Introductory material (continued 8)

August 30

Our course has been bad for twenty-four hours, as during the greater part of that period we steered nothing to the northward of west, and our present course would take us to Honolulu in 165°. Ships are generally forced over to 140° or 145° even under ordinary conditions, and if we do not find ourselves 20° west of San Francisco when the Trades let go, we will do well. The weather, though, is perfect; warmer certainly than in the southeast Trades, but not at all disagreeable in the shade,—about 81° at mid-day. A very acceptable change since we took this wind is that there have been no more rain-squalls. During the late Doldrums these squalls were at times practically continuous; and while the old man did finally rig up a bit of canvas, six feet by six, to serve as an awning, under which we had to crouch as though in the ’tween-decks, it was not of much use in the rain. It was extremely annoying to have to gather up the backgammon-board, two novels, a lot of sewing, a pillow, and two chairs and dash for the wheel-house half a dozen times a watch. Often the squalls lasted only two or three minutes, yet there was enough water in each shower to drench everything.

There is a very ingenious way of disposing of the main-top-sail and top-gallant-halliards on the “Higgins.” They are always very bulky, heavy ropes, and when coiled over a pin in the rail are very unsightly objects. To obviate this, there are two large reels in the monkey-rail at the forward end of the cabin-house, one on each side, upon which the free end of these ropes are wound when the yards have been mastheaded. A bit of twine then secures the reel to prevent the halliards paying out, and another piece stops it (the rope) up to the shrouds, clear of the men’s heads on the main-deck. When the yards have to be lowered, a sharp jerk breaks the twine, and the halliards run off without danger of fouling. It is a clever scheme and ought to be in more general use, the only drawback to it being that a hand has to mount the poop and reel up the halliards again when the yards have been hoisted; but that is a small matter.

I went down into the lazarette yesterday afternoon, after Louis had gone forward, and found that his quarters were not so stiflingly hot as might have been expected; the Frenchman still bears his confinement with extraordinary indifference. Mr. Rarx passed a very bad night. Latitude, 13° 17′ north; longitude, 126° west.

August 31

On this, the last day of August, we have but little cause for rejoicing. In the first place, the wind has been dead against us and light at that; and, in the second place, the captain is in so churlish a temper as to barely answer yes and no to civil questions. Shortly before four o’clock yesterday the wind began to ease up, and by nightfall had dwindled to a light air, and then whipped into the north-northwest, so that our course up to eight this morning was west, and we got that only by pinching her, so that our speed was seldom more than two knots. The night was a gorgeous one, with a sky that glistened with golden stars, while a new moon hung low down in the west; and far away in the southeast, over the face of a black cloud, shimmered waves of heat-lightning, lovely in the extreme.

By morning, as there were no indications of coming up, the captain concluded to tack ship, which was done between eight and nine o’clock; and we discovered, when braced up on the port tack, that we looked up to north-northeast, which was by no means bad. At the present time, three in the afternoon, the wind is a fresh, even a strong breeze, and we are doing pretty well except for a long head-swell, into which we plunge so heavily that we are not doing more than five knots instead of seven or eight.

The captain is in a worse humor than ever before, though it must be said that the evolution of tacking ship this morning was accomplished quietly, and, what is much more remarkable, without a single oath. Conversation at meals has been almost completely suspended again, except that my wife and I converse together, ignoring the captain entirely; this would be childish behavior on our part were it not that every remark that we have made lately has met with either a rough denial or indifferent silence. He asked us the other day whether Captain Kingdon of the “Mandalore” used to lose his temper in calms and head-winds; a question which we found much pleasure in answering in a vehement negative. The sailors have resumed most of their erstwhile good humor, perhaps on account of the proximity of the end of the voyage; it is reassuring to see them thus again, for a score of brooding, scowling sailors aboard ship is an unpleasant reminder of what the men could do if they were determined. Indeed, from a passenger’s point of view, I would far rather see a captain in a perpetual bad humor than the men. Considering all the ill-treatment that sailors get, it is extraordinary at first sight that they do not vindicate more frequently their wrongs at sea by quietly dropping the after-guard over the side. It is perfectly feasible to dispose of the officer of the watch at night. A single well-aimed blow of an iron belaying-pin in the helmsman’s hand is all that is necessary; and the captain and the other mate are asleep below and both could be readily made away with. But on close inspection two very strong reasons are disclosed showing why it is that the sailor does not more readily appear in the rôle of avenger. The first reason is, not being a navigator, what is to become of the ship? and if they do reach a port, what credible story can be concocted? Murder will out. The second reason is to be found in that wonderful sense of obedience to captain and officers apparent in even the most desperate and abandoned seamen; so blind is their submission to authority, however grossly and fiendishly it may be abused, that they sometimes at the present day, in our own long-voyage ships, suffer death itself rather than resist him whom the law has invested with power so absolute that the might of a sultan suffers in comparison! But too few of our sailing-ship-masters seem to be possessed of the ordinary feelings of humanity toward their crews. After they have exhausted all other defences in upholding their bad treatment of sailors, they nearly always conclude by saying, “Well, what have we got in our ships? A lot of Dutch and English scum that you’ve got to lick h—— out of afore they’ll obey an order.” But how about the “S. P. Hitchcock” and the “St. James,” commanded respectively by Captains Gates and Banfield? Here are two deep-water American ships, who also have to take whatever crews the shipping masters give them, so that they are not a whit better off in the quality of their sailors than other vessels; yet there is never any trouble aboard of them at sea, and good-will and cheerfulness pervade both vessels. They have made some rattling good passages, and are positive proof that discipline can be obtained without violence; and, after nearly four months’ experience here, I believe that I am justified in expressing my opinion, which is, that brutality toward and the continual driving and hazing of sailors do not conduce to order and discipline. Commands are not obeyed here with the precision that they were on the “Mandalore,” and many and many a time I have seen the men make a great show of hauling on the braces when in reality they were not pulling a hundred pounds. Knock them over for this? No, it only makes them worse next time, but that’s what Yankee mates generally do. If work is to be got out of sailors, they must be treated justly to begin with; if not, you will get no more out of them than out of any other class.

The apathy and ignorance of people ashore is more remarkable than anything else in connection with this subject of brutality to sailors. I even know a young man who owns shares in some of our largest square-riggers who was utterly amazed when I told him of the record of one of his own captains. In justice to him, though, I must say that he took no personal interest in the ships other than that they should pay good dividends, and he really was in total ignorance of the modus operandi of American captains. But it is not so with the vast majority of our sailing-ship-owners, who are fully aware of the manner in which their vessels are run, and who go bail to the extent of many hundreds of dollars for their inhuman captains when the latter are occasionally held to answer for some particularly atrocious deed, and who in many cases connive at the disappearance of blackguard mates when they are seeking to escape ashore from infuriated sailors whom these mates have half killed at sea. Cannot something be done to compel decent treatment of our long-voyage seamen? Sailors must be ruled with a hand of iron, for there are desperate characters among them; but, in heaven’s name, let him who wields the power be compelled to administer justice in his punishment of the men under him, that the disgrace and shame which now rest upon our long-voyage sailing ships may be removed, and that the offensive name of “Yankee hell-ship,” by which our deep-water vessels are known to foreign sailors, may be forever obliterated. Latitude, 13° 43′ north; longitude, 127° west.

September 1

Now in truth hath Disappointment come upon us and doth hover sullenly o’erhead on sable pinions. The Trades, the lovely northeast Trades, which we fondly imagined had reached us, did not materialize! For, having blown fitfully for two days, driving us two degrees farther west, they vanished, and in their stead a fresh westerly wind has arisen, and the weather is once more sticky and showery and the heavens are piled high-with huge wool-packs and glistening thunder-heads. But this is not all. We are plunging into a steep, heavy swell, that is surging down from the north in great, long, blue heaves; and it is a grand thing to look forward and see the jib-boom now rearing up higher and higher towards the zenith, now diving down, down into the deep quiet hollows, as the ship tumbles heavily to the catheads into the creamy waters.

We had quite a lively time at dinner to-day, for the westerly wind had smoothed the kinks out of the old man’s temper and he commenced a jocose argument with the mate about American politics. It will be remembered that Mr. Goggins is by birth an Englishman, but his papers give him the right to talk about “hour constitootion,” of which he takes advantage at every opportunity. I laughed at everything they said to egg them on, and at length they both began to wax wroth, the mate in a few minutes being quite wet with perspiration, so that at last all he could say was, “Be gar’s sake, sir,” which he repeated indefinitely like a hungry parrot asking for a cracker. Finally, though, the skipper spoiled the fun by getting really angry, and, gazing with piercing eye at Goggins for the space of half a minute, he utterly extinguished him with, “Well, I guess you’d better shut up; you don’t seem to know much about it.” Latitude, 15° north; longitude, 126° west.

September 2

Very strong winds from west shifting to southeast; high, northerly sea; excessive humidity and incessant rain-squalls. These have been the weather conditions for twelve hours, to which must be added a fall of thirty one-hundredths of an inch in the aneroid. Yesterday afternoon at four o’clock there were plenty of cyclonic indications round about us: a heavy swell, suffocating humidity, a wild, ferocious look in the enormous cumulus clouds, and a curious hot wind that at times strangely increased to strong gusts that hummed with a dreary drone in the rigging and then instantly subsided. Towards five o’clock the windward horizon grew to a uniform gray, oily, and dull as lead, with an indescribably menacing aspect in the low, greasy scud that hurried in tattered wisps just over the mast-heads. The captain was very uneasy, and admitted the proximity (if not of a cyclone) of one of those furious summer northers that often sweep across the North Pacific; and it must be remembered that we are close to the cyclonic belt which extends out into the ocean from the Central American seaboard.

At dusk both wind and sea had increased, and by eight o’clock we were charging into a swell large enough to merit the term majestic, the bowsprit rising and falling fully fifty feet, for the sea was from dead ahead, and there was wind enough to drive the ship rapidly up the slope of a billow and then far out into space, so that she fell full upon the breast of the next sea with a crushing force that must have wrenched every timber in her hull.

At 9.30, as the captain and I were on the poop discussing the second mate, there came a report from aloft, and there was the mizzen-royal in ribbons, snapping and popping merrily away in the darkness. Then the skipper cast loose his deep-sea voice so that it must surely have reached force 12 in Beaufort’s scale, and the sail was secured in short order. Throughout the night we labored heavily, while the seas thundered over the bows and dashed against the forward house with alarming fury, and then washed aft, where the water in the waist was to be measured in feet, not in inches. Broadhead said that at times, in the middle watch, the ship buried herself to the light-houses, and that he hadn’t seen much more water aboard off Cape Horn. At three this morning came another discharge from aloft, and away went four whole cloths out of the lee side of the upper foretop-sail, and when daylight came we had to send up a new sail.

During the morning watch the wind shifted suddenly to southeast, and when we went on deck it was blowing half a gale from that desirable quarter, and the ship, with braces well rounded in, was fairly skipping from sea to sea, save when her speed was momentarily checked by an extra heavy one that smote her rudely full in the face and then fell in glorious showers over the forecastle. Another fine spectacle was afforded whenever one of the short seas, occasioned by the shift of wind, struck the big, clumsy main-channels, when the spray shot far into the air and was swept across the deck in snowy clouds. Altogether, it was a scene of wonderful beauty, and we rejoiced to observe that the dun, threatening look of the heavens had given place to dense masses of trade-clouds and promises of plenty of clear sunshine; and if the night was a boisterous one and the port watch had to pass the whole of the forenoon at the pumps, our run of two hundred miles wreathed every one’s face in jolly smiles, and “’Frisco” was heard repeatedly in the men’s conversation.

Writing of hurricanes awhile ago, reminds me of the pertinacity with which the great majority of the people in our Western States allude to their terrible tornadoes as cyclones. It would be reasonable to presume that the inhabitants of a district subject to any peculiar atmospheric disturbance would know and make use of the proper term for such a phenomenon, but it seems not. Hurricane and cyclone are synonymous, and are applied to circular storms having a diameter of from three hundred to one thousand miles, in which the wind seldom attains a velocity of over one hundred miles per hour, a pressure of about fifty pounds per square foot. They have also a progressive motion varying in speed from twenty-eight miles per hour in the United States to only eight or nine miles in the Bay of Bengal.

Tornadoes are also gyratory storms that progress in a straight line at a mean speed of thirty miles an hour, but their path is almost infinitesimal compared with the cyclone’s, for it is generally between one thousand and six thousand feet in width and about forty miles long, each individual storm completely dissolving and vanishing like a thunder-squall in less than an hour. A cyclone may blow for days.

In the fury of its rotary motion and upward suction a tornado is the most appalling of all natural phenomena save, perhaps, the earthquake, and the passing of one causes the most incredible and seemingly impossible freaks. Chickens are stripped of their feathers, straws are driven firmly into planks, and locomotives weighing fifty tons have been over-turned without effort, the latter being possible by the formation of a partial vacuum. Straws, however, have been driven an eighth of an inch into a plank by an artificial blast of air moving at the rate of one hundred and sixty miles per hour. The presence of a vacuum is proved by the violent bursting outward of the closed windows and shutters of a house in or near the track of a tornado.

Many people will remember the dire results of the famous St. Louis tornado of May, 1896, which resulted in the death of two hundred and twenty-five persons and the loss of twelve million dollars in property destroyed; yet there is no reason to suppose that this storm was an unusually severe one; it simply happened to pass over a more or less densely populated region. As usual, this tornado left behind some remarkable mementos, the strangest of all being that a piece of pine plank was driven by the wind head-on through the five-sixteenths inch web of an iron girder in the approach to the St. Louis bridge! This is a performance well known to the government Weather Bureau. Immense blocks of sandstone set in cement were dislodged and thrown down (in all, five hundred and eighty tons of it), together with two hundred and eighty tons of flooring and girders, some of the latter weighing thirteen thousand pounds each. In Lafayette Park, St. Louis, another example of tornadic vagaries was shown by the fact that, right in the path of the storm, surrounded closely by forest-trees which had been wrenched bodily from the earth, stood unharmed a flimsy, straw-thatched structure upon six light posts!

Unfortunately, from the very violence of the wind, no accurate estimate of the velocity of the gyratory movement of a tornado can be made, as an anemometer would be useless, even if it were not destroyed. Experts calculate, however, that the speed of the wind approximates five hundred or six hundred miles per hour. At any rate, the destructive force of a tornado is ten or perhaps twenty times that of a cyclone; and if cyclones blew with the violence of tornadoes, the earth would be devastated in a short while.

At sea the tornado with its terrible cloud-funnel has its counterpart in the water-spout; though in the latter the wind does not seem to attain the same fury, as many vessels have passed through a water-spout without very great damage. Two curious instances, however, are on record of atmospheric freaks at sea; one of them was reported by the American ship “Reaper.” She was proceeding toward Cape Horn in the equatorial North Pacific, the day being perfectly fine and clear, save for a few small, detached clouds, and the wind a light breeze, when she suddenly lost all of her light sails in a blast that came apparently out of a clear sky, while at the moment there was nothing but the light wind on deck. Again, the ship “Sintram,” Captain Woodside, was almost totally dismasted off the West Indies, homeward bound from the East; the weather was fine and a four-knot breeze was blowing on deck when the upper spars seemed to melt away, she having been struck by a similar blast from a clear sky. Subsequently I wrote to the forecast official at New York asking whether any such accidents ever happened ashore; he answered that in Nebraska and Kansas similar strong whirlwinds have been known, in perfectly clear weather, to tear the upper portions of forest-trees completely off, including large branches, while the leaves and twigs nearer the ground were untouched. This indisputably proves that only a few feet mark the boundary-line between atmosphere in a state of rest and wind of inconceivable violence. As has been shown, such instances occur also in tornadoes, which, of course, are nothing but immense whirlwinds.

It is my earnest hope that the reader has not been worried by this long meteorological dissertation, which has nothing to do with the voyage; but as the forecasting of the weather has lately been of increasing interest to the public, perhaps I may be pardoned for my digression. Latitude, 17° 55′ north; longitude, 125° 30′ west.

September 3

It seems to be tolerably safe to say now that at last we have picked up the northeast Trades. During yesterday afternoon the wind hauled constantly to the northward, and at ten last night it was northeast by north, blowing a fresh breeze; indeed, by this morning it had increased so that we have not been able to carry the sky-sails since, and we did another three degrees of latitude; imagine three hundred and fifty miles of latitude here in forty-eight hours. It is very refreshing, and even the skipper has recovered his equanimity. Up to noon to-day, though, the weather was very showery, the fine rain blowing in level clouds across the ship, as dense as fog. The greatest change, however, is in the temperature, for the air has fallen 15° and the sea 10°, so that we begin to appreciate that in thirty-six hours, if this wind holds, we will have emerged from the torrid zone. It is quite impossible for us to realize that in another fortnight this voyage will probably be an event of the past. No one who has not made a long voyage can imagine the excitement, actually the excitement, occasioned by the speculation as to how much longer the passage will last, when only ten days or so remain. There is continuously present such an element of luck when solely dependent upon the wind, that you are constantly estimating and calculating how far the Trades will extend, how the winds will be afterward, the chances of fogs and calms on the coast, and other equally important questions. This doesn’t mean necessarily that you want to get ashore; it is the involuntary and irresistible anticipation of an impending change, though my wife will probably not regret the moment when the tow-boat gives us her line outside the Heads. Latitude, 20° 52′ north; longitude, 126° 40′ west.

September 4

This was a perfectly ideal day, with brisk northeast winds, smooth sea, cloudless sky, and a noon temperature of 72°, and 68° at midnight. This is a very lucky chance that we are having here; we are going well, about eight knots, and our course has been to the northward of northwest by north, showing that the Trades are well to the eastward.

I wonder how many people have ever seen the scale of provisions as laid down by the United States government for the vitualling of long-voyage ships? As I have said, the curious part of it is, though, that no attention is ever paid to it on our ships, except under unusual conditions. Yet it is not so very curious that no attempt is made to observe the scale, for almost everything in connection with our sailors and ships is performed in an irregular manner. Behold the scale.

BREAD. BEEF. PORK. FLOUR. PEASE. TEA. COFFEE. SUGAR. WATER.

Lb. Lbs. Lbs. Lb. Pt. Oz. Oz. Ozs. Qts.

Sunday 1 1-1/2 1/2 1/8 1/2 2 3

Monday 1 1-1/4 1/8 1/8 1/2 2 3

Tuesday 1 1-1/2 1/2 1/8 1/2 2 3

Wednesday 1 1-1/4 1/8 1/8 1/2 2 3

Thursday 1 1-1/2 1/2 1/8 1/2 2 3

Friday 1 1-1/4 1/8 1/8 1/2 2 3

Saturday 1 1-1/2 1/8 1/2 2 3

Then comes a list of substitutes, such as molasses for sugar, potatoes for pease, etc. Other nations also have provision scales, but they are adhered to; foreign schemes add oatmeal, but all sailors get too much meat; both captains and seamen say that. Our blue-water ships have a great name for fine “grub,” which they deserved forty years ago, but which most of them certainly do not now. A Yankee captain has the privilege from the owners to lay in whatever sort of stores he thinks fit (of course neither he nor the owner ever thinks of the law); if he is a generous man, the crew are lucky; if not, it’s a case of hunger and hustle for four or five months. As a sample of the manner in which the food has been given out here, the men consumed an entire barrel of molasses during the first seventeen days that we were at sea; since then they have had none. Other articles were scattered around in the same reckless manner, with the natural result that the “dainties” which ought to have lasted the whole voyage had vanished at the latitude of the Falklands; so that ever since the men have been on pretty hard rations, and Broadhead told me that when the old man made the show of putting all hands on government allowance it didn’t mean anything at all. Since the stabbing, though, all the food has been weighed out by the mate each day in full view of the sailors, eighteen pounds of bread (i.e., hard-tack), so many pounds of beef, etc., and the men themselves carry it to the cook, so that there can be no fault-finding. As to the water, three quarts per day amounts in all to fifty-four quarts, which is measured into a cask in the forecastle, and the men are at liberty to give any portion of it they choose to the cook in which to boil their beef and pork, or tea and coffee. These three quarts, by the way, are for all purposes, drinking, cooking, and washing, though most foremast hands are not much troubled with the latter, except when it rains hard. Each man probably does not have more than a quart and a half of drinking water a day, which is a truly scanty allowance for men who are painting on a blistering deck several hours out of the twenty-four.

American captains profess to think that weighing out food to sailors is very degrading, and they always add, “It’s too much like them Britishers.” Personally I have never been able to perceive where the indignity comes in. Food is weighed out in the navy, so why not in the merchant service? I had it on my mind to-day to ask Captain Scruggs which he really considered the more debasing, giving a man a stipulated quantity of food, or knocking his teeth out with wooden or iron implements and then kicking him into the scuppers; but I thought it best to preserve peace rather than advance so hazardous a question. Latitude, 23° 18′ north; longitude, 128° 40′ west.

September 5

Oh, what magnificent weather this is! It is just like those grand days in the southeast Trades. Our everlasting recollections of the Pacific Ocean, both north and south, will be of weeks of a matchless climate; deep cobalt sky, sprinkled with little pink, cirrus clouds; a calm sea over which shoot thousands of flying-fish in glittering flight, and soft, enchanting breezes. “What about those two or three disagreeable days not long ago?” says the pessimist. True, they were not ideal days; but they only serve to show off these lovely ones in all their glorious perfection. We have, unhappily, passed the limits of the tropics, however, having crossed the circle of Cancer yesterday at four o’clock.

A few minutes ago, at the pumps, Broadhead asked me, “Would you mind telling me why you came out here in an American ship?” I told him why,—that, having made one voyage in an Englishman, we wanted to compare the vessels; and I also reminded him that foreign ships are not allowed to trade between American ports. “Well, you and the lady must have lots of courage,” said he. “Now there’s the Loch Line of ships to Australia out of London; you ought to have gone in one o’ them.” “Yes; MacFoy told me about them,” said I. “Well, they’re worth all you can say in favor of ’em,” continued this American; “they’re dandies; carry lots o’ passengers, first- and second-class and steerage. Each ship has what they call a double crew; say a ship had fourteen men before the mast, one o’ these would have twenty-eight, so the whole of an ordinary ship’s crew is on deck at one time, and not a stroke o’ work is ever done aloft after eight in the morning, so that nothing can drop on passengers’ heads.” This may seem like getting things down to too fine a point; but any one who has voyaged in a sailing vessel will remember how many articles drop from men working aloft. We have seen at least a dozen objects fall during the voyage,—knives, paint-brushes, and serving-mallets, any one of which dropping on a man’s head from a height of at least a hundred feet would be very painful, not to say dangerous.

Perhaps the most remarkable and unusual device to enable the captain of a vessel to pocket the wages of a crew appears in a copy of a maritime paper, which I found to-day in a bundle of the skipper’s magazines. It was perpetrated by the master of the British ship “S——,” and consisted in his taking a quantity of liquors of divers sorts to sea and retailing them to the men at immense profit. An investigation at Liverpool showed that this enterprising man had bought twenty cases of whiskey at three dollars and a half a dozen, which he sold to the crew at one dollar per bottle. He also had large stores of gin and beer on board, and the amount of money that the captain must have cleared by the various transactions may be imagined when it is mentioned that the carpenter’s bill for liquors for one voyage footed up a total of sixty-seven dollars, and the men testified that some of them averaged a bottle a day. It seemed to me that the captain’s punishment was rather light, as it consisted in suspending his certificate for three months. Of course, this is a penalty which could not be inflicted upon an American captain, because none of our sailing-ship-masters has a government certificate. Our law-givers do not think that any is necessary, though they require a stiff examination in the case of a steam-ship-master, another sparkling example of the perfection of the United States shipping laws. Latitude, 25° 47′ north; longitude, 130° 46′ west.

September 6

After breakfast this morning we trembled when we found the wind letting go, for everything indicated a cessation in the Trades; but at ten o’clock they freshened again, and since then we have swung handsomely along over a light swell at seven knots. This is very gratifying, and every day sees us a hundred and seventy-five miles nearer port. My wife is beginning to rejoice at the prospect of fresh vegetables and fruit, though I think I could live very comfortably on the present diet for at least a year. I had to tell the captain to-day, though, not to have any more stews for my sake, for I couldn’t possibly eat another one. This is not astonishing, because, when a week out from New York, I happened to express a desire for a stew, and on every single day since then I have eaten some of this concoction at least once and at times twice. Four solid, uninterrupted months of stews are apt to produce a surfeit thereof. What was worse than anything else, though, was that the steward, desiring to enrich the gravy, at length became addicted to the disagreeable habit of thrusting large pieces of aged, canned butter into each stew, after turning it out of the sauce-pan, so that when the dish reached the table the surface of the stew glittered with little iridescent, golden globules, that danced upon it like drops of yellow quicksilver. Thus decorated, it was a very pleasing dish to contemplate, though familiarity with it bred contempt.

Every day now, particularly at supper, we enter the dining-room with distended eyes, trying to discover some surprise in the culinary department. Usually, however, when the covers are removed, there lie disclosed the same old standbys,—stewed beef or mutton, cold beef and ham, biscuits, and boiled potatoes the size of hot-house grapes, though none the worse for that. Indeed, we went to sea with several barrels of new Bermuda potatoes at ten dollars the barrel; this will show the unstinted manner in which this ship was stored aft.

Sometimes, though, we are stunned by some fantastic creation of the Chinaman’s. Last night, for instance, when the steward whipped off the huge pewter covers, each almost as big as an umbrella, we were entranced by the appearance of something entirely new. In a deep vegetable dish lay four enormous Welsh rarebits? Oh, the gladness of that moment! What mattered it that the bread was a blood relative of india-rubber, that the rarebits were clammy and inflexible, or that the rind of a pineapple cheese had contributed to their manufacture? Were they not a change, and as such to be venerated and exalted beyond price? Therefore we helped ourselves reverently, as became so momentous an occasion; and if the compound did produce an incalculable amount of subsequent distress, we extended meek thanks and congratulations to the little Cantonite in the galley. In truth, though, there is no fault of any sort to be found with the cabin food; it is every bit as good as when we started.

Last evening, in the second dog-watch, the Scotch bosun came up to me on the main-deck and asked how we were getting on. I told him, very well indeed; and then he said, “Before we left I heard that a gentleman and his wife were going out in the ship, and be gob I felt sorry for them.” Good old MacFoy! He is continuously solicitous for our welfare; and a day or two ago he came aft with a copy of Dickens’s “Christmas Stories” which he had found in the forecastle library furnished by the Seamen’s Friend Society, and said that he had found a fine sea story for me to read in the book, called “The Wreck of the Golden Mary.” It is a fact worthy of note that this rough sailor-man is the only individual whom I have ever met who has read this delightful account of a shipwreck off Cape Horn. The best-read man whom I ever knew said that he had never even heard of it. In every art, though, there seem to be one or two jewels that exist unknown even to the connoisseur. How many musicians are there, thorough musicians though they may be, who know the gorgeous, glorious chorus in A, andante sostenuto, from Schubert’s Lazarus? Gorgeous in its tone colors, glorious in its fire and rhythm, it is an almost unknown fragment from that transcendent mind. Latitude, 27° 58′ north; longitude, 132° 20′ west.

September 7

Nothing but a faint breeze remains of the northeast Trades. In the Pacific at this season they are generally a failure, and they carried us through only twelve degrees of latitude. We are beginning to appreciate how hard it is going to be to get into the land in the latitude of San Francisco, unless we soon take the westerly winds that are supposed to blow out here. We are now well to the westward of ’Frisco, ten degrees in fact, and it is impossible to calculate how much farther we will have to go; old Goggins, a year ago, bound up to Nanaimo from Acapulco, fetched over to 160° west before he got a slant north. To-day is a great deal warmer than yesterday, with at times a nearly glassy sea and one hundred and ten miles of the two degrees of latitude that we made were done in the first sixteen hours.

Last evening I had another session with the garrulous Scot. “I’ll tell ye somethin’ about the ‘H. D. MacGregor’; she’s the toughest ship I ever was in, though there’s one still worse. Cap’n Summers is a corker; he’s a little man, but very broad and strong, with a fearful temper; he’s all bruk up, though.”

“What broke him up?” said I.

“Jumpin’ after the men,” answered David; “he’s hardly got a sound bone in his body; they do say his back’s broke, but I never thought it. But I did see him smash one of his legs. He had that temper that if he wanted to reach a man he just jumped down on top of him where he stood. I mind one afternoon, just before we got into ’Frisco two or three years ago, when I was bosun with him, one of the men was doin’ somethin’ aft on the main-deck. Summers said a few words to him, and the feller didn’t say ‘yes, sir,’ soon enough to suit him, so th’ old man jumped right off the poop down on the main-deck, full eight feet. He meant to lep on top o’ the sailor; but just as he jumped the ship give a roll, and he fell into a water-barrel near by. His left leg brought up sharp ag’in’ the chimes o’ the cask, and crack! went his thigh-bone. Lucky for him we were only two days from port, and we fixed him up pretty well till we got in.”

Yesterday afternoon the top of the deck-house was painted a beautiful, lustrous, pearly gray, and very fine it looked, glistening in the bright sunshine. Not a drop of rain had fallen all day until fifteen minutes after it was finished, when a light shower passed over us, extending not five hundred yards in any direction. It lasted not one minute, but it completely ruined the wet paint; and it was then that we heard the gentle voice of the mate raised in blasphemous remonstrance. Latitude, 29° 48′ north; longitude, 134° 6′ west.

September 8

Just as we had finished writing up our journals yesterday afternoon there came a loud patter of rain overhead and a heavy puff from the eastward that laid the ship well over. Still, we didn’t pay much attention to it for some time; but, finding that we moved steadily along without righting, I went on deck to find the ocean covered with white-caps to the horizon, which was thick with dense, gray, very windy-looking clouds. We were flying through the water at ten knots, and heading up north by west true, which was very fine; but, even as we looked, there came a slight but portentous heave from ahead that foretold a northerly swell. And so it proved, for by 8 P.M. our progress had dwindled to six knots, as we went pitching and diving into an ugly head-sea. It is astonishing how even a moderately heavy swell from ahead will check the speed of a ship, even with a strong wind blowing. A steamer will cleave right through a tall swell without any perceptible difference in her speed, a fact proved to us once when, in crossing the Atlantic in the “Etruria,” we encountered a head-sea that buried the entire bows at every plunge; yet the speed was lowered by only a quarter of a knot. Even a sailing yacht will overcome a head-swell in a very creditable manner; but when a massive, clumsy square-rigger runs into one, farewell to even a moderate run. She stops at every sea for an appreciable time, till the impetus of so ponderous a mass asserts itself and she tumbles into the next valley. So it was with us all through the night, though we made good a fine course north-northwest.

A fact little known generally is that in former years there existed in our ships what was known as a hospital tax. It was finally abandoned, not more than fifteen years ago, and consisted in each man’s paying forty cents a month as long as he was on board a given vessel toward a common fund, the total sum being handed to the proper persons on the ship’s arrival for the maintenance of the marine hospital at the port to which she was bound, provided that such a port was of sufficient importance to warrant an institution of this sort. I think this was a pretty good idea, and cannot think why it was abolished. On a ship like this one, for instance, the amount at the end of a four-months’ voyage would be nearly forty dollars. Yet no one on board would feel the loss of the dollar and a half that he had contributed. Latitude, 32° 7′ north; longitude, 135° 6′ west.

September 9

Yesterday afternoon a sail was sighted from the fore-sky-sail-yard, and at once threw everybody into tumult of excitement. Truly, a long time had passed since we had beheld a vessel of any sort, for the last time that we saw anything fashioned by man’s hand was seven weeks ago, off the Horn. We beat this record on our first voyage, however, when sixty-five days passed without our sighting a vessel. The ship “I. F. Chapman,” however, arrived at New York from Manila shortly before we sailed, having been at sea one hundred and twenty-five days, and during all that time not a single craft of any description sailed into her ken!

At five o’clock the upper sails of our new friend were in sight from the deck, and I walked to the break of the poop, where the mate was, to ask his opinion of her. He was extremely pompous, and talked with such assurance that you would suppose he had just come off the stranger. She had not risen to her upper topsails when Mr. Goggins said, “Ho! I know ’er; she’s a barkentine that trades between San Francisco and the Hawaiian Islands!” (I have never met a captain or mate who said Sandwich Islands.) This was to exhibit his infinite knowledge of the Pacific coast. Now, when hull down, I make it a rule never to contradict a sailor when he gives an opinion as to how a square-rigger is sailing, whether on or off the wind, or what her precise rig is; few objects are more puzzling, even to an experienced eye. But on this occasion I had a pair of very excellent glasses on the vessel, and suggested that she was either a bark or a ship steering by the wind. “Naw, naw,” shouted the mate, with a backward sweep of his arm; “she’s a barkentine, a-runnin’ free.” An hour later it proved to be a British ship close-hauled on the port tack, standing to the eastward. The mate was overwhelmed with chagrin, but his cup of misery was not yet full, for when the old man went on deck last night at ten, the moon being very bright, he asked him whether the ship was still in sight, to which the mate answered, “She’s not, sir.” “Then what’s that?” asked the skipper, pointing under the spanker. There, on the quarter, dim, but in plain view, was the handsome stranger, and she had gone around on our tack.

Last evening we witnessed a sunset that was the most impressive of the whole voyage. An hour before the sun disappeared we noticed great cumulo-nimbus clouds marshalling themselves in the west, the horizon then being veiled in a curious, diaphanous mist. When we came up from supper, though, the sun had nearly reached the sea-rim, and for ten minutes we were the enchanted spectators of most exquisite cloud scenery. High up toward the zenith two ranges of heavy, gloomy cloud mountains were reared, peak on peak, forming in themselves a scene of remarkable grandeur, and right between these purple ramparts, and just then touching the horizon, lay the great, blazing globe of fire, edging the immense vapory masses with a fringe as of living flame and transmuting the clouds into glowing pictures of the Delectable Mountains, more beautiful than artist ever conceived, with a suggestion of the Celestial City itself in the surpassing glory of the moment. As Handel said when composing the “Messiah,” “I did think that I did see all heaven before me, and the great God Himself.” The entire spectacle was visible through the thin mist, now changed into a veil of radiant bronze, putting a finishing touch upon a scene which, for magnificence of coloring and stately splendor, we have never seen equalled.

No sooner had the orb of day vanished than out soared the moon from behind a sable cloud and a night of ineffable peace and purity followed, with now and then a weird effect produced by a guny floating slowly across the moon’s face, with the appearance of a gigantic, prehistoric bat. Oh, how superb Nature is when viewed thus from the deck of a sailing ship! How can a man deny God at such moments as these? How can he say that he is lonely when he is surrounded by such wonderful memorials of His earthly magnificence? Latitude, 34° 5′ north; longitude, 137° 14′ west.

September 10

We can stand but very little more of this northerly wind, for we are getting very anxious to go on the other tack. Last night and this morning the wind was very unsteady, and we alternately broke off to west-northwest and came up to northwest by north. It would be useless to tack ship at long as we can hold as good a course as the former, for we would have to make a little southing on the other leg. By to-morrow we will probably be in the latitude of our destination, though a thousand miles west of it, and the skipper intimates that he will then let her come round whether or no.

This morning, it being the first occasion for a long while, we had a brace of fresh eggs for breakfast, which when poached were so indescribably delicious that the memory of them lingered long and sweetly in the palate. It is only about once in three weeks that our barren, emaciated hens honor us in this fashion, and when they do, our gratitude is boundless. Ordinarily, my wife’s breakfast consists of fresh, crisp soda biscuit, a boiled potato, and a cup of cocoa; my own comprising soda biscuit, potatoes, jam, and tepid water. It is a matter of surprise to every one who has experienced a lack of ice how readily one becomes accustomed to being without it; by the seventh or eighth day the desire for iced water has passed entirely away and doesn’t return except in case of illness. People generally regard a man who refuses any of the customary matutinal beverages with the most extreme astonishment; when he declines coffee, they open their eyes; when he refuses tea, they begin to murmur; and when he also denies cocoa, they drop everything and look intently at him, as though they expected to discover some visible proof of his abstinence. “Why, but your health,” these people cry; “every one needs something hot in the morning.” This is quite false, even in winter weather, as anyone can prove to one’s own satisfaction by shunning so strong a stimulant as coffee for a fortnight and taking only water at breakfast; nearly everybody would feel great benefit from such a course in less than a week.

One would think that long-voyage ship-masters would grow to detest salt and dried meats and tinned vegetables, but they do not; and Captain Scruggs affirms that after one or two good “feeds” of fresh meat ashore after every voyage he wants to return to his salt beef; and I have yet to see the captain or mate who preferred the finest pressed tongue and canned corned beef to ordinary salt junk; they cling to it with a truly wonderful pertinacity.

The captain detailed to us last evening the ingenious method of loading coal at Newcastle, Australia. A ship there hauls in close to the pier, along the edge of which extends a railway track. A train of coal-cars is then backed down on the wharf, each car holding five tons. They are then uncoupled, a hydraulic crane lifts each one silently from the track, swings it over a given hatch, the bottom drops automatically, precipitating the coal into the hold, and the car is then swung back again and placed on the rails, and another takes its place. The same method is now or was once employed at Newport, Wales.

In the United States chutes are in general favor for loading colliers, especially in the coastwise trade, which is conducted by means of fore-and-aft schooners, some of which are as large as many ships. The “W. B. Palmer,” for instance, registers about two thousand tons, with a carrying capacity of thirty-five hundred, equal to that of the “Hosea Higgins,” while several range well over fifteen hundred registered tons. In spite of the encroachments of steam, these mammoth schooners seem to more than hold their own, as the fleet is constantly being increased. Ten years ago a vessel like the “Governor Ames,” or any of the Randalls, paid from twenty to twenty-five per cent., though the profits are now probably somewhat reduced. The “Ames” has loaded twenty-five hundred tons of coal at Norfolk in nine hours, which is the best work on record, as this included trimming, and everything else, all ready for sea. This phenomenal speed was attained by simultaneously working the four hatches, rivers of coal continuously sliding into the hold through the chutes. At Aden and Port Said the steamers are coaled entirely by hand in quite an interesting manner: A lighter of coal is secured alongside a steamer, aboard of which is a swarm of black men, mostly Kroumen, each with a shallow, wicker basket as large as a dish-pan. As soon as the lighter is made fast two cargo ports are opened in the steamer’s hull, one forward and one abaft the bunkers. The men then fill their baskets, which they carry upon their heads, and march in single file through the forward port, empty their baskets as they pass the bunkers without pausing, and issue from the after-opening into the lighter, where a freshly-filled basket awaits each. So great is the number of men that a solid black stream passes through the steamer; and though each basket holds but twenty pounds of coal, it is loaded into the bunkers at the rate of one hundred tons per hour. On our return from India in a P. and O. steamer through the Red Sea we coaled thus at Aden, by electric light; the weather was drizzly (itself a curiosity), and when the moisture condensed on the naked, sooty backs of the Kroumen, they appeared as though clad in a mail of sparkling jet; and as they maintained a dismal chant throughout the process, the whole scene resembled a picture from the land of gnomes and pixies. Latitude, 35° 50′ north; longitude, 139° 20′ west.

September 11

The winter of our discontent is now at its height. Vainly do we endeavor to make easting; we cannot, for the wind for a long time has been at northeast instead of between north and west, as it should be. At four this morning, exasperated beyond endurance, I heard the skipper growl to the mate, “We’ll let her go round, anyway; maybe we’ll fetch Cape San Lucas.” We did make good an easterly course for a while, but at five we broke off to east-southeast, which, with the variation, was southeast three-quarters east, a preposterous course; so we went around again at eight, and are still pegging away on the starboard tack, making good north by west, and only twenty miles south of ’Frisco.

Every opportunity the dour Scot has for conversation now he embraces. At seven last evening, sitting on the main-hatch, he said, “I’ll bet you never heard what ‘Long John’ (Pettersen) said to the mate one night off Cape Horn; ’twas that night when we had the worst snow-squalls. I dunno what the row was about, but Mr. Goggins called John up on the poop and began to blackguard him; then he let him have it once or twice in the face about as hard as I ever saw, and was just goin’ to kick him down the poop-ladder, when down jumps Long John on the main-deck, turns around and yells, ‘You come down here and I’ll break yer —— —— neck!’ and he’d ’a done it, too. What did Mr. Goggins do? Walked aft and looked into the binnacle. ‘That settles you in my mind, me buck,’ says I to meself. I don’t believe he had a right to hit John, for, if I do say so, he’s the willingest sailor I ever had to do with; but when John dared him to come down off the poop—— Well, that’s the sort o’ stuff the mate’s made of; he hasn’t got the sand of a worm. But look, sir, I want to tell ye somethin’ more about the Australian packets. The best and finest voyage I ever had in all me life was in one o’ those ships, the ‘Loch Rannoch.’” (I love to hear MacFoy roll out his sonorous Scottish names.) “We had a hundred and eighteen passengers, most o’ them, of course, in the ’tween-decks, which was fitted up wi’ bunks for ’em. Oh! but we had the fun that passage, though the rules are strict, just like in the navy, and well they need be. The emigrants can’t go either forrad or aft o’ certain limits, all lights are out at eight in the evenin’, no smokin’ after that hour, and in heavy weather none o’ them are allowed on deck. In the Southern Ocean, runnin’ our eastin’ down, the hatches were battened for two weeks, and all the air the people got was thro’ the ventilators. When such emigrants get to Melbourne they have to report at Government House, and things are fixed so they can pay their passage-money in instalments. The men are generally a pretty decent, well-conducted lot; but the women,—oh, Lord! the women! Some o’ them’s amazons, and that’s a fact. I remember one that we had on board had the whole ship in a hurrah till one day Cap’n Skene ordered her aft to talk to her. I mind the time well: the cap’n, a fat, short, little man in blue and brass buttons wi’ podges on his shoulders, as vain as a turkey, but a good seaman, was talkin’ to a couple o’ first-class passengers when this lassie was led aft, and he turned with a frown to size her up like. ‘Well, mutton-face, who’re ye lookin’ at?’ says she; and then, without givin’ him time for a word, she bawled at him, ‘D’ye know what I think o’ you? You’re no more good than a hoot down a dumb-waiter shaft.’ She said she was no bloomin’ sailor, and she’d have the run o’ the ship if she liked; and, will you believe it, they had to put the irons on her, she got that bad. We used to have great singin’ in the dog-watches. Man, ’twould ha’ done yer heart good to see us sailors a-sittin’ on the forecastle-head, thirty of us, and pretty soon we’d start a chanty and keep it up for ten minutes; and no sooner would we stop than a score of emigrants amidships would take it up, the women’s and men’s voices soundin’ fine together, till it was most as good as a concert. You’d better believe it, though, that it takes strict discipline to keep a hundred and fifty people in order for three months.”

“See here, MacFoy,” said I, when he had finished. “I want you to answer me a straight question; is this a hard ship on the men?”

“Why, no, of course it’s not,” he answered.

“Well, Mr. Rarx told me that once, but I didn’t know whether to believe him or not,” said I.

“I can just tell you, she’s the quietest Yankee ship I ever sailed in,” observed David; “why, there’s been no blood flyin’ at all to amount to much. The men can’t make it out; there hasn’t one o’ them been clouted now goin’ on three weeks. But I can tell you why it is; it’s all on account o’ you and your wife. The old man won’t let out before ye, but I’ve often seen him hold on tight to himself and just swear instead o’ knockin’ the feller end-wise. Yes, Mr. Rarx was right when he told ye this was an easy ship.” Latitude, 37° 18′ north; longitude, 139° 50′ west.

September 12

Hurrah for California! Hurrah for the north wind! Our bowsprit is at last pointing towards the brown crags of the Golden Gate. At the change of the watch at midnight we heard the captain sing out, “All hands on deck; tack ship.” A few moments later came “Put your hellum down”; and a moment afterward he called out “Hellum’s a-lee”; yet another minute or two and “Maintop-sail haul” split the air. A dead silence followed as the men cast off the braces, and then the heavy yards clattered noisily around, followed by the agreeable sound of ropes running over patent sheaves (always pronounced shivs); and finally, “Let go and haul” went ringing forward, the head-yards swung round, and in ten minutes more the ship was braced up on the port tack, heading somewhat to the northward of east. All continued to go well, and we are now doing seven knots.

At 10.30 this A.M., as we were watching the mate reeve a new log-line on the “cherub,” I heard Kelly at the wheel say “Sst, sst,” and looking where he pointed, lo! a sail appeared well above the horizon on the lee bow. The glasses resolved her into a three-masted fore-and-aft schooner on the starboard tack; and we presently perceived that she was rigged with pole-masts and a spike bowsprit, being the first vessel of the sort I ever saw. It makes a very serviceable rig, not so picturesque as fidded topmasts and slender jib-boom, but powerful and able looking, which count for more in a seaman’s eye than æsthetic beauty.

Before long it became apparent that if neither of us shifted the helm there would be a collision; and as we were on the port tack, we should be the one to alter our course; but then the other vessel was only a schooner, so this would never enter the mind of a square-rigger skipper. Sure enough, although the other had the right of way, she shifted her wheel and we passed across her bows, not more than a cable’s length away. She was the “Sequoia,” of San Francisco, three hundred and twenty-five tons, and was probably bound up to Puget Sound from a southern Californian port. Observe how hard it is to make northing as well as easting here at this season, when vessels are obliged to stand off shore twenty degrees in order to reach up, and the “Sequoia” hadn’t tacked ship yet to fetch in. I never before saw a fore-and-aft schooner a thousand miles off shore, though there are small two-masters that trade between Newfoundland and Spain, and between Boston and the Bight of Benin.

As we passed the “Sequoia,” all hands aboard of her crowded to the side to see us; and we probably made a splendid picture as we swept by, only two or three hundred yards away, under all possible canvas. The captain and mate declared that her name was pronounced “Sequina”; ship-masters often have the most remarkable pronunciations even for well-known ports and landmarks, and they cling to them with dogged tenacity.

Last night we had another new dish for supper,—cream toast. This sounds odd, I expect, but it was simply delicious; it is true that, as in the case of the rarebits the other evening, the bread was not all that could be desired; but by using unsweetened condensed Swiss cream, thinned a little with water, it proved to be a most savory dish, though an expensive one for the ship, as an entire can has to be used each time. In truth, if made thus, it tastes far better than if fresh milk is used, as the great fault with ordinary milk toast lies in its flatness and insipidity; but the Swiss cream, being very rich and perfectly pure, is eminently adapted to this purpose. It sticks in my mind that this ought to be a hint for housewives.

Already we have begun to estimate precisely when we will reach port; if we do it in six days, or by next Saturday, it will mean only a hundred and fifty miles a day, or six and a half per hour, which we should do without trouble if we do not fall to leeward of the Farallones.

Mr. Rarx is still very feeble, and will evidently have to be carried ashore. Latitude, 38° 10′ north; longitude, 139° 10′ west.

September 13

A magnificent day, though not quite so much wind as we would like to have. Up to ten this morning we did passably well, but since then it has been pretty light, though there is a bank of wool-packs rising in the west, foretelling more wind from that desirable quarter. We made three degrees of departure, and to our chagrin, not to say consternation, fifty-eight miles of southing; this latter must be due, we think, to an error in our previous dead reckoning, as we hadn’t had the sun for two days, and the currents here are often strong. A line drawn from yesterday’s alleged noon position to that of to-day passes directly over the reputed Reed Rocks; but as we are by no means sure of yesterday’s work, we cannot on that account positively deny their existence. They were first reported about fifty years ago by one Reed, an American mariner; but as the British admiralty charts do not acknowledge the presence of the rocks, and as our own charts have D marked beneath them, meaning doubtful, it is probable that, if they ever did exist, they have now disappeared.

It is worthy of mention that the total cost of running and maintaining a ship like the “Hosea Higgins” for one year amounts to an average of twenty-five thousand dollars. In New York alone the bills that Captain Scruggs had to pay before we went to sea amounted to almost fifteen thousand dollars, though this was a somewhat excessive amount, owing to the putting in of a new bowsprit and fore lower mast, which, with the rigger’s bill, footed up a total of two thousand dollars. Here is a list of the accounts rendered: Riggers, stores, stevedore, foremast, blacksmith, wharfage, advance to men, ship-chandler, sail-maker, tow-boat, pilot, shipwright, tonnage dues, butcher (fresh meat).

In San Francisco there will be an equally heavy account, as a new mizzen lower mast will be shipped there; and when the “Higgins” arrives back at New York she will have to be thoroughly overhauled and repaired, being of the age of fifteen years. Wooden vessels are classed A 1 for that period and no longer without a complete renovation, and she is then reclassed; iron vessels are rated A 1 for a much longer period. The list of firms above enumerated would not be complete, however, without mentioning the cooper’s bill. This is sometimes quite large for repairs made to cases, barrels, etc., on account of damage sustained while loading, at sea, or discharging. Goods must always be delivered in first-rate condition. Yet, in spite of the heavy running expenses, this ship averages fifteen and sixteen per cent. profit; and there is one very large iron four-masted ship, belonging to the keenest ship-owner in New York, which regularly pays a twenty per cent. annual dividend. Nearly all American sailing ships pay well; but the greatest profits that I know of in late years have been made by a British eleven-knot tramp steamer, whose name I cannot remember. This vessel for the last four years has paid the owners an average annual profit of thirty-four per cent. Much of this is, of course, due to the vessel’s happening to strike the various markets at exactly the right time, though there must be a good, sharp business head to the concern to achieve such an astonishing result. It is said, however, that the majority of British sailing ships are not good money-makers. Latitude, 37° 12′ north; longitude, 136° 15′ west.

September 14

A magnificent breeze that has driven us along at nearly nine knots has blown steadily from the north-northeast for twenty-four hours, giving us an easterly course by compass. But, alas! the point and a half of variation and another half-point of leeway force us to steer about east-southeast true. We made a whole degree of southing in consequence, and are now ninety miles south of ’Frisco Heads. If we have to tack ship it will be a piece of outrageous luck; and if the ship doesn’t come up three points by noon to-morrow, that’s just what we will have to do.

Last Sunday, as I was talking to some of the men forward, Broadhead spoke of the Yellowstone Park, and he chanced to mention that a friend of his had spent his honeymoon in that delectable locality, adding that, of course, everything looked particularly rosy even for the Yellowstone. Conversation then changed, when all at once I found the eyes of Jimmie Rumps fixed upon me, and a moment later he said, wistfully and earnestly, “I should think it must be just grand to go on a honeymoon.” Rumps, it might be added, would make an excellent cabin-boy on a yacht; but as bosun of a large ship, it would be difficult to find one more thoroughly incompetent than he is. There are at least a dozen of the men before the mast who are far better sailors than he, and seamanship is a sine qua non in a bosun as well as in a second mate.

Another speech of one of the men afforded us a little amusement this forenoon. As my wife stepped to the binnacle to learn the course, the old man having just gone below with his sextant, Paddy, the merry, humorous young Irishman, was steering; but instead of his usual jolly smile, his face indicated the most extreme dejection. So, to cheer him up, my wife nodded to him and remarked, “We’ll soon be in, Paddy.” “Yes, mum, I know,” he replied, “but I got gum-boils now”; to show that variety had been vouchsafed him in his afflictions, as he has only just recovered from the worst sea-boils in the ship.

It may not be very widely known that in the United States there are several competent women ship-mistresses, as I suppose they ought to be called. I don’t mean women who understand more or less about the handling of vessels, but those who are entirely capable and have received their certificates for steamers from the government. The first woman to pass the examination in this country was a Mrs. George Miller, of New Orleans, and it was the late Justice Folger, at the time Secretary of the Treasury, who, after mature deliberation, decided that a woman could legally, if she passed the severe examination necessary to command a steam-vessel, assume the responsible position of captain. Since then several women in the United States have obtained master’s licenses and have demonstrated their ability to handle steamers; but the woman-captain of a square-rigger has not yet appeared on the horizon, though many long-voyage captains’ wives are almost, if not quite, as capable navigators and seamen as their husbands.

The British Board of Trade, however, has positively refused to allow a member of the gentler sex to appear before it for examination. A test case recently came up when the daughter of an English marquess applied to that institution for master’s papers. This lady pointed out that she simply desired to command her own yacht, which she was quite capable of doing, and did not wish to have anything to do with any other vessel; but the Board of Trade’s answer to her application was that it would not permit a woman to be examined for a master’s certificate, as the word master implicitly specified that men alone were eligible. Shortly afterward the marquess’s daughter married an Irish merchant captain, and at the present time is no doubt ably assisting her husband in the navigation of the splendid ship which he has the good fortune to command. Latitude, 36° 21′ north; longitude, 132° 30′ west.

September 15

This is the second of my wife’s birthdays that we have passed at sea, as three years ago we celebrated one in the “Mandalore” in 37° south, 16° east; and to commemorate this occasion we have had very strong northerly winds, with heavy puffs, a clear sky, and a rough but magnificent sea, with the ship bounding through it under the maintop-gallant-sail, bursting the spray high up to windward in drenching showers as she shoulders her way through the great creaming billows. How superb and proud they look, their snow-white, downy crests standing pompously forth against the azure sky, with intervening valleys of that wonderful blue which imparts such a fascination to the scene! We love nothing better than to pick out a particularly tall sea when it is still a quarter of a mile away on the bow. On it comes, as resistless as time; now hidden as the ship drops into a hollow, now soaring above its fellows as some grand, snowy peak towers over its pine-clad neighbors. Nearer and yet nearer it approaches, challenging combat as it comes, the vessel half advancing to meet it. And now it is right alongside, and hangs menacingly thirty feet above the ship, and the spray scattered from its glistening summit flies overhead in a swirling cloud, and a rainbow spans for an instant the streaming decks. It seems impossible that the vessel can clear the swift rush of the great billow; but just as it gathers itself for the assault the ship, with a heavy lurch to leeward, presents a high, copper-sheathed wall to the seething flood, and before you know it you have passed the crest of the huge wave and are sliding smoothly and noiselessly into the quiet valley beyond.

We have just cause for rejoicing, too, for the ship has come up two whole points since midnight, and we are now steering east-northeast by compass; two more points to the northward and we can fetch to windward of the Farallones. The captain seems wonderfully positive that we will fetch in all right, and when he expresses himself so surely, which he seldom does, we always feel pretty certain of the chances being in our favor.

I haven’t mentioned Mr. Rarx for some time. He has not been doing at all well, eats hardly six ounces of food a day, and he has withered away to a wraith of his former self; an idea of this may be gained from the captain’s estimate that he has lost at least forty pounds. The impression grows that Louis will be cleared in court, this opinion being held even by the skipper, for the men say that the second mate knocked Karl down with a maul besides the block, and there are three others who can bring damaging evidence against Mr. Rarx. But I am very much afraid that the mellifluous voices of the crimps when they swarm aboard in San Francisco harbor will exercise a somewhat different influence upon their opinions. I should like to see a ship-master with the courage to prevent the entrance of these crimps into his vessel; but if he did so and had them all kicked over the side into the harbor, as they ought to be, what a time this ship-master would have getting a crew together when he was next ready for sea! For not a boarding-master in the city would let him have a man.

If sailors would only hold together when they get ashore and testify against the bad treatment that they get at sea, nine-tenths of the villains who officer our deep-water-men would now be contemplating existence behind grated windows. If we had any doubts as to this particular ship’s being worse in its treatment of the men than the average Yankee, they were further dispelled by a remark of Jack Nickalls, an unobtrusive little sailor, and a good one: “This ship’s a peach compared to them wot I’ve been in.” Louis is fairly cheerful and conducts himself remarkably well. Latitude 36° 1′ north; longitude, 128° 20′ west.

September 16

To our very great astonishment, the wind increased very rapidly yesterday afternoon, and by three o’clock it was blowing a strong gale from the northward, with a cloudless sky. Several exciting incidents marked the day, the first of which occurred at the above hour. I had just gone on deck when suddenly there was a most tremendous clatter forward, and in another second down fell the big maintop-mast stay-sail, hanging outboard so as to just touch the water, as, of course, it was blown to leeward by the gale. From beyond the head, which was that part that hung down, extended about six feet of the heavy iron wire stay which had parted, and there instantly began the most terrible slatting that I have ever heard or seen. It was nothing short of fearful. There was a heavy sea running, and as the ship would lay far over every few moments the wind would gather up the sail, blow it out horizontally to leeward, and then jerk it back and forth, up and down, seemingly in every direction at the same instant, with appalling fury, the iron wire dashing now against the main-backstays, now against the bulwarks, now full into the bunt of the main-sail, with a force that was awful and made you hold your breath as the weapon was flung against the backstays with the crack of a pistol. I have seen slatting before when the gear of large racing yachts carried away; but it was not to be spoken of in the same breath with that of to-day. It was as if the power of the universe was concentrated in the twisting, bounding, whirling stay-sail; and the sailors stood aghast, for it was certain death to approach.

The captain was asleep when the stay parted, but he was on deck in a few seconds, and instantly ordered the helm hard up, so as to get the ship before the wind and prevent further destruction, for the main-rigging couldn’t have stood the thrashing much longer. Slowly the ship paid off, but five minutes passed until she was running free before the big, smoking seas, for we had started nothing, but had simply put the helm up. Meanwhile the slashing continued, and at last the wire burst through the main-sail and made a gaping rent in the after-leech. How the whole lee side of the sail escaped is marvellous; but when we were dead before the wind four hands simultaneously seized the heaving sail, and by heroic work finally got it muzzled after fifteen minutes of most courageous efforts.

No sooner was it secured and the ship on her course again than the old man sung out, “Clew up the main-t’-ga’nt-s’l.” There was a rush to the clew-lines and halliards; but somebody slacked away something too quickly for the zephyr that was whispering aloft, for there came a crackling report, and the top-gallant-sail at once was transformed into canvas pennants. A varied assortment of profanity tinged the atmosphere for quite half an hour, as a new sail had to be bent, and no one who has not seen a sail shifted in a gale of wind can form any true idea of the hard labor entailed in the process. So, leaving the uninitiated to picture it as well as he can, I must go on to describe something that occurred which more nearly concerned ourselves.

My wife and I were in our room a few minutes later discussing the stay-sail business, when, without warning, there came a very great lurch, and then the booming of mighty waters smote our ears as a whooping sea fell thundering directly on the poop. For a moment we were speechless as the water rushed in our windows, in spite of this being the lee side, drenching every object in the room; but we were called to our senses mighty suddenly by the volume of water that came cascading down the companion-way and gushing inches deep into our room. But, alas! what could we do? Such a thing happens in a second, and by the time that we had slammed the door and shutters there was no more water to come in and the damage was wrought. Personally we did not suffer extensively, but the after-cabin was a rare sight. The skipper’s room was on the weather-side, and as the ship heeled far over to the sea, everything movable shot out into the cabin, and when we first saw it books, magazines, balls of twine, slippers, shoes, ocean directories, charts, dividers, rulers, cigars, and an incredible number of old San Franciscan newspapers, every letter of which we have read, including the advertisements, were washing about in half a foot of brine. An idea of the volume of water may be gained when it is said that the steward and Sammie were an hour and a half in baling it out with buckets. Fortunately, the weather windows were protected by the solid wooden shutters which had just been closed; but the companion door had been left open, and this did nearly all the damage. Not even when the forward skylight was stove off the river Plate was there so much water below, and it was really an alarming thing to see so much ocean flowing down the companion-stairs.

But all these little inconveniences were as nothing when compared with the fact that the gale delayed us seriously and that the sea kept knocking us off, though the wind was steady at north-northwest; so that, in spite of it, we did not make good a better course than east by north and went through the water very slowly, as we had to hold her well up to make even one point of northing.

By ten this A.M., however, the wind had so moderated that the top-gallant-sails were set, but we began then to break off to the southward of east, and at one o’clock we wore ship and are now on the starboard tack, heading up northwest by north. The point to be avoided at all hazards is not to fall off to the southward any more; never mind going back into the Pacific a little if you can make some northing. Our destination is distant only a hundred and fifty miles, and the captain has until Saturday to save his record of one hundred and thirty days. Latitude, 36° 28′ north; longitude, 125° 30′ west.

September 17

Instead of being now within sight of the coast, lo! we are becalmed within twenty miles of where we were at noon yesterday. It is difficult to imagine anything more exasperating than to lie idly upon the surface of a glassy ocean, only a little more than a hundred miles from the port for which you have been striving for four months. I wouldn’t care if the voyage were to be several weeks longer, but it is trying for all hands to thus lie becalmed so near the haven. Off the Hooghly, we were similarly tortured with light winds for several days.

When we went on deck this morning the weather was such that we might well have conceived ourselves down between the Trades, for we apparently floated in oil, and the big squares of canvas depended in writhing folds from the lofty yards. Not even the smallest clouds spattered the blue heavens, but a thin haze covered the sea and rose above the horizon some fifteen degrees or so, a semi-transparent curtain of a deep orange, beautiful to behold, but of ill omen, as it was highly improbable that anything worthy the name of breeze would come from anywhere with such conditions.

Astern, among the dark, spiral water-funnels floated half a dozen gunies, and we thought that perhaps we could capture one; therefore the skipper rigged a small hook baited with bacon-rind to a thin line and dropped it overboard. In a few minutes one took the bait; and, giving the line a jerk, he hooked the creature in the upper part of the bill and hauled him through the water and up over the stern. This bird made but little resistance, and formed a strong contrast to the fierce struggles of an albatross under similar conditions. When finally deposited upon the deck, he seemed to be about the size of a swan as to body, but his wings were very long, the alar extent being eight feet, or only three or four feet less than an average albatross. Like the latter, a guny can inflict a very severe wound with his bill, and it is necessary to have a care for your calves as you pass by. We endeavored to take some photographs of the big bird, but he would insist upon continual motion, and finally the wretched beast cast up the contents of his stomach on the deck, after the manner of all sea-fowl. Then the captain brought up the Maltese cat, who entertains a very lofty opinion of itself and who is in the habit of valiantly putting the chickens to flight; he was apparently stunned, though, when confronted with the great bird, and when the latter opened a beak in which the whole of Tommie’s head might have rested, his tail thickened and he sped him away. As it was useless then to keep the guny any longer on board, the skipper grasped him dexterously by the tip of one wing and threw him over the side; whereupon catching himself before he touched the water, he flew off with a joyous scream to rejoin his comrades, and no doubt relate to them his wonderful adventures. Latitude, 36° 35′ north; longitude, 125° 50′ west.

September 18

Becalmed, sixty-five miles from the Farallones! It is a dismal fact that although we had a light, fair wind all last night, it let go at nine this morning, and since then we have been weltering in a light swell from the northward, with the sea at times like blue ice. Such a dead calm was it that my wife and I played cards the greater part of the morning on deck. At 7 A.M. the haze that shrouded the sea commenced to melt under the hot sun, and two ships were disclosed to our vision, one to port, the other to starboard. The former was a three-master of about two thousand tons, while the other was a very large, full-rigged, four-masted ship—that is, square-rigged on all the masts—of fully twenty-eight hundred tons. Both were metal vessels, and made a fine picture as they gracefully topped the easy swell. They were bound to the southward, and therefore have all their troubles before them.

The poor old man has broken his record, and we feel very sorry for him; and, indeed, it is a very fine thing for a captain to be able to say that never, upon any voyage, in any part of the world, has he been more than one hundred and thirty days at sea. He takes this voyage very philosophically, which is a remarkable fact, and says that no matter how fine a man’s record may be, it’s only necessary to keep on and it will at last be broken. I divided up some articles of old clothes among the men this afternoon, and their pleasure as they drew lots for the various pieces, which they made no attempt to conceal, was delightful to see. We, ourselves, are all packed up ready to go ashore whenever the wind will allow us; it is very satisfactory to get this done, for we always travel with an altogether unnecessary quantity of impedimenta, and it is a matter of considerable skill to compress all the things into two or three trunks.

While we were looking at the smaller of those two ships this morning the captain said that she looked like the British ship “Eurydice,” the present holder of the record passage across the North Pacific, she having made the voyage from Yokohama to Port Townsend in the wonderfully fast time of nineteen days. With this voyage compare those of two other British square-riggers, the “Clan Macfarlane” and the “Matterhorn”; neither is a slow ship, yet the former was one hundred and one days sailing from Hong-Kong to San Francisco, and the latter one hundred and fourteen between the same ports.

The captain is beginning to wonder how difficult it is going to be for him to get a crew in ’Frisco when he is ready for sea again; he is worrying a good deal over it, for when we sailed from New York sailors were so scarce in San Francisco that the big ships “Forfarshire” and “Kensington” went to sea with crews half of which were ranch hands, who had been rounded up by the crimps. Latitude, 37° 11′ north; longitude, 124° 12′ west.

September 19

At half-past six this morning there was a great rapping and thumping on our door, and Captain Scruggs cried, “If you want to see the Faralleeones you’d better come on deck.” Ten minutes later we emerged from the companion-way, but at first could see nothing at all for a chilly fog that lay upon the water, which had, during the night, changed to the muddy green of soundings. By dint of perseverance, though, we saw a large, dark mass loom gradually up until we could plainly discern the brown, sterile cones of the Farallones, which lie about twenty-five miles west of San Francisco Heads. Many persons have been puzzled to know why it is that the majority of the Pacific coast population pronounce the word as though it was spelled Fa-ra-lee-owns. The explanation of it seems to me to be a corruption of the Spanish pronunciation Fa-ralyo-nes, as, of course, the double l in that language has the sound of y. The same can be said of Mollendo, an important Peruvian port in 17° south; for Californians who are not especially erudite call the place Mol-ly-en-do, from the Spanish Mol-yen-do. It will be perceived how readily careless persons could fall into the way of putting an extra syllable in names which contain the double l, from hearing Mexicans and South Americans pronounce the words, which, of course, they do correctly.

As we had packed all of our valises, etc., the night before, there was nothing for us to do but to anticipate with pleasurable excitement the entrance into the Golden Gate, for the captain assured us that by eleven o’clock there wouldn’t be a vestige of fog left; this being a peculiarity of the coast climate. Sure enough, at ten the mists began to disperse and a bright glare overhead indicated an impending flood of sunshine.

At this moment we heard several sharp whistles ahead, and a tow-boat passed close to us in another minute, and then rounding to, ranged up alongside. How odd a sensation it is to see a new face again after an absence of four months from the retreats of men! Day after day, week after week, we have watched Mr. Goggins relieve Mr. Rarx, and Broadhead relieve Paddy, so steadily that we almost forgot that there was any one else in existence; and when we perceived the captain of the tug-boat standing in the pilot-house in a glistening “biled” shirt and store clothes and a polish on his brown shoes that quite dazzled us, we gazed upon him fascinated, for he was the biggest dude we had seen in nineteen weeks. And how uncouth the ship’s company looked when contrasted with even the tow-boat’s crew! However, we were soon brought to from our reveries by a large bundle of newspapers that the tug’s skipper hove on board; and who can depict the joy of that hour, during which we pored over the journals, marvelling at the commonplace allusions to momentous events which had been almost forgotten by the daily reader?

Presently we passed two ships bound up to Puget Sound,—the “Dashing Wave” and the “Yosemite” (old Neilsen, a Swede, said he used to sail in the “Jo-se-might”),—and then, the fog lifting suddenly and completely, we found ourselves only two miles from the Heads. “Get out an old ensign,” said the skipper to the mate, “and put it in the riggin’, union down.” “Hall right, sir,” answered that individual with much satisfaction, and in a few minutes an old torn flag, reversed, fluttered in the starboard mizzen-shrouds. It was of ominous meaning, for to a sailor it signified “police assistance wanted on board.” And then we remembered the Frenchman below, and wondered what his thoughts and anticipations must be, for of course he knew that a tow-boat had our line.

It was a quarter to noon when we entered the Golden Gate under a cloudless sky and caught our first glimpse of the world-famed harbor. A single word describes it,—magnificent. The entrance itself, where the ship moves on between wild, rugged hills that tower sheer out of the sea, is marked with an individual grandeur, and serves to prepare one for the splendid haven within; and when the ship finally glides beyond a certain headland and creeps slowly along in a perfect maze of great wooden and steel sailing ships, with the immense expanse of shining water ahead, the wonderful, perpendicular streets on the starboard hand, and the endless chain of lofty hills on the other, a sensation of pride tingles through you when you think that it is your “ain countrie” that boasts this great, matchless harbor.

Long before the anchorage was reached a handsome white steamer was seen approaching us, with a vertically striped flag in the stern. It was the revenue cutter; and, steaming alongside, four men at once stepped on board. The first was the customs inspector, and the others, a deputy United States marshal and two policemen. It was a dramatic scene. All of our men were huddled around the galley, with anxious looks toward the officers of the law, who immediately went into the cabin and held a long conversation in low tones with the captain. Then the deputy marshal stepped into the second mate’s room and talked with him five minutes in whispers, a blue-coat posting himself at each cabin door. A rattling of keys was heard in another moment, and then old Goggins, somewhat awed, but as pompous and ridiculous as a turkey, stumped down into the lazarette, and with much unnecessary clanking of chains Louis issued forth into daylight. He was as pale as ashes, for a sort of prison pallor was upon his usually dark cheeks, and he seemed on the point of breaking down when he saw the police. Then he looked all around imploringly, first at his shipmates near the galley, then at Captain Scruggs, and finally he caught sight of us, when he cast upon us a look so sad and beseeching that I will remember forever the sorrowful look in his eyes. Only for an instant did he stop, though; the officers stepped forward at a nod from the deputy, grasped the Frenchman, still manacled, by the collar, marched him quickly over to the port side, hustled him aboard the revenue boat, and in another instant Louis Jacquin, able seaman, of Dunquerque, disappeared from view and was on his way to show cause for an assault on the high seas upon Thomas Rarx, second mate of the clipper “Hosea Higgins.”

When the anchor had touched the bottom we stood by for the crimps. Even before we were aware of it the evil creatures began to swarm on board like a flock of sinister vultures, and without ceremony they fell upon their prey. They plied the men from bottles whose black nozzles protruded from their coat-pockets; and in a few minutes each had persuaded his man to go with him when they should get ashore. Poor fellows, once more in the clutches of the vampires, who, while not actually fostered by the government, yet are allowed to ply their abominable and iniquitous trade full in the face of the law. And I repeat, the allotment or advance system of wages that now prevails, and which is the basis upon which the whole scheme of crimping is founded, must be abolished. It is the duty of the Federal government to see to it that this is done.

At fifteen minutes past twelve there was a loud order from the captain, “Let go.” Then came the heavy, crushing splash, the fierce rush of the cable, the big four-thousand-pound anchor gripped the mud of San Francisco Bay, and our long voyage was a thing of the past. How many exciting moments we had had in those one hundred and thirty-one days! What varied phases of the ocean we had witnessed in the seventeen thousand four hundred miles we had sailed, from the snowy squalls and hissing seas of Cape Horn to the quiet breezes and calm surface of the equatorial seas!

Little time was given us for reflection, though, for the tug-boat skipper had agreed to put us ashore at the foot of Market Street, if we would “look alive.” So we threw our valises and shawl-straps to a deck-hand on the tug, shook Captain Scruggs’ hardy fist, and then turned to do the same with Mr. Goggins; but as this individual was invisible at the time, no doubt below in the fore-peak, we were obliged to forego that pleasure. And now there ensued a remarkable scene: as we went over the side we noticed that all the sailors were on the mainyard, unbending the sail, and as we stepped aboard the tow-boat I shouted, “Good-by, boys! Good luck to you all!” There was a moment’s silence, and then Broadhead, who was at the starboard yard-arm just over our heads, sung out, “Now, fellows, three times three for them”; and at once there broke out the most vociferous and lusty cheering that ever came from eighteen throats. The men seemed to get worked up as they shouted, and at last MacFoy and a dozen others fairly yelled and threw their caps on deck and waved their arms like madmen, so that their voices went ringing peal on peal over the broad harbor, bringing to the rail the officers and crews of the big Scotch ships “Aberfoyle,” “County of Linlithgow” and “Blairgowrie,” which lay hard by, to know what all this cheering meant on a Yankee just in from sea. It was a moment to bring a tear to your eye; and neither my wife nor I can ever forget these honest, big-hearted sailors as they appeared on that yard, shouting themselves hoarse. Why? Simply because we had bade them good-morning and good-night during the voyage and had shown that we understood and appreciated their hard and thankless labors. If ship-masters would realize that a single kind word or even look often exerts more influence over a crew than oaths and blows, what a difference there would be in the handling and navigating of our long-voyage sailing ships!