“What’s the use of learnin’ to swim?” he argued. “Any sailor dumb enough to fall overboard oughta drown and if he’s washed overboard he couldn’t swim anyhow—so what’s the use?”
“But Father made me learn to swim,” I protested.
“That’s different,” grinned Stitches. “You see, Skipper, the Captain knows a woman ain’t got sense enough not to fall overboard. Now if you was to fall overboard and couldn’t swim, some dumb sailor, whether he could swim or not, would jump in and get drowned trying to save you; but bein’ as you kin swim, if you fall overboard, nobody don’t worry—they just toss you a rope and you pull out by yourself and the Captain don’t lose no good sailor. All that happens is you come back aboard and you get your stern tanned with a rope’s end to warm up the chill. No ma’am! Captain ain’t goin’ to let no good sailor go dead tryin’ to save a woman.”
Quite unconvinced, I puzzled and puzzled over Stitches’ point of view, but it was not until some years later, in one tragic moment, that I learned how wide can be the difference between a man’s philosophy and his action in a crisis.
Next to Stitches the most interesting shellback I ever knew was John Henry, a withered old seaman close to seventy, with a cracked whiskey voice and a face so furrowed that it looked like the relief map of a mountain range. He chawed a hunk of tobacco incessantly and the juice drooled down his chin, leaving a little yellow rut marked in his whiskers. He had sailed the Horn a hundred times, to hear him tell it, and he would have been a captain long ago instead of a common seaman, only a captain couldn’t get drunk in public on the waterfront—so John Henry preferred not to be a captain. But for all his shortcomings, John Henry was a real seaman. An ordinary gale was music to his soul and a hurricane seemed to take off thirty years—for no young man could hold to the foot ropes aloft better than he and few could steer a dangerous course as well.
We shipped John Henry at Frisco and in a week Stitches’ nose was out of joint, for John Henry had quite won me. He would sit for hours, on his watch below, and teach me to tie intricate sailor knots—everything from splices, monkey fists, running bowlines, Turk’s heads, true lover’s knots to a hangman’s noose.
“I bin in every jail from Seattle to Port Said,” he confided, “an’ I can learn you every kind of a knot they use for killin’ off undesirables.”
Stitches was disgusted.
“Damned old shellback! Teaching you how to tie knots to get rid of undesirables, is he? I dunno nobody as undesirable as he is. If he had what was comin’ to him, somebody’d tie a knot for him long ago. Mebbe they will yet.”
On the end of a halyard John Henry was chief chanteyman. One day I was helping haul in the slack of the fore topsail and he said: