Wherever there was a woman, native or half-breed, he took us ashore to make her acquaintance.
"Come along now," he would say, in a tone of command, "and be nice. They don't get a chance to talk to many women. Haven't you got some little womanly thing along with you that you can give them? It'll make them happy for months."
We were eager enough to talk to them, heaven knows, and to give them what we could; but the "little womanly things" that we could spare on a two months' voyage in Alaska were distressingly few. When we had nothing more that we could give, the stern disapproval in the captain's eyes went to our hearts. Box after box of bonbons, figs, salted almonds, preserved ginger, oranges, apples, ribbons, belts, pretty bags—one after one they went, until, like Olive Schreiner's woman, I felt that I had given up everything save the one green leaf in my bosom; and that the time would come when the captain would command me to give that up, too.
There seems to be something in those great lonely spaces that moves the people to kindness, to patience and consideration—to tenderness, even. I never before came close to such humanness. It shone out of people in whom one would least expect to find it.
Several times while we were at dinner the chief steward, a gay and handsome youth not more than twenty-one years old, rushed through the dining room, crying:—
"Give me your old magazines—quick! There's a whaler's boat alongside."
A stampede to our cabins would follow, and a hasty upgathering of such literature as we could lay our hands upon.
The whaling and cod-fishing schooners cruise these waters for months without a word from the outside until they come close enough to a steamer to send out a boat. The crew of the steamer, discovering the approach of this boat, gather up everything they can throw into it as it flashes for a moment alongside. Frequently the occupants of the boat throw fresh cod aboard, and then there are smiling faces at dinner. It is my opinion, however, that any one who would smile at cod would smile at anything.
The most marvellous voyage ever made in the beautiful and not always peaceful Pacific Ocean was the one upon which the Dora started at an instant's notice, and by no will of her master's, on the first day of January, 1906. Blown from the coast down into the Pacific in a freezing storm, she became disabled and drifted helplessly for more than two months.
During that time the weather was the worst ever known by seafaring men on the coast. The steamship Santa Ana and the United States steamship Rush were sent in search of the Dora, and when both had returned without tidings, hope for her safety was abandoned.