Four months later McLean left the ship. There is no place on a ship for a one-armed sailor.
17
Strip poker and female struck—which of course have nothing to do with each other
When I was about sixteen, we took a trip to the Line Islands to get a cargo of guano.
“What in the hell is the use of getting a ship full of bird dirt?” I asked my father as we neared our destination.
He was balanced on the taffrail cleaning and oiling his sextant when I approached him.
“Well, besides stinkin’ worse than copra and bein’ a rotten cargo to carry through the heat of the tropics, it’s used for fertilizer and ammonia. Land folks ain’t so particular what they use to make their food grow,” he said.
I was keenly interested, for we were going to a part of the South Seas that was unknown to me. So much has been written about the colorful atmosphere of the South Sea islands, but little has been said about the tragedy that inhabits some of the desert rocks along the Equator known on the charts as the Line Islands.