’t give them the fighting chance that the mutineers had given Bligh and his men.

Christian had sailed the Bounty to Ruratu. His men grew so restless and lonely, that he advised them each to take to himself a native wife. Fascinated by the white skin of the sailors, their peculiar clothing and strange language, the young native girls looked upon them as gods, and showered gifts of fruit and flowers upon them. Mr. Christian, acting in the capacity of minister, conducted the ceremony, and each man became a husband to a native girl.

The Chief of Ruratu had a daughter Loa-Lea of unusual beauty who offered herself to Christian. This so angered the old Chief that he was planning to exterminate every white man of the crew, along with their native wives who had set a bad example for his Loa-Lea. His plans were frustrated in their inception because Loa-Lea loved the Lily-Man, or “he of the white skin” as she termed Christian, because he treated her with such kindness—such respect. To be treated with deference was a new experience to her, for native women have little or no importance in a tribe other than as creatures of convenience and producers of sons.

Loa-Lea brought news of her father’s plan to exterminate them to her “lily-man,” and Christian secretly departed in the night with all his men, their native wives and Loa-Lea, whom he married.

Christian had heard that the seas were being combed for them, and so he sailed far to the westward to escape His Majesty’s forces. Just as our ship was heading now, the Bounty was heading. Fifteen hundred miles south of the Equator and about the same distance west of the coast of South America, they came upon an uninhabited island.

They had great difficulty in finding a way to land on the island, as there was no beach and the cliffs were almost perpendicular. Christian and a handful of men went ashore to explore the island’s possibilities. On the east end they found a cove, overlooked by a plateau, which had the semblance of great steps up the side of the cliff, as if some sea giant had carved them for doorsteps to his castle. On the table top of the island they found an abundance of fresh fruits, water in springs, and wild birds.

Christian returned to the Bounty, called his people together and impressed upon them that if they landed on that island it was to be forever, as he intended to destroy the Bounty, and with it gone there would be no means of escape. With one accord the mutineers agreed to colonize the island of rock. They named it after General Pitcairn.

The mutineers set about to strip the Bounty of all metal which they would use ashore. They set their supplies adrift on rafts to float in shore. Those who did not swim in went to the landing in small boats. When the last man had left the vessel, Christian lashed the helm amidships, headed her bow directly into the island and deserted her.

Gathered on the cliff of their new colony, the crew watched the ground swells of the Pacific wash the Bounty in toward the cliffs, until with a mighty crash she struck the wall and sank into the unsounded depth of the sea. Gone forever was their hope of ever leaving the island, but also, gone forever was any evidence of the Bounty to betray them into the hands of His Majesty’s officers.

Each man and wife set about and built a hut and portioned off a plot of land for a home. Every variety of tropical fruit and berries grew in great profusion. There was more than enough of everything for everybody. But in spite of that all did not run smoothly on Pitcairn. Christian was chief. The Bible was the only form of government. Their religion was and is to this day Seventh Day Adventism.

In time children were born to the mutineers by the native wives, and the children were white. South Sea natives have intermarried so much for generations that their blood is depleted and the white man’s blood predominated.

The sailors call Pitcairn Eden, and rightly perhaps, because a woman was the cause of a quarrel which proved fatal to the whites. One of the mutineers, a Mr. McCoy, had sent his wife to gather sea bird eggs from the rocks on the edge of the cliff. Losing her foothold she fell a thousand feet to the reef below and was instantly killed. As there was only an equal number of women and men, and all of them married, the mutineer, when he became lonely, took to himself the wife of one of the men. That so angered the husband that he killed his wife. McCoy became an outcast, and all the husbands looked upon him as a danger to their happiness. From that time on dissension and intrigue flourished. Several of the mutineers set out in a small boat to find another island, and that left McCoy, Christian, a Charles Adams, and seven other whites with their native wives on the island. The natives there now are the descendants of those families.

Those whites and natives have a colony now without quarrels. They are industrious and God-fearing—but lockjaw is rapidly wiping them out.

The mate came up on the poop deck to where Father was sitting and asked,

“Shall we give the Pitcairn Islanders some rope and canvas this trip, Captain?”

We were only about fifty miles from Pitcairn, and by nine o’clock that evening we would be hove to off it.

“Yes. We’ve lost our cargo, so we might as well divide up our supplies.”

The Pitcairn Islanders wait months and months for sailing ships to come. Very few ships ever go so far off the beaten sailing tracks, and when one does, the islanders offer up devout thanksgiving. Along about nine o’clock, Pitcairn loomed ahead. On the top of it fires were burning. First they appeared on one end of the island, then on the other. They had sighted us. The fires were beacon lights to us, so that we would not strike the shoals by sailing in too close.

“Give them the freedom of the ship when they come aboard,” Father instructed the mate. “These natives never steal anythin’.”

Within an hour from the time we hove to, three boats from Pitcairn were alongside, and about thirty-five islanders came on board. I studied them closely for signs of native blood, but they were as white as I am. They spoke English, simply, and with a peculiar accent. The women were delighted to see me, another white woman. One old dame stroked my hair; a young girl offered to trade her native fibre dress for a pair of overalls.

We went up behind the companionway and swapped the clothes. She thought she had made a grand bargain as she strutted around with my faded blue overalls on. She ran down on the main deck and brought back a tall, quiet young woman, who seemed to be revered by the natives.

“This is Frances McCoy, who is saving our people.” Miss McCoy placed both hands on my shoulders—a custom of greeting probably inherited from her native maternal ancestors.

“Did you have a peaceful voyage?” she asked, and her voice was smooth and quiet.

“No. We had the goddamndest trip we’ve ever had. We struck icebergs south of Tasmania and had to shoot our cargo of salt to hell.”

Miss McCoy turned away from me quickly and looked off to sea, but didn’t speak. McLean, who had heard me talking came over to me and said:

“They never swear on Pitcairn, Skipper,” he explained. I had offended her. On Pitcairn gentleness rules, and cursing is against their law. I couldn’t see how people could express themselves without cussing—but anyhow I watched myself with a terrific strain in my following conversations.

The young native girl in my overalls asked me:

“Have you any books to give to us?”

I was surprised that “white natives” could read, but I was anxious to make amends for my swearing, and asked her and Miss McCoy to come down in the cabin and help themselves. The only books we had on board at that time were books on navigation, a doctor book, and a partial set of the Encyclopedia Britannica with those volumes from N to S missing.

“You can take all of these,” I told them, “and the books on navigation and the charts if you want them.” Miss McCoy grabbed for the doctor book.

“My people are being wiped out by lockjaw,” she said, “and I am studying medicine from books that passing ships give me, so that I can cure them.”

That was why she was so revered by the natives. She was to save their lives!

“For years our people have begged nails and canvas and ropes from ships so that we can get enough material to make a ship to sail away in to the mainland. I am going in to get medicine and I will bring it back here to stop the deaths caused by lockjaw. There is a kind of a thorn, which when it pricks a person, gives him lockjaw,” she explained. No wonder Frances McCoy, the descendant of a pirate and mutineer, is looked upon as a saint there.

Out of gratitude for the books and charts I gave them, the two women gave me a beautiful screen made of skeleton leaves, painted with the juice of wild berries and a small chest of carved coral. After our bargain was made, we joined the others on the hatches on the main deck. One of the descendants of Christian was asking about the war.

“In the Bible we read of far-off countries going to war against each other. Is England at war now? A sailing captain of a German full-rigged ship stopped off here about three months ago and said he would never again trade with us.”

I hadn’t heard anything about the war that I could understand. I knew that the price of copra had gone up because “soldier’s foods were preserved with copra oil,” but it was just as indefinite in my mind what war was as it was in the minds of the natives.

Then the conversation skipped from war to music. One of the men asked if we had an organ to give them.

“What in the hell is the use of an organ in the South Sea Islands?” I asked. The “hell” had slipped out, but young Christian answered before anyone noticed it:

“We had one but the salt air has rusted it, so now it will give no music. Next time you come here will you bring to us another organ?”

I guess the Pitcairn Islanders thought in America we could pick organs off trees or something, so naïve and sincere were their requests.

At about midnight Father told the natives they would have to leave. Sadly they departed, begging us to sail to them again, and thanking us for our gifts to them. A Pitcairn Islander, when he is making a trade, doesn’t drive a bargain like regular natives. They put down a commodity such as two bunches of bananas in front of you, and then they say:

“I have made you a present. Now please, you will make me a present.”

It is our cue to give them a “present” in return, and if it doesn’t meet with their approval, they take back their present and say, “I do not make you a present.”

I was triumphant as we sailed away from the island of white natives. I had a dress instead of overalls, feather fans, the screen and a box of coral.

Father was leaning against the spanker mast watching the sails belly out in the wind when I went to him.

“Hey, look, Father, all I got just for a few old charts and books,” and I displayed my treasures.

“Charts? What the hell are you talking about?” he shouted.

“I gave them all the old charts I could find below and the books on navigation and they gave me all these things,” I explained.

He didn’t stop to hear any more. He took me by the back of the neck and almost carried me down in the cabin.

“Now what did you give them?”

I pointed to the empty place where the charts had been.

“How in the hell can I navigate now?” he shouted. This sounds calm as I write it, but Father wasn’t calm. His face was blue he was so mad.

“I’ve heard you tell the sailors lots of times you were so good at navigating that you didn’t need charts,” I answered.

I was sorry a moment later I had traded away my overalls for that native dress, as the dress was no protection for the rope’s end that tattooed my behind. I got a licking, but Father to this day has never bragged about his navigating abilities where I could hear him! But he was too stubborn to go back to the island for his charts. He had to steer by dead reckoning the rest of the trip.

After that visit to Pitcairn, I could see why everyone who has been there wants to go back. Maybe I’ll go there again some day myself. I have heard since that Frances McCoy finally got off the island in a boat which took the natives three years to build, to America. She landed in Seattle, where she began to study medicine as she had dreamed. However, within three months of the time she landed in Seattle she died a pitiful death of brain fever. She was not accustomed to the noise and confusion and strange life of cities and it struck her down before she could attain her ambition of mercy.

I had settled down for a snooze on the mizzen hatch, bored by the monotony of a dull tropic afternoon, when Father’s voice shook the air with a “Clew up the topsails! Down with the foremain and mizzen!”

“Aye aye!” came from the mate on watch. “Aye aye!” echoed the sailors forward, as they ran to their places at the several ropes. We were taken “aback.” Slap! smack! went the sails against the rigging as the wind caught them from the opposite tack.

“Sheet in the jibs!” Father took the wheel from the helmsman and sent him forward to lend a hand on the halyards. I leaped up the ladder to the poop deck. The wind had begun to hum with a vicious steadiness from leeward. The sky darkened over with rioting grey clouds and the sea became a funereal black.

Over the roar of the wind and the falling sails, Father called:

“Waterspout to leeward!”

I looked where he pointed and saw the horizon in turmoil. As I watched, the clouds appeared to come down and the sea reach up to meet them. It was as though the great God of Storms had mated the sky and the sea in anger so that out of the resulting travail might be born the “terror of the sea.”—Then, swaying and bending like a thing alive, whirling always with tremendous momentum, a gigantic hourglass sped with terrific pace across the waters, wearing blackness about it like a woman’s trailing cloak. To me its base seemed the horizon, its top the middle of the sky and its path led straight across our bow.

“Get the wind under your tail and give a hand here,” called Father.

“What’s going to happen?” I yelled.

“We’ll all be sucked to hell if we cross its course. This damned wind is shooting us right into the belly of the spout.”

I grabbed half of the spanker boom tackle and tried to sheet in its slack. As the sail luffed I got in a few feet, only to lose them when the ship rolled back to leeward and snatched the ropes from my hands.

“Pull in the tackle,” ordered Father as if he were commanding a regular sailor. I gritted my teeth and hauled again, but in vain. The wind was too strong for my single strength. Closer swept the waterspout, swelling and reaching like a living monster eager to destroy relentlessly anything in its path.

Down on the deck the men sweated and heaved on the ropes to get down the sails. Still the ship went forward, the current and wind taking us ahead at the rate of two knots an hour with no sails up, except the truant spanker sail that I couldn’t haul in. I heard Swede groaning and calling a breathless chantey as he led his watch lashing down the main boom. Bulgar, Nelson and McLean were straddled on the foot ropes of the jibboom struggling to lash down the jibs which flapped and ballooned.

It was all chance and our fate rested in the lap of the gods.

Now there are all sorts of sea traditions and superstitions about waterspouts. Some grave scientists who never went to sea write learnedly that a waterspout does not and cannot sink a ship. But no sailor ever would agree with those scientists and when you consider on the one hand that waterspouts are tornadoes on the ocean and on the other hand see what tornadoes do to cities on the land the justice of the sailor’s attitude seems evident. A spout starts when a whirling, funnel-shaped cloud hanging from a bunch of storm clouds dips down and hits the water. The swirling wind starts a swirl of water and just as the land tornado picks up a house and drops it a quarter of a mile away, so the water tornado picks up its swirling column of water and carries it along. Surface fish, driftwood, anything in its path goes up to tear, like a huge hourglass, across the sea. But so temperamental is the sea tornado that anything which changes the current of air, will break its hold and the swirling upraised column collapses, dropping its tons on tons of water back into the sea to crush anything beneath.

And, caught apparently right in the path of our waterspout, that was the fate we faced. It is funny in a crisis how little things catch your attention. With that waterspout racing toward us on the wind, the men had to cling on with their knees and stomachs to keep from being whisked off into the sea. I had never seen any of our crew show such real fear in my life. They were as pale as the white canvas they were trying to reef in, for a waterspout was no ordinary hazard. No calculations or navigations could estimate what dizzy course it might take. I found myself listening to the frenzied cries of the sea birds that came down from the sky to seek the protection of the sea against the angry chaos of the air above. Whenever sea birds fly low on the water in a storm it is proof that the winds of the heavens are too vicious—too conflicting for their wings. Rats leaving a sinking ship are not as fatal a sign to mariners as defeated sea birds. The smaller birds lasted longer under the beating of the wind than the big ones. An albatross, with a spread of six feet of wings, flapped helplessly in the valley of the swells.

For the first time in the midst of danger my father didn’t sing. He bit his lips together in grim determination and never once took his eye off the fast approaching waterspout. He turned the helm and threw the ship into the belly of the swells, a move that no sane navigator would do under ordinary conditions, for a vessel is at the mercy of the sea once she loses her balance in the trough of the breakers.

With almost an agonized screech he called the crew aft:

“For the love of Christ get this spanker in before we go nose in to croaking.” Swede, the mate, Oleson and McLean, who had come in off the jibboom, clambered up the deck. They hauled on the spanker tackle. The rope wouldn’t give to their pulls. A knot had become tangled in the block on the end of the boom, and that boom was swinging out over the sea about fifteen feet.

“Send a man out to clear it,” ordered Father. Nelson volunteered.

“Now hold on out there,” the mate advised him as he started out the swinging tackle, holding on with his feet and shinnying along like a monkey on a stick. Once when the vessel rolled heavily the boom dipped to the water and the waves lapped Nelson, almost sucking him under. But he held fast. The other sailors stood at position on deck ready to haul it in the second the block was free.

After what seemed hours, but in fact was only a few moments, Nelson called: “Take it away,” and with one accord the men on deck began to pull in the truant boom. Nelson hung on to the boom as they pulled it in. The boom on a big ship is handled very much as you handle the boom on a little fishing boat. There is a pulley block fastened to the end of the boom and a pulley block fastened to the deck and the boom is controlled by three strands of tackle running over the two blocks, the free end of the tackles being cleated down on the deck. To help in the handling of the boom as it swings over and to ease the strain, the block on deck is fastened to a steel coupling which slides along a three foot steel rod riveted at each end to the deck. This coupling is enclosed in a steel lined wooden box or hood to protect the coupling from rusting. The block itself is outside the hood and slides along the top of the grooved opening. The wind had eased a little and the boom began to swing over so fast that the tackle showed a few feet of slack. However, the strain had been so heavy that the steel coupling had jammed slightly at the end of the rail. McLean reached down in the opening at the top of the hood to push the steel coupling free and hurry the boom over. Then the wind suddenly veered back a point, caught the spanker and slung it over the side again with a terrific jolt. A gruesome shriek of pain split the roar of the wind and rattle of ropes and McLean fell in a heap over the hood. His arm, just above the elbow, had been caught and crushed in the grip of the steel coupling. The wind backed up the force of the boom that held taut the tackles.

McLean was moaning. I heard a stifled, agonised “O Jesus” come from him. But a man’s life is of little consequence when the fate of a ship is at stake. That boom had to be hauled in or lost, no matter what happened to McLean. But with the man’s arm crushed in the jammed coupling and his body lying across the block the boom could not be pulled in.

“Chop away the jaws of the spanker boom,” came Father’s voice. No man could be spared to do anything for McLean until the ship was safe. Nelson had found his way back along the boom, holding on to the leachings of the sail and was safe on deck now. With axes and crowbars the crew set about chopping away the spanker boom. Better that it sink into the sea than push us on into the path of the waterspout. I ran below and brought back a big mug full to the brim with whiskey for McLean. We had no chloroform or morphine on board, but the whiskey at least would help him to endure. In my innocence I thought later it might knock him out completely. He lay over the block, quiet except for a low monotonous moaning. His breathing was very shallow. The veins in his temples bulged in big throbbing cords. I poured the entire mugful of whiskey down his throat. It might have been water for any effect it had. The men hacking for their lives at the jaws of the boom and the rigging had done their work. The boom crashed into the sea taking with it riggings and stanchions of the railing. But even free of the boom the ship went forward.

“We haven’t got a chance,” I heard Father mutter. He saw the waterspout was traveling at a course and speed sure to bring it close up across our bow.

Suddenly he shouted: “Joan, get my rifle!” I turned to run below for it and as I was disappearing down the companionway I heard his next command:

“Every man below the decks!” I could hear voices mumbling dissent, and Father’s voice rose above the crew’s as though he were beating them with his voice: “Get the hell below, you goddamned fools, or you won’t have a Chinaman’s chance!”

I brought up the rifle and handed it to him. He had lashed the wheel. “Throw a canvas over McLean,” said Father through his teeth, “and then you get below!” Nelson had already got a big piece of canvas and he completely covered McLean with it. I ducked below without hesitation; I didn’t know what was going to happen. I wondered if Father was going to use the rifle to kill McLean and mercifully end his suffering. I hadn’t been below two minutes before I heard the report of his rifle! Then several reports followed in rapid succession and Father came running down the cabin himself, first closing the hatchdoor on the companionway.

“The shot busted it,” he said simply.

We went to the lee portholes and looked out. Father said the shots from his rifle had started new currents in the air that broke the rhythm of the waterspout. Like a wounded beast the spout seemed to stagger and then collapse, dropping tons on tons of water, fish, and driftwood back to the sea. The spout when it collapsed was nearly half a mile away but the low heavy black clouds it came from were already over us and now they opened and emptied themselves just above the ship.

Did you ever see a cork under a waterfall? That was our ship beneath that downpour. Father had known what was coming and had saved the crew by forcing them below, for not one could have kept on the deck under the force of that bombardment with the ship pitching and wallowing in the conflicting currents and undertows like some blinded thing.

McLean covered with canvas and held fast by his crushed arm was the only living thing exposed.

I felt trapped down there below. The air was suffocating. The pressure of the humidity was so great that my pulses beat rapidly and I broke out in a cold sweat. Then in less than fifteen minutes the rain stopped abruptly, the clouds disappeared, the sun burst forth and the sea calmed as though nothing had happened.

“There won’t be a whiff of wind now,” Father said with disgust. With typical sailor fatalism he had dismissed the horror of the waterspout but he hadn’t forgotten the trapped man above.

“We got to get that poor beggar out of that trap,” he said, referring to McLean. I went on deck with Father to help him. We lifted the canvas off McLean’s body. He lay cramped over in a doubled position, softly moaning.

“Can you stand it for another few minutes, old man?” Father asked.

He seemed to come from far away to answer: “Jesus, Captain, take a pop at me with your rifle and finish it. I can’t stand this!” His eyes were bulging in excruciating pain.

“Why, you goddamned bawling sissie, shut your face or I’ll leave you squawking there all night!” Father yelled at him. The voice was terrible to hear but there were tears in Father’s eyes. His bullying tone of voice was a trick to give McLean the guts to stand the ordeal he had to go through.

I was still shaking with fright from the terror of the waterspout as Father spoke to me and sent me below to get some iodine and his razor. When I brought them on deck to him he was leaning over, examining the steel couplets that had clamped McLean’s arm.

“I’ll have to cut your arm off, McLean. It’s the only chance in hell you got to get out of this steel trap,” he said.

McLean looked at Father, saw that he meant it, and that it was the only way to save him, and he forced a smile.

“Go ahead, Captain, but do it quick,” he begged.

Father beckoned me to stand over McLean and keep his head lifted up. I got my arms under McLean’s shoulders and heaved him up in a semi-sitting position. Bulgar and Swede held his legs. Another sailor brought a couple of buckets of sea water. Father twisted a tourniquet of rope around McLean’s arm. Then he swabbed the arm just above the place where it was gripped by the steel, and cut in with his razor. McLean tried to watch him, but bracing his back with my leg, I put my arm across his eyes so he couldn’t see himself being butchered. Bulgar and Swede jammed down on his legs to keep him from thrashing about. In about a minute Father had all the flesh sliced away from the bone. He leaned over to Swede and whispered. Swede went over to the rail and got a steel belaying pin. He raised it over McLean’s arm. I saw Father nod and say “Now.” And Swede brought the belaying pin down across the exposed bone of McLean’s limb and broke the bone as clean as a hound’s tooth.

“A bucket of sea water, quick,” called Father. They poured two full buckets of water over the stub of McLean’s arm. Ocean water is the best disinfectant against blood poisoning there is on a ship. I hated the job we had to do, for I could feel McLean trembling like one stricken with palsy. Blood sputtered out of his arm over the deck and over us. He began to laugh in a delirious frenzy. I kept hold of his head and four sailors gripped and held him so he couldn’t move until Father had stitched up the shreds of flesh with catgut and a surgical needle. Then we carried him below and put him in my father’s bunk. He had small chance of living, but Father kept that spark alive with big doses of whiskey every half hour. He left me to attend him, for he had duties on deck that were more serious. With the spanker boom gone, the rigging destroyed and no wind to steady us against the rising cross swells, there was danger of us “shaking our sticks (or masts) out.”

For twenty-four hours the crew labored clearing the debris. They set up a makeshift spanker sail, “jury rig” it was called, in place of the boom. The horror we had been through was duly written down in our ship’s log as follows:

Four months later McLean left the ship. There is no place on a ship for a one-armed sailor.