Voyage to Somewhere (8 page)

“Onward, Christian Soldiers,

Marching as to war,

With the cross of Jesus …”

“Come to me, my melancholy baby,

Cuddle up and don't be blue …”
^*

“Bless 'em all, bless 'em all,

The long, the short and the tall,

There'll be no rotation this side of Fort Mason,

So cheer up, my lads, bless 'em all!”

Organizations like the Salvation Army that made music in public gathered a large following. One evening Mr. Rudd and I were walking home from the officers' club just before the eleven o'clock curfew. We heard a hubbub down the street, and walking in that direction, we heard the sound of singing. We walked for a long while, and the singing grew louder and louder. Finally emerging into a public square, we saw a huge crowd of people, almost all of them sailors. They were gathered around a little group of some obscure religious organization that was conducting a street meeting. A tall man played a bass drum, and there was a cornet and a violin. Inside the circle of sailors several ill-dressed old women held up standards on poles. While they sang hymns they waved these standards gently in time to the music. “Trust In God,” they read. “Bring Your Troubles To God. He Understands.” Standing with these angular women was one shabby little man who held above his head a plainer standard than the others.

“Friends,” this standard read, “Co-operate With The Police. Make Way For The Traffic While You Sing.”

While we stood there more and more sailors joined the group. They sang hymns of every denomination.

“Abide with Me.”

“Ave Maria.”

“Now the Day Is Over.”

Mr. Rudd turned around. “Come on,” he said, “let's go home. Let's go back to the ship.”

^*
Copyright 1911 by Ernest M. Burnett. Copyright renewed. Used by permission of Shapiro Bernstein & Co., Inc
.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

W
E WERE GLAD
to leave Honolulu. One month there had gained us very little more than promises in the way of repairs or material. Most of the work that was done on the engines was done by Mr. Rudd and his men. The reason we had to stay there so long was that the small electric motor which drove the sanitary pump had burned out, and we had to wait for a new one to be shipped from the States. When finally we dropped our mooring lines from the SV-130, which was still held for lack of a cylinder head, we felt freed.

“On to New Guinea,” I heard one of the boys shout. “On to New Guinea and
mail
!”

We were to sail without stopping from Honolulu to Milne Bay in British New Guinea. After we cleared Honolulu harbor we found that the ocean was not very rough, and only two of the men were seasick. When the steep green hills of Oahu had become dwarfed and blue in the distance astern, I retired to the flying bridge, where we had rigged an awning and placed a handmade deck chair. Stretching out and lighting my pipe, I regarded the voyage ahead with some satisfaction. The way we were routed it would take about twenty-five days to reach Milne Bay. At the present time of the year in that part of the globe there should be no typhoons or other disturbances. Our course kept us free and clear of all land, reefs, or other navigational worries. Feeling comfortable and expansive, I called Mr. Crane up to me.

“How'd you like to handle the navigation this trip?” I asked.

Mr. Crane grinned. The sun had tanned his pale skin, and some of the weight had gone from his hips. Ever since he had been aboard he had acted with a certain calm competence, in spite of the fact that he had never before been to sea and that he had trouble with seasickness.

“Sure,” he said, “I'll do it. But you better check me.”

“I'll check you once a day,” I told him, “and if I find you're right I won't take any more sights until just before your landfall.”

Mr. Crane descended to the wing of the bridge to get the sextant. “I want to take a few sights right now,” he said, “while I
know
where I am.”

The days following slipped by as effortlessly as the water slipped by the hull of the ship. Relieved of my navigational duties, I lived a life of ease. Most mornings I slept until about nine-thirty, had a comfortable breakfast of coffee and toast, then retired to my chair under the awning on the flying bridge. The weather was perfect, and the sky and the sea, bisected by the horizon, together seemed to make a huge glass globe, the bottom half of which was only a slightly darker shade of blue than the top half. Each day was so exactly like the one before it that it required a consicious effort to remember the date; it seemed as though the whole voyage should be counted as one day, at least until the weather changed or something happened to divide one hour from the next. My attitude changed from the nervous apprehension I had felt on the voyage from San Pedro to Honolulu. I became lazy and philosophical, and spent long hours idly gazing at the exact, well-organized pattern that the wake made as it marched out astern.

One warm afternoon six days after we had left Honolulu, I was seated thus when Mr. Crane approached me.

“I've got a man I want to put on report,” he said. “It's Widen.”

I searched my mind to identify Widen. He was a machinist's mate, I remembered, a tall, broad-shouldered boy with very light hair. I didn't know the black gang as well as the deck force, but Mr. Rudd had, I thought, spoken well of Widen.

“What's he done?” I asked.

“This morning while I was trying to take my morning sun sights, Widen came running up on the bridge without asking permission and said he wanted to talk to me. I asked him what was the matter and he tried to tell me about some grievance or other. I was just taking my sun line, and I told him I'd see him later. He kept right on talking, however, and finally I put down the sextant and asked him if the matter was an emergency. He said it wasn't, but it was important, and right away he started telling me something about shower baths. I picked up my sextant and told him to get off the bridge. He refused to leave at first, and when I finally told him I'd court-martial him if he didn't go below, he stamped his foot like a small boy and said, ‘Well, I didn't know I'd got on that kind of a ship! Go ahead and court-martial me if you want to!' So I figured I'd better put him on report for insubordination.”

“Yes,” I said, “it looks as though you had.”

I heaved a disconsolate sigh. This was the first disciplinary case we had had, and I did not look forward to judging it. The worst part about justice, I thought, was that it usually involved doing something unpleasant to someone.

“Well,” I said to Mr. Crane, “Widen is in Mr. Rudd's department, so let's see what Mr. Rudd has to say about him.”

We went below and found Mr. Rudd reading in his state-room.

“We've got one of your boys on report, Mr. Rudd,” I said. “It's Widen. He was insubordinate to Mr. Crane this morning. Have you ever had any trouble with him?”

“Widen?” asked Mr. Rudd in astonishment. “Why, he's one of the best men I've got. What did he do?”

Mr. Crane told him what Widen had done. Mr. Rudd looked puzzled. “I can't understand it,” he said. “I've never had a minute's trouble out of Widen.”

“Well, I had trouble with him,” Mr. Crane said, somewhat more tartly than I would have expected.

“Yes, so it seems,” said Mr. Rudd, “and, of course, some action will have to be taken.”

Mr. Crane stepped out of the stateroom and I was about to follow him when Mr. Rudd called me back.

“How are you at conducting mast, Captain?” he asked.

“What do you mean, how am I?”

“Do you throw the book at them?”

“Sometimes.”

Mr. Rudd leaned forward on his desk and picked a cigar from a box. Slowly he started to unwrap it.

“All I wanted to say was, don't sour him. He's a good man in the engine room, one of the few I've got, and I wouldn't like to see him soured.”

“I never knew you were one to mollycoddle the men,” I said.

“I'm not,” Mr. Rudd retorted, “when I'm in a place where I can get replacements. But out here you've got to live with what you've got.”

Captain's mast was set for the following morning. I decided to make a practice of holding it in the privacy of my cabin rather than on deck. At ten o'clock Wenton arrived with his pad to act as recorder. Mr. Crane followed with another pad in which he had written the charges, and finally Boats, the master-at-arms, arrived with Widen.

Widen stood against the bulkhead rigidly at attention. He was half a head taller than Mr. Crane; he was a handsome man, and his face did not bear the look of a culprit. Instead he bore about him a look of forceful righteousness, almost an air of a martyr. His righteousness bothered me. It wouldn't be bad to punish a culprit who admitted his guilt, but when one knows that the culprit honestly believes himself to be blameless, it is difficult to be a judge. Rather than go through any formal procedure, I decided to feel my way along the precarious road to justice as best I could.

“Widen,” I said, “you are charged with insubordination. Specifically it is charged that you went to the bridge without permission, thereby disturbing Mr. Crane in his navigational duties. Did you do this?”

“Yes, sir!” said Widen. If anything, his glow of martydom brightened.

“What were you going to tell Mr. Crane?”

Widen shifted uneasily on his feet, and for the first time his stern look of righteousness softened. “I was going to tell him about the shower baths. Yesterday morning about five o'clock the starboard generator went out, and I started to work on it. I worked on it for four hours. It was hot down there, and seeing I had to take a cylinder all apart, I got greasy. When I was through I went up to take a shower and found the water had been turned off. Willis was on watch and I asked him to turn the water on, and he said he couldn't because of the water hours that Mr. Crane set. I told Willis that I had been working during water hours, but he wouldn't listen to me. I realize we have to save water, but I was hot and greasy, sir. It was over a hundred and ten down there in the engine room. I wanted a shower, and I got mad and came running up on the bridge to speak to Mr. Crane. He wouldn't even look at me.”

He stopped and turned to Mr. Crane. “Sir,” he said, “have you ever been hot and greasy?”

There was a deathly pause, and suddenly I thought I understood the whole question.

“It is my job to navigate, not to work in the engine room,” said Mr. Crane quietly.

“Yes, sir,” said Widen, a little too quickly.

“Widen,” I cut in, “the question under discussion is not whether or not you should have had a shower bath. Undoubtedly you should have, and we'll have the rule about water hours changed so that men who have been working can have the water turned on. The question under discussion is whether or not an enlisted man of this ship can come up to the bridge at any time he pleases and talk in any way he pleases to the navigator. Do you think such a state of affairs should exist?”

“No, sir,” said Widen.

“For insubordination,” I concluded, “I award you twenty hours of extra duty.”

“Yes, sir,” said Widen.

Wenton noted down the sentence on his pad, and, followed by Boats and Widen, withdrew. Mr. Crane stayed behind.

“I'm sorry that happened,” he said.

“Probably a lot more things like it will happen,” I replied. “I just hope we get nothing more serious.”

CHAPTER TWELVE

A
FTER WE
had crossed the equator, New Guinea seemed much closer. The Marianas had just been invaded, and the men stood around the radio shack listening to the progress of the battle.

“It won't be long before we're there ourselves,” they said, and glanced at each other. The wags in the crew, principally the coxswain by the name of Wortly, made jokes about it. “Say, we're going in the wrong direction,” he said. “I think this war is dangerous. If they don't watch out somebody is going to get hurt.”

The long tropical days seemed endless. Slowly the mercury in the thermometer on the wing of the bridge climbed until it hovered around ninety-five each day at noon and fell only to eighty-five at night. All hands discarded uniforms for bathing trunks or trousers cut down to shorts. As the ship steamed steadily along there was very little for the men off watch to do. They lay sunning themselves on deck. I heard a group of them laughing on the forecastle deck one morning and glanced at them. Four seamen were there—White, and three of his friends. They were all between eighteen and twenty years old, and as they sat there laughing and sunning themselves, they reminded me of the boys one sees lying around on swimming floats in summer lakes. I listened to see what they were talking about.

“On the trumpet,” one of them was saying, “you can't beat Harry James.”

“I don't know,” White replied. “Have you ever heard Hot Lips Page?”

“Yeah, but Hot Lips plays only one style. Harry James can play anything.”

Many of the men followed the time immemorial custom of sailors and began to work on all different kinds of handicrafts. They took coins and by tapping them constantly on the edge with a teaspoon they burred and rounded the edge, so that when the center was bored out, the coin was transformed into a very professional-looking silver ring. This fad took possession of almost the entire crew, and sometimes the whole ship resounded to the tapping of coins. Guns figured out that to make a good ring it took forty-eight hours of constant tapping. Boats taught the men how to make square knot belts, and soon everyone was sporting one of them. As the weeks slipped by they became more and more expert at their belts, and were soon turning them out woven in different colors, like Indian baskets. They took the brass cases of shells used in target practice and hammered them into ash trays, bedside lamps, and cigarette boxes. They took sail needles or nails and carefully pricked their names or their wives' names into these articles, then wrapped them, set them aside, and waited to mail them home.