Tramping on Life Part 23

"What good will the Sailors' Aid Society do you?"

"You just wait and see what good it will do me!"

"Nonsense, Franz! The captain's willing to pay you off at Sydney."

"Pay me off, eh? Yes, and the old boy will pay me handsome damages, too!... the sentimental old ladies that have nothing else to do but befriend the poor abused sailor, will see to it that I find justice in the courts there."

"You have a good case against the captain as it is, then. Why don't you turn to and behave and be treated decently?"

"No," he replied, with a curious note of strength in his voice, "the worse I'm treated the more damages I can collect. I'm going to make it a real case of brutal treatment before I leave this old tub."

"But they--they'll--they might kill you!"

"Not much ... those days are about gone ... for a man who knows how to handle himself, as I do....

"Well, let us thank G.o.d," he finished, "for the Sailors' Aid Society and the dear old maids at Sydney!"

I walked off, thinking. Franz had sworn me not to tell. Yet I was tempted to. It would get me in right with Captain Schantze.

We shaped to the Cape of Good Hope with great, southern jumps. We were striking far south for the strong, steady winds.

"There was a d.a.m.ned English ship, the _Lord Summerville_, that left New York about the same time we did ... she's a sky-sailer ... we mustn't let her beat us into Sydney."

"Why not, Captain?"

"An Englishman beat a German!" the captain spat, "fui! We're going to beat England yet at everything ... already we're taking their world-trade away from them ... and some day we'll beat them at sea and on land, both."

"In a war, sir?"

"Yes, in a war ... in a great, big war! It will have to come to that, Johann, my boy."

The cook's opinion on the same subject was illuminating.

He told me many anecdotes which tended to prove that even England's colonies were growing tired of her arrogance: he related droll stories told him by Colonials about the Queen ... obscene and nasty they were, too.

"Catch a German talking that way about the Kaiserin!"

The old cook couldn't realize a peculiarity of the Anglo-Saxon temperament--that those they rail against and jibe at they love the most!

Off the Tristan da Cunha Islands we ran head-on into a terrific storm ... one that lasted forty-eight hours or more, with rushing, screaming winds, and steady, stinging blasts of sleet that came thick in successions of driving, grey cloud.

It was then that we lost overboard a fine, handsome young Saxon, one Gottlieb Kampke:

Five men aloft ... only four came down ... Kampke was blown overboard off the footrope that ran under the yard, as he stood there hauling in on the sail. For he was like a young bull in strength; and, scorning, in his strength, the tearing wind, he used to heave in with both hands ...

not holding fast at all, no matter how hard the wind tore.

It was all that the ship herself could do, to live. Already two lifeboats had been bashed in. And the compa.s.s stanchioned on the bridge had gone along with a wave, stanchions and all.

There was no use trying to rescue Gottlieb Kampke. Besides, he would be dead as soon as he reached the water, in such a boiling sea, the captain said to me.

The melancholy cry, "Man overboard!" ...

I took oath that if I ever reached home alive, I would never go to sea again. If I just got home, alive, I would be willing even to tie up brown parcels in grocery cord, for the rest of my life, to sweep out a store day after day, regularly and monotonously, in safety!...

The captain saw me trembling with a nausea of fear. And, with the winds booming from all sides, the deck as slippery as the body of a live eel, he gave me a shove far out on the slant of the p.o.o.p. I sped in the grey drive of sleet clear to the rail. The ship dipped under as a huge wave smashed over, all fury and foam, overwhelming the helmsman and bearing down on me....

It was miraculous that I was not swept overboard.

After that, strangely, I no longer feared, but enjoyed a quickening of pulse. And I gladly took in the turns in the rope as the men sang and heaved away ... waves would heap up over us. We would hold tight till we emerged again. Then again we would shout and haul away.

"It's all according to what you grow used to," commented the captain.

By the time I was beginning to look into the face of danger as into a mother's face, the weather wore down. The ocean was still heavy with running seas, but we rode high and dry.

Unlucky Kampke!

His shipmates bore his dunnage aft, for the captain to take in charge.

And, just as in melodramas and popular novels, a picture of a fair-haired girl was found at the bottom of his sea-chest, together with one of his mother ... his sweetheart and his mother....

Depositions were taken down from his forecastle mates, as to his going overboard, and duly entered into the log ... and the captain wrote a letter to his mother, to be mailed to her from Sydney.

For a day we were sad. An imminent sense of mortality hung over us.

But there broke, the next morning, a clear sky of sunshine and an open though still yesty sea--and we sang, and became thoughtless and gay again.

"Yes," sighed the cook, "I wish it had been Franz instead of Gottlieb.

Gottlieb was such a fine fellow, and Franz is such a son of a----."