Cappy Ricks Part 1

Cappy Ricks.

by Peter B. Kyne.

TO THE IDEAL AMERICAN SAILOR

As exemplified in the persons of my good friends,

Captain Ralph E. Peasley, of Jonesport, Maine,

Who skippered the first five-masted schooner ever built, brought her, on that first voyage, through the worst typhoon that ever blew, and upon arriving at the Yang Tse Kiang River for the first time in his adventurous career, decided he could not trust a Chinese pilot and established a record by sailing her up himself!

Captain I. N. Hibberd, of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania,

Sometime master of the American clipper ship, Cyrus Wakefield, who, at the age of twenty-five, broke three world's records in one voyage: San Francisco to Liverpool and back, eight months and two days; Liverpool to San Francisco, one hundred days; from the equator to San Francisco, eleven days. The clipper ship is gone but the skipper remains, an undefeated champion.

Captain William P. Cantey, of San Francisco, California,

Sometime mate of the brig Galilee, who, with his naked hands, convinced in thirty-five minutes nine larger men than himself of the incontrovertible fact that you cannot keep a good man down.

TO THE AMERICAN SHIPOWNER

As exemplified in the persons of my good friends,

John H. Rossiter, Manager of W. R. Grace & Co., of San Francisco.

Edwin A. Christenson, President of the Sudden & Christenson S.S. Line, of San Francisco.

John R. Hanify, President of the John R. Hanify Company, of San Francisco.

TO THE PACIFIC COAST LUMBERMAN

As exemplified in the person of my good friend,

Augustus J. ("Gus") Russell, California Manager for the Portland Lumber Company, and my personal representative, without salary, in the wholesale lumber trade, ever since I abandoned lumber for literature.

TO FREIGHT, SHIP, AND MARINE INSURANCE BROKERS

As exemplified in the persons of my good friends,

Messrs. E. B. Smith, Oscar J. Beyfuss, and Allan Hayes.

This volume is dedicated, without charge for the advertising but with profound appreciation of the part they have made in making this book possible. With the author they must bear an equal burden of whatever of praise or censure shall entail.

CHAPTER I. MASTER OF MANY SHIPS AND SKIPPER OF NONE

A psychologist would have termed Alden P. Ricks an individualist, but his a.s.sociates in the wholesale lumber and shipping trade of the Pacific Coast proclaimed him a character.

In his youth he had made one voyage round Cape Horn as a cabin boy, his subsequent nautical experience having been confined to the presidency of the Blue Star Navigation Company and occasional voyages as a first-cabin pa.s.senger. Notwithstanding this apparent lack of salt-water wisdom, however, his intimate knowledge of ships and the men who go down to the sea in them, together with his very distinct personality, had conduced to provide him with a courtesy t.i.tle in his old age.

It is more than probable that, had Alden P. Ricks been a large, commanding person possessed of the dignity the average citizen a.s.sociates with men of equal financial rating, the Street would have called him Captain Ricks. Had he lacked these characteristics, but borne nevertheless even a remote resemblance to a retired mariner, his world would have hailed him as Old Cap Ricks; but since he was what he was--a dapper, precise, shrewd, lovable little old man with mild, paternal blue eyes, a keen sense of humor and a Henry Clay collar, which latter, together with a silk top hat, had distinguished him on 'Change for forty years--it was inevitable that along the Embarcadero and up California Street he should bear the distinguishing appellation of Cappy. In any other line of human endeavor he would have been called Pappy--he was that type of man.

Cappy Ricks had so much money, ama.s.sed in the wholesale lumber and shipping business, that he had to engage some very expensive men to take care of it for him. He owned the majority of the stock of the Ricks Lumber and Logging Company, with sawmills and timberlands in California, Oregon and Washington; his young men had to sell a million feet of lumber daily in order to keep pace with the output, while the vessels of the Blue Star Navigation Company, also controlled by Cappy, freighted it. There were thirty-odd vessels in the Blue Star fleet--windjammers and steam schooners; and Cappy was registered as managing owner of every one.

Following that point in his career when the young fellows on the Street, discovering that he was a true-blue sport, had commenced to fraternize with him and call him Cappy, the old gentleman ceased to devote his attention to the details of his business. He was just beginning to enjoy life; so he shifted the real work of his multifarious interests to the capable shoulders of a Mr. John P. Skinner, who fitted into his niche in the business as naturally as the kernel of a healthy walnut fits its sh.e.l.l. Mr. Skinner was a man still on the sunny side of middle life, smart, capable, cold-blooded, a little b.u.mptious, and, like the late Julius Caesar, ambitious.

No sooner had Cappy commenced to take life easy than Skinner commenced to dominate the business. He attended an efficiency congress and came home with a collection of newfangled ideas that eliminated from the office all the joy and contentment old Cappy Ricks had been a life-time installing. He inaugurated card systems and short cuts in bookkeeping that drove Cappy to the verge of insanity, because he could never go to the books himself and find out anything about his own business. He had to ask Mr. Skinner--which made Skinner an important individual.

With the pa.s.sage of five years the general manager was high and low justice in Cappy's offices, and had mastered the not-too-difficult art of dominating his employer, for Cappy seldom seriously disagreed with those he trusted. He saved all his fighting force for his compet.i.tors.

However, Cappy's interest in the Blue Star Navigation Company did not wane with the cessation of his activities as chief kicker. Ordinarily, Mr. Skinner bossed the navigation company as he bossed the lumber business, for Cappy's private office was merely headquarters for receiving mail, reading the newspapers, receiving visitors, smoking an after-luncheon cigar, and having a little nap from three o'clock until four, at which hour Cappy laid aside the cares of business and put in two hours at bridge in his club.

Despite this apparent indifference to business, however, Mr. Skinner handled the navigation company with gloves; for, if Cappy dozed in his office, he had a habit of keeping one eye open, so to speak, and every little while he would wake up and veto an order of Skinner's, of which the latter would have been willing to take an oath Cappy had never heard. In the matter of engaging new skippers or discharging old ones Mr. Skinner had to be very careful. Cappy always declared that any clerk can negotiate successfully a charter at the going rates in a stiff market, but skippers are, in the final a.n.a.lysis, the Genii of the Dividends. And Cappy knew skippers. He could get more loyalty out of them with a mere pat on the back and a kindly word than could Mr.

Skinner, with all his threats, nagging and driving, yet he was an employer who demanded a full measure of service, and never permitted sentiment to plead for an incompetent. And his ships were his pets; in his affections they occupied a position but one degree removed from that occupied by his only child, in consequence of which he was mighty particular who hung up his master's ticket in the cabin of a Blue Star ship. Some idea of the scrupulous care with which he examined all applicants for a skipper's berth may be gleaned from the fact that any man discharged from a Blue Star ship stood as much chance of obtaining a berth with one of Cappy Ricks' compet.i.tors as a celluloid dog chasing an asbestos cat through Hades.

The reader will readily appreciate, therefore, the apprehensions which a.s.sailed Cappy Ricks when the Blue Star Navigation Company discovered it had on its payroll one Matthew Peasley, a n.o.body from Nowhere, who not only had the insufferable impudence to apply for a job skippering the finest windjammer in the fleet, but when rebuffed in no uncertain terms, refused to withdraw his application, and defied his owners to fire him.

Such a preposterous state of affairs borders so closely on the realm of fancy as to require explanation; hence, for the nonce let us leave Cappy Ricks and Mr. Skinner to their sordid task of squeezing dividends out of the Blue Star Navigation Company and turn the searchlight of inquiry upon the amazing Matthew.

CHAPTER II. THE MAN FROM BLUE WATER

If, instead of advancing the theory that man sprang from a monkey, Darwin had elected to nominate the duck for that dubious honor, there is no doubt but that he would have pointed to the Peasley family, of Thomaston, Maine, as evidence of the correctness of his theory of evolution. The most casual student of natural history knows that the instant a duckling chips its sh.e.l.l it toddles straightway to the nearest water. The instant a male Peasley could cut his mother's ap.r.o.n strings, he, also, made for the nearest water, for the Peasleys had always been sailors, a statement which a perusal of the tombstones in Thomaston cemetery will amply justify. Indeed, a Peasley who had not acquired his master's ticket prior to his twenty-fifth birthday was one of two things--a disgrace to the family or a corpse. Consequently, since the traditions of his tribe were very strong in Matthew Peasley VI, it occasioned no comment in Thomaston when, having acquired a grammar school education, he answered the call of his destiny and fared forth to blue water and his first taste of dog's body and salt horse.

When he was fourteen years old and very large for his age, Matt commenced his apprenticeship in a codfisher on the Grand Banks, which, when all is said and done, const.i.tutes the finest training school in the world for sailors. By the time he was seventeen he had made one voyage to Rio de Janeiro in a big square-rigger out of Portland; and so smart and capable an A.B. was he for his years that the Old Man took a shine to him. Confidentially he informed young Matt that if the latter would stay by the ship, in due course a billet as third mate should be the reward of his fealty. The Old Man didn't need a third mate any more than he needed a tail, but Matt Peasley looked like a comer to him and he wanted an excuse to encourage the boy by berthing him aft; also it sounds far better to be known as a third mate instead of a mate's bosun, which was, in reality, the position the Old Man had promised Matt. The latter promptly agreed to this program and the skipper loaned him his copy of Bowditch.

Upon his return from his first voyage as third mate Matt went up for his second mate's certificate and pa.s.sed very handily. Naturally he expected prompt promotion, but the Old Man knew the value of experience in a second mate--also the value of years and physical weight; so he informed young Matt he was entirely too precocious and that to sail as second mate before he was nineteen might tend to swell his ego. Consequently Matt made a voyage to Liverpool and back as third mate before the Old Man promoted him.

For a year, Matt Peasley did nicely; then, in a gale off the Orinoco River, with the captain too ill to appear on deck, the first mate went by the board, leaving the command of the ship to young Matt. She was dismasted at the time, but the lad brought her into Rio on the stumps, thus attracting some little attention to himself from his owners, who paid his pa.s.sage back to Portland by steamer and found a second mate's berth for him in one of their clipper ships bound round the Horn.

Of course Matt was too young to know they had their eyes on him for future skipper material and were sending him around Cape Horn for the invaluable experience he would encounter on such a voyage. All he realized was that he was going round the Horn, as became one of the House of Peasley, no member of which would ever regard him as a real sailor until he could point to a Cape Horn diploma as evidence that he had graduated from the school for amateurs.

Matt Peasley lacked two months of his twentieth birthday when he stepped onto a San Francisco dock, in his pocket a highly complimentary discharge as second mate from the master of the clipper ship--for Matt had elected to quit. In fact, he had to, for on the way round the mate had picked on him and called him Sonny and Mother's Darling Boy; and Matt, having, in the terminology of the forecastle, come aboard through the hawse pipes, knew himself for a man and a sailor, despite the paucity of whiskers on his big, square boyish chin.

Accordingly he had advised the mate to address him only in the line of duty, on which occasions he desired to be referred to as Mr. Peasley, and, the mate demurring from this program, the customary maritime fracas had ensued. Consequently, somebody had to quit on arrival at San Francisco; and since, Matt was the last to come, he was the first to go.