A Year with a Whaler

by Walter Noble Burns

When we began to get north into cold weather he needed them badly, and there were none on board large enough for him to get his toes in. The captain went through his stock of Eskimo boots, made of walrus hide and very elastic, but they were too small. When we entered the region of snow, Louis was still running about the deck barefooted. As a last resort he sewed himself a pair of canvas shoes—regular meal sacks—and wore them through snow and blizzard and during the cold season when we were in the grip of the Behring Sea ice pack. Up around Behring straits the captain hired an Eskimo to make a pair of walrus hide boots big enough for Louis to wear, and Louis wore them until we got back to San Francisco and went ashore in them. I met him wandering along Pacific Street in his walrus hides. However, he soon found a pair of brogans which he could wear with more or less comfort.

One night while I was knocking about the Barbary Coast with my shipmates we heard dance music and the sound of revelry coming from behind the swinging doors of the Bow Bells saloon, a free-and-easy resort. We stepped inside. Waltzing around the room with the grace of a young bowhead out of water was "Big-Foot" Louis, his arm around the waist of a buxom negress, and on his feet nothing but a pair of red socks. We wondered what had become of his shoes and spied them on the piano, which the "professor" was vigorously strumming. Louis seemed to be having more fun than anybody, and was perfectly oblivious to the titters of the crowd and to the fact that it was not de rigueur on the Barbary Coast to dance in one's socks.

We left the Hawaiian Islands late in March and, standing straight north, soon left the tropics behind, never to see them again on the voyage. As we plunged into the "roaring forties" we struck our first violent storm. The fury of the gale compelled us to heave to under staysails and drift, lying in the troughs of the seas and riding the waves sidewise. The storm was to me a revelation of what an ocean gale could be. Old sailors declared they never had seen anything worse. The wind shrieked and whistled in the rigging like a banshee. It was impossible to hear ordinary talk and the men had to yell into each other's ears. We put out oil bags along the weather side to keep the waves from breaking. But despite the oil that spread from them over the water, giant seas frequently broke over the brig. One crushed the waist boat into kindling wood and sent its fragments flying all over the deck. We were fortunate to have several other extra boats in the hold against just such an emergency. Waves sometimes filled the ship to the top of the bulwarks and the sailors waded about up to their breasts in brine until the roll of the vessel spilled the water overboard or it ran back into the sea through the scuppers and hawse-holes.

The waves ran as high as the topsail yard. They would pile up to windward of us, gaining height and volume until we had to look up almost vertically to see the tops. Just as a giant comber seemed ready to break in roaring foam and curl over and engulf us, the staunch little brig would slip up the slope of water and ride over the summit in safety. Then the sea would shoot out on the other side of the vessel with a deafening hiss like that of a thousand serpents and rush skyward again, the wall of water streaked and shot with foam and looking like a polished mass of jade or agate.

I had not imagined water could assume such wild and appalling shapes. Those monster waves seemed replete with malignant life, roaring out their hatred of us and watching alertly with their devilish foam-eyes for a chance to leap upon us and crush us or sweep us to death on their crests.

I became genuinely seasick now for the first time. A little touch of seasickness I had experienced in the tropics was as nothing. To the rail I went time and again to give up everything within me, except my immortal soul, to the mad gods of sea. For two days I lay in my bunk. I tried pickles, fat bacon, everything that any sailor recommended, all to no purpose. I would have given all I possessed for one fleeting moment upon something level and still, something that did not plunge and lurch and roll from side to side and rise and fall. I think the most wretched part of seasickness is the knowledge that you cannot run away from it, that you are penned in with it, that go where you will, on the royal yard or in the bilge, you cannot escape the ghastly nightmare even for a minute.

There is no use fighting it and no use dosing yourself with medicines or pickles or lemons or fat meat. Nothing can cure it. In spite of everything it will stay with you until it has worked its will to the uttermost, and then it will go away at last of its own accord, leaving you a wan, limp wreck. I may add, to correct a general impression, that it is impossible to become seasoned to seasickness. One attack does not render the victim immune from future recurrences. I was very sick once again on the voyage. After a season ashore, the best sailors are liable to seasickness, especially if they encounter rough weather soon after leaving port. Some time later we were frozen solidly in Behring Sea for three weeks. When a storm swell from the south broke up the ice and the motionless brig began suddenly to rock and toss on a heavy sea, every mother's son aboard, including men who had been to sea all their lives, was sick. Not one escaped.

Unalaska