He seemed to come from far away to answer: “Jesus, Captain, take a pop at me with your rifle and finish it. I can’t stand this!” His eyes were bulging in excruciating pain.
“Why, you goddamned bawling sissie, shut your face or I’ll leave you squawking there all night!” Father yelled at him. The voice was terrible to hear but there were tears in Father’s eyes. His bullying tone of voice was a trick to give McLean the guts to stand the ordeal he had to go through.
I was still shaking with fright from the terror of the waterspout as Father spoke to me and sent me below to get some iodine and his razor. When I brought them on deck to him he was leaning over, examining the steel couplets that had clamped McLean’s arm.
“I’ll have to cut your arm off, McLean. It’s the only chance in hell you got to get out of this steel trap,” he said.
McLean looked at Father, saw that he meant it, and that it was the only way to save him, and he forced a smile.
“Go ahead, Captain, but do it quick,” he begged.
Father beckoned me to stand over McLean and keep his head lifted up. I got my arms under McLean’s shoulders and heaved him up in a semi-sitting position. Bulgar and Swede held his legs. Another sailor brought a couple of buckets of sea water. Father twisted a tourniquet of rope around McLean’s arm. Then he swabbed the arm just above the place where it was gripped by the steel, and cut in with his razor. McLean tried to watch him, but bracing his back with my leg, I put my arm across his eyes so he couldn’t see himself being butchered. Bulgar and Swede jammed down on his legs to keep him from thrashing about. In about a minute Father had all the flesh sliced away from the bone. He leaned over to Swede and whispered. Swede went over to the rail and got a steel belaying pin. He raised it over McLean’s arm. I saw Father nod and say “Now.” And Swede brought the belaying pin down across the exposed bone of McLean’s limb and broke the bone as clean as a hound’s tooth.
“A bucket of sea water, quick,” called Father. They poured two full buckets of water over the stub of McLean’s arm. Ocean water is the best disinfectant against blood poisoning there is on a ship. I hated the job we had to do, for I could feel McLean trembling like one stricken with palsy. Blood sputtered out of his arm over the deck and over us. He began to laugh in a delirious frenzy. I kept hold of his head and four sailors gripped and held him so he couldn’t move until Father had stitched up the shreds of flesh with catgut and a surgical needle. Then we carried him below and put him in my father’s bunk. He had small chance of living, but Father kept that spark alive with big doses of whiskey every half hour. He left me to attend him, for he had duties on deck that were more serious. With the spanker boom gone, the rigging destroyed and no wind to steady us against the rising cross swells, there was danger of us “shaking our sticks (or masts) out.”
For twenty-four hours the crew labored clearing the debris. They set up a makeshift spanker sail, “jury rig” it was called, in place of the boom. The horror we had been through was duly written down in our ship’s log as follows:
“Thursday, p.m. 160 latitude, 32 longitude sighted waterspout. Shots from rifle broke it. Seaman J. McLean laid up unable to work. Crew busy clearing ship’s deck.”