From Job to Job around the World

by Alfred C. B. Fletcher

GOVERNMENT INSPECTORS AT PEARL HARBOUR

On our return to Honolulu there still was no word from the Naval authorities as to appointments at Pearl Harbour. We decided to stand by a few weeks longer in the hope that an opening would soon occur. As our money was running low it was necessary for us to obtain temporary jobs to insure that we would get food each day and have a place to rest our heads at night. Richardson soon fell into the berth of sales-clerk in a photograph shop on the main street of Honolulu, selling kodak supplies and fixtures at twelve dollars a week. I was not so fortunate. I scoured the town for days for something that paid a living wage. I applied to the City Health Department, hoping to get a position as mosquito inspector, ambling about town with a can of oil on my back, pouring the liquid on the various duck ponds which are operated by Chinese and Japanese and which are prolific incubators for this tropical pest. I sought work as a checker of sugar as it is loaded on ships in the harbour. I made application to the three newspapers in the hope of being taken on as a reporter and I canvassed all the houses in the wholesale district. No one would have me. However, I knew one job I could get but I was standing it off as long as there might be prospects of obtaining something else. But finally I had to take it. A re-enforced concrete jail was under construction on the water front and one afternoon, after several hours of searching in vain for work, I sauntered around to this structure. I found the Irish foreman, assumed an empty appearance and said, "I am hungry." The good man immediately agreed to take me on as a labourer at $1.50 a day.

I appeared the next morning attired in suitable raiment for the work I was about to take up and was assigned to my post. The building had been in course of construction several months and had reached the point where the concrete had set and the forms were ready to be dismantled. Equipped with a pinch bar, I worked on a scaffolding with a dozen native Hawaiians and a score of Portuguese, removing the forms from the walls and ceilings. After several days of this fascinating pastime I was placed on the end of a shovel mixing concrete on the roof and propelling a wheelbarrow laden with cement. Pushing two hundred pounds of concrete in a primitive wheelbarrow on the top of an Hawaiian jail under the glaring and penetrating rays of the tropical sun with school teacher's hands was no joke. Blisters the size of nickels arose on my hands; my back became lame, my feet swollen and every muscle in my body as tender as a baby's. To reach the apex of misfortune I ran a rusty nail through the sole of my shoe into my foot. This was a fat load of discomfort to carry for a meagre $1.50 a day. But I had to eat.

In the meantime a vacancy occurred at Pearl Harbour and Richardson received an appointment. After swearing that he would support the Constitution of the United States, the laws of the territory of Hawaii, the Ten Commandments and what not, he was duly authorised to exercise the duties of sub-inspector of dredging. Richardson's one per cent. better mark in the examination put him on the dredging job three weeks in advance of myself and during this period he earned seventy-five dollars—a costly one per cent. for me.

After several weeks as a hod-carrier, I also received my Pearl Harbour appointment, which had been cabled from Washington, and I at once abandoned the concrete business and—from hard labour—joined Richardson in a life of leisure as a government inspector.

The United States Government was spending several million dollars in developing Pearl Harbour, a beautiful land-locked bay on the island of Oahu about ten miles from Honolulu. Under the supervision of the United States Navy Department a dry dock was being constructed, a naval station was to be built with shops, barracks, parade grounds, marine hospital, etc. In order to make this natural harbour accessible the government was having the channel dredged to a width of six hundred feet and to a depth of thirty-five feet. The work was under contract to the Hawaiian Dredging Company, who employed, at this time, about six hundred men. The task was being performed by six dredgers, each of a different type,—a clam-shell, a dipper, a converted schooner, an electric hydraulic, a steam hydraulic and a drag-bucket. These machines were superintended by experienced men from America, but the general run of their crews was recruited from the riff-raff of the earth. Drunken sailors, bums and tramps, good-for-nothing Europeans, worthless hulks, swearing Britishers and high sea wanderers blew into the camp and were taken on—to remain but a few days—when new recruits would come along or men would be enlisted from the patrons of the waterfront saloons of Honolulu. As deck hands, launch men and any sort of unskilled labour they were set to work, only to be replaced in a few days by a bunch equally as worthless and degraded. It was common occurrence for the whole outfit on a dredge to quit at midnight and be replaced in a few hours by a crowd obtained from the drunken ranks of the low-down dives of Honolulu. They would arrive at the dredge, laden to the shoulders with booze, howling drunk, some of them fighting mad, and before they were all landed from the launch it was an unusual thing if two or three had not fallen overboard and had to be fished out. However, beneath the uncouth externals of many of these men was a heart as big as a fortune, an unselfishness one would hardly surmise and a disposition which it would be difficult to duplicate.

The headquarters for the camp were located in Watertown, a little settlement at the mouth of the harbour, whose inhabitants, numbering about five hundred souls, were made up of Hawaiians, Japanese, Russians, Chinese, Portuguese and a score of Americans. This small camp contained one store and fifty or more houses where the employés of the dry-dock, machinists, launch hands, labourers and native fishermen lived.

According to its regular custom, the Government employed inspectors to see that the work was done properly. Call them what you will—spies, loafers or parasites—each name characterises some phase of the job. Such appellations are no reflection on the personnel of the force, however. There were fifteen of them and it would be hard to find a more interesting set of men grouped together in one spot. The several epithets by which they have just been designated are not due to any failing of theirs, but to the nature of the job, whose chief demands on the inspectors were to look intelligent, maintain the dignity of the Government, and draw pay. There were among these fifteen inspectors an ex-dentist of Honolulu, one of the finest fellows on this earth; an ex-lawyer, a brilliant and sterling man; an ex-doctor, whose Irish wit was of the rare and clever variety; an ex-professor of Whittier College, California; an ex-sailor and several nondescripts. Besides upholding the dignity of the Government each inspector was supposed to have a thorough knowledge of the channel, its width and depth, to inspect the dredging, to supervise the dumping of the dredged material and to submit a daily report to the head inspector.