3‘ 6 
FOREST AND STREAM. 
[Aug. 29, 1908. 
looked it, the patches were so thick you could 
not tell what the original color had been. 
There were patches of all colors and shapes, 
some round, some square, some heart-shaped; 
in fact, all kinds of figures were made, and each 
one had its own tale. One little black patch 
like a round button was where it had caught 
in the brace block and had a piece pinched out 
just as a brace sometimes catches the finger 
of the man belaying it, when the watch lets 
go ot it before he has a turn and it nips a piece 
out of his finger; another long, narrow blue 
strip was where a watch mate, in a fo’castle 
row, had ripped open his coat with a sheath 
knife and been laid up for a week afterward 
for doing it, according to Charlie’s yarn, and 
he certainly looked a bad man to tackle, being 
a giant in stature. So it ran on, each patch re¬ 
calling some scene of sea life that during the 
voyage was picturesquely related during the 
dog watches when a yarn with the other watch 
was all the go. 
You could tell, among the patches, the ones 
that had been put on during the outward 
passages from those of the homeward voyage 
by the length of the stitches. The former were 
short, neat stitches close together, the latter 
genuine homeward bounders an inch or so long. 
The big mittens (or bags they really were) 
that I had made from the tails of my overcoat 
would pass from one man to the other, as we 
took trick and trick about at the wheel. Hats, 
boots and, in fact, everything were thus loaned 
about or used in common, and no one thought 
of such a thing as complaining if the coat or 
boots were soaking wet when he got them back. 
That was the proof of good fellowship; when 
one man would lend his dry clothes to another 
and have to wear them himself soaking wet. 
Hardships are plentiful at sea, and although 
there is always a bully in the crew, the sailors 
as a class are the most generous of men. 
Sundays found me hard at work ripping the 
pockets off my oilskin coat to get stuff enough 
to patch the' elbows, and when the pockets 
were used up, I cut about six inches off the 
bottom of the breeches and used that. Seeing 
how poorly provided we were, the captain let 
the mate give us some oil, and we treated our 
oilskins to a coat of it to try and make them 
water-tight. Every time we used paint, I man¬ 
aged to give my tarpaulin a coat of it until 
there was as much paint as hat. 
When I left New York I had a pair of duck 
breeches; these I had used in the hold when I 
was working cargo, and they had become 
covered with oil and grease and patched so 
many times I had thrown them aside. But now 
I hauled them out from under the bunk, where 
they had lain ever since I tossed them there, 
and put patches on the knees of No. 1 sail 
cloth, all I could get hold of. This is the 
heaviest kind of canvas, the kind the fore and 
main courses were made of, and when the 
patches became bent from kneeling down, they 
' stayed so and gave my breeches an appearance 
that was grotesque if not stylish. 
Our pots and pans had also been lost with 
our clothes, so the cook gave us the empty 
soup and bullie tins which we cut down and 
used the bottoms of for pans. For pots _we 
saved the condensed milk cans as we emptied 
them, for I had given each man a can, along 
with some of the sugar I had bought. These 
were rather small and had a tendency to grow 
hot with the coffee or tea and burned our 
fingers to handle them; but they were far better 
than nothing. 
Some of our fellows would use the pans of 
the other watch, but that was more than I cared 
to do. I tried it once, but, hungry as I was, the 
sight-of that black grimy pan, with grease from 
pea soup, cracker-hash and meat sp thick you 
could cut it off with your .knife, sickened me. 
It had never been cleaned since we left New 
York, for as soon as its owner had scooped 
up its contents after each meal, it was tossed 
into the shelf or at the foot of its owner’s 
bunk and all the grease would turn black and 
harden on the tin. _ 
I always kept my pannikin clean, either by 
wiping it out with a handful of shakings or by 
saving the crusts of my bread, and so getting 
the benefit of all the soup and crusts, too, by 
eating them after wiping out the pan with 
them. The same way with my bunk. I tried to 
keep it clean. Very often I would take out all 
my bedding, and while they were airing out on 
deck in the sun, I’d give my bunk a good swab¬ 
bing out. Some of the other men, however, 
had made up their bunk at the beginning of 
the voyage and never touched it to clean it until 
ten months or a year later, when they packed 
up to leave the ship. 
We found the winds variable after leaving the 
coast, and when the month of March came 
around, we were beating our way south, tacking 
ship nearly every day and sometimes several 
times a day. This may not sound much, but it 
is a job disliked by sailors. In a schooner it 
would only be necessary to haul the headsails 
and shift over boom tackles, but in a square- 
rigger, it was a more complicated job. 
As a rule, our officers waited until eight bells, 
when both watches would be on deck, and our 
captain, a big, strapping six-footer from Down 
East, with a voice like a bull, seemed to 
delight in this maneuver. Taking his position 
on the poop, he would tell the man at the wheel 
to “keep her away a point,” while the mate 
with two men to haul over the jibs was on the 
fo’castle head and the second mate at the lee 
fore braces ready to let them swing around 
when the bark had come head to the wind and 
the captain sang out, “Tops’l haul! Let go 
and haul!” 
All the lee braces had previously been “faked 
down,” as the process of coiling them down is 
called, each “fake” or turn being kept clear of 
the other. By a quick jerk the second mate 
would throw the braces off the pins and jump 
back to escape the snake-like coils of rope that 
seemed to writhe and twist about in the air as 
they buzzed out through the blocks as the 
yards, with all their gear, swung creaking 
around on the other tack. Sometimes when 
there was much sea on they would swing 
violently around clear up against the backstays 
and start to swing back again before we, haul¬ 
ing in the slack braces hand over hand, could 
rally in the slack. Then the second mate and 
all hands would tally on to the fore brace and 
sweat it up against the backstay. 
While the cook was hauling in the wet and 
dripping fore sheet, now trailing overboard, 
Laurence, the cabin boy, would be bracing 
around the to’gansels and royals, whose braces 
were made fast up on the poop deck. 
“Ya, ha! EIo, you! Hi, yah! Ho! Sweat 
’em up!” sang out the second mate as the last 
pulls were given; then “Belay all!” when the 
brace was as stiff as an iron rod and the line 
of men would swing in to the rail, so the end 
man could make it fast on the pin. The strain 
on a lower brace is something enormous, and 
once or twice when I would be twisting the 
rope around the pin, the fellows have let it 
go, thinking it was belayed, and the brace, like 
a vise, has tightened and cut a piece clean out 
of my finger. Of course, I swore, as others did 
when they got pinched, and the finger would be 
painful for weeks afterward; but without second 
thought for the man that got pinched, the 
others hauled in the other braces and belayed 
them, while the mate would be hauling over 
the jibs forward with his two men and the cap¬ 
tain would be jumping up and down aft and 
shouting to lay aft to the main braces. 
So aft we ran helter-skelter,_ crowding up the 
narrow poop ladder or vaulting up from the 
main deck to the poop, where the lee braces 
were made fast on the rail alongside of the 
house. And a man had to run, too, when tack¬ 
ing ship, for the mates would urge on the 
laggards ’ with their boots. Albert was going 
aft once on a dog-trot, when the mate shouted 
to him, “Get along there, get a move on you! 
Run, d—n you, run!” 
“I am running,” replied Albert, to which the 
mate answered with a vigorous kick, “Well, 
then fly, d—n you, fly!” 
It was hot work running about in that man¬ 
ner, and a man would get kind of short of wind. 
“Haul away!” then came the order as the mate 
let go the weather main braces and encouraged 
us by saying, “Hand over hand, now rattle them 
in, boys.” 
We would all do our best, the Dutchman 
trying to outdo the Swede; the Swede the 
Yankee and, so on. 
As soon as the topsail braces were fast, some 
of us would scatter about to the different 
halliards and hoist up the gaff topsail and stay¬ 
sails that had been let go before we tacked, 
while the others braced up the to’gansels and 
royals. 
Then the mate would sing out, “Relieve the 
wheel!” And if it was our watch on deck, the 
man whose trick it was to steer would relieve 
the man at the wheel, and he would follow the 
rest of his watch forward into the fo’castle, 
while we would proceed to coil down the 
fathoms upon fathoms of rope that lay in con¬ 
fusion about the decks. 
One day Hans and I were sent up to double 
up the buntlines on the 1 fore lower topsail, to 
be ready for the bad weather off the Horn. To 
reach the leeward one, we had to trice in the 
foot of the sail to the rigging, and we had just 
taken a turn to hold it there, while we cast 
loose the buntline where it was made fast at 
the bee hole, when the second mate sang out 
for us to lay down. 
Hans started down the rigging, leaving me 
to cast off the line that held the sail. 
“Lay down!” again shouted Mr. Stevens. 
“Aye, aye. sir!” I answered, and hastened to 
let the line go; but the strain of the sail 
jammed it hard, and while I was getting it clear, 
he again shouted, “Lay down here, - you; 
we’re going about!” 
“Aye, aye!” I answered, and forgot to add 
“sir.” 
“Aye, aye!” he retorted, stopping on his way 
aft to shake his fist at me, “Aye, aye!- 
I’ll aye, aye, you! Lay down!” 
He always was proud of his ability to swear 
and let it out whenever he got the chance. But 
he was so absurd in this instance and kept rais¬ 
ing his voice until at the last he was screeching 
in that high falsetto voice a woman uses, and I 
could not help laughing at him. They could not 
tack ship with the topsail lashed fast to the 
rigging, so I cut it adrift and came down. I 
thought he was going to sail into me when I 
reached the deck, but he took it all out in 
jawing. C. G. Davis. 
Canoeing. 
A. C. A. Fixtures. 
Sept. 5-7.—Atlantic Division Camp.—Hermit Point, Hud¬ 
son River. . 
- —.—Central Division Cruise and Camp.— 
Allegheny River 
A. C. A. Membership. 
NEW MEMBERS PROPOSED. 
Central Division—D. J. Edwards. Rome, N. 
Y„ and Arthur D. White, Rome, N. Y., both 
by C. S. Cooper. 
Northern Division—H. A. Clark, 58 Concord 
avenue, Toronto. Can.; R. C. Blackburn, 388 
Berkeley street, Toronto, Can.; J. McFarlane, 
95 Wood street, Toronto, Can.; Wm. A. Me- 
Nabb, 86 Wellington street, Toronto, Can.; H. 
Allan Withev, 27 Wellington street, Toronto, 
Can.; A. McNichol, 80 Wilson avenue, Toronto. 
Can., all by J. W. Sparrow; Alfred W. Allyn, 
Bank of Ottawa Building, Montreal, Can., by 
C. E. Britton. 
Western Division—William Kouba % 30 St. 
James place, Chicago, Ill., by Geo. J. Cowan. 
NEW MEMBERS ELECTED. 
Atlantic Division—5582, John R. Fraser, 580 
E. 165th street. New York city. 
APPLICANT FOR REINSTATEMENT. 
Atlantic Division—Henry H. Smythe, Har- 
way avenue, Bensonhurst, N. Y. 
MEMBER TRANSFERRED. 
5583, Walton Clark, Jr., Chestnut Hill, Phila¬ 
delphia, Pa., from Central Division to Atlantic 
Division. 
