Stirling turned the wheel over to the quartermaster after Marr had indicated a compass point, then rolled across the quarter-deck and stood by the green starboard light of the ship, which was turned out. He felt the warm breath of the following wind, gulped the sea air, and squared his shoulders, casting a shrewd eye at the poop-deck log, which was outrigged from the starboard rail.
The land of California was a haze over the starboard quarter. It lifted in places like a cloud bank, and the cleft which marked the Golden Gate was crossed by the white water of the bar. The Ice Pilot smiled, as the simplicity of clean living came to him as a flood.
He turned away from the land vision and studied the ship. On what mission was she headed, he wondered? Upon what seas would they force the taper jib boom? What trade stuff and spoil would be crammed between the hatches? He revolved these questions over and over in his mind, and was in the grip of the unknown. The little dapper skipper, the woman's voice, the mention of Disko Island, and the seal rookeries, all wove their spell:
"Though I plow the land with horses,
Yet my heart is ill at ease,
For the wise men come to me now and then
With their sagas of the seas."
He quoted this verse as he pulled out a great silver watch, gathered in the log line, and timed fifty revolutions.
The Pole Star was striking out into the Pacific on her first leg at fourteen point three knots an hour.
"Somebody's pullin' the strings," Stirling said as he let the slack out of the line and replaced the silver watch. "Maybe the Mazeka girls of Indian Point," he added, striding to the poop rail.
He stared with idle interest at the crew which were still under the able tutelage of Whitehouse and Cushner. The British whaler had a voice like a costermonger, and "Blym me, yes" and "Heaven strike me pink" rolled up the wind and burst like shrapnel upon the poop.
Stirling narrowed his eyes, and indeed the sight of the two mates in sea boots and the ragged crew swarming along the waist was one to charm the heart of a sailor. It brought to his mind other voyages, and he recalled an expedition he had piloted to Point Barrow and the reaches of the Mackenzie. A younger son, with money to spend, had chartered a whaler and taken the Northern seas in search of new game. Game he had found in plenty: walrus, seals—both hair and fur—killer whales, bowheads, polar bears, and musk ox had fallen to the younger son's rifle or harpoon. The crew, however, had proved too strong a stench for polite nostrils. They were picked from the slums of the Barbary Coast.
The Pole Star's foremast hands and the most of the harpooners and boat steerers would have delighted the eyes of an ethnologist. Stirling studied them and called their breeds. One was a cockney, like the mate. Another was a blue-eyed Dane. Three Gay Island natives were mixed with two Kanakas. Two bore the high cheekbones of Swedes. Four, at least, were Frisco dock rats who had been gathered in by the boarding-house runners and promised an advance, little of which they secured.