When I was about sixteen, we took a trip to the Line Islands to get a cargo of guano.

“What in the hell is the use of getting a ship full of bird dirt?” I asked my father as we neared our destination.

He was balanced on the taffrail cleaning and oiling his sextant when I approached him.

“Well, besides stinkin’ worse than copra and bein’ a rotten cargo to carry through the heat of the tropics, it’s used for fertilizer and ammonia. Land folks ain’t so particular what they use to make their food grow,” he said.

I was keenly interested, for we were going to a part of the South Seas that was unknown to me. So much has been written about the colorful atmosphere of the South Sea islands, but little has been said about the tragedy that inhabits some of the desert rocks along the Equator known on the charts as the Line Islands.

No tropical foliage flourishes there, no sea blue lagoons, no fruits, flowers and long golden beaches enhance their nakedness. They are barren reefs, spewed up out of the sea by submarine volcanoes. As you approach them they look like snow-capped rocks with a fringe of white foam edging them from the breakers that crash against their cliffs. The screech of white gulls fills the air for miles around. The guano islands are the home of the sea fowl. There they lay their eggs in mating season. Millions of birds find those rock islands every year. The rocks are hardly fit for human habitation, yet a few men survive on them.

The French government owns the greatest number of those guano islands, and the income from them amounts to a small fortune every year.

I’ll always remember my trip to those places for two reasons. First, it was on that voyage that I was introduced to the mysteries of strip poker and second, I saw a man so “female struck” that he swam a mile through a rough sea to get away from me.

The night before we sighted the Islands, Fred Nelson, Swede, Bulgar and Oleson were sitting in the lee scupper under the fo’c’s’le head playing poker by the dim green glow of the starboard running light. I wasn’t allowed forward of the mizzen mast unless my Father was with me, for that was the sacred domain of the crew. However, I went forward every time I got a chance, when Father wasn’t looking. This particular night I waited until I heard him snoring on his settee before I tried it. Running along in the shadow of the sails on the leeward side I came upon the four men in the midst of the game.

They didn’t pay the least attention to me. I stood by and watched them for about five minutes and then I butted in.

“Deal me a hand, will you?” I asked.

Swede looked up at me and then spat a big stream of amber juice over the rail. Oleson pretended he hadn’t heard me, and Bulgar just scowled his disapproval of my presence. However, Fred Nelson was more sociable.

“Sure, Skipper, you can play next hand—but I advise you not to. This is strip poker we’re playing.”

For the first time I noticed certain oddities in the men’s appearance. Swede had on nothing but his underdrawers. His shirt and dungarees were piled beside Oleson. Bulgar’s pipe and leather belt were in front of Nelson. When the hand was finished Oleson handed over his clasp knife to Nelson also.

“See what it is? Now do you want to sit in?” asked Swede.

All I had on was a pair of overalls and a faded blue cotton blouse and me “as-is” underneath. With such a slim margin of safety to go on I probably would have withdrawn but for Nelson.

“Don’t think you’d better try, Skipper,” he said.

As usual, opposition made me stubborn.

“What’s the reason I hadn’t? Gimme cards!” and I plumped myself down.

Swede dealt me a hand. The cards were so dirty and worn and sticky with tobacco juice that it was hard to keep them separate in my hand.

“Ante up, Skipper,” said Oleson.

I looked at my hand; I didn’t even have a pair, but I wasn’t going to let them bluff me out.

“One leg of my overalls,” I piped up.

All except Swede laid down their cards.

“Ain’t you takin’ a chance?” said Nelson, looking at Swede’s drawers.

“No more than she is,” said Swede. “Raise you a whole bloomin’ pair of pants,” he bet, “and I better not lose!”

I could feel my face looked the picture of guilt.

“Two legs of my pants,” was my come-back.

“Call you,” grinned Swede. He showed a pair of jacks and a king, and I showed him a six, seven, a ten, and a queen and threespot.

“Hand over the wardrobe,” he said.

I stared at him. There was nothing under my pants but me. And my pants now belonged to Swede.

“Hand ’em over, Skipper,” he grinned.

Strip poker suddenly had become very unattractive.

“But—but—that’s all I got on,” I stuttered.

“What are you going to do, welsh?”

He stuck his chin out at me and his voice was the essence of contempt as he taunted:

“ ’Tain’t my fault if you force yourself into a strip poker game on just a pair of pants. What are you goin’ to do?”

I don’t know just what I would have done. Probably I would have taken off the overalls rather than fail to live up to the code of a true sailor, but Fred Nelson intervened.

“Skipper is a girl,” he said, “and she don’t take off nothin’.”

“I’d ’a’ give her my drawers if I’d lost,” protested Swede.

“All right, I’ll give you my pants,” snapped Nelson.

“It’s her pants I won!”

Nelson jumped to his feet.

“Do you take my pants or a punch in the guzzler?” he asked, very quiet, for that was the way he always was when he fought. He could whip any man on the ship except Father and they all knew it. Swede looked up at him and grinned.

“Gimme your pants, Nelson.”

Nelson yanked off his pants, threw them at Swede and sat down beside me in his underdrawers.

“I’m through with this game and so are you,” he said.

“But I want to win back your pants for you,” I pleaded with him. Bulgar, the sly bully of the lot, spoke up. “I know how you can stay in the game without taking off anything, Skipper.”

“How?”

He smiled craftily: “Pay your losses out of the slop chest.”

The slop chest is the sea-going term applied to the Captain’s ship store of gumboots, sailors’ overalls, shirts, socks, sou’westers and shoes, and tobacco. Father invested some of his own money each trip to stock up with supplies and the expenditure was often a big sacrifice for him to make, for money was as scarce as hen’s teeth. There was always something to eat up his profits: the ship had to go into drydock, then there were new canvas, ropes, and paint to be bought, bail for drunken sailors in foreign ports, to say nothing of cargo lost or damaged by storms. As a result Father kept a jealous eye on his slop chest. At sea when a sailor wanted to buy something the cost of the article was deducted from his pay at the end of the voyage.

This precious slop chest was stowed under the bunk in my cabin, and many a time in the night when a sailor had to get a sou’wester or warm socks or something because of sudden inclement weather, I would be routed from my bunk while Father dug under my mattress to get it for him. I had absolutely no sense of the economic value of things, for I never saw any money. Everything to me was an article of trade, and I would just as soon have given a fifteen dollar pair of rubber sea boots in exchange for a pineapple as a three cent piece of calico. The idea that the things in the slop chest were Father’s stores and important never occurred to me.

Naturally, therefore, I hailed Bulgar’s suggestion with delight. Nelson wouldn’t play but the others agreed I could stay in the game and pay my losses from the slop chest. But the next hand was no better for me. I got a pair of kings and I was so delighted with them that I grinned like a full moon as I bet. With one accord Swede, Oleson and Bulgar folded up their hands and wouldn’t bet with me. I was licked either way—if I bluffed they called me, or if I had them they wouldn’t come in, and in an hour of playing I lost three pairs of sea boots, one jersey sweater, ten pairs of socks, four shirts and eleven plugs of chewing tobacco.

“We want our winnings NOW!” they warned me, and I knew it wouldn’t be healthy to hold out on them. Nelson made no further attempt to help. He was evidently disgusted with me.

I went aft to raid the slop chest, but I didn’t trouble to let Father know I was doing it. I lugged my losings forward and paid them to the sailors and sneaked back into my bunk, where I fell asleep with no twinge of conscience.

The next morning Swede came to the wheel in new dungarees, jersey and shoes, Bulgar went about cleaning brass in a brand new shirt and socks and Oleson had two plugs of tobacco sticking out of his back pants pocket. Swede’s outfit caught Father’s eye of suspicion and I held my breath for fear he’d start an investigation. When Bulgar walked right past him I knew I was sunk.

“Where in the hell did you guys get the new outfits—have you been stealing out of the slop chest?” Father inquired. His question made me wonder where I would be the most comfortable, up in the crosstrees of the foremast, or hid down in the lazarette underneath a bale of rope.

“No, sir,” spoke up Bulgar. “We just had a bit of luck, sir.”

Father went below and I knew he was going to take an inventory—so I went aloft and got very busy with a bucket of grease oiling down the topmast. I figured that if I was doing some useful ship’s work when he caught me I would fare better. I hardly had time to get up to the crosstrees, swing into a bosun’s chair and start swabbing grease on when I heard Father’s voice booming out on the deck below:

“Call both watches on deck.”

Keeping one eye on my grease rag and the other on the scene below I didn’t miss a thing. Father made every man on board haul everything out of the fo’c’s’le on the deck where he rummaged through everything looking for the things that had disappeared out of the slop chest. Father yanked the shirt and sweater off Swede and Bulgar and made them strip. I heard the sailors trying to explain that they had bought those articles of clothing ashore before sailing—and Father’s answer to their alibis:

“Any louse that steals on the high seas ain’t worth killin’,” and he landed on Bulgar and knocked him head over heels. They took their medicine sailor-fashion without squealing and Father took their honest winnings back to his cabin—satisfied that he had taught his crew a lesson in honesty!

Swede and Oleson looked up at me in the rigging. I couldn’t hear what they called me but I was sure it was no term of affection, so I decided to remain aloft. I don’t know what they would have done to me but for Nelson and Stitches, who of course knew the story.

“Skipper is a kid and she never had a chance in a poker game with you robbers. It was honest stealin’ on her part and dirty stealin’ on yours and you got what was comin’ to you,” declared Stitches.

“And if you ain’t satisfied and wants to get even, I’m glad to give you some more,” added Nelson and then the cry from the look-out, “Land Ho!” ended the argument.

Our destination, the Line Islands, was in sight.

“You can’t go ashore here, Joan. There’s no tellin’ what kind of riffraff is livin’ on the island.”

Father sailed the ship in as near as he dared without striking any sunken reefs. There was no sign of life that we could see, nothing except myriads of seagulls circling overhead.

“Where do the guano gatherers live?” I inquired.

“In a rocky cave, near the water. They can’t live too high on the island because the fumes of the guano make poisonous gases.”

I climbed the rigging of the mizzen mast so that I could get a better view of the island. I hung on with my toes to the ratlines to keep from falling off, for the swells and backwash from the shore were rolling the ship like a pendulum. I watched carefully for about twenty minutes, and then I saw a tiny black speck splashing in the water. As it came nearer, I saw it was the figure of a naked man, swimming out towards us. He was so burned by the sun that he was almost black.

“On deck,” I called.

Father called back: “Hello?”

“Look at the native swimming out to us. He is just a quarter point off the stern,” and I indicated with my hand to the spot where I saw the man swimming.

“He’s comin’ out to make a bargain with us for a load of guano,” Father answered, megaphoning through his hands. I descended from my perch in the rigging by sliding hand over hand down a halyard. By the time I reached the poop deck, the “native” was within a hundred yards of us. We waved and called to him, and he raised a brown arm in answer. I was dressed in old faded overalls, and wore no blouse. My hair blew away from my face.

“What dialect does he speak?” I asked Father.

“One that you don’t know, so for once you won’t be able to hog the conversation—French!” I had never heard of a French dialect. I knew all the easy languages,—Samoan, Marquesan, Gilbertina, etc. but French was some savage language foreign to me. I wasn’t going to be left out of the greetings, so I hollered as loud as I could: “Hello you!”

The native was right under the stern. At the sound of my voice he looked up. I smiled down at him. “Hello again to you,” I said, and I smiled my best native trading smile. The native, who was a white Frenchman, stared up at me as if I were an apparition. He opened his lips as if to speak, his face flushed under its brown and he turned in the water as if struck by a bullet and swam back for the shore. Father called to him to stop. On he plunged back towards the island, and never once looked back.

“What in hell’s the matter with him?” asked Father of no one in particular.

“Female struck,” spoke up the mate. “These guys spend a lifetime on the islands alone and the sight of Joan with her exposed neck and shoulders and the curves around her hips set him nutty.”

“What was he afraid of me for?” I wanted to know. “I didn’t say anything except hello to him.”

“There’s a lot of things you got to learn about men, Skipper. I seen cases like this before. Sometimes the sight of a female drives them so crazy they kill themselves.”

At that time I couldn’t understand the mate’s explanation. Why should a man be afraid of me? Father sent the mate and three sailors ashore to make the dicker for the cargo. When they returned the mate asked to speak to Father alone. It was obvious that he did not intend for me to know what he had to tell.

I was determined to know, however, so Father took me down into the cabin and explained:

“A man isn’t complete without the love of a woman, some time in his life, Joan. A seagull can’t fly with one wing, and neither can human beings really live alone by themselves and be whole. That man was convicted of a crime in France when he was a young boy about nineteen. The French Government, instead of sendin’ him to Devil’s Island for life, gave him the choice of workin’ for a lifetime on this island. He lives worse than an animal in the foul atmosphere of bird manure. He eats nothin’ but bird eggs and raw fish, and him just catchin’ the sight of you made the man in him realize his aloneness.”

I had never been conscious of my sex before that time. Father’s words impressed me so deeply that I began to wonder about myself.

For three days we hove to while the crew made trips back and forth to the island in our boat with loads of guano. I had lost interest in the loading—I could only think of the derelict on that barren island.

The following September we set sail for the Gilbert Islands with a load of trading articles to exchange for pearl shell. In our crew were just three old members: Bulgar, the Swede and Axel Oleson. The remaining men were shipped aboard at Sydney.

There was a labor strike on in Sydney at the time and to find a crew of non-union men willing to ship for the voyage was impossible. Father was up against it, but a crew he had to have and he was never a man to be balked by seeming impossibilities.

Now there is a widespread belief that “shanghaiing” as a common practice flourishes only in the stories of Jack London, Conrad and other writers of sea tales, but deep sea captains and sailors know better. So Father in his difficulty sought out a “sailors’ runner,” a ratty-faced little crimp familiar with the waterfront, and made his deal—five pounds a head for a crew.

“I’ll want them aboard ship by five o’clock flood tide. I’m goin’ to sail tonight without waitin’ for any goddamned pilot and tugboat,” he said to the crimp and returned to the vessel.

About four thirty that afternoon a launch sputtered alongside, and the mate and two sailors lowered a Jacob’s ladder over the side. The man on the launch yelled up at them:

“Put over a cargo boom. These beggars won’t come to until you hit the Equator.”

I looked over the side and saw eight lumps of flesh, eight dead men, so it seemed, sprawled over the bottom of the launch like so many sacks of wet wheat. With every roll of the launch the bodies pitched from side to side in grotesque rhythm. Our men rigged up a cargo boom and tackle and the man on the launch slipped a running bowline around one of the limp hunks of flesh.

“Take it away!” he grunted, and the sailors, with my help, pulled up the load.

It was a blond, husky Scandinavian. His body landed on the deck with a dull thud.

“Is he dead?”

The mate only looked at me contemptuously—as if anything could kill a Swede—and threw back the tackle for the next load of flesh. Over and over again they repeated that process until a row of eight bodies was on deck. The mate told me to call my father. I went below, almost sick, for I thought the men were dead. However, I was better trained in the code of the sea than to let anyone see I was affected by the sight of eight men laid out like corpses on the deck of the schooner.

I brought Father back with me. He reached down and picked up the foot of the first man and let it drop back with a lifeless thud on the deck.

“He’ll be a good man on a halyard,” he said, and passed on to the next one. He was a dirty, uncouth-looking person so black with coal dust that he looked negroid.

“What a hell of a mess this is to soak me five pounds for,” and he passed on to the next and the next until he had felt the muscles of each one. Satisfied that he had a good load of “beef” to pull on ropes in a storm or pump ship if a leak should spring, Father signalled the launch to cast off.

Turning to the mate, Father said:

“Take these so and so’s forrard to the fo’c’s’le and lock them in, then come aft and stand by. We’ll sail out tonight anyway and sign those” (indicating the unconscious sailors) “on the Ship’s Articles when they come out of it. You, Joan, take the wheel. I’ll lend a hand to set enough sail to get out of here.”

I was just short of sixteen at that time, husky and as strong as most men, and I felt myself to be as good a sailor as ever held a ship to a course. I went up on the poop deck to the helm, unleashed it and pulled with all my strength on its spokes.

“Hard over,” called Father, and I slowly turned the big wheel.

“Hard over” means to turn the wheel completely around. Under my hands the wheel didn’t turn as quickly as it should have, and Father let out a volley of curses at me that made the sky blue, but it also put vitality into me or scared some more strength into my arms, for I pulled the helm around as the wind caught the topsails and we glided out the Heads for the Gilbert Islands.

It was a hard week, that first one out, for the men were so drugged and beaten that they were slow in regaining consciousness. Three sailors, Father, the cook and myself navigated that big schooner, which in fair weather ordinarily required sixteen men to handle. I took the helm in the daytime, the sailors stood by the fore and main masts and the cook tended the jibs. Father slept in his clothes.

On the fourth day out we ran into the electrical storms off Lord Howe Island. Lord Howe is a barren island off the Australian coast, around which all the fury of the China Sea, Indian Ocean and South Pacific gathers. I’ll never forget it—lightning so blinding and near that it made our eyes blur with blue shadows! Thunder which rattled so loud and so close that it reverberated on the deck!

And then, right in the midst of the thunderstorm the wind suddenly veered from southeast to north—northwest and we had to tack ship to keep from running aground.

The mate went aloft to free a tangled block from the mizzen topsail. He had reached the crosstrees and was straddled on them to balance himself as he freed the rope from the block. The lightning rods on the tops of the mast were alive with fire—they looked like huge gas jets aflame on the top of each spar. I was at the wheel, tied there by two ropes to keep from washing overboard in the seas that were sweeping over the poop deck. Father looked up to see if it was all clear aloft so he could let go the mizzen boom to tack over, when a streak of lightning made him cover his eyes with his hands to keep from being blinded. At the wheel I put my face down in my overalls’ bib, and I guess the other men hid their eyes from the fiery onslaught of streak lightning, for not one of them saw just what happened. The mate aloft must have touched a ring bolt of steel on the mast and received the full shock! He dropped from the crosstrees to the deck, and his body was crushed into a mangled pulp by the fall. Before anyone could reach the spot where he fell a green sea swept across the deck and carried him overboard! It was too horrible—too gruesome! I crumbled inside. I don’t know what would have happened to me if a sea hadn’t washed over the poop and almost smothered me with water bringing me to.

The ship was “around” or tacked, and we were trying to hold her head up to the wind and keep her out of the belly of the swells to avoid capsizing. We couldn’t possibly hold out much longer as the terrific strain had told on her strength. There seemed only one thing to be done as a last resort—revive the shanghaied sailors.

Father went into the fo’c’s’le and attempted to rouse them. They only moaned and turned over and slept, or didn’t move at all. It was four days later, exactly eight days from the time they were sent aboard ship, that they regained consciousness. The crimp had made a good job of them. He had first drugged them and then his gang beat them to lifelessness. Of the eight only two were sailors; the others were not worth their beans at sea as a crew. One was a waiter, another a truck driver, another a coal passer, another a cattle man and still another a hopeless dope fiend. The crimp had had a hard time finding heads to make up his blood money of five pounds apiece, so he had raided a waterfront saloon and made a wholesale slaughter of the available men he had found standing at the bar. All of them except the two sailors were seasick and cowardly of the storm.

With the mate dead and a bunch of landlubbers for a crew in one of the worst storms of the South Pacific, Father turned into a savage. The men had to sign on the Ship’s Articles as seamen. It is maritime law that every man voluntarily sign his own name to the Articles, and in doing so, he becomes liable to obey the laws of the sea as dictated by the master of the ship. Once those men had put their signatures to the Articles, Father had them! They didn’t want to sign, but when he invited them to sign or get off and walk, they wrote their names willingly.

Immediately after signing, the coal passer and cattle man made the mistake of refusing to go aloft to shift the topsails in the storm. Father took his revolver and pointed it at them.

“You dirty blank so and so’s, you’re sailors now. Get aloft and make fast those sails or you’ll go over the side. Swimming isn’t crowded around here,” and he pointed to the seething ocean to windward. They went aloft.

The entire trip up through the islands was like that. Father was captain, mate and part of the crew and I was chief helmsman. The crew were unwilling prisoners, and they made life aboard a lively hell for us all.

As a result of poor seamanship and adverse winds, it took us ninety-three days to reach Papua. The ship was a mass of wreckage on deck—broken pieces of booms and rigging cluttered the scuppers. There was never any time during that trip that we had an uneventful day. Southerly busters, those vicious white squalls of the South Seas, smacked our schooner and tossed us around like a cockleshell on the water. Then we reached the doldrums, that great area of deadly calms. Even in the calms there was no respite from the slapping and smashing of the rigging which was useless for sailing purposes and its battered condition. Ground swells from some distant storms shook the Minnie A. Caine until she wallowed like a drunken sailor.

Most people think the real dangers of the sea are storms, but to the deep sea sailor there is a terror greater than wind or sea which stalks in the wake of sailing ships long overdue—scurvy. Scurvy is caused by lack of fresh food, unhealthy water and heat on salt foods. The disease acts insidiously; the victim doesn’t know he has it until terrific pains in his stomach make it impossible for him to eat anything. Then come headaches, blinding and maddening. The body appears dry and withered like the husk of a coconut. Fever and delirium follow, and in a short time, if medical relief or fresh food is not obtained—death!

Contrary to popular ideas and the maritime law of all countries, a ship’s medicine chest usually contains nothing but Friar’s Balsam, which is a sea-going iodine, salts, and blue ointment for vermin; none of which is a cure for scurvy.

Under the hardships of our voyage it was no wonder that we fell victim. For days at a time, while the decks were awash with swirling seas, the cook could prepare no meals. Time and again vainly he attempted to build a fire in the galley but no sooner would it begin to draw than the ship would list heavily to port, submerging the galley, cook and his pans in green seas. As a consequence we lived on dried salt fish and lime juice. The shanghaied men couldn’t even stomach that, and they were the first to be stricken with scurvy. The coal passer had the worst dose of all. His teeth dropped out one by one. His body withered. He seemed at the point of death. The cattleman, who was a sailor by circumstance, lost his eyesight. None of us could sleep.

We put up the distress signal at the masthead and took turns standing on look-out aloft for signs of another ship or tramp steamer to bring us relief. That red flag branded us as an outlaw, a crippled ship with a diseased, dying crew aboard. All around us lay the monotonous circle of horizon without a sign of life, except for an occasional whale or school of flying fish. And so we wallowed on, expecting—waiting for death.

I was the last to get the scurvy. I suppose that was because I was the youngest and healthiest on board. When it did hit me it was horrible. I felt I was dying from the outside in. I would sit for hours and peel dead skin off my body. When I look back on those days now I wonder how we ever lived through it. Scurvy seems to make savages of men at sea—they lose all sense of balance. There is nowhere to turn for help—nothing to do but suffer and wait for it to finish you. Only my father raved at the bad luck:

“It’s a goddamned shame. If I had anything but a bunch of vomitin’ landlubbers for a crew we’d be in Honolulu now.” He paced up and down the poop deck from the rail to the binnacle and back. I crouched on the hawser bit astern, picking dead skin off my arm.

“Porpoise!!”

The cry brought us all to our feet. There, close to us on the windward side was a school of about twenty porpoises diving and snorting in the spray of the bowsprit.

“All hands on deck! Man the capstan! Stand by the harpoon!”

Father rushed forward over the debris on deck. In less than five minutes every living man aboard was on the fo’c’s’le head standing by to help land a porpoise.

A porpoise is a mammal and its meat is very like that of beef. If we could land one it would furnish fresh food for a week. Father stood down on the martingale under the jibboom, harpoon in hand. We waited praying for the porpoise to come near. The thin leader line from the harpoon was fastened to a three-quarter inch rope made fast to the capstan.

So eager was I to help land the porpoise that, not realizing what I was doing, I twisted the leader line of the harpoon around my hands. A big porpoise dived under the bow. Father hurled the harpoon. It struck the porpoise amidships and sunk in deep. The porpoise let out a squeal like a stuck pig and dived.

“Play out the leader line,” called Father.

He was going to let the porpoise have plenty of rope for it couldn’t get away with a steel harpoon through it, and sooner or later that harpoon would take its life. Six fathoms of line played out quickly, and then suddenly I was jerked with a terrific force to the edge of the fo’c’s’le head. The porpoise, diving deep, had used up the slack, and I couldn’t let go of the rope twisted around my hands. Slowly it slipped as the porpoise, with its two tons of weight, pulled, and the slipped rope burned inches into my hands, cutting, burning the flesh off down to the bone. I was being dragged overboard with only my own strength against that of the maddened, dying porpoise.

Two sailors grabbed me, trying to hold me back. They nearly pulled my arms from their sockets, but the porpoise took us all closer and closer to the edge of the low rail. Father looked up from the martingale and saw what was happening. He reached out, grabbed the taut leader line, and with a jerk using all his strength, managed to slack it for a moment. The porpoise, under the water, changed its course, turning back underneath the keel. That saved my life. The leader line caught in the hawse hole and held until one of the men cut the line free. The porpoise was gone, taking that harpoon with it.

The line was twisted and cut into my hands so deeply that Father had to pull it out. He looked at the raw flesh hanging on the bone, and without wasting words, dashed for the galley. In a minute he was back with a handful of wet salt.

“Hold out your hands.”

I held them out and he spread that wet salt on the deep burns. The pain was so great I thought I couldn’t stand it. I suppose now if that happened to me I would cry or moan or faint, but then I took it like a sailor. I cursed until the air was blue, and cursing that way held back the tears, for I would rather have been drawn and quartered than have let a sailor see me bawl—even though those sailors were seasick, shanghaied landlubbers.

The men set about to harpoon another porpoise and got one on deck within an hour. As they hoisted it aboard it opened its long snout and squealed and hollered. Father shot it several times, then chopped its head off with an ax.

The men were like vultures, hovering around for the first taste of its blood to relieve their fevered throats. The Jap cook snatched the ax from Father’s hand and licked the raw blood off it. Then Father hacked off a piece of blubber and meat for each sailor. He gave me a piece of its bloody liver and the tragedy then was not my burned hands, but that I couldn’t hold anything in them to eat. I lay down on the fo’c’s’le head and lapped up the blood, chewing at the liver like a dog.

That fresh blood saved our lives. Five days later we dropped anchor in Papua, a “plague ship” manned by semi-delirious men.

It is such things as this that make me wonder why land folks think being the daughter of a sea captain is so romantic.

At Papua we all put in to the marine hospital for treatment. One of the most dangerous things to do after starvation and scurvy is to eat, but it is almost impossible to keep from gorging oneself on food at the first opportunity. I traded a plug of tobacco with a native for a dozen bananas and I ate ten of them. The result was that my stomach swelled and I took on the proportions of a fat turtle in pain.

We were in port for a month, while the ship was being repaired and the sailors were recovering. If Father could have found any sailors at Papua he would have shipped them in a minute, but they are scarce in that part of the world, and beachcombers or halfbreed natives were the only crew he could assemble as he struck out once more from Papua to the Union Group of Islands, which are situated about twenty-eight degrees south of the Equator and one hundred sixty-seven longitude west.

All of the hardship of the trip thus far was paid for as far as I was concerned when we made Atafu. This is the largest island of the Union Group, and at that it is only three miles long by half a mile wide. It is atoll shaped, around a blue lagoon of clear water. Atafu is what is known as one of the coral islands, for its base is pale pink coral. The island rises about three feet above sea level, and is covered with thick tropical foliage. The palms are thirty to forty feet high, and the underbrush is a tangled jungle of tropic vines.

Breadfruit trees, coconuts, yarrow root, banana and plantain palms, blossoming hibiscus flowers, poisonous wild peas, giant morning-glory vines and little native berry plants grow there in such profusion that as you approach the southeast side of the island it looks like a solidly woven mat of green and white. The beauty of Atafu is distinct from other South Sea islands. The sand on its horse-shoe beach is an orange gold, the coral jutting out under the white spray of the surf a delicate pink against the transparent green sea. Then within almost a stone’s throw from the beach inland lies the opalescent, bottomless lagoon. The natives say that at the bottom of the lagoon, which is so deep it has never been fathomed, in the “Sunset Land”: their heaven. They will tell you in all earnestness that that lagoon reaches to the other side of the earth where the sunsets are painted, and as natives worship beauty that far away the place at the pit of the lagoon is to them the “hereafter.”

The village which nestles on the edge of the jungle is composed of queer little three-cornered houses of coconut fibre matting. These houses are movable, and if the wind veers around or rain comes, the native husband turns his hut around to keep out the storm. The huts are only about four by six feet, and can be lifted by one man—it is no uncommon sight to sail up to Atafu and find the whole village gone. Not a sign of a hut or a living thing anywhere. That happens in the hurricane months, which are June and July in the tropics. The island is so low to sea level, that the giant breakers whipped up by a hurricane wash far upshore, even to the edge of the lagoon. The natives spend six months a year preparing for their winter. On the lee of the island, they dig caves and barricade them with twigs and woven palm leaves to shut out the wind. The women dry fruit and fish and bury it in the bottom of the cave for provision during the two months of hiding. One of the rarest delicacies they preserve is sun-dried plantains. These plantains are a species of banana. They let the intense heat of the sun crystallize them to sugar, then wrap them in damp leaves of morning-glory plants. The plantain thus wrapped turns to a sugary wine. They are wrapped up in little bundles that look like a Spanish tamale. I knew of some travellers who were touring the South Seas and their charts gave an accurate position of the native villages on each island in that group. When they returned to Australia they reported that they had found no sign of life. That was because they arrived there during hurricane time. I once asked a native Chief if his people didn’t grow restless during the two months they were buried alive on the island, and he said “No, they all get very no-doing,” which means drunk. The native men take coconuts and punch holes in the nut to let air get to the milk. Then they stop it up and let it ferment, thus brewing a liquor that is more deadly than any pre-Volstead drink ever conceived. I saw one of our sailors take a couple of drinks of coconut wine, and topple over me as if he had been hit on the head with a belaying pin, so I never pitied those natives who were forced by the elements to lie in a cave and suck wine while the sailors at sea had to struggle to keep a ship afloat.

The trip to Atafu was uneventful, except for Father’s vocabulary of profanity which he developed in finding expletives to describe his landlubber crew’s seamanship.

About five o’clock of the night of October 19th, we hove to off Atafu. There is no anchorage there so we had to drop extra sail and keep the ship up in the wind. The natives had evidently sighted us long before we saw Atafu, for the beach was a swarming mass of black men, wildly gesticulating to us.

Father called to me, “You get your trading stuff on the poop deck, Joan, we want to get a chance to trade before you cheat them out of their breech clouts.” I have always been able to get more from the natives by trading than any six sailors, and Father said I must be cheating! My particular store of goods to trade consisted of pieces of tinfoil off chewing gum and tobacco which I had begged from the sailors, boxes of matches, ivory soap, and red calico. The natives were crazy to get the tinfoil. They rolled it into little knobs and put it on their bushy hair like jewels. The matches were my next best bet for a good trade. I would give them two matches for a Panama hat or a handful of bird of paradise feathers. Ivory soap was especially valuable in trading. The old natives would give me a rare mat, or a box of sandalwood inlaid with raw pearl for a cake of it. No, they didn’t want the soap to wash in; they ate it for dessert! The red calico was for the women. From them I would coax a ring of tortoise-shell inlaid with blue mother-of-pearl, or fans painted on palm leaves with berry juices.

“Drop over a Jacob’s ladder,” called Father as four heavily laden outrigger canoes shot out toward us. These outriggers are so built that they will not capsize in a surf, and they were overflowing with bunches of bananas, breadfruit, dried fish, and wild chickens, about the size of pigeons. Years before some whaling captain must have given them some chickens and they interbred them so much that they degenerated until their offspring became as small as pigeons. They live wild in the trees and the natives sneak up on them at night and catch them.

“Ora-ai,” shouted a large native in the bow of the first canoe. That meant “Friendly we come as friends.” The large man was none other than Rara-mongai, the native Chief of Atafu. Rara-mongai was the largest man on the island and by virtue of his stature he was king. When he died the next biggest man would succeed him. Rara-mongai was all dressed up for the gala occasion of the “white man’s ship with wings” arrival. The natives see about two ships a year and it is a big event when one will stop and trade with them. As that native Chief climbed up the Jacob’s ladder loaded down with strings of rare shells, he was the queerest looking live thing I had ever seen. His fuzzy hair was turning grey, which seemed to accentuate his black skin. He wore an old full-dress coat, a woman’s muslin petticoat, (it looked like the cast-off of some sea captain’s wife) which ended above his knees, and a string of jewelry around his waist. His jewelry was rusty hardware that had washed ashore from some passing ships. A tomato can jangled amidships, ring bolts of iron came next to that, and an old colander and a can opener. The chief wore them as ornaments, for to him they were strange, weird, unheard-of things, those bits of sea-washed, rusty hardware.

Rara-mongai stepped forward and placed a string of shells around my neck, and then one around Father’s. That was a sign of friendly welcome, too. Father made the sign of friendship back to him and we waved to the blacks in the canoes to come aboard. They scrambled up the side of the ship like screaming monkeys. Their bronze bodies were naked except for a protecting breech clout. In a flash they had unloaded their canoes and were chattering wildly for bargains. In the last canoe, unnoticed apparently, were two women. They were so fat they weighed the canoe down astern. The youngest of them was the Chief’s daughter, “Good,” and the other woman was her nurse.

“Come on aboard,” I called to them, in English, forgetting in my excitement to speak their dialect. They just held on to the edge of the canoe and grinned. My pantomime convinced them I wanted them, so they climbed aboard, but with great difficulty. Father and the sailors were engaged on deck trading, so I sneaked the women down to the cabin of the ship. I asked them if they wanted something to eat; they said they did, so I called the cabin-boy and told him I would eat my supper then. Those two native women never in their lives had been inside a room without fresh air, and that, combined with the rolling of the ship, made them seasick. They were game, though, to see it through. I was watching them to see what they would do just as they were curiously watching me. They sat at the table when the food was served. First came soup. I watched them to see if they knew what to do with it. They didn’t, but they watched me, then followed my every movement and ate the soup. They had never tasted any food in their lives except native fruits and fish, so the expression on their faces at onion soup was one of wonderment. All during the meal they laughed and gurgled, and stared at me. Suddenly Good and her nurse heard a commotion up on deck and I told them to wait a minute and I would be back. The noise I found there was the natives shoving off for the island. The Chief said to Father:

“You come, Chief of white-ship-with-wings and I make fun for you.” Father wasn’t very anxious to go ashore to have natives “make fun,” or dance for him.

“Can I go?” I asked, fearing he would forbid me to be out of his sight for an hour.

“All right, you can go ashore and help those two blankety-blank landlubbers fill the kegs with fresh water.”

I turned and disappeared down the companionway before he could take back his promise. There I found Good and her nurse just finishing the contents of the swill barrel. While I was gone they had prowled into the pantry, thought the garbage was part of the strange new food and ate every mouthful of it. I had to get three natives and Father to carry them up to the deck and fresh air.

Some of the natives at the signal from the Chief to return to the island, jumped overboard, their breech clouts bulging with their trades, the others pulled back in the outriggers. I started to get in the outrigger with Good but Father caught me by the seat of my pants, just as I was going over the side.

“Hey you, you go ashore in the dinghy with the crew. Bring back two barrels of fresh drinking water, and when you get them filled come smack back here to the ship.”

“Yes sir,” I answered, only too eager to obey. Bulgar and the Swede, the waiter and the truck driver and myself put off with the two barrels. It is one thing to land an outrigger canoe through a surf, and quite another to get a clumsy ship’s boat with two water kegs and four people in it ashore. Swede sculled, and I stood in the bow directing him through the channel, for I could see over the reef. A long sinuous green comber sneaked up on us and lifted us high in the air, then let us down with a smack in the surf. We got by that, but another came before we got righted out of the swell, and it took boat, landlubbers, sailors, water kegs and me, and sent us flying toward the beach smothered in foam. I dodged a water barrel and landed without a scratch on the beach, but the boat was lost. It broke up into splinters. The water barrels washed ashore. I don’t think I was as sorry as I should have been about losing the boat, for without it Father couldn’t get ashore, and we couldn’t get back to the ship. I didn’t care particularly, because I wanted to explore the island. Before I had shaken the water off myself I was surrounded by a dozen or more boys, about twenty years old. They formed a circle around me, and were laughing. Finally, with a great show of bravado, one of them dashed up to me and touched the white skin on my legs, whereupon all the others shouted and cheered. I was the first white girl they had ever seen and they wanted to know how white skin felt under their dusky fingers.

With a guard of them we were taken to the center of the village to the Chief. That kindly old man was very much concerned over our accident. However, Good was not concerned, sulked on the floor of the hut, and would have nothing to do with me. I think she credited me with being responsible for the pains in her stomach from her meal of garbage. However, I was undaunted—I was ashore once more. I had my bare feet on real land again so didn’t care about anything else.

“Chief, where is the water for our barrels?” I asked. Instead of summoning a servant to take me to the native reservoir, he himself took me by the hand and led me down a path through the jungle. Hand in hand we walked, and the sailors followed behind carrying the two barrels and cursing at the stickers in the jungle that were cutting their bare feet.

In native dialect Rara-mongai said to me:

“Over there, in the hollowed-out heart of the palm trees we save water. When it rains, water goes inside the palm trunk. Save it for dry months.”

He pulled some green leaves away from a row of chopped off banana palm trunks, and there, inside of each, were trunkfuls of cool fresh water. I tasted it, and it had the tang of palm pitch in it, which made it the more refreshing. Carefully, using coconuts and tortoise-shells for dippers, he helped us fill the two barrels.

“Tonight when moon comes up full, dance of Virgins in the village. You stay and see all by my side. Your friends (meaning the sailors) they stay too and see Virgin dance.”

“Virgins? Sure I’ll stay,” piped up Bulgar.

“What is the Dance of the Virgins?” I asked.

“Every year young girl ready to marry. Must choose mate at Virgin Dance. Then become good wife because she pick husband alone.”

I was so anxious to stay and see the dance that I forgot all about returning to the ship. I asked Swede, as he was the oldest sailor and therefore had the most authority over the others, if he wanted to stay.

“Hell yes, Skipper, any time any virgins dance that’s where you’ll find me.” As long as he had expressed a willingness to stay also I saw no occasion to hurry back aboard ship, so we followed the Chief to the village. The sun had set, and the moon was just beginning to dip out of the horizon. I sat at the Chief’s feet, and the men stood behind him and watched the festival begin.

Once a year it is the custom in Atafu to have a marrying festival, which is celebrated by the Dance of the Virgins. An Atafu girl is ready to marry when she is ten or eleven years old, and she alone has the choice of her husband. No man can woo her until she has given him the sign that she has chosen him. The marriage festival is the biggest event of the year. The little girls shine their gold brown bodies with coconut oils. Instead of preparing lavish wardrobes they make their skins shine like burnished gold. Over their left ear, snugly tucked in their thick hair to assure its not falling out during the dance, is a white lotus or hibiscus flower. The white hibiscus is a flower sacred to virgins, and when they place one on the left ear it is the sign that they are ready to take a mate.

The moon rising on the set day of the festival is the signal for the dance to begin. All the young men who are going to take a wife, or rather who desire a wife, line up on the left side of the Chief, and stand with folded arms and watch the dance. The folded arms are a sign of “must not touch, but only look” until the dance is over. Slowly and almost inaudibly at first, then gradually becoming louder and more wild and barbaric, it burst into a thrilling savage rhythm. The tom-tom is the tribe’s only musical instrument. They have never heard of the ukulele or guitar. I have found out since that the ukulele was introduced into the Hawaiian Islands by a boy from Harvard!

As the beating of the tom-toms swelled, the virgins, nine in all, started their dance—there in our presence they unfolded the sacred rite of virginity crying for a mate. Every movement of their muscles has a meaning, and it is foreign to the meaning that the civilized world has put upon it. The Chief, on seeing the sailors’ spellbound gaze, said:

“On your far-away island United States men pay women many gifts to make bad our dance.” I hotly denied that accusation. The hula-hula, which is always associated with the South Seas, is a cheap imitation of the real thing, but at that time I had never heard of it.

The writhing of their abdomens was symbolic of calling upon the fires of the earth to burn their wombs clean for the coming of a manchild to make their tribe strong. Their waving arms called on the sea to bring them ships loaded with treasure, and on the winds to bring long life to their body, so that their loved one would enjoy them long. As the music swelled their dance became more uncontrolled; they seemed to be spirits inside of native bodies trying to express a hunger for mating.

Suddenly the music stopped, the girls threw themselves on the ground singing a triumphant song, but the left hand of each was cupped over the lotus flower to keep it from the ground.

Rara-mongai rose from his throne and walked to the middle of the clearing where the girls lay. A hush fell, as he solemnly spoke:

“To you who are looking for a wife, I speak. The strongest men alone can have maidens. Here in moonlight on festival night, each man step forward and show what strength of body he has that the maidens may choose the greatest of you.”

A native man’s way of wooing is to show off in front of his bride to be, physically. He tries to outdo his rivals by excelling in physical strength, such as husking a coconut with his teeth, stabbing a wild boar, diving and killing a shark single-handed. Instead of protesting their love in so many words they believe in action, and by displaying physical supremacy, they think to impress the women that they are the masters. At the Chief’s words about twenty young natives stepped forward eagerly. The truck driver and Swede made a dive for the center of the clearing too.

“Say, Chief,” spoke up Swede, “I’m stronger than any of these young pups, and I’ll take that little girl with the nice fat figger.” Swede was so pleased with himself that he didn’t notice the anger in Rara-mongai’s face. He spoke harshly in his dialect:

“Maidens choose husband. No white man touch my people.”

To Swede, the dance had just been a good show, and sailor-fashion he was entering into the spirit of it, not realizing he was violating the most sacred rite of Atafu.

By intervening I gained the favor of the Chief once more. The girl that Swede had pointed out never took her eyes off him during the rest of the ceremony. A white man wanted her, and she wouldn’t make any effort to attract her own native kind. Any white man in the South Seas who is healthy looking and strong, can win a native woman away from any native or chief.

For two hours while the rest of the villagers feasted, the native men wooed the virgins by showing off athletically. Not one word is spoken, the whole story of their desire is in pantomime. When the moon reached the center of the sky, the Chief called for silence. According to the custom of the tribe he told the girls that now they must choose a man, by taking the lotus from their left ear and placing it on the right ear of the chosen one. I looked at the faces of the twenty young men who stood in a row hoping to be selected. As the girls walked up slowly with the lotus blossoms in their outstretched hands toward them, fear and triumph flashed down the line. Three girls went to one young buck and gave him their lotus, another man received two flowers, and the others one. Those that were passed up by the girls once more folded their arms in to their bodies.

“Huh,” grunted Swede contemptuously, in my ear, “if those birds just fold their arms and lay down on the job no wonder the janes didn’t pick ’em.”

The Chief walked to the three girls who had picked one man, and did a Solomon. He handed the man to the girl who had reached him first. Primitive law, administered swiftly and without question. A couple stood before the Chief. With his tortoise-shell emblem of state he touched the girl and the man on the head, the native sign of wedlock. To the woman he said:

“By choosing this man you now become nothing. He is the stronger. If any man touch you after this wedlock the man shall be punished, for you have no right or privilege to say what shall be done with your body. If your husband gives privilege of your body to man he must be paid for it. If man take you without your husband’s willingness, that man shall be sent to the coral reef to scrape the salt that dries there from the surf. There he shall stay until he is again like a child (until madness seizes him) and then he shall fall in the sea.”

The native man turned to the girl, she lifted her bare shoulder to his lips, and he bit her until her blood came. The Chief went on:

“Woman’s blood in husband’s body make you one always.”

Then to the man, the Chief admonished: “Every girl come now and touch her body to your body. If you do not desire them when they touch you, your choice of wife is good. You have woman good for you.”

He beckoned to a group of the youngest and prettiest girls in the village. One by one they sidled up to the groom and in the most alluring and sensuous manner, they let their bodies caress his. The groom stood with his eyes averted, unmoved. It was a triumph over temptation, and that was the signal for the tom-toms to burst into an exotic rhythm, as the married pair walked hand in hand down to the lagoon. There is a tribal custom on Atafu that every newly married couple walk hand in hand up to their necks in the waters of the lagoon, they cleanse themselves together, and when they have done that, their marriage is consummated before the eyes of all.

When the last couple was married, the festival was over, and dancing, singing and feasting lasted long into the night. I had forgotten all about time, the water barrels and Father’s order to come right back to the ship. By the position of the moon I guessed it was about four a.m. A frightened cry from a native running up from the beach broke in on the revelry. Wildly he pointed to the ship off shore. The truck driver who never had much to say at any time laconically observed:

“The Old Man’s sending up flares from the vessel. Guess he thinks a cannibal swallowed you whole.”

I was in for it and I knew it. I could feel my hind part tingling in anticipation of what was going to happen when Father got his hands on me.

“Let’s beat it back to the ship, Swede. There won’t be a barnacle left on my bottom when Father catches me.”

“Yeh? Well, what’s your hurry, how you going to get the water barrels back?”

I knew I’d catch hell for staying ashore, but to come back minus a life boat and no fresh water was suicide.

“Say, Chief, will you lend me an outrigger and a couple of men to bring it back, so I can get back to the ship?”

The Chief smiled, and said:

“White girl always ora-aii on Atafu. I help you go, but sorry. Some day come back again?”

I would have promised that Chief anything just to get off the island. He gave us an outrigger and we shoved out for the schooner. I saw the red distress flares from the ship light up the sky—Father was in earnest, and the moon was so bright I could plainly see the hull of the ship from the beach. Without much difficulty we got beyond the surf and were soon alongside. I let the sailors go aboard first. They threw over a bowline and hauled the water kegs on deck. Father was at the Jacob’s ladder leaning over the side, smoking his pipe. The smoke was coming out of it in fast jerks, and I needed no barometer to tell me a storm was coming.

Leisurely I climbed the rope ladder, for I was in no hurry to get aboard. Halfway up Father called:

“Where in hell is the dinghy?”

“I was going to explain to you about that, Father. We were trying to ride the surf and we capsized and. . . .”

I got no further. Father had me by the neck and seat of the pants, hurrying me up to the poop.

“I can understand these so and so landlubbers upsettin’ a boat, but you’re my daughter and I won’t believe any yarn like you losin’ control of a dinghy.”

Along about dawn I was comfortable enough to sit down without too great pain! We were sailing along under full canvas, and Father, evidently content that I could get into no further deviltry, had turned in for a nap.

Swede and the sailors were sitting on the hatch near the mizzen mast. From my place at the wheel I heard Swede saying:

“Yeh, I coulda had any one of those dames, they was crazy about me; that fat little nigger wench is just busted-hearted to see me leave.”

And it was me that got a licking!

I was never to forget that experience on Atafu. I thought that everybody in the world was married according to native custom. I thought that some day I, too, would be taken to a dance where I could pick out my mate.

The days that followed our departure from Atafu became dull and monotonous. The sound of the tom-toms and the vision of the native girls abandoning themselves in a dance, was constantly before me. I hadn’t even had a licking for almost a week and the calm atmosphere was too much for me. I would have to start something if nothing was going to happen of its own accord. I started a cockroach war. I caught two big cockroaches and tied their bodies together with pieces of thread. Then I went around to the sailors and took bets on them. I drew a line on the deck and put a roach on either side of it. The one that pulled the other over the line won. I bet two plugs of tobacco and one of Father’s undershirts on the fattest cockroach, but the ship took a list to leeward just as he started to pull hard, and the other cockroach won and I lost. In novels of the sea the Captain’s daughter is frequently pictured as occupying herself with lovely feminine pastimes, but cockroaches, rats, or bedbug hunts were more fascinating to me. But even in the trade winds those games tired me. I wanted action.

One afternoon, finding nothing more exciting to do, and when I was sure Father was asleep, I started on my own Dance of the Virgins. I didn’t have anything I could use for a lotus flower except a pair of dried flying fish wings. I put them behind my left ear as I had seen the native girls do. I wasn’t sure just which one of the sailors on watch I would give that flower to, but that was to come later anyway.

Swede was at the wheel. I whispered to him:

“Will you go forward and get me a can full of grease from the cook? I’ll take the wheel for you.” He was glad of any excuse to get away, so he consented. He brought back a can of salt pork dripping from the galley.

“What are you goin’ to do with that stuff?” he asked.

“Don’t talk so loud, Swede. I’m goin’ to do that Virgin Dance the way we saw them do it on Atafu.”

“Jeeze,” he said.

I went down on the main deck near the mizzenmast and began greasing my body. I took off my overalls, and gave my body a glorious shine that would rival any I saw on the island, and started the dance. I pounded on a rain barrel for a tom-tom. Every sailor on deck beat it just as I got going. They had seen Father’s head appearing out of the companionway, but I hadn’t. The next thing I knew Father grabbed me but my body was so slippery he couldn’t keep a hold on me.

“What the hell are you doing?” he yelled.

“Just dancing the way the girls danced for us on Atafu,” I answered, and I ran aft and locked myself in the flag locker.

Father followed me, but couldn’t unlock the door. “I’ll knock hell out of you when I lay hands on you,” he promised. I had no intention of ever coming out of that flag locker. Hours later I heard the dinner-bell ring. I was greasy and hot and hungry, but I thought better than to venture out. At dusk I heard a low whistle outside the porthole. I looked out and saw a piece of bread dangling there on a piece of string. The Jap cook had taken my side, and smuggled me some supper. The next morning I unlocked the door and looked around for Father. He was busy on his chart. I stood by him wrapped up in a flag. I thought I might as well get the licking over with so he could go on with his work. However, he didn’t even speak. He reached up to his book shelf and took down an illustrated copy of Dante’s Inferno, and opened it to the illustrations of women burning in fire in hell. I was cured. I would never be a dancer!