The wind, the pouring rain, and the sudden gales continued for weeks. The weather turned bitter cold. Unable to hold her course, the Glenalvon ran “by the wind” far to the north. One night in the second week out, a goat froze to death. With only my khaki uniform, I should have suffered the same fate had it not been for the kindness of a shipmate who allowed me to use a “dead man’s gear” which he was afraid to wear.
To tell of all the hardships and misfortunes that befell us during that voyage would make this story too long. We slept in wooden bins on sacks filled with bits of straw and lashed ourselves fast to keep from being thrown out on the deck. The kind of beds we had mattered little, though, for we were not in them much of the time. The food fell so low that we had to get along on half rations; which was well, perhaps, for what was left had been on board more than two years. The biscuits in one cask opened toward the end of the voyage, were stamped with the date of 1878.
Looking forward to an easy passage, the captain had rigged out the ship in her oldest suit of sails. One by one, the fury of the wind tore them to ribbons. The bursting of canvas sounded above the roar of every storm. As each sail went, new ones of double-weight canvas were dragged from the locker and raised on high to the top of the mast. It was dangerous work to hang on away up there while bending a sail on the icy poles, with the wind howling about you, the foot-rope slippery, and every line frozen stiff, while the ship swung back and forth far below like a cork on the end of a stick. Every old sail was carried away before that unchanging wind, and even the new canvas was sometimes split.
On the eighth of September we found that, after all our work, we had covered just sixty miles! But on that day the wind changed, and our vessel caught the breeze on her beam and raced homeward like a steamer.
On the nineteenth day of September some one said that we were nearing port. Several of the seamen declared that the voyage was not half over; but, for all that, everybody began to get excited. In the middle of the afternoon the mate gave an order to get the anchor over the side. He did not have to repeat the command. The men rushed to the work, laughing childishly. In a short time the anchor swung in place, and we waited impatiently for signs of land.
But the best pair of eyes could not have made out a mountain a ship’s length away in the fog that enveloped us. For two days we beat up and down the coast, not knowing just where we were, while the crew nibbled stale biscuits in helpless rage.
On the twenty-first the gale died down to a quieter breeze, and in the early afternoon the fog thinned and lifted, and a mighty cheer from the watch brought every man tumbling from his bunk. A few miles off before us a rocky highland rose slowly, throwing off the gray mist like a giant freeing himself of a flowing garment. A tug hovering near the shore spied the flapping canvas of the Glenalvon, and darted out to meet us. We were near the entrance to Puget Sound.
All night long the tug strained at the ropes of our vessel. In the afternoon we dropped anchor in a quiet bay close off a wooded shore decorated by several wigwams.
The next morning I began work with the crew as usual, and toiled from daylight to dark. No hint that I was to be freed from duty having reached me by the next afternoon, I marched forward and asked for my discharge.
“What’s your hurry?” demanded the captain. “I’ll sign you on at full wages and you can make the trip home in her.”