Which proved only how little I knew of the vagaries of “windjammers.”
Tokyo Bay, shaped like a whiskey bottle with the neck turned westward, is so nearly land-locked that few masters of sailing vessels attempt to beat their way out of it. When we had begun to heave anchor a fair wind promised to carry the Glenalvon straight out to sea. By dawn, however, it had shifted and before grog had been served it blew from exactly the opposite point of the compass. Nothing was left but to tack back and forth against it. A bellow summoned us on deck before breakfast was half over, to go about ship. A few more mouthfuls and a short pipe and we wore ship again. But it was no use. The head wind increased, the bay was narrow; on the third tack the skipper ventured too close ashore, lost his head, and roared out an order:—
“Let go the anchor!”
The “mud-hook” dropped with a mighty roar and rattle of cable; the fore-and-aft sails came down with a run; ropes screamed through the blocks; the topsail yards fell with a crash; the topgallants bellied out and snapped in the breeze with the boom of cannon; the blocks at the corners of fore and main sails threshed about our heads; ropes and steel cables of every size squirmed about the decks, snatching us off our feet and slashing us in the faces; pulleys, belaying-pins, apprentices, and goats sprawled in every direction. It seemed, as a seaman put it, that “all hell had been let loose”; and in three minutes the work of five arduous hours had been utterly undone.
When the uproar had abated we took up the task of reducing the chaos to order; furled the sails, squared the yards, coiled up the thousand and one ropes that carpeted the deck, manned the pump and washed down. To an unbiased observer this would have seemed work enough for one day, but after a bare half-hour for dinner we were routed out once more and sent over the side with our paint-pots.
Exactly this same experience—without the grog—befell us the next day, and the next, and the next. It came to be our regular existence, this being called soon after midnight to man the capstan, and to work incessantly until twilight fell. Day after day the wind blew steadily in at the mouth of the bottle, barely veering a point; and, what was most regrettable, it was just the breeze to send us flying homeward, once we were out of the bay. My shipmates were less downcast than I, for it mattered little to them whether they earned their wages in Tokyo Bay or on the open sea. But even they began in time to grumble at the long hours and to curse the captain for his parsimony in refusing to charter a tug.
A week went by. The bark that had long ridden at anchor near the Glenalvon towed out to sea and sailed away. The mail steamer glided by so close that the Chilian hailed me from her forecastle-head. A dozen craft went in and out, and still the peerless cone of Fujiyama gazed down upon us. Had there been any chance of the request being granted, I should long since have craved to be set ashore.
There were ominous whispers in the forecastle that it was dangerous to be forever tacking back and forth in Tokyo Bay. Nor was such gossip idle. One morning, after the usual fiasco, we dropped anchor not far from the northern shore. Immediately a small Japanese war-vessel steamed out and hailed us; but her officers spoke no English, and our captain, consigning them all to purgatory, turned down into his cabin. He was up again in short order and what he saw caused his jaw to sag and his rugged countenance to take on a sickly green pallor. Just beneath our bow, a half-ship’s length ahead, the Japs had anchored a small buoy bearing the red flag that indicates the presence of a submarine mine.
The “old man” did not wait for a repetition of the offer of the Japanese to tow him to a safer anchorage. The crew manned the capstan with unusual alacrity and a cable was quickly made fast to the stern bollards. At the very moment, however, when we were beginning to congratulate ourselves on a narrow escape, the cable parted. Urged on by half a gale, the Glenalvon commenced to drift rapidly and unerringly towards the red flag. For one brief moment pandemonium reigned. “Carrot-top” and half the apprentices were for jumping overboard; but the foremast hands behaved like men, and a second cable was made fast just in time.
For all this experience Captain Andrews persisted in his attempt to beat out of the bay. The harbor of Yokohama came to be a sight odious to all on board, the crew was worn out in body and spirit, I began to despair of ever again taking up the well-fed existence of a landsman, and all because our niggardly skipper had set his heart on saving a paltry sixty pounds. But he was forced to yield at last, and all hands rejoiced that his miserliness had recoiled on his own head. On the morning of August eleventh we turned out to heave anchor for the tenth time. The skipper had been rowed ashore the afternoon before and a tug was waiting to take us in tow. Late in the day she dropped us outside the narrows and when night fell the Glenalvon, under all sail, was tossing on the open sea.