She Blows! And Sparm at That!

by William John Hopkins

My father was pleased, and accepted the old sailor’s offer; and he told him of his own experience in the navy, and they swapped yarns for half an hour. The old man had been a boatswain in the navy. He was only fifty-eight, he said. I don’t wonder he put it that way. The second mate had moved, and I looked up and saw the Helen Augusta, our largest tugboat, just about to make a landing at the end of the wharf.

I seized my father’s arm in a panic.

He smiled. There was something infinitely protective in my father’s smile.

“I ’m going down with you, Timmie, and come back in the tug. It ’s too wet to work, luckily, so it won’t make any difference to me, and I guess Cap’n Nelson ’ll let me go. Unless,” he added, looking at me suddenly, “you ’d rather not have me. Perhaps you ’d rather say good-bye here. If you would I ’d understand it.”

I shook my head, and clung fast to his arm. I could not have spoken to save my life. The old sailor, my new friend, was rolling along beside us, his canvas bag over his shoulder and sticking out a foot or two fore and aft. He glanced at me and smiled, and we all trooped aboard the tug on to her upper deck, and the men filed down the ladder to a place where it was dry and warm.

We were about to follow them when we were hailed from the pilot house. We obeyed the beckoning finger, and in the pilot house we found Captain Nelson and the captain of the tugboat, a silent, sour-faced man whose name I cannot now remember, although it was then very familiar to me. Another man was leaning on the windowsill, his head outside, and one hand grasping a spoke of the wheel. He shouted some orders, pulled the bell, and we backed for a minute against a stern hawser. Then he pulled the bell once, and the chug of the engine stopped; before the water had stopped its swirling past the side he pulled the bell again, the engine chugged once more, and the bows turned faster toward the harbor. I was looking out at the wharves through a glass covered with little fine drops of mist, and I saw one of the men on the wharf lift the bight of heavy line over the top of the mooring-pile and drop it into the water as we began to go ahead. The man at the wheel pulled the jingle bell, and the engine chugged faster, and I could hear little familiar noises from the engine, as though it had settled down for a day’s work.

I was still looking out through the misty glass at the rapidly receding wharves, with the vessel that the riggers were not through with, the other that my father was working on hauled down, the stagings floating in the dock beside her; the lightship in the process of being hove down; the pens of sheathing and the rows of oil barrels; the tops of the wharves themselves, every foot of which I knew intimately. I wondered when I should next set foot on those familiar wharves; the picture blurred a little, and it was not the rain. But I was not quite fifteen, and I was going away on a voyage of four or five years. At fifteen, four or five years might as well be four or five æons. Our turning had cut off my view of the wharves, and we had straightened out for the Clearchus, and the rain was coming dead ahead.

We were drawing alongside the Clearchus, and we made fast and the crew went over the side stolidly, although some of them seemed merry enough, and my old sailor took the whole thing as a joke. Then Captain Nelson went, and my father and I. By the time I had got on the deck of the ship the captain had gone aft and was talking with the mate.

I had never happened to be on the Clearchus before, and neither had I been on any whaler just starting on a voyage. Her deck was well cluttered with all sorts of stuff, which there had been no time to stow below, and no men to do it. Some of it was covered roughly with tarpaulins to keep it from the wet, and it was shoved into corners or littered the alleyways between the great brick try-works and the bulwarks. The deck itself—where it showed at all—was covered with a film of moisture, and seemed to have sweated just oil enough to make it very slippery.

The deck of an old whaler is full of odd structures. On almost all old whaleships there were two small deckhouses aft, one on either side, with the wheel and the cabin skylight between them; and on many ships this space was roofed over, giving the steersman protection in bad weather. This was the case on the Clearchus; and there was another structure just forward of this after house. This “gallows,” as it is called, was no more than a roof covering the booby-hatch—which led to the steerage; where the boat-steerers slept—supported on posts at the corners, the posts inclined sharply inward at the angle of the standing rigging. On the top of this roof were three spare whale-boats, bottom up. There was a third structure—merely a roof—just aft of the foremast, over the try-works. The galley was in the starboard side of the after house, which may strike some as a very queer place for it, but it was always so on a whaler. It was necessarily very small, taking up less than half of that side. The cabin stairs, or companion, were in the port side of the after house.