One time—on one of those long voyages he'd made to Australia—he and two other guys had mutineed. They were all big fellows and on that crowded little freighter there wasn't any room for a brig. The Mate had shackled the three big mutineers to the metal rails that ran along their bunks in the fo'castle. They sat around and smoked or slept quietly through the day and came that first night they began getting in their licks. The First Mate is the police department aboard a ship and he is the keeper of the keys—of the brig, shackles, etc. Comes trouble, his responsibility as a jailer is added to his regular duties—his watch on the bridge from four in the morning to eight and from four in the afternoon to eight in the evening.
About one o'clock in the morning, while the Mate was sleeping fast so he could roll out for his early morning turn to, one of the mutineers raised his voice and shouted into the darkness for the man on watch.
"What's the matter?"
"Get the Mate, will ya? I gotta go to the can. I'm all cramped up."
So the man on watch roused the Mate who climbs down, unlocks the big bellyacher, leads him to the can, and stands around blinking sleepily until the guy has done his stuff, slowly. The Mate leads him back to his bunk, locks him up again to the iron rail, and goes off to get some more sleep, he hopes. About four bells (two o'clock) mutineer number two howls for the man on watch— Get the Mate, etc., etc. The sleepy Mate suggests maybe either number three or number one feel certain needs.
"What the hell you wake us up for? We were sleeping, weren't we?"
Come half an hour or so after the harassed Mate has climbed back up to his cabin—and mutineer number three goes through the same formula. Why didn't he come along when number two had bellyached?
"Jeezus, Mate, I didn't feel like it then. Can't help it if I didn't feel like it."
By the time the Mate stumbled up to the bridge at four in the morning, he was a very tired guy.
That mutiny lasted three hectic days and three sleepless nights for the Mate, until he broke down with a "now-listen-fellers."
The mutineers blamed their unpredictable bowels on the bread and water diet and general intestinal lassitude on their enforced inactivity. And the mutiny was broken—the mutineers broke it and almost ruined the Mate. He skipped ship in Sydney, Australia.
Naturally, my one-man mutiny could not be managed the same way. I'd be damned if I'd stay awake three nights running to harass this Mate, and besides, he was a shrewd Swede; I was sure he'd have unearthed a chamber pot and put it in my brig. Joe shook his head. It was too bad I'd given in before he had a chance to talk with me. He was sure he could have figured an angle and instructed me on the proper way to carry on a one-man mutiny.
31. The Boneyard
LIKE A GANG OF BEAUTICIANS WE ROUGED THE UPPER DECKS, golden-buffed the masts and booms, french-grayed the trim, whitened the superstructure, and blackened the main deck with glistening fish oil. Like a gang of beauticians? More like a gang of morticians, for she was an empty, dead ship, though none of us knew that until we dropped anchor in the boneyard along the Jersey coast. And the S.S. Hermanita looked prettier as she lay in her grave than she ever did in life.
The Mate was desperate those last three days. He had every hand he could commandeer swinging brushes and paint buckets. The crew knew that since this was his first hitch with the Universal Tropical Line he wanted to make a good impression on the home office with a beautifully painted, clean ship. They did what they could to bitch it up for him in their quiet way. Steady hands developed palsy as they wiggled the lines of her trim, gaping holidays were left up on the mast, and the Bos'n's chair was rigged again to patch up. Red deck paint slopped over on the clean gray bulkhead, white spattered the buff, black fish oil blurred white paintwork. Everything had to be gone over again and a few times more.
Up on the boat deck where we day men were painting the white lifeboats with more white—adding another coat to the crust that already covered the unworkable davits and the rest of the gear—we could see the crew spotted all over the ship with their little pails and brushes, like a bunch of busy little gnomes on an old Hammacher and Schlemmer advertisement. I'll bet that the Mate had missed us day men when we were lost down in the bilges. He couldn't get the work out of his A.B.'s he'd get out of us. I don't know what deal he'd arranged with Joe, Slim, the Polack, and Perry to get those guys out on deck smearing paint for him. It was the Third Mate's watch and that gang were off. He might have stood watch for them, as he was doing that afternoon for the Third Mate, taking the wheel himself while those guys slept peacefully through the night. The Third Mate was out with a bucket and brush too; so was the Bos'n.
The red-headed Second grumped around up on the boat deck with us. He wasn't working—he was supervising. He was jumpy as a cat as he paced that deck. It seems that as the navigator, through the weather charts and stuff that was available to him, he knew better than anyone aboard, except the Captain I suppose, that our ship riding blithely through the hurricane belt with her empty hull just kissing the crest of the waves was as safe as a kid's torn paper boat in a whirlpool comes the first bit of a blow—and he worried.
If I'd have known what I know now, from reading the newspapers in recent years about the hurricanes that swept the Atlantic seaboard and bashed almost everybody's summer cottage to bits from Florida to Maine—to say nothing of completely ruining their gardens—or if the Second had confided in me and shown me those ominous potentialities on his charts, I might have worried with him. But I was blissfully ignorant of the horror that could happen to a gaily painted ship like ours, and she did look pretty in an abstract way, with the varied patches of paint spotting her from stem to stern. So I thought, as I dipped my brush and again got down to dab at the bottom of the lifeboat I was working on.
As far as I was concerned it was a fine bright day; the water was a wonderful blue-green, and that ship felt solid enough for me as she bobbed and sailed over the bounding main—over the bounding main—B-A-M!
"Choke off your goddam whistling, you goddam Jonah!"
I made a wild grab at a line that dribbled off that lifeboat and saved myself from going over side into the wonderful blue-green sea with its millions of bounding waves. It seems I had with my natural exuberance not only been thinking of the bounding main—I'd been whistling the tune, high and shrill. And that bloody red-headed Mate had kicked me in the tail and darn near sent me out to join the fishes. I'd been blowing for a breeze—piping up a blow or whistling up a squall—I can't remember which, but it was one of those three. A silly superstition, prevalent among the illiterate seafarers. And as I righted myself and my spilt paint bucket, I sneered up at that sputtering purple-faced red-head. I said, calmly:
"Yeah—and you a college man."
"Pipe down, you—you—" and he went off into a scream of hysterical epithets which would take up a couple of paragraphs—on my genealogy, person, and intellect. I've not recorded them for this text, since there was neither truth nor fancy in any of his mouthings.
Perry, the old Sailing Man, and a few others said later the Second had a right to do as he did—and they looked at me accusingly when a few lumpy dark clouds appeared on the horizon a couple of days later. They brought us a quick gush of rain that lasted for half an hour; then the sun came out again and stayed as long through the day as it rightfully should, until we dropped anchor early one morning alongside the most beautiful green hill I've ever seen.
The guys said that was Staten Island—we were in the Channel that separates that Island from the Jersey shore. It is strange. I never saw that hill before or since—and I've lived on Staten Island, I've visited it time and again (some of my wife's friends), and I've been there on business. Perhaps it can only be seen from the deck of a patched-up little freighter with clean bilges and an empty hull, fresh back from the muddy coast of Argentina and its Nord-American-hating people who lived there in those days.