Every garment forward of the mainmast was dripping wet or frozen from one week’s end to the other. The rigging was coated with ice from bulwarks to masthead. The sails were frozen as stiff as sheet iron and reduced our fingers to mere bleeding stumps. The food in the lazaret fell so low that we were reduced to half rations; which was as well, perhaps, for the stuff had been on board for more than two years and there was not an ounce of it that could not be smelled from the royal yard, as it passed from galley to forecastle. The “salt horse” was worm-eaten, the pork putrid; the man who split open a sea biscuit and found therein less than a dozen weevils carried it around to his mates as a curiosity. The biscuits in one cask, broached towards the end of the voyage, were stamped with the date 1878.
The effect of this delectable diet was an epidemic of boils. As many as five men were laid up at a time from this cause, even though the skipper refused to enter on the sick-list any one with less than a dozen. An old Welchman in the port watch displayed forty-two at one time. Having joined the ship more recently, I escaped the attack, but with that single exception not a sailor nor an apprentice was spared, and even the second mate appeared one morning with a shame-faced air and a bandage peeping out from the sleeve of his ulster.
Accidents were as common as boils. But for the fact that a seaman prides himself on indifference to minor injuries, there would have been nothing left but to heave to and turn the craft into a floating hospital. The stoutest apprentice was struck on the head by a flying block and rendered senseless for days. A burly Swede, the best seaman on board, clung too zealously to a tack sheet, which, yanking his hands through a hawser hole, broke his right arm. Looking forward to an easy passage, the captain had rigged out the ship in her oldest suit of sails. One by one the gale reduced 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 hoisted aloft. It was ticklish work to bend a sail on the icy yards, with 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 sail of the “soft-weather suit” carried away before that unchanging head wind and even the new canvas could not always withstand its violence. Between Yokohama and Royal Roads the Glenalvon lost no fewer than twenty-seven sails.
The most dismal day of the voyage was the second of September. About seven bells of the morning watch, the mate, fearing a blow, let go about half the canvas. All of it except the fore-royal had been furled when I returned the “scow-pans” to the galley. It was then about three minutes to eight bells, and under ordinary circumstances the flying royal would have been left for the next watch. There were, however, in the port watch, two apprentices, nearly out of their time, who had won the enmity of the first mate.
“What the devil are you hanging back for?” he shouted, advancing upon them. “Lay aloft and furl that royal!”
The apprentices mounted, muttering to themselves. Eight bells sounded before they were halfway up the mast. Squirming out on the yard, one hundred and sixty feet above the deck, they took in the slack of the sheet. But their anger, evidently, had not abated, for one, grasping a gasket, wound it once round the sail, and yanked savagely at it. The rope carried away. With flying arms the apprentice fell head foremost, struck on a back-stay, bounded against the foresail, and crashed on the deck a few feet from the forecastle door. His brains washed away in the scuppers.
One by one the crew slunk into the forecastle, shuddering or grumbling. Soon, however, there came a summons for all hands to lay aft. We hastened to execute the order. The captain, no doubt, wished to express his sorrow at the misfortune. He stood at the break of the poop, puffing fiercely at a huge, black cigar; and not a word did he utter until every man had assembled.
Then, stepping to the rail, he raised a clenched fist and bellowed:—“Why the bloody hell don’t you damn fools be careful! Don’t you know we’re short-handed already? Lay aloft, a couple of hands, to furl that royal—and clean up that mess forward.”
On the eighth of September we crossed the meridian less than half a degree south of the Aleutian Islands. During the week ending that noon we had been routed out from every watch below, we had pulled and hauled and reefed and furled times without number, and we had covered just sixty miles!
But on that day the Jonah weakened, for the wind turned northerly, and, though the gale continued, the Glenalvon caught the breeze on her beam and raced homeward like a steamer. The invalids began to pick up, though the garbage doled out to us was as nauseating as ever. Then came an unlooked-for catastrophe to depress our rising spirits. The tobacco gave out! Those fortunate beings who had a plug laid away would not have sold it for its weight in gold. They chewed each quid for half a day and stuck it up on the bulkhead above their bunks, smoking it when it had dried. The Swede gave a suit of clothes, a sou’wester, and a half-worn pair of shoes for two cubic inches of the weed. Another offered a month’s wages for a like amount and was deterred from carrying out the transaction only because the skipper refused to note it in the articles. The tobaccoless smoked the ground beans that passed for coffee—or tea, according to the hour; and, when the “doctor” refused longer to supply the stuff, they smoked rope-yarns and scraps of leather picked up in the rubbish under the forecastle-head.