Jack the Young Canoeman: An Eastern Boy's Voyage in a Chinook Canoe

by George Bird Grinnell

"No, I expect not," said Crocker. "I would have had two good legs right now if I hadn't come round on this coast and took to sealing."

"Why," exclaimed Jack, "how did sealing make you lose your leg?"

"Well," said Crocker, "it was in this way: I made two or three voyages, as mate of a sealing schooner,—first with Indians, and then with Japs. The last voyage we made with the Indians we didn't get any skins, and the captain proposed to me that we cross over to Japan, and get a crew of Japs and then go north to the Commander Islands, and make a raid on them, and steal seals from the Russians. Of course I said it was a go, and just before the next season began we went over and got a crew of ten Japs and sailed.

"When we came in sight of the islands we found that there was a Russian gun-boat anchored near them, and so we stood out to sea for two or three days, and then, going back to the islands, we found the gun-boat had gone. Now we thought we had a sure thing on a load of seal skins. We sailed in pretty close to the shore, and then I took a boat and six Japs and we started in for the beach, the schooner standing off, just outside the rocks. As we rowed in towards the beach we could see that the rookery was a big one and that seals were plenty. It seemed as if things were going our way. We pulled in hard toward the rookery, and just as the boat was going to ground and the bowman got ready to hold her off a lot of Russian soldiers raised their heads up over the bluff and fired at us.

"It was about the first bunch of soldiers I ever saw that could hit anything; but they certainly hit us. Four of the Japs were killed at the first firing. One more was shot through the lungs and another through the thigh, breaking the bone. I got a shot through this leg, below the knee. I tried mighty hard to push off so as to get away, but the soldiers ran down to the beach and into the water, caught the boat and hauled it ashore. They threw the Japs overboard, for both of the wounded ones died pretty soon, and they carried me up onto the bluff and over to the little houses where the sealers lived.

"You see these Russian soldiers didn't care anything about the Japs, but they treated me pretty well. They gave me a good bed and tried to set my leg, but both bones were badly smashed, and I made up my mind that without a doctor there if they tried to set the leg they would make a botch of it, and the leg would go bad and I would croak. So after a day or two I picked out one of the nerviest of the chaps and had him take my leg off. He didn't know what to do, but I sat up and helped him, saw that the arteries were taken up right and tied, and that the bone was squarely sawed off, with good flaps left that were sewed up. Three or four days after the leg was gone the gun-boat came back and her surgeon came ashore. He looked at the leg, dressed it, and said that it was a good job, and that he wondered that any of those soldiers had known how to take a leg off like that. You see, he could talk a little English and good French, and I could talk a little French and good English, so we got on pretty well. He seemed to take a kind of a shine to me, too, and after I got a little strength he had me brought on board the ship, and after a little while we sailed for Petropaulovski. Before we got there I learned from something that he said that the soldiers had told him about my sitting up and telling them how to take off the leg. He seemed to think that was a great thing.

"When we got to town they carried me ashore and up to the jail and took me in. But before they had fairly got me locked up, the doctor, who had left the ship before I did, came in and showed the governor of the jail an order, and then I was taken to a mighty comfortable house, and stopped there for quite some time. The doctor used to come in two or three times a day and talk to me. Finally I got able to get up and be around, and by that time the doctor had had a carpenter make me a wooden leg; so I pegged around with that leg and a cane, and got to having a pretty good time; but, of course, I didn't know what they were going to do with me.

"There was a prince in town, a Russian prince. He was the head, so they said, of the Russian Fur Company. Once or twice he sent for me and questioned me about the seal stealing, and I told him all I knew, for there wasn't any use of making any secret of it. He seemed to be a pretty good sort of a fellow, and at length one day, after I had been there some months—it was winter, and mighty cold at that, you bet—he said to me: 'I ought to send you to the mines, but I don't believe you would be very useful there, with that one leg of yours, and I think the best thing to do with you in spring, when the weather opens, is to send you to Yokohama on some vessel.' Of course I didn't have any ambition to go to the mines, and I was mighty glad to be let off as easy as that. So when spring came, they found a little schooner that was going to sail to Japan, and they put me on board of it, and off I went. And what do you think that prince did? Just as I was going to step into the boat to be carried out to the schooner he suddenly appeared, shook hands with me, and wished me good luck and handed me a little canvas bag, which was pretty heavy, and said: 'Take good care of that, and make it go as far as you can'; and, by Jove! when I opened that bag and counted what was in it there was six hundred dollars.

"That doctor and that prince," he said slowly, as he rubbed his chin, "were mighty good to me. They treated me white. I wish though that the doctor had got around to the island four or five days before he did, and maybe I would have two legs now."