PRENTICE MULFORD: Autobiographical Works (Life by Land and Sea, The Californian's Return & More). Prentice Mulford Mulford

and Sunday’s and Thursday’s duff. The hours for labor were not exhausting. It was “watch and watch, four hours off and four hours on.” Many a New York retail grocer’s clerk, who turns to at 5 in the morning and never leaves off until 11 at night, would revel on such regulation of time and labor. So would many a sewing-girl. We had plenty of time for sleep. If called up at 4 every alternate morning, and obliged to stand watch until 8 a. m., we could “turn in” at that hour after breakfast and sleep till noon. Apart from the alternate watches the work or “jobs” occupied about six hours per day. True, there was at times some heavy work, but it was only occasional. Sailor-work is not heavy as compared with the incessant fagging, wearing, never-ending character of some occupations on shore. Skill, agility, and quickness are in greater demand than mere brute strength.

      Lobscouse is a preparation of hard bread, first soaked and then stewed with shredded salt-beef. It looks somewhat like rations for a delicate bear when served out by the panful. But it is very good. Salt beef is wonderfully improved by streaks of fat through it. These serve the foremast hands in place of butter. I know of no better relish than good pilot bread and sliced salt junk, with plenty of clean white fat. On shore that quart of boiling hot liquid, sweetened with molasses and called tea, would have been pitched into the gutter. At sea, after an afternoon’s work, it was good. With similar content and resignation, not to say happiness, we drank in the morning the hot quart of black fluid similarly sweetened and called coffee. It was not real coffee. I don’t know what it was. I cared not to know. Of course we grumbled at it. But we drank it. It was “filling,” and was far better than the cold, brackish water, impregnated thickly with iron rust, a gallon of which was served out daily. For the fresh water was kept below in an iron tank, and, as the deck leaked, a small portion of the Atlantic had somehow gained admission to it and slightly salted it. It resembled chocolate to the eye, but not to the palate.

CHAPTER IV.

      MUCH WATER AND MUTINY.

       Table of Contents

       On the fourth day out the Wizard was found to have four feet of water in her hold. The ship was pumped dry in about four hours, when she proceeded to fill up again. The Captain seemed a man of many minds for the next two or three days. First the ship was put back for New York. This course was altered and her bows pointed for Africa. Then the foremast hands became worried, and going aft one morning in a body, asked Captain S—— what he meant to do and where he meant to go, because they had shipped for San Francisco and they did not intend going anywhere else. The Captain answered that his own safety and that of the vessel were as dear to him as their lives were to them, and that he intended doing the best for the general good. This answer was not very satisfactory to the crew, who went grumbling back to their quarters. Ultimately it turned out that we were to take the leak with us to San Francisco. At the rate the water was running in it was judged that the bone, muscle, and sinews of the crew could manage to keep it down. So we pumped all the way round Cape Horn. We pumped during our respective watches every two hours. In good weather and on an even keel it took half an hour to “suck the pumps.” If the vessel was heeled to larboard or starboard, it took much longer. In very rough weather we pumped all the time that could be spared from other duties. There were two pumps at the foot of the mainmast worked by levers, and these were furnished with “bell ropes” to pull on. Half the watch worked at each lever, and these were located exactly where on stormy nights the wild waves were in the habit of flinging over the bulwarks a hogshead or two of water to drench us and wash us off our feet.

      The Wizard was a very “wet ship.” She loved giving us moist surprises. Sometimes on a fine day she would gracefully, but suddenly, poke her nose under, and come up and out of the Atlantic or Pacific ocean with fifteen or twenty tons of pea-green sea water foaming over the t’gallant forecastle, cascading thence on the spar deck and washing everything movable slam bang up and sometimes into the cabin. This took place once on a washday Sailors’ washday is often regulated by the supply of water caught from the clouds. On this particular occasion the fore deck was full of old salts up to their bared elbows in suds, vigorously discoursing washtub and washboard. Then the flood came, and in a moment the deck was filled with a great surge bearing on its crest all these old salts struggling among their tubs, their washboards, their soap and partly-washed garments. The cabin bulkhead partly stopped some, but the door being open others were borne partly inside, and their woollen shirts were afterward found stranded on the carpeted cabin floor. One “duff day” we had gathered about our extra repast in the boys’ house. The duff and New Orleans molasses had just commenced to disappear. Then a shining, greenish, translucent cataract filled the doorway from top to bottom. It struck boys, beef, bread, duff, and dishes. It scattered them. It tumbled them in various heaps. It was a brief season of terror, spitting, and sputtering salt-water, and a scrambling for life, as we thought. It washed under bunks and in remote corners duff, bread, beef, plates, knives, forks, cups, spoons and molasses-bottles. The dinner was lost. Going on deck we found a couple of feet of water swashing from bulwark to bulwark with every roll, bearing with it, heavy blocks and everything movable which had been loosened by the shock, to the great risk of legs and bodies. But these were trifles. At least we call them trifles when they are over. I have noticed, however, that a man may swear as hard at a jammed finger as a broken leg, and the most efficacious means in the world to quickly develop a furious temper is to lose one’s dinner when hungry, get wet through, then abused by a Dutch mate for not stirring around quicker, and finally work all the afternoon setting things to rights on an empty stomach, robbed and disappointed of its duff. This is no trifle.

      Learning the ropes isn’t all a boy’s first lessons at sea. He must learn also to wash and mend his own clothes. At least he must try to learn and go through the forms. I never could wash a flannel shirt, and how the extraneous matter called dirt, which the washing process is intended to disperse, is gotten rid of by soap and muscle at an equal average over the entire surface of the garment is for me to-day one of earth’s mysteries. I could wash a shirt in spots. When I tried to convince myself that I had finished it I could still see where I had washed clean and where I had not. There is a certain system in the proper manipulation of a garment in a washtub which to me is incomprehensible. An old sailor is usually a good washer. It’s part of his trade. Those on the Wizard would reprove the boys for their slipshod work. “Such a slovenly washed shirt as that,” said Conner, an old man-of-war’s man, “hung in the rigging is a disgrace to the ship.” He alluded to one of mine. The failure was not from any lack of labor put on it. The trouble lay in that I didn’t know where to put the labor on. It was easier to tie a shirt to a line, fling it overboard and let it tow. This will wash clothes—wash all the warp out of them in time. The practice was at last forbidden the boys on the Wizard, It’s a lazy boy’s wash. The adage “It’s never too late to mend” is not applicable on shipboard. It should there-read “It’s never too early to mend.” Of course a boy of sixteen, whose mother has always stitched for him, will allow his clothes to go until they fall off his body before using his needle. As I did. And I sewed myself up only to rip asunder immediately. I went about decks a thing of flaps, rips, rags, and abortive patches, until they called me the ship’s scarecrow. And so would many another spruce young man under similar discipline. It’s good once in one’s life to be brought thus low.

      It was particularly disagreeable at midnight as we assembled at the bell ropes to give her the last “shake-up,” and more asleep than awake pulled wearily with monotonous clank. Sometimes at that hour, when our labors were half through, the valves would get out of order. It was then necessary to call the carpenter and have them repaired. This would keep us on deck half an hour or more, for by mutual compact each watch was obliged to “suck its own pumps.” Such delays made the men very angry. They stopped singing at their work—always a bad sign—and became silent, morose, and sullen. For the first six weeks all the “shanti songs” known on the sea had been sung. Regularly at each pumping exercise we had “Santy Anna,” “Bully in the Alley,” “Miranda Lee,” “Storm Along, John,” and other operatic maritime gems, some of which might have a place in our modern operas of The Pinafore school. There’s a good deal of rough melody when these airs are rolled out by twenty or thirty strong lungs to the accompaniment of a windlass’ clank