One day, when I was about two years old, our ship was caught in a white squall off Lord Howe Island. A white squall is a sudden wind storm that rises without warning on the barometer and its velocity is so great that it will sweep the sea with huge waves ten minutes after it starts. Wet Nurse was standing by the galley door looking wistfully at the cook in the hope of getting an occasional scrap or two from his pans, when the squall hit the ship.
Whipped by the wind the vessel listed far over to leeward and great seas washed over the decks. I was tied in my hammock below, for Father had called all hands on deck. The crew was reefing down the topsails and battening down the hatches. Father stood at the helm steering the ship out of the belly of the swells to keep the seas from swamping us. Everyone forgot Wet Nurse. A giant green wave came over the fo’c’s’le head, washed over the galley, put out the cook’s stove and drove Wet Nurse against the bulwarks. With a shudder the vessel hove to the windward side and another sea smacked her deck with such force that it lifted the fore hatch from its cleats and sent it swirling to the lee bulwarks pinning Wet Nurse beneath its wreckage.
She lay crippled and terrified and nearly drowned under the debris until the storm subsided. The mate and Stitches found her, and lifting her gently, as if she were a person, from beneath the hatch, they carried her up to the poop deck to my father. She had broken both her legs and several ribs were smashed in. Father, who has always had a gentle hand with animals, carefully set her legs in splints and bound her ribs with bandages made from small pieces of canvas. Then he lay Wet Nurse in his bunk beneath my hammock. In spite of everything he could do for her, Wet Nurse died that night. She was given a regular ship’s funeral. The ship hove to for five minutes, as her body, sewn in sailcloth and weighted with a piece of chain, was committed to the deep.
And the next day I went on regular sailor’s diet.
3
“A ship is called a ‘she’ because her riggin’ costs more than her hull.”—Stitches.
Father had devised and carried out the scheme for nourishing a baby at sea, but another and more difficult problem for any man is clothing womenfolks.
When I was two years old I could walk and say “goddamned wind.” That was my first sentence, which I picked up from the mate. I had outgrown my baby dresses—so something had to be done about it. On deep water vessels the crew, as well as the mates and captain, usually wear coarse dungarees and heavy woolens in cold weather, white cotton undershirts and short cotton trousers in the tropics. Shoes are worn only in port as it is too dangerous, as well as too expensive, for sailormen to walk around the slippery decks in leather soles.
When I began to walk by holding on to the rail of the poop deck we were off Easter Island, getting a load of guano, which is bird manure used for fertilizing purposes. It would be months before we hailed the mainland, so again Father was ingenious in solving a difficulty. I had to have something to wear! Father turned the fo’c’s’le into a sewing room. His seamstresses were Lars Erickson—a Dane, Scotty—an old Scottish sailor who had only one snag tooth in his mouth and that brown from tobacco stain, and the trusty Stitches.