Lit2Go

What happened to me next on the sealing-schooner Ghost, as I strove to fit into my new environment, are matters of humiliation and pain.  The cook, who was called “the doctor” by the crew, “Tommy” by the hunters, and “Cooky” by Wolf Larsen, was a changed person.  The difference worked in my status brought about a corresponding difference in treatment from him.  Servile and fawning as he had been before, he was now as domineering and bellicose.  In truth, I was no longer the fine gentleman with a skin soft as a “lydy’s,” but only an ordinary and very worthless cabin-boy.

He absurdly insisted upon my addressing him as Mr. Mugridge, and his behaviour and carriage were insufferable as he showed me my duties.  Besides my work in the cabin, with its four small state-rooms, I was supposed to be his assistant in the galley, and my colossal ignorance concerning such things as peeling potatoes or washing greasy pots was a source of unending and sarcastic wonder to him.  He refused to take into consideration what I was, or, rather, what my life and the things I was accustomed to had been.  This was part of the attitude he chose to adopt toward me; and I confess, ere the day was done, that I hated him with more lively feelings than I had ever hated any one in my life before.

This first day was made more difficult for me from the fact that the Ghost, under close reefs (terms such as these I did not learn till later), was plunging through what Mr. Mugridge called an “’owlin’ sou’-easter.”  At half-past five, under his directions, I set the table in the cabin, with rough-weather trays in place, and then carried the tea and cooked food down from the galley.  In this connection I cannot forbear relating my first experience with a boarding sea.

“Look sharp or you’ll get doused,” was Mr. Mugridge’s parting injunction, as I left the galley with a big tea-pot in one hand, and in the hollow of the other arm several loaves of fresh-baked bread.  One of the hunters, a tall, loose-jointed chap named Henderson, was going aft at the time from the steerage (the name the hunters facetiously gave their midships sleeping quarters) to the cabin.  Wolf Larsen was on the poop, smoking his everlasting cigar.

“’Ere she comes.  Sling yer ’ook!” the cook cried.

I stopped, for I did not know what was coming, and saw the galley door slide shut with a bang.  Then I saw Henderson leaping like a madman for the main rigging, up which he shot, on the inside, till he was many feet higher than my head.  Also I saw a great wave, curling and foaming, poised far above the rail.  I was directly under it.  My mind did not work quickly, everything was so new and strange.  I grasped that I was in danger, but that was all.  I stood still, in trepidation.  Then Wolf Larsen shouted from the poop:

“Grab hold something, you—you Hump!”

But it was too late.  I sprang toward the rigging, to which I might have clung, and was met by the descending wall of water.  What happened after that was very confusing.  I was beneath the water, suffocating and drowning.  My feet were out from under me, and I was turning over and over and being swept along I knew not where.  Several times I collided against hard objects, once striking my right knee a terrible blow.  Then the flood seemed suddenly to subside and I was breathing the good air again.  I had been swept against the galley and around the steerage companion-way from the weather side into the lee scuppers.  The pain from my hurt knee was agonizing.  I could not put my weight on it, or, at least, I thought I could not put my weight on it; and I felt sure the leg was broken.  But the cook was after me, shouting through the lee galley door:

“’Ere, you!  Don’t tyke all night about it!  Where’s the pot?  Lost overboard?  Serve you bloody well right if yer neck was broke!”

I managed to struggle to my feet.  The great tea-pot was still in my hand.  I limped to the galley and handed it to him.  But he was consumed with indignation, real or feigned.

“Gawd blime me if you ayn’t a slob.  Wot ’re you good for anyw’y, I’d like to know?  Eh?  Wot ’re you good for any’wy?  Cawn’t even carry a bit of tea aft without losin’ it.  Now I’ll ’ave to boil some more.

“An’ wot ’re you snifflin’ about?” he burst out at me, with renewed rage.  “’Cos you’ve ’urt yer pore little leg, pore little mamma’s darlin’.”

I was not sniffling, though my face might well have been drawn and twitching from the pain.  But I called up all my resolution, set my teeth, and hobbled back and forth from galley to cabin and cabin to galley without further mishap.  Two things I had acquired by my accident: an injured knee-cap that went undressed and from which I suffered for weary months, and the name of “Hump,” which Wolf Larsen had called me from the poop.  Thereafter, fore and aft, I was known by no other name, until the term became a part of my thought-processes and I identified it with myself, thought of myself as Hump, as though Hump were I and had always been I.

It was no easy task, waiting on the cabin table, where sat Wolf Larsen, Johansen, and the six hunters.  The cabin was small, to begin with, and to move around, as I was compelled to, was not made easier by the schooner’s violent pitching and wallowing.  But what struck me most forcibly was the total lack of sympathy on the part of the men whom I served.  I could feel my knee through my clothes, swelling, and swelling, and I was sick and faint from the pain of it.  I could catch glimpses of my face, white and ghastly, distorted with pain, in the cabin mirror.  All the men must have seen my condition, but not one spoke or took notice of me, till I was almost grateful to Wolf Larsen, later on (I was washing the dishes), when he said:

“Don’t let a little thing like that bother you.  You’ll get used to such things in time.  It may cripple you some, but all the same you’ll be learning to walk.

“That’s what you call a paradox, isn’t it?” he added.

He seemed pleased when I nodded my head with the customary “Yes, sir.”

“I suppose you know a bit about literary things?  Eh?  Good.  I’ll have some talks with you some time.”

And then, taking no further account of me, he turned his back and went up on deck.

That night, when I had finished an endless amount of work, I was sent to sleep in the steerage, where I made up a spare bunk.  I was glad to get out of the detestable presence of the cook and to be off my feet.  To my surprise, my clothes had dried on me and there seemed no indications of catching cold, either from the last soaking or from the prolonged soaking from the foundering of the Martinez.  Under ordinary circumstances, after all that I had undergone, I should have been fit for bed and a trained nurse.

But my knee was bothering me terribly.  As well as I could make out, the kneecap seemed turned up on edge in the midst of the swelling.  As I sat in my bunk examining it (the six hunters were all in the steerage, smoking and talking in loud voices), Henderson took a passing glance at it.

“Looks nasty,” he commented.  “Tie a rag around it, and it’ll be all right.”

That was all; and on the land I would have been lying on the broad of my back, with a surgeon attending on me, and with strict injunctions to do nothing but rest.  But I must do these men justice.  Callous as they were to my suffering, they were equally callous to their own when anything befell them.  And this was due, I believe, first, to habit; and second, to the fact that they were less sensitively organized.  I really believe that a finely-organized, high-strung man would suffer twice and thrice as much as they from a like injury.

Tired as I was,—exhausted, in fact,—I was prevented from sleeping by the pain in my knee.  It was all I could do to keep from groaning aloud.  At home I should undoubtedly have given vent to my anguish; but this new and elemental environment seemed to call for a savage repression.  Like the savage, the attitude of these men was stoical in great things, childish in little things.  I remember, later in the voyage, seeing Kerfoot, another of the hunters, lose a finger by having it smashed to a jelly; and he did not even murmur or change the expression on his face.  Yet I have seen the same man, time and again, fly into the most outrageous passion over a trifle.

He was doing it now, vociferating, bellowing, waving his arms, and cursing like a fiend, and all because of a disagreement with another hunter as to whether a seal pup knew instinctively how to swim.  He held that it did, that it could swim the moment it was born.  The other hunter, Latimer, a lean, Yankee-looking fellow with shrewd, narrow-slitted eyes, held otherwise, held that the seal pup was born on the land for no other reason than that it could not swim, that its mother was compelled to teach it to swim as birds were compelled to teach their nestlings how to fly.

For the most part, the remaining four hunters leaned on the table or lay in their bunks and left the discussion to the two antagonists.  But they were supremely interested, for every little while they ardently took sides, and sometimes all were talking at once, till their voices surged back and forth in waves of sound like mimic thunder-rolls in the confined space.  Childish and immaterial as the topic was, the quality of their reasoning was still more childish and immaterial.  In truth, there was very little reasoning or none at all.  Their method was one of assertion, assumption, and denunciation.  They proved that a seal pup could swim or not swim at birth by stating the proposition very bellicosely and then following it up with an attack on the opposing man’s judgment, common sense, nationality, or past history.  Rebuttal was precisely similar.  I have related this in order to show the mental calibre of the men with whom I was thrown in contact.  Intellectually they were children, inhabiting the physical forms of men.

And they smoked, incessantly smoked, using a coarse, cheap, and offensive-smelling tobacco.  The air was thick and murky with the smoke of it; and this, combined with the violent movement of the ship as she struggled through the storm, would surely have made me sea-sick had I been a victim to that malady.  As it was, it made me quite squeamish, though this nausea might have been due to the pain of my leg and exhaustion.

As I lay there thinking, I naturally dwelt upon myself and my situation.  It was unparalleled, undreamed-of, that I, Humphrey Van Weyden, a scholar and a dilettante, if you please, in things artistic and literary, should be lying here on a Bering Sea seal-hunting schooner.  Cabin-boy!  I had never done any hard manual labour, or scullion labour, in my life.  I had lived a placid, uneventful, sedentary existence all my days—the life of a scholar and a recluse on an assured and comfortable income.  Violent life and athletic sports had never appealed to me.  I had always been a book-worm; so my sisters and father had called me during my childhood.  I had gone camping but once in my life, and then I left the party almost at its start and returned to the comforts and conveniences of a roof.  And here I was, with dreary and endless vistas before me of table-setting, potato-peeling, and dish-washing.  And I was not strong.  The doctors had always said that I had a remarkable constitution, but I had never developed it or my body through exercise.  My muscles were small and soft, like a woman’s, or so the doctors had said time and again in the course of their attempts to persuade me to go in for physical-culture fads.  But I had preferred to use my head rather than my body; and here I was, in no fit condition for the rough life in prospect.

These are merely a few of the things that went through my mind, and are related for the sake of vindicating myself in advance in the weak and helpless rôle I was destined to play.  But I thought, also, of my mother and sisters, and pictured their grief.  I was among the missing dead of the Martinez disaster, an unrecovered body.  I could see the head-lines in the papers; the fellows at the University Club and the Bibelot shaking their heads and saying, “Poor chap!”  And I could see Charley Furuseth, as I had said good-bye to him that morning, lounging in a dressing-gown on the be-pillowed window couch and delivering himself of oracular and pessimistic epigrams.

And all the while, rolling, plunging, climbing the moving mountains and falling and wallowing in the foaming valleys, the schooner Ghost was fighting her way farther and farther into the heart of the Pacific—and I was on her.  I could hear the wind above.  It came to my ears as a muffled roar.  Now and again feet stamped overhead.  An endless creaking was going on all about me, the woodwork and the fittings groaning and squeaking and complaining in a thousand keys.  The hunters were still arguing and roaring like some semi-human amphibious breed.  The air was filled with oaths and indecent expressions.  I could see their faces, flushed and angry, the brutality distorted and emphasized by the sickly yellow of the sea-lamps which rocked back and forth with the ship.  Through the dim smoke-haze the bunks looked like the sleeping dens of animals in a menagerie.  Oilskins and sea-boots were hanging from the walls, and here and there rifles and shotguns rested securely in the racks.  It was a sea-fitting for the buccaneers and pirates of by-gone years.  My imagination ran riot, and still I could not sleep.  And it was a long, long night, weary and dreary and long.