“Are they fish?” I asked.
“Kind of. They is barnacles in the making. When they catch fast to the bottom of a ship with their little blue threads of trailing anchor lines they petrify into shell and that is how barnacles grow.”
I marveled that the little inch high jelly ships could ever turn into the curse of seamen—barnacles! There was a fleet of thousands of them before my eyes.
“As long as they keep moving they is all right, but they are like some cussed folks ashore who, when they stick on to someone else, turn into a damned nuisance,” Stitches concluded. It was another lesson I learned from the sea. Only a few days before we had passed through a floating mass of porous-looking petrified lava—the spewed up evidence of an undersea volcano in eruption. There was so much of it that it gave the appearance of floating land.
“Shore folks call that pumice stone and they grind it up to make tooth paste,” Stitches had said. Why did shore people make everything so difficult for themselves? I used salt to brush my teeth with, not lava from deep sea volcanoes.
“It appears like you was usin’ up a lot of wind askin’ questions with your mouth—and your mind is a-headin’ off to leeward on another tack. Ever since you seen that love dance on Atafu you been moonin’ around.”
Stitches’ words struck home. The beauty of the dance, the thrill of seeing the native girls choose their mates, and the expression of longing on the native men’s faces to possess the girls haunted me. No matter how I tried I couldn’t drive the memory from my mind. I pretended to be interested in ship work, but really just one problem absorbed my mind. I wanted to mean everything to some one person—I wanted to be wanted. My loneliness on shipboard was accentuated after I saw the marriage dance on Atafu. Where would I find a mate? I didn’t have any lotus to wear to make any man choose me. In fact none of the men on board seemed to have the slightest idea of the thoughts constantly in my mind—I was just a nuisance, and no one of them ever showed an inclination to offer himself. I probably never would be taken to a dance where I could pick out my man. Then the thought came: the girls on the island could choose only from the men they knew and the dance was merely a method of selection. After all, getting the man was the important thing and if the native girls had an island full of men to pick from—I had a shipload, so I became encouraged.
I would find my man on board the ship and so I began to look over the crew. First, of course, there was Stitches. I loved him but not as a prospective mate. He looked so much like a wise old turtle, and if I spoke to Stitches about my plan he’d go to Father and I’d get a mug full of salts or a rope’s end on the back of my lap to clear away “crazy fancies.” The rope’s end never really hurt—my body was too tough. But of late my ideas with regard to lickings had changed. They made me furious. I was getting too old to be treated as a child. That’s what I thought. But what I thought made no difference to Father. It was the rope’s end or the salts, clear to the last day we were on the ship.
So it was plain Stitches would not do.
There were the two mates. Strange, but all the time I was on the ship we never had a mate I really liked. I passed them over. There were just four of our old men on board now, Stitches, Swede, Bulgar and Nelson; the rest of the crew to me were just sailors, new men who meant nothing.