The Star was making ready to sail for Wrangel, Alaska. On board the crew, canners and fishermen, one hundred and thirty-eight in all, eagerly awaited the start. It was a strange conglomeration of humans gathered from the ends of the earth. Quartered in the forward hold the Chinese canners disputed the space with thousands of bitterly resentful rats. A Chinese cook prepared their native food for the canners, and over the crowded hold, filled with squealing rats and chattering Chinese, a brass Joss god, made fast to an under beam, looked calmly down. Him the Chinese worshipped believing he would bring them good luck. What the rats thought about the brass Joss no one knew or cared. Probably they respected him for he was the only thing in the hold they could not bite successfully!
The crew of all nations, Swedes, Yankees, Chinese, Irish, lived in the fo’c’s’le head.
Amidships was a veritable little Italy. The Italian fishermen were housed in cabins on deck. They too carried their native Italian cook who prepared rich-smelling Italian foods. The aromas of their cooking, when wafted forward and merged with the smell of boiling rice and herbs from the Chinese hold, made a queer combination of Latin and Oriental odors.
Then, maintaining the peculiar social distinctions of the sea, the white tradesmen and officers of the ship and cannery lived aft in luxurious quarters. The walls of the cabins were of bird’s eye maple. In the dining salon hung a six foot oil painting of the Star under full sail outriding a hurricane. The swinging lamps were brass, ornately decorated with whales’ teeth and carved ivories. In my father’s cabin, curtains of red plush proclaimed the captain’s aloofness. A “telltale” compass over his bunk and a rack of rifles within easy reach were additional furnishings.
On April 8th, my father stood at the taffrail watching the finishing of the loading of great pieces of steel machinery for the cannery, barrels of oils and salt, and lumber to rebuild some of the warehouses of the company in far distant Wrangel. At his side stood my mother, fighting back, as she had done every year for fifteen years, the quiver of sorrow that sailing day always brought her. Father would be gone for six months. He would sail up past Nome into the frozen Arctic, and if luck was with him, sail back the following fall before the ice froze him in.
Father looked at her with a twinkle in his eye.
“What’s the matter, Mother?”
“Nothing,” she answered, “only I wish Joan was old enough so that I could go with you this trip. I feel you are in danger.” She forced a smile she was far from feeling. A deadly foreboding that seems to be instinctive with the womenfolk of deep sea sailors came upon her.
“Shame on you, Mother. Why I’ll outsail the Star of Alaska and the Star of Nome and the Star of the North by a month. Don’t let the crew see you weakening.” The mate interrupted them:
“Beg pardon, sir. It’s time to let the men knock off for lunch and their last mug of beer. It always makes them sail happier if they have an hour on sailing day to get drunk and kiss their sweethearts good-bye.”