I could have kissed my mother, and I would have if I hadn’t thought it was too sissy to do it.
Father hotly denied that he had held up sailing on account of me, but he didn’t look mother in the eye when he blustered:
“I’m sailin’ on the flood tide tonight, Mother, and Joan goes with me.”
True to his word Father sailed that night and I was on board. After helping set sail, I climbed to the crosstrees where I watched the receding lights of the harbor disappear into a foggy bank of night. A snorting breeze carried us out the Golden Gate past the Farallone Islands, and beyond the moan of the bell buoy on the shoals. Our bow was pointed due west. The jibboom plunged under rising swells and shook itself free. The ship rolled and groaned as if she were relieved in her freedom from anchorage. I heard six bells ring below, and the watch was set. Nelson was at the wheel, Stitches was singing on the fo’c’s’le head, and the dim glow of Father’s pipe traced his paces from the binnacle to the rail and back, and I, up in the spanker crosstrees thumbed my nose at the land we left far astern.
15
From the region of floating mountains of ice to the Island of White Natives
“We’ll have to dodge the hurricanes south of the Equator this trip,” said my father to the mate, as we sailed out of Adelaide, South Australia, with a load of salt for the States. “With a dead weight on board of wet salt it’ll be too dangerous to try to outride the storms at this time of the year.”
It was April—just the beginning of tropic winter time. By the time we had sailed south of Tasmania and had circled the South Island of New Zealand, which would take about two months, we would be right in the midst of the worst weather of the year.
“We better get the fog horn out and the riding lights trimmed if you’re going to take that south passage, Captain,” observed the mate. “Them fogs and mists from the Antarctic are mean beggars.”