It must not be supposed that our labors were confined to the mere task of sailing the vessel. Far from it. The “old man” begrudged every sailor his watch below; he would have died of apoplexy had he caught one of us loafing during his watch on deck. He was a firm believer in the rust-eaten adage, “Six days shalt thou labor and do all that thou art able; and, on the seventh,—holystone the deck and scrape the cable.” We did both these things and a great many more. It mattered not in the least whether the watch had been robbed of its “time below” for several consecutive days, there must be no idling during “ship’s time.” On this passage of the Pacific there was not a day that the Glenalvon carried the same canvas steadily for four hours; yet we found time during the trip to paint the entire hold from keel to deck, to overhaul every yard of rigging, to chip and rub off with sand and canvas all paint above decks and daub on a new coat, to scour and oil every link of the cable, to overhaul the capstan, and to braid rope-yarns enough to have supplied the British merchant marine for a twelvemonth to come. When all else failed we were sent down in the hold to sop up the saltpetre saturated bilge-water,—and lost most of the skin on our hands in consequence.
There was no getting the upper hand of Captain Andrews. One memorable day when the wind held good for a few hours and even the second mate was gazing helplessly at several unoccupied seamen, the “old man” gathered the watch together and dragged out of the hold the “automobarnacles.” It was a contrivance not unlike a wagon-box fitted with great stiff brushes, designed to do the work ordinarily accomplished in dry dock. With a rope attached to each end the thing was thrown over the side and dragged back and forth under the hull, each circuit leaving the crew blue in the face and often tearing asunder two barnacles as huge as snail shells.
On the nineteenth day of September the rumor drifted forward that we were nearing port. There was no confirming it. The dignity of the quarter-deck requires that the skipper shall permit information of this sort to leak out only in such a way that it cannot be traced to him. The pessimists in the forecastle swore that the voyage was not half over, the conservatives vowed that we were still several days’ run from the coast; but for all that, an unwonted excitement prevailed on board.
In the middle of the afternoon watch all disputes were settled by an order to get the anchor over the side. It needed no cursing to arouse every man to his best efforts. The watch below forgot their sleepiness and turned out to scramble into the rigging, laughing childishly. In record time the anchor swung from the cathead and we waited impatiently for signs of land.
But the fog horn had been croaking at regular intervals for days. The best pair of eyes could not have made out a mountain a ship’s length away. Moreover, the skipper was none too sure of his whereabouts; his reckonings, like those of many a “windjammer’s” captain, were fully as much dependent on guesswork as mathematics. At four bells, therefore, we wore ship and ran due north. At midnight we went about again, and for two days we beat up and down the coast, while the crew nibbled worm-eaten biscuits in helpless rage.
On the twenty-first the gale died down to a moderate breeze and we hove to as near the entrance to Puget Sound as the skipper’s reckoning permitted. In the early afternoon the fog thinned and lifted, and a mighty cheer from the watch on duty brought every other man tumbling out of his bunk. A few miles off to starboard a rocky promontory rose slowly, throwing off the gray mist like a giant freeing himself of a cumbersome garment. A tug hovering under the lee shore spied the flapping canvas of the Glenalvon and darted out to meet us.
As the tow-line slipped over the bollards, the first bit of news from the outer world passed between our skipper and the tug captain.
“Is the —— in yet?” bellowed the former, naming the bark that had passed us in Tokyo Bay.
“Aye,” came back the answer, “three weeks ago—”
A sizzling oath mounted to the lips of the “old man.”