CHAPTER IX.
OUR BUTTER FIENDS.
In former days while narrating the events of this voyage, which I have done some thousands of times, I used to say “we whaled.” But I never whaled, never went in the boats, never pulled an oar. I had other fish to fry in the galley, and now that I commence to realize what a conscience is, I mention this for truth’s sake as well as to give variety to the story. We were boarded occasionally by a few Mexicans. There was one melancholy-looking Don Somebody who seemed always in a chronic state of corn-husk cigarette. When not smoking he was rolling them; when not rolling or smoking he was lighting them. He and his companions were persons of some importance, for which reason Captain Reynolds tendered them the hospitalities of the Henry and would ask them to whatever meal was nearest ready. These two Mexicans had enormous stowage for grub. They resembled the gulls. They also seemed unfathomable. There was no filling them. What they did at table they did with all their might, and when they finished, especially when eating by themselves, as they frequently did, there was literally nothing left. “Nothing” in this case meant something. It meant in addition to bread, meat, and potatoes, every scrap of butter on the butter-plate and every grain of sugar in the sugar-bowl. I didn’t take the hint the first time they ate with us, deeming the entire absence of butter and sugar at the end of the repast to be owing to my placing a small amount on the table. The second time they came on board I remedied this. But on inspection after they had finished I found left only an empty butter-plate and sugar-bowl. It was so at the third trial. Butter and sugar seem to be regarded as delicacies by the natives of Lower California. Nor do they seem to comprehend the real mission and import of butter and sugar on the table. They regarded both these articles as regular dishes and scooped them in. On discovering this, after a consultation with the Captain, I put them on allowance. These two men would have eaten up all our butter and sugar in four weeks.
However it was comparatively a slight toll they levied on us for carrying off their whale-oil, seal and abalone. We were miles within their legal boundaries taking away the wealth of their waters. Twelve other American whalers lay in Marguerita Bay that season. It was practically an invasion; only the Mexicans didn’t seem to know they were invaded or didn’t care if they did know. So long as they had plenty of butter and sugar on coming on board and the blubber-stripped carcasses which came on shore they seemed satisfied. These carcasses they cut open when stranded and extracted the fat about the heart, which on being tried out would yield from one to four barrels of oil and about three miles of solid stench. They borrowed from us the vessels wherewith to boil this fat. I was ordered to loan them all the pots, pans, and kettles which could be spared from my culinary laboratory. They never returned them, and I was very glad they did not. No amount of scouring would ever have rid them of the odor of decomposed leviathan. We left them a dozen or so iron vessels the richer. A Mexican, at least on that coast, with a kettle is looked up to as a man of wealth. Beyond serapes, cigarette-lighters, saddles and bridles, the gang of natives on shore had few other possessions. They seemed brilliant examples of contented poverty. The individual Mexican is a more independent being than the citizen of our own boasted “independent” nation. His wants are ten times less. Consequently, he is ten times as independent. Parties who use horses’ skulls for parlor chairs, whose wooden bowl wherein they mix flour for tortillas, flint, steel, and a small bonfire constitute their entire kitchen range, won’t keep many furniture or stove manufacturers alive.
Some mercantile hopes may hang on the señoras and señoritas. The few we saw wanted calicoes of gay and diverse patterns. The men will eat butter and sugar, but whether they will buy these articles remains to be proved. Perhaps furniture sets of polished and painted horses’ skulls might tempt some of the more æsthetic in the matter of household adornment to purchase, if put at a reasonable rate. Such are the conclusions drawn regarding the probabilities of trade with Mexico, at least the fragment of Mexico I saw from my galley. If we wanted any service of them they talked dollars at a very high figure. But they never abated. They showed no anxiety to tempt a bargain or an engagement. They went on just as ever, full to the brim of genuine sang-froid, eternally rolling, lighting, and smoking their cigarettes, and looking as if they felt themselves a superior race, and knew it all, and didn’t want to know any more, until we asked them to eat. Then they seemed in no hurry, but clambered lazily down the cabin stairs and lazily set to work to find the bottom of every dish on the table, including the sugar-dish and butter-plate. I learned on that voyage the true signification of the term “greaser,” as I fearfully noted the rapidly diminishing butter keg.
CHAPTER X.
GUADALUPE.
Two hundred miles from the Lower California coast lies the lone island of Guadalupe. Guadalupe is one of the twelve or twenty names which for centuries the Spaniards have been applying to the various geographical divisions of the earth’s surface. Each Spanish navigator, explorer, and discoverer, armed with these twelve or twenty “San Joses,” “Santa Marias,” “Sacramentos,” etc., has gone on naming, taking each one in regular order, and as the list was exhausted and more islands, capes, etc., were found, starting again at the beginning of the list and using it all over again. Whitney talked of the plentifulness of sea-elephant on the Guadelupe beaches; I presume the sea-elephant is identical with the sea-lion. They resemble a lion about as much as an elephant. So the prow of the Henry was turned toward Guadalupe. While on this trip one morning before daylight I heard at intervals a strange noise, something between a bellow and a creak. I thought it at first the creaking of something aloft, but as it grew lighter I saw a strange-looking head emerge momentarily from the water. It gave forth the same cry, dove, and came up on the other side of the vessel. It was a seal pup, which the sailors said had lost its mother and followed the vessel, mistaking the hull for its maternal parent. I presume that seals have no recognized fathers to look after them. The poor thing, uttering its plaintive but discordant cry, must have followed us to sea forty or fifty miles. I know not whether the sailors’ explanation of its conduct be correct. Anyway, it makes the occurrence more pathetic, and were I utterly unprincipled I should make an entire chapter describing how this pup seal followed the Henry during the voyage like a dog, being regularly fed, and as it grew up came on board and was taught a number of accomplishments, among the rest that of supplying us with fish. ’Tis thus that a rigid adherence to veracity spoils many an interesting and thrilling tale, and brings to him who practises it more poverty than pence.
Guadalupe on the third day came in sight; a lone, wave-washed, wind-swept isle about forty miles in length. It seemed the very embodiment of loneliness. Some would also say of desolation, as man is ever disposed to call any place he does not inhabit. But though Guadalupe contained not a single representative of the most intelligent animal on the planet, it sustained great herds of goats, sea birds, and a little black and white land-bird, so tame and trustful as to perch and eat from Miller’s and Whitney’s tin plates during their former visit to the island. All these got along very well without the presence of the talented biped who deems every place “desolate” unless he is there to carry on a monopoly of all the killing of bird and animal deemed necessary to his comfort and existence.
It was our business to murder all the mother sea-lions who had established their nurseries at Guadalupe. A boat full of murderers was quickly sent on shore. We did not see boat or crew again for three days. Most of that period was spent by us in looking for the boat, and by the boat’s crew in looking at us. They landed on the first day, found no seal, put off at dusk, lost us in a fog, went ashore, swore at the Henry’s people for not sighting them, hauled their boat well up on the beach at the mouth of a deep canyon, supped on hard bread and water, and, turning their craft bottom-up, crawled under it for a bed-quilt and went to sleep on the sands. During the night a semi-hurricane, called in those latitudes a “willa wah,” came tearing and howling down the canyon. Striking the boat, it rolled it over and over among the rocks, smashed the frail sides, and rendered it unseaworthy. For two days the crew roamed up and down the island, living on shellfish and the fresh water left standing in pools, and trying to signal us by fires built on the mountains. The Captain was in a state of great perplexity at this disappearance. But, having left a portion of the crew at St. Bartholomew’s Bay, he had not hands enough to send another boat ashore, and work the vessel. Then he dare not come nearer the island than three miles, fearing sunken rocks and currents setting in-shore. On the third night one of their fires was seen from the Henry. Standing in for it, by daylight the missing men were seen making for us in an old yawl. Behind, full of water, was towed the shattered whaleboat. The yawl had been found on the beach, probably left there by former sealers. By stuffing all the clothes they could spare in its sun-warped cracks and constant bailing they managed to keep afloat long enough to reach us. They crawled on board—a pale, haggard, famished lot—and I was kept very busy for a time ministering to their wants. They ate steadily for an hour. Even with this rescue a greater catastrophe than all came near happening. Becalmed and by means of a treacherous current we were being rapidly carried toward an enormous rock, which towered sentinel-like alone a mile or more from the north end of the island. It reached full five hundred feet toward the clouds. Its perpendicular sides seemed built up in artificial layers. Toward this the Henry seemed helplessly drifting, and the “Old Man,” under the influence of combined anger and despair, jumped up and down in his tracks and howled on the quarter-deck as he saw the voyage approaching such an unfortunate termination. Fortunately a providential or accidental breeze came off the land just in time to give us steerage-way. We trifled no more with Guadelupe, but sailed straight away for our old harbor. As we passed the last of these towering sentinel rocks at dusk, we heard from them the howling and barking of what, judged by the sound, might have been ten thousand seals. It was as the roaring of a dozen combined menageries. Had Virgil of old ever sailed by such a sound, he would have pulled out his stylus forthwith, and written of the Æneid an extra chapter about some classical hell afloat. These seals were howling at our discomfiture. The rock was half veiled in a mist in which we could indistinctly see their countless forms seemingly writhing and tumbling about.
CHAPTER XI.
AT THE GOLD MINES.
After a ten months’ cruise we went back to San Francisco with 500 barrels of oil and ten tons of abalones. My share of the proceeds amounted to $250, having shipped on a “lay.” Mine was the fifteenth lay, which gave me one barrel of oil out of every fifty and a similar proportion in abalones. Then I looked around for something to do, didn’t find it, spent a great deal of my money unnecessarily in so looking for a job, shipped at last as cook on a coasting schooner, was discharged before she left the wharf, my grade of culinary work not reaching to the level of the captain’s refined taste.