Shortly after my grandfather’s death, my grandmother met a fascinating German pearl-trader, Captain Wagner. Beautiful women were scarce in Australia in those days, and there has always been a certain affinity between beautiful women and pearls. Moreover Turkish women are fatalistic. So it was not long before the pearl-trader married my grandmother, but, once married, he absolutely refused to have his honeymoon cluttered up with his predecessor’s children. As to my grandmother, new love and the pearls outweighed old love and her children—and as I have said before, Turkish women are fatalistic.
So she and her pearl-trader sailed away to the South Seas, and the good Jesuit Fathers took in the unwanted children.
For the first ten years of his life my father endured the confinement, the strict discipline and the soul loneliness of the Jesuit Orphan Asylum, and then the Wanderlust in his blood took hold. Fearing the good Fathers might not understand, and not wishing to hurt their feelings by telling them what he thought of their orphanage, he departed quietly one night without saying good-bye. A few days later when he left Australia on a trading schooner plying between Melbourne and China, that same modesty and diffidence kept him from letting the captain or the crew know he was on board until, when they were out at sea, hunger forced his confession. They whipped him and put him to work, but they couldn’t turn back or stop the ship on his account so he got to China.
Then followed eight years’ work on traders in the Far East before the boy, now eighteen, sailed into San Francisco Bay, deckhand on a full-rigged English clipper.
San Francisco at that time was only a sheltered harbor with a dock about a block long!
One day a young girl wandered down to the wharf to watch the ships come in. On the clipper ship she saw a handsome, dark-haired young man holystoning the deck. He spoke to her. She had never seen any one like him before. He told her stories of the sea, stories of trading and escapes from sea thieves off the China coasts. She was so fascinated by his tales that she stole away every day to meet him. The girl was Emmaline Trask Lowell, the fourteen year old daughter of Dr. Butler Lowell, once of Boston, but then of more liberal-minded San Francisco.
The Lowells were a very respectable family in Massachusetts. Young Doctor Butler Lowell had relatives enough to keep any young doctor comfortably occupied,—he was a cousin, though twice removed, of James Russell Lowell—but when he began to preach that “consumption was catching” and people with the dry cough should be put off by themselves, all the sisters and the cousins and the aunts turned against him. I guess there were too many in Massachusetts in that day rather proud of their dry cough as an added subject of conversation!
When the neighbors turn against a doctor there is only one thing for the doctor to do, and Dr. Butler Lowell did it. His move landed him in San Francisco.
Although Dr. Lowell had radical medical ideas his other notions were quite in accord with his family tradition. Which perhaps was the reason that Emmaline Lowell didn’t tell her parents of the deckhand she had fallen in love with. Instead she eloped with her sailor to Niles, California. They kept their marriage a secret and a month later my father sailed for Samoa to be gone for a year. When he returned he found a baby son—my oldest brother.
My mother hated the sea. It took my father away from her sometimes for months, sometimes for two or three years. She never went with him, for the babies came along too fast—I was the eleventh!