After a couple of months on the job as inspectors Richardson and I had a few dollars in our pockets and, feeling rather reckless one day, decided to purchase some sugar stock in the hope of making a stake and thus being enabled to continue the trip in comparative luxury. We each bought ten shares of the Oahu Sugar Company's stock at thirty dollars a share. In order to do this we had to borrow one hundred and fifty dollars each from a Honolulu bank. While we were building castles in the air concerning the big pile we were going to make, the slump in the market, usual when amateurs begin meddling with stocks, occurred and our shares dropped six points. With the drop of our stocks came a drop in our hopes and we could picture our earnings of the past months vanishing as we stood helplessly by. We concluded that if there was no other way out of our financial difficulties we could at least stay on the job and earn what we had lost. In addition to our bail money for Smith and our loss on our high finance I had, either out of the goodness of my heart or because I was an easy mark, loaned out over two hundred dollars to acquaintances of mine who had put up tales of hard luck. With our finances in this state our trip for the present began to look somewhat dubious. However, everything turned out all right and we climbed out of our financial tangle with profit. The last week of our stay in Hawaii we were both released from Smith's bail, our sugar stocks had gradually risen to two points higher than the figure at which we purchased them and I collected every cent of my loans.
We had now been at Pearl Harbour several months and were anxious to be moving, so we started a vigorous campaign to make a getaway. Honolulu is simply a port of call and crews are not made up there and for this reason it is a poor place in which to be stranded, for it is next to impossible to sign on as a sailor on any ship. When off duty at Pearl Harbour we went to Honolulu and canvassed all the likely looking vessels for passage to either Australia or the Orient. The reception we received at the hands of the captains and stewards varied from the painfully courteous to the hardest of treatment. The skipper of a United States Army transport took us into his cabin, told us stories, gave us a drink but, true to his duty, refused to give us a lift across the Pacific. The steward of a Pacific Mail liner, whom we unfortunately caught ten minutes before the boat sailed—a busy time for a commissary chief,—disposed of us in short order. Seeing a man who filled the description given us, I hailed a greasy looking fellow as he was hurriedly ascending the gangway and asked him,
"Are you the steward?"
"Yep; what do you want?"
"May I have a minute of your time?"
"No, sir, only a half a minute." Our case looked hopeless.
"What are the chances for two of us to get a job?"
"None. I have had enough of fellows like you. Get off the gangway before I have you kicked off," shouted the chief cook as he beckoned to several deck hands to enforce his threat. There being nothing else to do, the two of us withdrew amid the laughter of the people on the pier who witnessed the dialogue. We retired to the opposite side of the wharf where we sat down, smoked a cigarette and talked the matter over. We felt pretty much subdued.
We were novices at the game of procuring maritime jobs and the old sea dogs with whom we had to deal knew it, but we concluded that the only way to get experience was to persevere. We started the trip as tramps and now, for the first time, we realised that we actually were tramps; but we always clung to the idea that we were of the refined variety.