The fourth day out the weather began to change for the worse, and on the fifth day we witnessed a most fearful storm in which Branner and I came near losing our lives; had it not been for the life-lines we would have been lost.
We were working on the main deck with some sheep. The wind was blowing a terrific gale, and the waves were angrily dashing some fifteen or twenty feet above the deck of the ship. It was pouring rain and lightning was playing fantastically on the black, treacherous looking clouds in the distance. The ship was pitching in every direction, and we could only keep our positions by holding tightly to the life lines which were stretched across the deck. We had been working there about half an hour when the ship gave a tremendous lurch, followed by a most savage plunge into the water; a huge wave swept the deck, carrying off fifty-two sheep, pens and all, right out from under our feet, while we held frantically to the line.
The sheep and pens were carried over with such force that the iron railings which surround the deck were mashed and torn to pieces; part of it being carried into the sea with the sheep and the pens. The weather became so very bad that we were compelled to change our sleeping quarters.
Nights thereafter we lowered ourselves through one of the hatches to the bottom of the ship by means of a rope, and there on the bales of hay we made our beds.
We slept in the bottom of the ship for eight nights. Every morning at a quarter of four the night watchman would open up the hatch and yell in a deep voice, "Hello, down there, quarter of four, time to water," and we would invariably reply with the question, "How is the weather to-day?"
The answer would usually be, "Bad, the sky's still foaming."
The bad weather continued for five days, raining all the time, the ship tossing from side to side. After we had fully cleared the banks the weather began to get better and three days before we landed it was again calm. During clear weather, on afternoons when work was finished we used to go up on deck, strip, and then turn the hose on one another. It was a trifle cold but after we had given ourselves a friction bath with a rough towel, we felt like new beings and were ready for our beds of hay and a good night's rest, to be followed by another day's labor.
Often we would amuse ourselves on deck by a wrestle or a round or two with some of the sailors, who thought themselves the best men on the ship. Three rounds in the ring with a husky sailor is positively guaranteed to remedy any case of indigestion.
There were some great characters on our boat besides Mike Johnson, the big Irish foreman. There was old man Dunn, "the locator." I believe he sometimes went by the name of Colonel Dunn, but he was generally known among the cow-punchers as the "Locator," for at every available opportunity he applied the word "Locate," generally humorously inappropriate.
Colonel Dunn was a man of sixty-seven years, born in Scotland, near Edinburgh. At the age of ten he ran away and joined a ship bound for Australia. On his arrival there he spent several months on a ranch some hundred miles in the bush. Soon tiring of this, he embarked for England where he enlisted in the English cavalry. He subsequently served in the French cavalry for three years and in Uncle Sam's cavalry for six years. He was in the West with General Custer, but just a few days before Custer made his last stand Dunn was taken ill, consequently not participating in that historic fight. He had crossed the Atlantic over twenty times and had been around the world more than once; besides he had traveled in almost every land of the world.