Fred Klebingat - collection

Bark Anna (ex Otterburn)

(credit: clydeships.co.uk)

Capt Fred Klebingat's name popped up several times when I looked up history of sailing ships and the US west coast. It turned out also that he has published a number of articles in the Sea History magazine that are readily available on Issuu and also in Sea Letter from archive.org (published predating or in parallel with the Sea History). Both magazines were started by Karl Kortum, the director from the San Francisco maritime museum. I found his writings interesting and dug about in the interwebs so did find one of his his first entries in the Pacific Islands Magazine and other small articles he wrote. I thought they would all make a good read from one persons perspective, experiences and stories of a bygone era. 

He also had a way with words like e.g. as written by Walter Rybka (involved in restoring Elissa) that had consulted Capt Fred on matters of rigging: 'One of the greatest insights I got was when I visited the late Captain Klebingat. I asked him how things were done in his day. He said, "Any damn way that works. Every time we took a new ship from the builder's yard, we usually had to change half the damn rig on the first trip out." I asked him how they managed to work it all out without drawings. The fact is a lot of the leads of the running rigging were not worked out by the designers: the crew worked it out later.' (credit: Journal for preservation technology, APT Bulletin vol 19, no 1, 1987). The other blurb of his: "Well, maybe I was wrong 2% of the time."

Lastly, he also was in a special position that he had extensively experienced the life on the Pacific and the West Coast and as early as the 50's he was a member of the Journal of Polynesian society and wrote some opinions in the local PIM magazine (Polynesian Islands Monthly). 

Eventually he also found his first wife in New Zealand and over there he got married to Phyllis Reid in 1927 which lasted as far as to 1947 when they separated. During their marriage they had one son in 1933 that Capt Fred outlived as he passed away in 1970 at a very young age of 38 years. Still he had also managed a son with Mary Trumbull, Fred Klebingat III, that apparently survives in Oahu, Hawaii & another sibling. Phyllis passed away in 1980. 

Jo Dee (wife of Ron Cleveland), Irene and Capt Fred in March 1983

(credit: National Park service)

Capt Fred then relocated to Coos Bay in Oregon in his later 'academic' years until he passed away in 1985 (same year I went to sea). There he found his second partner Irene Sigler, who was a widower herself, and shared Fred's interest in maritime history. She outlived Capt Klebingat by 8 years and passed away in 1993. 

After the Great War he returned to stay in California and was acquainted with Karl Kortum and Harold Huycke among many other wind ship enthusiasts sharing the same interest, his latter career then consisted of the history he had lived and an extensive communication within the shipping community.

San Francisco maritime museum has documented Capt. Fred's CV as follows: 

1905 Deck hand on the full rigged German ship D.H. Watjen (built 1892; ship, 3m)

1906 Ordinary seaman (O.S.) on Bremen Watjen & Company's bark Anna (built 1893; bark, 4m). 

1912-1913 Carpenter on Chanslor (built 1910, tanker) and then her sister ship William F. Herrin (1911)

1914 Carpenter on City of Topeka (built 1884; passenger steamer), he also became U.S. citizen.

1916-1918 Chief Mate of Falls of Clyde (1878, bark, 4m)

1918 Chief Mate of Star of Poland (built 1901; bark, 4m) 

1918 Master of bark Chin Pu (built 1873, bark, 3m)

1919 Master of the four-masted schooner Melrose (built 1902; schooner, 4m)

1925-1942 Master of Zane Grey's Fisherman (built 1919; schooner, 3m: yacht), Master of Navigator (schooner, 2m: yacht), Master of Bali (yacht). 

During World War II, Master of Liberty ships (Oliver Evans, William Mulholland) and tankers (Apache Canyon, Harpers Ferry). 

After the war, he returned home to San Pedro, California. Klebingat worked various jobs, mostly employed by lumber companies running goods up and down the Pacific coast.  

1963 - 1968 The Falls of Clyde rescue and restoration project took place between 1963 - 1968 (not sure to what extent he was involved and if he did any gigs during this time).

1969 Master of Coos Bay, his last job at 80 years of age. 

I think not many can share this impressive resume. Interestingly they don't mention Annie E. Smale as Capt Fred does tell a story from a trip on her, neither the Santa Clara, perhaps these 'one time wonders' were not worth talking about as they were short gigs. One also has to remember that in those times there were no weather forecasts, no electricity 24/7, everything was done manually.

The other common thing in his stories is Christmas, I think the good Captain was very fond of Christmas and everything related to it or his writings always coincided with the Yuletide editions for him to fill up editing space. It is true, Christmas onboard can be a lonely event for a seafarer away from his family and loved ones but most times all crew come together and try to make the best of it with what they have, food, decorations and atmosphere. I recall from my youth that some holidays in port could be quite rowdy but when at sea one had to think of responsibilities too. 

I still remember vividly how one Boxing day, when I was 17, was spent on weather deck scooping up heavy fuel oil, that was like toffee, into buckets and barrels. The engineer had some mishap and filled up the tank a bit too much so it overflowed on deck, maybe he was also a bit 'flooded'. 

Come to think of it, Capt Fred may have also been fond of the wise-mens drink but in later years I think he took the oath and stayed dry. His published book by the Bishop museum was called Christmas at sea and most of the chapters have been published in Sea History or elsewhere as can be found down below. Most remarkably I understand that Capt Fred did not keep any journals or notes so his memory must've been near photographic as he wrote many of these stories late in life, possibly he could have had letters and other keepsakes jogging his memory but still an astonishing mind.

Reading his later writings one can sense the melancholy and sadness of times passed by as he, an old man, reminisces about the life he had lived. Probably most of his friends and peers had passed by then and younger friends maybe could not always partake in the gravity of his experiences. He had even outlived his son, maybe that's why he was still sailing in his 80's. He surely had had an active life full of excitement at times!

Eventually Fred Klebingat was also noticed by the historical maritime enthusiasts in Germany and Mr Eberhard Hewicker translated and published several of his stories in Germany.

Enjoy!

*****

PIM, 12th Nov 1957

Letter to the Editor

Harold Gatty's Early Days in USA

Was sad at heart when I read about the passing of Mr. Harold Gatty, (Sept, PIM), whom I knew quite well in the days when he first arrived in the United States.

The history of Harold is not complete without mentioning those days and the man who befriended him then and, you may "grubstaked" him, so that he could take up the study of Weems system of Navigation  and await an opening in aviation.

This friend was Captain Norman Ferguson, a native of Timaru, New Island, and then master of the large US schooner-yacht Goodwill. When Gatty met the Captain, the master was over 70 years old, a tall standing man, about six feet tall, hard as nails, but with a very kind heart.

Captain Ferguson was an early shipmate of Captain William Ross, the well-known trader in the Tongas about 1900 and owner of barkentine Ysabel. He was last seen in the South Seas, when the Goodwill made a cruise to Tahiti and the Tongas and returned to Los Angles via Christmas Island and Honolulu about 1924.

The Goodwill was a steel two-masted schooner of over 200 tons and was owned by Mr. Keith Spalding, of Pasadena, California. She carried a crew of 26 men and was tops when it came to upkeep and pay.

She very seldom went on a long cruise and most of her sailing was done on week-ends between Los Angeles and Catalina Island, about 20 miles away.

I do not know how Harold Gatty met the Captain - it may have been a letter of introduction, as without doubt he needed work, And, as it happened, there was an opening as Chief Mate on Goodwill, Captain Ferguson gave Getty the job at 50.00 per month, not forgetting what we would call fringe benefits, such as free laundry and subsistence when the ship lay up in the winter. Harold Getty could not have wished for m better job for his purpose- a lot of leisure time, which gave him a chance to study and work on some inventions such as a drift indicator for planes; a sextant for air navigation; and others. In between times, he also started to reach Weems System of Navigation. It is well known that the Lindberghs were amongst his later students.

How long Harold Gatty was Chief Mate on the Goodwill I can't recall but some time later on, the Pioneer Instrument Co. wanted some one to adjust their aeroplane compasses.

Gatty resigned to take the job.

From that day on he became firmly established in aviation. His later career is well known.

I am. etc.

Fred K. Klebingat (Capt)

San Pedro,

California, USA.

November 12, 1957

*****

Sea breezes, Sept 1959

It may have come to the notice of some readers that the famous Falls of Clyde, first and last of the "Falls Line of Ships" is up for sale. She is now 81 years old. In common with many other people I would like to see the ship restored as a 4-masted full-rigged ship utilised as a museum. This was her rig when under the Red Ensign. Sail and rigging plans are now needed.

Sea Breezes enabled Mr. Karl Kortum, Director of the San Francisco Maritime Museum, to obtain plans of the interior of the Balclutha which made it possible for him to restore the ship to her original condition.

Among readers there may be someone who has copies of sail and rigging plans of the Falls of Clyde. If such is the case we shall be pleased to pay for copies to be made.

Capt Fred K. Klebingat

873, 22nd Street,

San Pedro, California

*****

PIM, Feb 1963

 

Polynesians Did Make Voyages Of Discovery

Sir, —With great interest I read the article “There’s Still Room for Unbelievers on Those Polynesian Voyages”, by Gordon Russell in the November, 1962, issue of PIM. I rather agree with him.

Previous to World War II, I visited Honolulu every year, and I became well acquainted with Sir Peter H. Buck, Director of the Bernice Pauahi Bishop Museum, who knew me as a navigator who had spent the greater part of my life under sail amongst the Islands of the South Pacific. 

Many a time, when visiting with Dr. Buck, our conversation turned to Polynesian migration and discovery, and he urged me repeatedly to write down my theory of migration from a seaman’s standpoint. I never got that far.

On one point we always agreed. A lot of voyages were made solely with the idea of discovering other lands. I called this the “Golden Age of Discovery.” 

Without doubt thousands perished at sea, but there must have been others who returned to their homeland. As with the Spaniards and Portuguese, that spirit of discovery lagged and the news of discovery of other islands became myth. But there are geographical names to remind us that some such voyages were made. In Hawaii, for instance, there is Kealaikahiki Channel—“ The Road to Tahiti”. 

William Mariner in his Tonga Islands, gives us a description of how navigation was done when there were no stars in sight. In this case it was lucky that William Mariner had a compass along. They were steering by the direction of sea and wind, but the wind and sea shifted during the night. Mariner was the only one who noticed this, by looking at his compass. Finau, the chief, finally believed him; if he hadn’t Finau and his men would have been lost. 

But steering by the direction of the wind was done many a time in the sailing ship era. The binnacle light may have blown out, or would not burn and the man on the wheel might get the order, “Keep the wind on the port quarter”, or whatever direction the wind was. 

Coming back to Mariner’s Tonga there is no doubt that they visited Samoa, Rotuma and Futuna — and these are respectable distances. 

On the subject of latitude, we know that the Polynesians did not have an instrument resembling sextant. But I have been shipmate with many a sailor who could guess the latitude (by looking at the polar star) within a degree or two. Without doubt there were also Polynesians who could guess as well as they.

Yours, etc.,

Captain Fred Klebingat

Research Associate,

San Francisco Maritime Museum.

*****

Sea Letter no 5, Winter 1963

Christmas Forward ...

Right: The foc's'le of the Falls of Clyde, Christmas 1916 - Captain Fred Klebingat, then chief mate of the Clyde, recalls the crew and the photographer, Ernest Aderman, then an A.B. 

"Aderman, of course, used flashlight powder for this picture. He usually lit the fuse and sat down if he wanted his own picture taken too. The fuse would delay enough, so that he could do this.

"Several of the faces in the picture I fail to recognize. Herman Wenzke, the sailor with the cigar, is third from left. Next to him at the table with the mug in the hand is Emil Dorsch, pumpman of the Falls of Clyde .... In front right is Tom Thurstensen, now dead; his brother Barney was with us too at about the same time. Barney isn't here; he was probably on the wheel...

"The camera Aderman used was a Kodak, post-card size. He did his own developing and printing. Printing was done with the aid of the kerosene lamp in the foc's'le of the Falls of Clyde."

Note: Falls of Clyde will be spending this Christmas at her new berth in Honolulu, where she is being restored as a museum ship. The dramatic last-minute rescue of the Clyde was made possible by the successful fund-raising efforts of John Wright and columnist Bob Krauss in Hawaii, and followed four years of effort on Clyde's behalf by the San Francisco Maritime Museum, and by Captain Klebingat, the maritime historian Harold Huycke, Robert Weinstein and others concerned with the fate of the last four-masted full-rigged ship in the world. The Clyde herself once carried cheer to the Islands, as this item from the Hawaii Herald, October 17, 1905, notes:

"The Falls of Clyde expects to return [from San Francisco] with a large cargo of Christmas goods." 

The Clyde had contributed its part to the New Year's celebration for 1905 as well. In the Hilo Tribune for December 27, 1904, we read:

"New Auto Car Arrives - J. Alexander, station agent at Keaau, received by ship Falls of Clyde last week a new automobile which will make another added to the list of entries in Admiral Beckley's auto parade on New Year's Day."

Christmas Aft...

Caption: Captain Fred Klebingat (right) on the schooner Melrose, 1921

Christmas aft ...

Christmas 1921 on the schooner Melrose at Port Angeles. Captain Fred Klebingat, then master of the

Melrose, recalls:

"Besides myself, there's a man by the name of Howard Josh who was running the Charles Nelson Company's launch-towboat in Mukilteo. This picture was taken in Port Angeles, where the schooner was laid up temporarily over Christmas. Josh just happened to be there, and he came on board celebrating. The bottle is pretty empty, so somebody probably went ashore to get another one from the bootlegger. We bought a decoration in the store, and had real tallows on the Christmas tree. We didn't have electric lights. They were scarce in '21.

*****

Sea Letter, December 1964

Christmas in the fo'c'sle

By Capt Fred Klebingat

"We ought to celebrate Christmas right, and make a Christmas tree,” said Carl Schroeder, Top Dog and the oldest sailor of the port fo’c’sle. “We have plenty to be thankful for.” And that we had, for just a few nights before, about midnight on December 17, 1906, we had barely escaped being wrecked on Tristan Da Cunha, a lone and solitary volcanic island planted just about in the middle of the South Atlantic Ocean between Cape Horn and the Cape of Good Hope. The night was dark and misty, and the four-mast bark Anna, ex-Otterburn, was logging more than twelve knots with all sail set. And it was only due to the vigilance of the Old Man, Captain Koster, that we escaped shipwreck — by the width of a cat's whisker. It was a miracle, that is sure, and it was a miracle that all were able to celebrate this Christmas. In that surf and on that high rocky shore, not all of us could have reached the beach alive.

“And come here, Fred,” said Carl, addressing himself to me. “You go and see ‘Chips’ and tell him that we want to make a Christmas tree. You are the only one who can get anything out of that old curmudgeon. See if you can talk him into loaning us some tools...” Chips was more than willing; he also had caught the Christmas spirit. At once he went to work to make a first-class base, and he handed me a piece of pine about two inches square and about four feet long. “Take a hatchet,” said he, “and taper this stick a little and plane it off.” Next we picked a piece of straight-grained soft pine about a foot long. We split this up in fine pieces and now notched the edges of these slivers to resemble pine needles. By this time I had finished tapering the stick and smoothing it with a plane. Chips now took his carpenter's pencil from the pocket of his overalls. He marked the tapered stick for three sets of holes. “Here is an auger; bore some holes,” he said. “Bore them at an angle — you know how the branches of a Christmas tree look.” That done, he fitted the stick to the base he had made. The rest of the sailors were notching pine slivers with their sheath knives like this:

We managed to get hold of some green paint and thinned this out with turpentine and painted the branches. Now we assembled the tree. Chips cut a nice star out of an empty margarine can — this we mounted on top. Those days everyone was familiar with cutting chains out of paper; we did the same. We made neat little baskets out of the silvercovered wrappers of our tobacco packages. We had no nuts to insert in these, so we used iron ones. “We should hang some cookies on the tree, too,” someone said. “I have it,” another answered. “We can cut them out of this piece of yellow laundry soap. For sugar, we can pound up some of that rock salt from the salt meat barrel.” They looked good enough to eat! Then someone came along with some cotton, which we draped on the tree so that it looked like snow. From the steward we managed to bum some big candles. They were not exactly the size we wanted, but we cut them up in chunks and seized them to the tree with wire seizing. The tree was now complete, and a fine tree it was, if I say so myself. The Anna had two fo’c’sles under the fo’c’slehead, one to port (where I had my bunk), and one to starboard. After finishing the tree, we moved it into the starboard fo'c’sle, although this watch had no hand in making it.

Christmas Eve came. The ship was in the “roaring forties,” racing before a light westerly gale with all sail set. She rolled heavily, and seas boarded her from port to starboard, at times filling the decks up to the rails. The man on the wheel was busily spinning the wheel trying to keep her before the racing seas. But in the starboard fo’c’sle all was snug. With the candles on the tree lit, “Merry Christmas,” it was — but what to do about Christmas cheer?

“Let us go aft and wish the Old Man a Merry Christmas and invite him to have a look at our tree,” Carl suggested. He did this; the ship had a fore and aft bridge, a cat walk, so one could get aft without any trouble. A short while later the Old Man and the mate appeared (we had no secondmate). Both of them removed their caps as they stepped into the fo’c'sle. “A Merry Christmas to all and what a beautiful tree,” the Old Man said. “The best I have ever seen.” The mate agreed.

“And how about Santa Claus?'’ (And nobody could look more like him than the captain. His smiling face, his long whiskers, his generous girth and tall boots — all that was missing was the red suit.) “I notice that you have no refreshment,” said the Captain. “I should have thought of that before — send a couple of the boys aft with buckets, and I'll see to it that you do.”

The boys soon returned with buckets of rum punch, and they also brought a box of cigars. Now can you beat this Christmas in the middle of the South Atlantic — a fine, lit-up Christmas tree, a mug of the skipper’s famous rum punch and the smoke of a fine Havana! Too bad the man on the wheel could not join us, but he would be relieved as soon as his wheel turn was up. And there was also the man on the lookout, but he sneaked down from the fo'c'slehead now and then to fill his mug and take another drag at the Old Man's Christmas cigar. It was a “Merry Christmas and Good Will to All Men.”

A day or so after Christmas, one of the men on the starboard watch was lying in his bunk on his watch below. The more he looked at the tree and those cookies, the more he wanted to have one. Being in the starboard watch, he didn't know that we had cut them out of laundry soap and sprinkled them with rocksalt “sugar.” “They won’t miss one,” he thought. He looked about; his shipmates seemed to be sound asleep. He untied a “cookie” and stuffed it into his mouth — then what a reaction! He choked and sputtered and spat and spat and jumped out of his bunk and rushed for the fresh-

water bucket and cursed and swore, and what he had to say about the port watch was no one else’s business, and the names he called them are not printed in any dictionary. A good laugh was had by all at this outcome of our Christmas party! And the rest of the cookies hung on the tree until well into the New Year.

This had been a perfect Christmas — A Christmas at Sea.

*****

Sea Letter, December 1965

Christmas in the South Seas

Aboard the S.N. Castle at Port Taiohae, 1910

by Captain Fred Klebingat

"To the owner of the ship, Duval Moore!"

The drawing above by Lyle Galloway illustrates Captain Fred Klebingat's account of a Christmas celebrated "at anchor in a calm bay under a tropic moon." With this story and the following presentation of gifts to the Museum in 1965, we send greetings of the season to our members, and hopes that wherever they spend this holiday, their celebration will be as splendid.

"Damn it, it is hot," said Singleman, the mate of the American barkentine S.N. Castle. "As hot as hell," he continued. as he pulled a red bandana out of his hip pocket and wiped his face and neck, which were dripping with sweat. "Hell could not be more hot than this, if there is such a place," he cried. "Right now I wish I was in Unimak Pass, beating against a northerly wind, straight out of the icy Bering Sea. If this keeps on, I roast to death."

The barkentine S.N. CASTLE had arrived at this place from San Francisco but a few days before Christmas, 1910. That is, at Port Taiohae, on the island of Nukahiva in the Marquesas, a French possession in the South Seas. We had landed most of our part cargo of lumber and general merchandise that was consigned to the big German Trading Company. Societé Commerciale de l'Oceans, generally known as S.C.O. 

Port Taiohac has the best and most accessible harbor in the Marquesas. It was in those days far off the beaten track. Jack London had been there in the Snark a few years before, but it would be years before Harry Pidgeon in his Islander and the other adventurers in small craft who followed his trail discovered it.

Caption: The American barkentine S.N. Castle at Port Taiohae. Island of Nukahiva, in the Marquesas. This photograph was taken by Captain Klebingat on the 1910 voyage of which he here speaks. The houses in the background belong to S.C.O., the trading company to which the cargo was consigned.

It was the headquarters of S.C.O., although the seat of French government had been shifted to a place called Atuono, on Hivaoa, the largest island in the group.

It was early in the afternoon of December 24th. The sun, nearly overhead, was beating down on the calm waters of this haven that is shaped like a gigantic caldron. It is more than a mile in diameter; mountains surround it, letting no cooling breezes penetrate. The palm fronds hung listlessly from the trees. Great heat waves rose and shimmered from the glassy surface of the bay. Only to the south and right ahead of the ship was the mountain rim broken, forming the entrance to the harbor with a view of the sea. And if one cared to look that way, one could see gamboling whitecaps in pursuit of one another, urged and hastened on by the strong. cool, refreshing trade wind. On that side where the sun sets, the West Sentinel would be visible, a high rocky islet that terminates this portal. On the very rim of the southern horizon, and right in the middle of the opening, one could view the pinnacled and spired mountains of the island called Uapou.

The natives who toiled in the heat of this inferno did not seem to mind it; they seemed to have become immune to it. There was the gang that carried freight from the flat-bottomed punt that was beached outside the store. Then there were those Marquesans in the lighter alongside who had to stow the freight with their bare backs exposed to the sun. It was my job to drive the donkey engine, the winch that hoisted the cargo out of the ship's hold. I certainly felt the heat as I stood near the donkey boiler. But of all of those about, Singleman, the mate, felt the broiling sun most. You see, for years he had been mate of ships of the Alaska Packer fleet, which left San Francisco every spring. loaded with supplies and manned by fishermen, bound for the salmon canneries in Bristol Bay in the Bering Sea. In the fall of the year, these ships would return to San Francisco deeply loaded with canned salmon. Singleman may have become short of funds; after his payoff from the Packer ship he had paid his debts, and then had had a fling on the Barbary Coast. Therefore he was broke, and he deigned to ship as mate in the S.N. Castle, which to him was an undermanned ship. But he was not alone. Working in the cool hold of the ship, and in comparative comfort, were other Alaska fishermen. There was John Adolf, the second mate. John Wind was a Hollander who sailed before the mast. With him was a Belgian, Van der Made was his name, who was quite a linguist. Like that famous writer of sea stories, Joseph Conrad, he had also sailed on Congo River steamers. But now he was a fisherman and a sailor before the mast.

All these men were used to the crowded decks of Alaska Packer ships, where there were a multitude of hands to do the work. They really had not come to this spot to toil. They were going to spend the winter at ease and in comfort and be paid for it. A South Sea tour was just to their liking. and they hoped to return to San Francisco in the spring, when the Packer ships would be fitting out for the coming season. They were looking forward to sailing in sunny and smooth seas, under blue skies and maybe starlit nights, and then to mooring the ship at Tahiti, then a Sailors' Eldorado, with cheap and abundant booze, and amorous adorable brown beauties. They were living in anticipation of moonlight nights on a white coral strand, beneath whispering palms. Reposing in the sand in the cool night air, they would watch these dusky island maidens dancing the hula. No, working cargo in the heat of Port Taiohae was not exactly what they had looked forward to, but in justice to them, they were good shipmates and did their work, nevertheless.

There was whistle from Singleman, the mate, with a motion of his arm that signaled "Heave up." He now walked from the hatch to the rail, at the same time hauling in the slack of the burton with both hands. I hoisted the load from the ship's hold up to the cargo span over the hatch at a lively clip. He set the rope tight and took turns with it at the dolly made for this purpose, which was fastened to the rail. Two whistles from the mate told me to lower away, so I eased the load into the burton, which served to lower the freight into the lighter alongside the ship. A motion of Singleman's arm indicated that I was to

stop lowering-the natives in the lighter were not ready to receive the load. It was now near the ship's rail, and we could see that it contained two wooden barrels. The head of each of them was covered by a label lithographed in many hues. It said: "Pabst Blue Ribbon Beer," and below was printed the information that this beer was a product of the Pabst Brewing Company, Milwaukee, Wisconsin, A stencil on the staves read "One gross pint bottles,"

The mate walked over and patted one of the barrels. "I'd give my payday for this right now," said he. "It's my favorite. A couple of bottles of this right now would cool me off in this godforsaken heat." He turned, and spoke as if talking to himself, but loud enough so I could hear: "Let's hope that those birds down below have enough sense to hold onto a barrel of this!"

Five o'clock came at last, the end of a day that had been toil and sweat. We washed up. Those who could

swim dove over the side, ignoring the frantic shouts of our skipper and of Kriech, head man of S.C.O., to get out of the water in a hurry or the sharks would have us. We dressed; none of us looked forward to supper. You see, the cook was the worst grubspoiler God ever made. Downright starvation only would compel one to sample any of his concoctions. Some of us grabbed a few of the bananas which hung in bunches outside the fo'c'sle door, climbed the fo'c'sle head, and sat down to smoke and curse the cook, or just to yarn.

The sun was rapidly sinking over the West Sentinel. It turned dark quickly, as it does in the tropics. A moon past full now rose over the hills and mountains to port. A faint zephyr, a breath of life, came off the land, It brought a scent of frangipani and other flowers, of leaves and grass, and the smell of damp earth. The stars twinkled in a sky devoid of clouds. The moon rose higher and threw an eerie light on mountain and crags. It illuminated the gable end of the store, as if it were freshly whitewashed. The wooden Tiki and the timber shed which it was guarding against thieves stood out in bold relief. The beach was as bright as day. The silvered edges of the palm fronds rustled in the faint breeze. Copra Shed, the abandoned Officers' Club, and the government buildings on the hill off the port quarter stood

out ghostly white. Moonlight dissipated the red glow of the harbor light, fixed on a pole atop the now-abandoned fort. The road on the beach, the only good one on the island, was all deserted. The few inhabitants of the village were all at the church for Christmas Eve Mass. Everything was quiet and serene. The stillness was only broken now and then by the gentle swish of the sternline fast to a palm on the beach. Tightened by the undertow, it dropped slowly into the sea as the strain eased. The faint roll and surge of the light surf on the coral strand astern was as rhythmic as if some giant were breathing. From the hills one could hear at times the faint bleat of a wild goat. It was as calm and tranquil as could be.

No one had spoken a word for some time, those of us sitting on the fo'c'sle head. We were all silent until John Wind said: "The skipper is ashore celebrating Christmas with the trader; he forgets about his crew." He straightened up from the cathead where he had been sitting and spoke: "The Old Man has forgotten, but I have not, that this is Christmas Eve. I have a surprise for you." He cast his eye aft to where the cook had been sitting and said: "I see that the grubspoiler has gone below - I don't want him in on this." Then, turning to me, he whispered: "Give me your flashlight. Fred." He was gone about ten minutes. When he reappeared, he was lugging a bucket loaded with beer bottles in both hands. It was the Pabst Blue Ribbon that Singleman had yearned for! "Let's fetch the mate and the second mate," someone said. "They are really good guys." 

"And Pabst Blue Ribbon is the mate's favorite brand of brew," said I, We fetched the mates and passed the bottles. There was no need for openers; everyone had a lumber hook handy, and some of us could remove the caps with our teeth. And so cool it was, coming right out of the wooden hold to the S.N. Castle, for no heat could penetrate that stout hull of hers, built as it was of Douglas Fir. So it had preserved for us in those bottles in our hands the chill of an autumn day on San Francisco Bay. Now, wasn't this a splendid way to celebrate Christmas? At anchor in a calm bay under a tropic moon, drinking this cold brew.

Singleman the mate raised the bottle to his lips, took a long swig, wiped his mouth with the back of his wrist, and held the bottle up in the moonlight in evident appreciation. He rose, raised the flask and said: "A Merry Christmas to the man who does not know that he is paying for this to the owner of the ship, Duval Moore." We all raised our bottles in unity with the Holiday greeting for the donor. Everybody seemed to be so sure that the cost of this celebration was already taken care of. But I, who knew the Old Man, the captain, better than any of my shipmates, did not feel so sanguine about the outcome of this celebration. Sooner or later we would hear more about this, I was sure. But the owner of the ship may not mind, I thought, when he learns that the barrel of Pabst Blue Ribbon had been purloined for such a purpose, to celebrate Christmas and to drink his health.

We had been silent for a while. At last I heard a chuckle from the mate. Then, taking a swig out of the bottle in his hand, he said: "Did you guys ever read a book called Typee, written by a fellow called Herman Melville?"

He looked about with a questioning glance and continued. "This bird Melville came here in 1842 in a whaler he calls Dolly. She must have dropped the hook about where we are now." He took another drink, and said; "When this scow dropped anchor, there were hundreds of young girls swimming around, a kind of female reception committee, so Melville says, They captured the ship and the crew, so the book says." In a reflective mood, Singleman continued: "What a Christmas this would be, if we were captured by such a band of mermaids - but I am sure we are too late for that." He looked at me, nudged me with his elbow and said; "You might know about this, Fred, you have been in this burg before and ought to know the ropes." Single girls were few and far between, and one had to be pretty well known to make the grade, so I told the gang: "We are about seventy years too late. It is a pitiful tale - those pretty maids who received Melville, as the mate told us, and the thousands of natives that were living on this island and in this valley, all are gone, killed by the white man's diseases. But let the mate tell us more about this fellow Melville."

"Give me another bottle of beer," said the mate, as he flung the empty bottle overboard and took another drink. 

"This here Dolly must have been a tough wagon, I am sure, so Melville and his chum Toby made up their minds to beat it," so Singleman said. "Both of them must have taken that trail that you see on the mountain off the port quarter," he continued, pointing in that direction with the bottle in his hand. "They landed in the next valley, called Typee, and Melville fell in love with a girl he calls Fayaway," the mate told us. We had all come to the conclusion that we were many years too late; we should have been here in Melville's time.

We sat and yarned and lolled about, and John Wind made many trips into the ship's hold, her wooden cellar that was keeping the beer cold. We talked about Christmases past, and where we had spent them. Meyer in his jargon, which was part German and part English, spoke of a Christmas he had spent in Hamburg's St. Pauli. My friend Charley had celebrated it in a ship that was collecting a cargo of copra in the Fijis. Billy Hauk, who had been mate in the South Sea schooner Gauloise, passed Christmas in that ship at Fakarawa in the Tuamotus, Van der Made, the ex-Congo Riverboat skipper, spent several Christmases while under way on the Congo, that great African stream. John Wind spoke of a Christmas spent at the Cannery at Naknek at Bristol Bay, Alaska, as a winter man, a "Sourdough." And John Adolf, the second mate, had at one time spent this holiday at the Yoshiwara at Yokohama with a Japanese lady as company. I related a story of a Christmas spent south of the Cape of Good Hope, "Running the Easting Down." And the mate spoke of a rip-roaring Christmas party on San Francisco's Barbary Coast.

Some of us started to hum Christmas carols, and it was after midnight and now Christmas morning when the mate proposed that we all sing Silent Night. "Now all together," said he. "Sing!"

Si-i-lent Night, Ho-o-ly Night

All is calm, all is bright.

Round yon Vir-r-gin, Mother and Child

Ho-o-l-y in-n-fant, so tender and mild.

Sle-e-ep in Heav-ven-ly pea-a-ce

Sle-e-ep in Heav-ven-ly peace.

It was a mighty chorus that arose (some of my shipmates had very fine voices; Meyer sang in German, John Wind with his bass-a real chain-locker voice-boomed in Dutch, Van der Made chanted in French, and the rest of us caroled the English version of this old Christmas song.) There could not have been a finer and more fitting place to sing this hymn than the great arena of a harbor. Our voices echoed from mountain and crag, and in my mind I visioned my shipmates and I to be great singers on a mighty stage.

All the while the great foremast was looking down upon us. a most fitting Christmas tree. Many Christmases ago it had been a sapling Douglas Fir that had seeded itself on the shores of Puget Sound, an immense tree it was before being hewn into this mast. The moonlight silvered the mast and yards, and the furled cotton sails looked like snow. And it mirrored itself in the silvery patterns in the ever-restless, never-quiet waters of the Bay. Like the Star of Bethlehem, Jupiter was on high and right ahead. Sirius sparkled right above us, and amidships of the entrance to the harbor, and above Uapou, the Island of the Night, glistened Canopus, another great star of the South. The Southern Cross, now rising, was visible over the mountains east of the portal of the Bay.

Never at any time had this lonely harbor seen such a grand Christmas celebration, never had anyone here heard such a grand choir singing Silent Night. Many men of note had visited this port before the arrival of Melville-Commodore Porter in the U.S.S. Essex, and the Reverend Stewart, Chaplain in the U.S.S. Vincennes, but these men had left the islands before Christmas, and at any rate, they had never heard of Silent Night. Not even in the days of the whaling ships that had come here to "refresh" their crews and were greeted by hordes of swimming brown beauties had this bay resounded with this glorious Yule-tide song.

John Wind had made his last trip to the ship's hold. We had sung the last verse, and the echo of our voices died away. Wishing each other "A Merry Christmas," we went to sleep under the bright Marquesan sky.

We finished landing our cargo a day after the holiday: a load of goods contained a barrel labeled "Pabst Blue Ribbon Beer"-empty. We loaded about twenty horses and many pigs that the Old Man had bought for his own account, and we raised the hook and set sail for Tahiti. It was dawn, just a few days after Christmas when we sighted Takaroa, a northern outpost of that chain of atolls called the Tuamotu or Dangerous Archipelago. We had made a perfect landfall, and I thought that the Christmas celebration and the empty beer barrel had passed unnoticed, or were forgotten.

As was customary with the Captain, he hugged the reef in lee of the island rather closely. It was a glorious morning, one on which it is enjoyable just to be alive. The watch on deck had their coffee and I had mine, and after a smoke, it was my turn at the wheel. I checked the course of the ship once in a while by the compass fixed in a little cubicle built into the after part of the house on the poop, right in front of the man on the wheel. Then I enjoyed the sight. The sky was blue, with a few cumulus clouds hurrying on overhead and veering off to lee. Heeling to a fresh trade and with the wind abeam, the ship slid along at a great clip. Here about a hundred yards or so from the sheltering coral ramparts it was as smooth as a lake. The sails were as white as snow in the strong morning light, as only sails made of cotton can be. Beneath the keel, unfathomed depths that showed up a deep blue; astern, a straight wake as wide as a city street. The dark shadows of the great spanker and ringtail topsail on her starboard side seemed to hasten along. as if they were afraid to lose contact with the speeding ship. It was quiet but for the hum of the wind in the sails and rigging. the gurgle of the water along the ship's side and the occasional "Aerrk, Aerrk" of a pair of red-tailed tropic birds, which showed their snowy plumage and iridescent wings as they nervously fluttered high over the mastheads.

The captain altered the course to clear a point of the reef that appeared ahead of us. It was marked by the white line of breakers and the light green of the shoals. Motu after motu was passed, those little islands that are strung like jade on a necklace around the rim of the shallow reef that surrounds the lagoon. Covered with dense groves of palm and dense undergrowth are they, and framed by dazzling white sandy beaches. They had recovered remarkably well from the devastating hurricane that had struck just a scant five years ago. We passed the narrow shallow channels that separate the islets and saw the sheltered waters inside, and far away the tops of the palms of those motus on the lagoon's weather side.

We now passed the wreck of the four-masted full-rigged ship County of Roxburgh. But for a couple of broken royal yards, she looked as well as she had when she left her builder's yard, And upright she stood, just as if standing in a drydock. Caught in the same cyclone that had ravaged the island, she was cast upon the reef to stand up high and dry. 

Captions: "It was my job to drive the donkey engine, the winch that hoisted the cargo out of the ship's hold ... "

Captain Von Dahlern: "When he was dressed up in his shore-going togs, and with his wide-brimmed hat and neatly trimmed pointed whiskers, he looked like a cross between a Kentucky Colonel and a retired British Admiral."

If those that had abandoned her and lost their lives had but a little more faith in that strong iron hull, they would be among the living. For there their ship stands in fine weather or foul, and many hurricanes will vent their fury on her after the last survivor has passed on. All seemed lonesome and deserted but for this iron ship, which proved that men had been here before. But it was not presently deserted; we sailed on a mile or so and saw blue wood smoke curling up out of a grove near the islands' pass, giving proof that there were villagers about and at their morning repast. Still speeding on, we opened the entrance to the lagoon, with its water green of many shades and a range of blues. To the southeast, the tops of the palms of the sister island called Takapoto peeped over the horizon's rim.

But if in this beautiful setting I thought that the Old Man was taking the ship so close in just to see the sights, I soon found out that I was mistaken. Conning the ship, he would also watch the troll line towing astern. There is mostly good fishing for tuna that close in. But on this day, the Captain was out of luck. He was getting more annoyed every minute, that I could see, and I was sure that someone would be getting it in the neck. And as I was closest to him, that victim would very likely be me.

Captain Von Dahlern was a short, stout man-"One Dollar," he was called by those who did not know his name. "And he was just as broad as he was long," one of the mates on a voyage past had described him to me. He was about 60 years old at the time I am talking about. When he was dressed up in his shore-going togs, and with his wide-brimmed hat und neatly trimmed pointed whiskers, he looked like a cross between a Kentucky Colonel and a retired British Admiral. His walk was a kind of rolling gait; he lifted the whole side of his body whenever he moved his leg. He had walked or waddled fore and back now for some time, between the house and me, and he seemed to get more ill-humored every moment. All of a sudden, daggers in his eyes, he turned to me and said: "Yes. Singing Silent Night on Christmas morning: I should have known something was up."

The Captain pointed his finger at me, to more impress me: "And Kriech, the Big Shot of the S.C.O. says to me, 'that is where that barrel of beer is that we are missing.' And me telling him that it was only fourteen barrels that he was entitled to, and not fifteen, as he claimed. 'I can read my own figures,' I told him.

"And then next day you bums send that empty barrel ashore, and make me a damn liar, and Kriech gives me the horse laugh," cried the Old Man. "Mind your steering there, the next thing you will be wrecking my ship. Wait till I get you birds in front of the Shipping Commissioner."

I took it all in and feigned surprise and innocence as I said: "I really do not know what you are talking about, Captain. Can't a fellow sing Silent Night anymore without being accused of stealing beer?" I turned the wheel a spoke or two, to bring the ship more on her course, and went on. "And what will the Shipping Commissioner say? Have you any proof, Captain? Where are your witnesses?"

"That will do you now," said the Captain. "I am not here to be told what to do by a damn sea lawyer: you just mind your steering, and no backtalk." He shook a pudgy finger at me. "You just watch, I'll get even with you."

It was best, I thought, to let the Old Man simmer down a while. Then with a peevish voice 1 spoke up again. "Just the same, Captain, I do not know who swiped that beer. For all I know, the longshoremen in Frisco may have taken it."

"Oh, no, you do not know a damn thing," the Captain responded.

"You must think that I am green. I just can imagine you birds sitting around while the longshoremen drank that beer! Why didn't you slap their wrists?" he asked sarcastically. "And keep this damn ship on her course while I am talking to you, and button up your lip."

Again I knew I'd better be quiet for a while, all intent on the course I was steering. Then with a grieved voice, and as if talking to myself, I said, "Duval Moore might say, Those men of yours, Captain, stole a barrel of beer at Christmas-you don't say? You mean that they should pay for this? Now, Captain, we are no Scrooges, you and I. Let's hope they had a fine time with it. We paid for that beer long ago." That's what Duval Moore, the owner, might say."

The Old Man had been standing on the port side bracing himself on the afterhouse. He turned abruptly, cupping his hand to his right ear with a face incredulous, as if he could not believe his senses. "Wh-a-a-a-t do I hear? You insinuate that the owner encourages broaching cargo? What a crust - why, of all the gall ... !"

After ranting like this, it seemed to dawn on him that he did not have much of a foot to stand on. His case was lost, and he started to see the humorous side of it. He tamped his pipe, which had gone out, struck a match, and cupping the flame with his hand, took a couple of draws. Then he turned to me and said, "You win, Fred. Sending that empty barrel ashore, that made me mad, and then Kriech giving me the horse laugh. It is a little late, but Duval Moore and I now make those that drank the beer a present of it, and retroactively wish them a Merry Christmas."

I gave the wheel a couple of spokes.

"But, of course, I am sorry that yow were not in on this, Fred. It must have been a fine celebration you missed. But let's change the subject," he said with a grin. "It is a beautiful morning."

*****

 The American West, Spring 1966

Out of Work

by Captain Fred K. Klebingat

A Sketch from the Memory

In 1908 Fred Klebingat was an eighteen-year-old seaman fresh off a Cape Horn ship and out of work on the San Francisco waterfront. In tow of his friend Tommy, an old hand wise to the ways of the West Coast seaman's world, Fred wandered the waterfront, feeding up at free-lunch saloons like The Castle, The Favorite, and Sanguinetti's, picking up a dime or a dollar now and then from open-handed sailors who had just been paid off arriving ships. When they had no choice, Fred and Tommy wrapped themselves in newspapers and slept in empty coal bunkers. Every day they went on the lookout for a job, but jobs for sailors were scarce that winter.

"Let's make a trip up Oakland Creek," Tommy said to me. "There is always a chance we see a skipper that gives us a hint when his scow is going to start up."

There was a ferry which went up Oakland Creek, the "Team Ferry" some called it, and it was about the cheapest way to cross the bay. The fare was only one nickle. But here was the rub: to go across the bay and return would be ten cents. So you watched your chance when a couple of drays were boarding, when you knew that the mate would be at one side of the drays. This gave you the chance to sneak by on the other side.

In thirty-five or forty minutes the ferry made fast to a slip at the foot of Broadway in Oakland, and we headed east, up the creek, past the bridges to Alameda. We borrowed a skiff at an ark where Tommy knew the owner and pulled out to look over the shipping. 

Lumber was what kept shipping going. With no freights offering, the steam schooners and sailing schooners would lay up in Oakland Creek. They would run up on the mud at the top of high water. No chance there was of getting adrift, but to make doubly sure the crew would run a wire to a "deadman" buried in the mudbank before they left.

There was no place more secure than this. No gale, blow it ever so hard, could do much harm. The ships would idle away until the depression or bad season that had halted construction ended, and the lumber barons recalled their idle mill crews and sent the loggers back to their woods. And so the sailors were out of work, and maybe only the skippers, in many cases without pay, would stay with the ships to keep the bay pirates from looting them.

It was a grand sight, that forest of all kinds of rigs - ships, barks, and barkentines, brigs and schooners and steam schooners - a grand spectacle to one poetically inclined, but a depressing sight to a sailor without a job. We could see, Tommy and I, as we pulled past these tiers of ships in our borrowed skiff, that many of them would never see the open ocean again. Many of them were worn out, old and rotten, and too far gone or too costly to repair.

All the while the busy teredo was eating away at planking and frames. An abandoned hull would sink lower and lower as the wood was consumed by the insatiable ship-worm. At low water you might see the outline of a ship that once was - here and there an iron bolt half rusted away, remnants of planking, frames, and ceiling still held together by the black locust treenails which defied teredos and dryrot.

Dependence on lumber cargoes had the most to do with the slumps that idled ships and seamen, but there was another factor that contributed to idle seafarers in wintertime - the Alaska fishermen. Tommy told me this and more as we pulled the skiff up and down the creek. He pointed to rows of big square-rigged ships now laid up, the greater part of them the "Star" fleet of the Alaska Packers Association. All

of these would start up in a month or so, to be drydocked, then towed over to the city to load supplies and material for the salmon canneries in Alaska. When the summer salmon run was over, they would load up the pack, return, and lay up for another winter - putting hundreds and hundreds of men on the beach to compete for berths at a time of the year when the lumber business might be slack.

"The way it works," Tommy said, "the fishermen belong to the Alaska Fishermen's Union and the Sailors Union of the Pacific both, and when they come back in the fall, they chisel us out of our jobs."

"How the hell can they do that?" I asked, with the indignation of youth. "How can that happen if one does his work, is good at humping lumber, and minds his business?"

"That is all you know about it," said Tommy. "I can see that you need some education badly. A kit of salmon bellies and a box of cigars for the skipper and mate both will turn the trick. Then the mate will tell you to go to the Old Man and get your dough and get out; they don't give a damn how good you are at your work. Of course you can complain to the union - a lot of good it will do you!

"Then in the spring, and if you behave yourself, and if you are around, you may have your old job back again, so that the fishermen can go back to Alaska again, and once more pack a few kegs of salmon bellies, and again buy a few boxes of cigars for your mate and skipper. 

"It's a hell of a system," Tommy concluded.

Ships laid up - The SF Maritime Museum

Ships laid up - The SF Maritime Museum

*****

SF Maritime Museum, July 1966

"A little chickenfarm in Petaluma..."

"Conversations on subject of sea-faring men retiring," 

by Karl Kortum, Director, San Francisco Maritime Museum

"It is said that cooks do not greatly care for food,

that jam-makers never touch jam, and that the

seaman's dream is ever of a farm."

John Masefield

"In The Mill," 1941

Conversation on subject of seafaring men retiring . . Captain Klebingat and Icy Helgason. Recorded by K.K. going up Mason Street, July 27, 1966

Helgason: "That was a byword by a sailor - to go to Petaluma and raise chickens."

Klebingat: "You didn't have to work at all - just sell the eggs."

Helgason: "To a seafaring man, thinking about retiring, it seemed an easy way to make a living. But it took a scientist."

Klebingat: "I saw so many skippers come back from Petaluma and go to sea to get something to eat..."

Helgason: "I talked to one - he told me if he knew as much when he went into the poultry business as when he got out, he would have been alright."

Klebingat: "You remember "The Terrible Swede" in the Packers? He eventually got his chicken ranch. Up at Petaluma. And the next time I saw him he had no use for chickens: 'Those sons-of-bitches! They climbed on top of each other and smothered to death. 1800 of them! Next night a thousand with their feet up. I had to buy oil to burn the god damn things... !"

"Capt. Benneche of the James Johnson - he acknowledged that he had to go back to sea to get money to buy chicken feed.

* * *

"Do you know how 'The Terrible Swede' got his name? He was mate in the Alaska Packers and those Italian fishermen shit in the hay they were carrying north as deckload for the livestock. He caught them and rubbed their nose in it. That's where he got the name, The Terrible Swede. When I knew him he had charge of the Georgina in the Creek. Another example of a beautiful West Coast barkentine."

"Icy" Helgason, July, 1962, Franciscan Restaurant.

"Every sailor those days... that's all you heard: chicken ranch! Just go around and pick up the eggs. The chicken ranch was a sailor's dream.

Who wouldn't sell the farm and go to sea...

Captain Fred Klebingat, 1978

Retiring on a farm -- well, many Pacific Coast sailing shippers did just that. But I heard of only one who made it go! His name was Henningsen and he was skipper of the Mary Winkelman for quite a while.

A lot of seamen those days thought that life on a chicken ranch was the life of Riley. But most of them found out that they were dealing with the most ornery animal in the barnyard. There was more to it than picking up the eggs in the morning. Most of them went broke.

I spoke to Captain Dahlquist, one of the Charles Nelson Co. skippers, when he quit the sea for a chicken farm. "If you see me at sea again," he said, "you can be sure the chickens need some chicken feed." I noted that he went back to sea.

Then there was Sutherland -- "Silk Hat Harry" mate in the Aryan when she last left San Francisco, and in the Falls of Clyde. He quit the Clyde at Honolulu and went into chicken ranching in the Islands. "One is bound to make money," he said, "with eggs selling at a dollar a dozen. " He went broke.

And Harry was a man who was careful with his money.

Harry later set up as a bootlegger in Oakland; that may have been more successful. Jack Dickerhoff and I were good customers.

* * *

That puts me in mind - I was mate in the S.N. Castle and it was a mean night near Takaroa in the Tuamotus. Captain Von Dahlern said as he left the deck:

"Try to make 10 miles west."

I tried, but it was raining torrents, and there were squalls and thunder and wind from all quarters. Clewing up the fore topgallant, I muttered:

"Who wouldn't sell his farm and go to sea."

One of the sailors, a Norwegian, replied, "Sell the farm? Sure, any day. Farm life is worse than this."

"You must have tried it," was all I could say.

So much for retiring to a farm.

*****

SF maritime Museum, 1968

Christmas at Annabelle's

by Captain Fred Klebingat

Caption: Annabelle, as she may have looked. 

Illustration for Horger's Boseer, January 1912, by James Montgomery Flagg.

It was near Christmas in those days when "I had quit going to sea, and had gone steamboating." The year was 1912.

Travel on a steamer was not really seafaring, at least not in the opinion of those who manned the windships. But that was that: by shipping on a steamboat, I probably fell in the esteem of my former shipmates. I had a knack with tools, although I had never learned the trade, so when the job was open, I shipped as carpenter on the tanker Wm. F. Herrin.

The Herrin, together with her sister, J. A. Chanslor (on which I also sailed as carpenter), were the most beautiful tankers ever launched. With their sleek brown-painted hulls, their white deckhouses and white stacks with big black metal "A's" mounted on their sides, their varnished teak rails and bridges, and their shining brass glittering everywhere, you could spot them anywhere. The holy-stoned decks on poop and midship bouse would have been envied by a hard-case Down-East bucko mate, if any should have still been about. Their sidelights were still housed in little lighthouses topped with gleaming copper domes. And, as was more customary on sailing ships than on steamers, the Herrin and the Chanslor had these lighthouses situated on either side of the fo'c'slehead. There were no other tankers as flash as these sailing the seas; they were the pride of their builder, the Newport News Shipbuilding & Drydock Company, and of their owner, the Associated Oil Company of San Francisco. They were the boast of their captains and the delight of the general manager, Mr. Walter E. Buck. 

This was the sort of packet I had shipped in, but flash as she was, I wasn't alarmed. For I wasn't the one who would have to shine the brass and scour the teak. Carpenter is still the coziest job on any man's ship, as those who know will tell you. It would have been foolish to turn down a job like this when it was offered, no matter what my former shipmates might think about it.

The Wm. F. Herrin with a cargo of California oil was bound to Linnton, a few miles below Portland, on the Willamette River, where Associated Oil Company had a wharf and tank farm. We had crossed the Columbia River Bar at high water, when it was still dark, as the skipper had reason to believe that it was fairly smooth. We had stopped momentarily at Astoria to take on the river pilot; Parker was his name. It never tired me to take in the sights as we steamed up this great river of the West, the Columbia. The morning mists still hung low, anchored to the thick timber that bordered the high banks on either side. The tall forest giants with their crowns of fog mirrored themselves in the smooth dark icy flood that rolled relentlessly on to the Pacific. For all I knew it may have looked the same to me then as it had that day when the first explorer of the region sailed up this great river.

And so quiet it was. The silence was broken only by the sound of the rush of the bow wave, which rhythmically rose and decreased in volume. It was quiet on board, too, but for the throb of the triple-expansion engine, and the slight vibration of parts of the tanker's hull. Far astern one could hear the swish of the bow wave as it spent itself on either bank.

At times we would pass a clearing on a strip of low land - a cluster of white- washed buildings, the smell of woodsmoke, log booms, a black stack, a giant slab fire: a sawmill and its settlement. The blue woodsmoke hovers over it like a gigantic mushroom. The sound of screaming saw and falling timber reaches us, muffled, though, as if reluctant to break the stillness that surrounds us. A small sternwheeler, her foredeck stacked high with firewood, makes snail-like progress to the mill with the log booms she has in tow. A sailing schooner and a steam schooner are tied up at the mill wharf loading lumber.

Here and there we pass a floating shack tied up at the river's bank - a common type of habitation in those days. (It had its advantages: there was no need for land, or to clear land of stumps; logs for floats were easy to get if one was not too particular about who owned them. And then, too, the river supplied the water for housekeeping and sanitation, and there was mobility if one tired of the location.) 

Now we are nearing a bend of the river; I hear the melodious tone of a steamer's horn. It echoes from woods and bluffs. Our pilot answers with a long, deep-toned blast of our steam whistle. Although common in those days, here is a sight one never will see again. Speeding towards us is a large white sternwheeler with a sailing vessel secured to either side. Rapidly she nears. Tied to her starboard bow is a large port-painted four-masted bark, in all likelihood loaded with wheat. To her port side she has fastened a white-painted four-masted schooner with a high deck-load of lumber. She is now abreast; her captain gives a wave of his hand to our pilot on the bridge. She passes; a long white plume of steam, her engine exhaust, issues from a pipe behind her tall black stack. I read the names of those ships that are being towed - or, rather, pushed. "Egon, Hamburg," is the legend painted on the stern of the bark, and I read "William Olsen, San Francisco," on the transom of the schooner. There is the swish of the sternwheel as a giant arm that moves forth and back out of the house (her engine room) turns a large crank. A sightly casing houses the stern paddlewheel and her name is lettered on it: "Harvest Queen, Portland." And a queen she surely is as she sweeps by with her two consorts; her wide white wake looks like the train of a royal highness. I envy him, the captain in the wheelhouse of this white beauty, high above those speeding hulls. What I would give to be in his place, in command of this monarch of the river, the Harvest Queen. (2)

Farther up the river, the valley widens out and is flanked by meadows. There are more habitations, and though it is December, there are cattle grazing on green meadows. It is near noon as we enter the Willamette, tributary of the Columbia. We near Linnton and its tanks and sawmill - just a wide place on the shore road.

My station is at the windlass as we near the wharf. I am ready to drop the hook, if this should be necessary. Santini, the mate, pauses near me on his way to the bow. "God only knows where we will be at Christmas, Chips," says he. "We will need some Christmas trees, so we may as well get them while we have a chance. The bo's'n will give you a couple of men to help you after you have connected the cargo hoses."

He added, almost as an afterthought: "Tommy Mullins (he was mate in the Rosecrans, another Associated tanker, which had had a run of bad luck of late) wrote me a note asking me to send him some trees. His ship will still be at the Union Iron Works at Christmas. So get plenty - a few more than you think you will need."

We cut the trees on the steep bank of the railroad track, just outside Anderson's Saloon, and in no time at all we had all we needed, and some to spare for Tommy Mullins. They stood that thick. With time to burn, we tarried at Anderson's for some refreshments and some premature Christmas spirit. We must have lingered longer than we realized because presently the company's team and wagon came clattering up to see us and our trees on board. Santini had sent them.

It was about 36 hours after we had crossed the Columbia Bar bound in that we were again at the Bar, awaiting a chance to cross over, bound out. A few loaded square riggers were anchored off Astoria waiting for a tow to sea. My station was at the emergency steering gear, abaft the engine-room skylight. The engine telegraph rings; I hear the engine slow down. Our skipper, Captain Macdonald, wants a little more time to observe conditions - to make sure it is possible to cross out over the Bar.

I look to seaward. Gigantic mountains of water are rolling towards us, a little to the north, but near ahead of us. I spot a tug atop a wave crest; her black hull stands out against the skyline. Surfboarding, she races down the slope of that water mountain pursuing her; for a moment she is lost to view. Speedy she is, but not fast enough; the following mound of water raises her swiftly to its very crest. But she is not alone; behind her and quite a ways astern, the white-painted masts and yards of a sailing vessel seem to climb out of this turmoil of moving water mountains and her hull heaves into view. She is a large port-painted French four masted bark, bound in behind the Port of Portland tug Onconta to load a cargo of wheat. They draw nearer now, and again the tug disappears behind the water mounds, and again and again the ship almost vanishes from view; the tops of her gallant masts and royal yards only are visible. The tug and its tow now draw abreast and pass quite close. Frantically the tug's towing engine winds in the steel towing hawser as the strain eases, and reluctantly it pays out, with a wheeze and clank of gears as the engine automatically reverses. The hawser tautens. With a rocking motion of his arm the tug captain signals Captain Macdonald that the bar is rough but passable.

There is no hesitation now. The engine telegraph rings "Full Ahead" and with a wheeze-wheeze-wheeze, the three pistons of that ponderous engine gather speed. The gears of the steering engine on the deck below me rattle and gnash in their frenzy to bring the ship on the proper course. At the slow bell, the fireman on watch had shut down at least one burner under each boiler. Now, to relight them, he rushes from furnace to furnace, a lighted torch in his hand. Each burner gives a woosh as it ignites and starts to roar. He adjusts each to burn with a white flame. He is fast; for all the engine's sudden demand, the steam gauges are still on the red.

The ship gathers speed. Her bow rises and falls with the approaching seas. Below me the engineer is standing by at the throttle, and I hear the swish and sigh of steam as the automatic governor closes the throttle when the stern lifts and the propeller frees itself of the sea. The bow slams into the big swells racing toward us. "Ring," goes the telegraph: "Stop." Too late! A gigantic mountain of water moves toward us. It breaks; the bow of the ballasted tanker crashes and buries itself deep into the sea. Water cascades off fo'c'slehead and foredeck, spray engulfs bridge and stack, The bow raises... drops into the next watery valley with a tremendous crash.

Caption: The entrance to the Columbia River, Peacock Spit lies to the north of the north jetty, which projects from Cape Disappointment.

The hull quivers and rattles and shakes. The stack near me clatters and strains at its stays. It shakes like a dog trying to free himself of his tether. It is only a minute - that is the way it seems - before the motion of the hull becomes less and less, and ceases. The telegraph rings: "Half Ahead." We are on the middle of the bar. To the south of us is the south jetty, and to the north of us a mass of breaking and smashing seas - Peacock Spit. Immense greybeards, like racing horses with white manes trailing from their breaking tops, rush to assault North Hend. A fearful sight to us, this graveyard of many a mariner. But those are the chances of seafaring, and I stay unconcerned.

In another half hour my ship was over the bar and safe and could shape her course southward to Monterey. Mr. Santini, the mate, was a young Italian with a disposition as sunny as the homeland of his ancestors. After standing the morning watch and having breakfast he used to come into the carpenter shop to yarn and smoke his pipe. Happy-go-lucky as he appeared to be, he had his thoughtful moments. He might bring up the hardships of seafaring and a tankerman's life in general. "We are just very small cogs in a gigantic machine," he said to me one day, settling himself on the carpenter's bench and getting out his tobacco.

"How do you make that out, Mr. Santini?"

"The oil company is the machine," he replied, "and as long as I do my work and stay sober, I may work for them until I die. If the company lasts that long.

Now this is supposed to be a good job - and it is - but do we live like other people?"

I let that go unanswered and busied myself with a piece of lumber which I had picked up when I heard him coming.

"Just imagine," Santini continued, "that for the next thirty years or so (that is, if I live that long) I will see nothing but those Great Northern fuel oil tanks near Everett, or the tank farm at Linnton. Siberia could not be more desolate than those places where we load - Gaviota, that Godforsaken place called Port Harford, that dump Port Costa." He smoked in silence for a while and then continued. "For months I sometimes don't go farther from the ship than those tanks where I take ullages before starting the pumps."

I was just a novice in the tanker game, but I knew that what the mate said was true. There was nothing to go ashore for in most of the places where we loaded or discharged. And there was so little time, for that matter. We loaded the ship in about four hours, and at most it took twelve hours to discharge. Even if you decided to go for a walk, you had to be at liberty, that is, off watch. Santini relit his pipe, took a couple of draws and continued.

"Come to think of it, I have not spoken to or even seen a woman for a month. We'd be better off in San Quentin! At least we would be on solid earth, and might be lucky enough to catch sight of the warden's wife and daughters." He fell silent.

"How about Monterey?" I asked. "That seems a little different to me."

"How about it?" the mate asked sarcastically. "We do not have time to make lady friends, and anyway, they shun the ship. If it was not for Annabelle and her ladies, it would be as sad a place as all those others."

I knew Annabelle. She was a stately woman in her late thirties. Lonely men like ourselves who desired ladies' company visited her and her lady friends in her little bungalow near town. Just where it stood I could not tell you today. It did not look any different from many others in the neighborhood or in town; it was just a large California bungalow, as this style of house was called in those days. Monterey was just a sleepy little town with apparently a broadminded city government. It had a garrison, but soldiers in uniform were seldom seen. The only strangers who came to town were the crews of the oil tankers. Everybody knew us, as we were not many; really we could not be called strangers after all.

A little gambling went on, openly. When I took a walk into town, I was sure to see Boyd, an oiler and the ship's card sharp, at a poker table. And I am sure that the city fathers thought that the orderly and well-conducted business Annabelle was running was a necessity and an asset, just like any other business, be it a clothing store, or a grocery, or a saloon.

The mate continued. "Now Annabelle, there is a lady who understands us. You can relax at her house for an hour, if you have that much time. Money or no money, you are always welcome there. She will listen to your troubles and share them, and cheer you up when you are in the dumps."

I agreed with the mate - all of us liked Annabelle and her companions. The mate rose to go. Before he passed through the door he turned and said, "Christmas is but a short time away. I wonder where we will be this Christmas?"

"I wonder too," was all I could say.

The barge Monterey, ex-full-rigged ship Cypromene, made regular trips between Monterey and San Francisco in tow of the company's tug Navigator. So on arrival we trans-shipped out Christmas trees for the Rosecrans to the north-bound barge and thus were sure that Tommy Mullins would get his decorations. One of our gang delivered a tree to Annabelle's bungalow. The ladies loved it.

We learned that the Rosecrans was still lying at the Union Iron Works up in San Francisco and it would be a little after Christmas before her repairs would he finished, and she would make her first trip. Quite a few of our crew had been transferred to the Rosecrans; some had made the shift the voyage before. It was a promotion for some, for others it was no improvement. Grunsell (that sounds like his name), our First Assistant Engineer, was going to be Chief, his first job as such since he had been Chief in the Mariposa many years before. Oil firing was in its infancy then, and he had run short of fuel once while the Mariposa was in the Tahiti run. They had to tow her home. It had been many years of lean pickings for him since - he was fired.

Our Second Engineer, MacPherson, was going First on the Rosecrans and of course that was a promotion, and better pay, too. That was important; MacPherson was about to be married. And there were others. 

Still on hoard the Herrin was my old friend Steve O'Hara, the engineer's storekeeper. He was a man in his forties, of average height and somewhat heavy. He walked with a limp, caused by a broken leg suffered in a shipwreck some years before. I never knew where he was born; it may have been Liverpool to judge from his way of speech. I used to spend quite a bit of time with Steve in his storeroom - just yarning, when there was little for the carpenter to do and one wanted to keep out of sight. We had become good friends and I didn't want to see him leave the Herrin.

"You should have your head examined," I said to Steve one day. "Why leave a good ship like this for that broken-down trap?"

"I know people will call me a fool," said he, "but I've promised Mac to go with him. That is that."

"The Rosecrans is a hoodoo, if you ask me," I continued. "First she goes on the beach at Gaviota and is salvaged, then she catches fire at the same place after they repair her. I wonder what comes next after she's fixed up this time?"

"I know all that," Steve replied. "But I must go - I wouldn't want to break my word to Mac."

It was no use to talk about it further.

We had arrived in Monterey on Christmas Eve, under a gloomy sky that foretold a southeaster, The sea was still calm, with a long glassy swell, and the Wm. F. Herrin had raced to reach her loading port. 

Top: Monterey Bay, California, showing Oil Pier.

The oil pier at Monterey. The oil barge is the Monterey, ex-British ship Cypromene. 

Post card courtesy  of Richard N. Shellens.

Bottom: This street corner in Monterey is a reminder of the Spanish character still evident in the little town.

The Rosecrans ashore at Gaviota, in the Santa Barbara channel. This stranding occurred in September 1912, three months before Steve and the other men from the Wm. F. Herrin joined her. This time the Rosecrans escaped doom; tugs got her off.

The engines of the empty tanker were opened out to the last notch; with her forefoot above water she snored to the south, masts and stack vibrating, everything not fastened down dancing about. We had to make the moorings and wharf before dark and the beginning of the storm.

On top of each of the three masts a Christmas tree was lashed, and a small tree decorated the flagstaff on fo'c'slehead and stern. Mindful of the mate's conversation, and somewhat bitterly. I had wondered at the rush to get in. There is no Christmas in port for a tankerman - we would be loaded by midnight and out to sea again. Those were the orders from the company.

The Associated Oil Company had built about six oil tanks below the Monterey Presidio, and a loading wharf jutted into the bay about where Cannery Row is found now. A railroad spur to Pacific Grove skirted the bay. A set of mooring buoys were placed abreast of the wharf. There were two buoys astern for the stern lines, and there was one buoy off the bow for the bow lines. These lines, together with an anchor ahead, kept the ship in place in an east-west direction. Then there was a buoy off the starboard quarter and one off the starboard bow. These were for the stern offshore breast line and the bow offshore breast line - hawsers to the buoys prevented the ship from getting too close to the wharf. Then there was a buoy near the beach off the port quarter and one inshore off the port bow; these lines, the stern inshore breast and the bow inshore breast, held the ship as close to the wharf as desired, which was never closer than 15 feet as there was always quite a surge, or undertow. The ship was secured to these buoys with manila hawsers 12 inches in circumference. Powerful capstans made handling of these heavy lines possible. To the east of this berth, about a quarter of a mile away, the Monterey fishing fleet, all small craft, was moored.

It was quite dark by the time we were fast to the moorings. The lights of the Presidio silhouetted the pines above it against the clouds; a glow in the low sky to the southeast reflected the lights of Monterey. The ship ranged to and fro restlessly. Off the head of the wharf - about 15 feet away - was a long gangway fastened to the stringer on the wharf and hanging in a bridle from one of our derricks to take care of the ship's motion.

It was my job to connect the two cargo hoses, which were suspended like a great "U" between the ship and the pipeline ashore. I made a motion with my hand to shore to open the valves when the connection was made. Steve O'Hara passed me, his bag on his shoulder. "I have to hurry to make the Del Monte Express," says he.

"Well, Merry Christmas .. ." I said.

"Same to you."

Everything looks to be all right," I said to Mr. Santini. "I think I'll sneak ashore for a while and take in the sights."

"Why not?" the mate answered. "But be back when the first whistle goes, in about three hours." This meant "the ship will finish loading in half an hour and will be ready to sail." Everyone in town knew this signal and would notify any crew members wherever we were - in the little movie theater in town, in the saloons, or at Annabelle's.

I wandered into town. There were lighted Christmas trees here and there. I dropped into Lewis's Saloon for a couple of beers and a yarn with the bartender. I had no intention of making a splash, and had left most of my money on board.

Nearly broke, I returned to the ship about two hours later.

And what a surprise!

The Herrin was now a hundred yards away from the wharf. I could only guess that the inshore breasts, which held the ship to the wharf, had parted in the increasing undertow. The cargo hoses had been let go in a hurry; this was only possible because they had patent couplings at the wharf end by which they would be disconnected with a quarter of a turn of a special wrench. The lashings that held the gangway to the wharf had been rudely cut with an ax, and the gangway now hung dangling from the side of the ship. The company's launch, used to run the lines to the buoys, swung at its moorings. The portholes of the messrooms on board were all a-light, and I heard faint songs and sounds of revelry. They were celebrating Christmas on board.

I wanted to join them, and looked for the company's skiff. But Old Man Johnson, in charge of the landing, must have foreseen this - the gate to the stairs that led to the foot of the wharf was securely padlocked, and the fence that topped it was doubly secured with barbed wire. His house at the foot of the wharf was dark. He and his family must have left to celebrate Christmas in the next county, so I supposed. So here I was broke, Christmas, no shelter. It started to rain.

"Hello there!" A voice from out of the dark called and alarmed me. "What are you trying to do? Swipe Old Man Johnson's skiff?"

It sounded like Steve O'Hara. "My God," I said. "You scared me. I thought you were on the train to San Francisco."

"So I thought, too," he said, "but I missed it. We're in the same boat. No money, no shelter, no one to help us - and Christmas Eve. But you know what we'll do, don't you?"

I looked at him.

"We'll go to Annabelle's."

Caption: "The ladies were most beautiful in their ballroom gowns..."

Wearily Steve and I trudged along the railroad track to town. By now the rain poured down in sheets. The windows were aglow with lighted trees in the main street of the town. We turned our collars up. Now a few blocks more and there are the lights we are looking for - our haven - Annabelle's. The door opens at our knock.

"Come in, and Merry Christmas!" our friend cried at the sight of us. "And oh my God - you are wet!" She turned and ordered: "One of you girls rustle up some dressing gowns so we can dry their clothes. And get a hot toddy for both of them so they don't catch cold after being out in all that rain." She turned to Steve, "It is wonderful to see you - I did not expect you ... you must have missed the train. I heard that you had left the ship."

Steve smiled broadly.

"And you," she said to me, "were expected." (I looked nonplussed.) "Old Man Johnson phoned me that the ship had broken her moorings," she continued, "and he said he was leaving to celebrate with his relatives. So don't be bashful. Come join the fun. And many thanks for the fine Christmas trees you sent us."

"Just imagine what we would have missed," I said to Steve, as both of us joined the company in our borrowed dressing gowns, "It was lucky for us that Old Man Johnson locked up his skiff."

The ladies were most beautiful in their ballroom gowns, and there was the lighted Christmas tree, a buffet supper and drinks. 

The French bark Colonel de Valebois Mareuil towing across the Columbia River Bar, October 1912. The photograph was taken from the tug; the photographer jumped into the galley and slammed the door a few moments before this sea struck.

The oil barge Monterey, built at Southampton in 1878 by Oswald & Mordaunt as the ship Cypromene. In 190 after shipwreck, she was refitted as the tank-barge Monterey by Captain William Matson, and in 1907 transferred to the Associated Oil Co. In the First World War, she was rerigged as a five-mast barkentine for deepwater trade again. In 1923 she collided in the fog off Cape Flattery with the passenger steamer that was carrying the mortally ill President Harding from Alaska to San Francisco. The steamer cut a six-inch slit the length of the starboard bulwarks, and tossed the Monterey's anchor onto the foredeck, dragging the chain out of the locker with the force of the collision. A voyage that was

being contemplated was abandoned, and after layup in Oakland Creek, the Monterey was scrapped in 1931.

A couple of Spanish musicians entertained us with songs for dances and Christmas carols, their baritone voices accompanied by their guitars. There were some guests - they looked reasonably select - and there was a present for everyone. There were other visitors during the evening who came in swallowtail coats and top hats to wish Annabelle and her ladies a Merry Christmas and to toast them in champagne.

Neither Steve nor I were much at dancing, and so we sat near the fireplace and watched the company. Both of us had had a busy day. It was now past midnight, and into Christmas Day, and we were tired. Annabelle must have realized this for she came over and sat down between us.

"The two of you are worn out," said she. "I will have the bed in Edna's room made up for you. Don't worry, Steve, I'll make sure you get your train for San Francisco in the morning. And you," she said to me, "I'll get you up at the same time to help heave the ship back alongside."

Annabelle hesitated, She covered her face with her hands for a moment. Raising her head, she turned to Steve. "There is one thing that has bothered me now for some time. Something tells me that you should not go on the Rosecrans, Steve. She is an unlucky ship. It is as though an inner voice tells me that the Rosecrans will not last long. Steve - please - do not join that ship." Her voice broke; her eyes were moist as she took Steve's hand and gave him a pleading look.

I looked on in astonishment. Steve may have been equally surprised, I do not know. I do not know if he had any inkling of her affection for him, or even if it was affection. As easily, it could have been a presentiment of evil. Annabelle was a woman who professionally did not let her emotions show, and for all the intensity of the moment, I could not picture it taking place in front of her girls. Steve patted her hand. "You make me feel sorry for myself. I wish now I had never promised MacPherson that I would go with him, but I can't go hack on my word."

Annabelle reluctantly released Steve's hand and reached into her bosom for her handkerchief. She dried her eyes and rose slowly to rejoin her guests. 

Steve and I retired to Edna's room. "It's been a good Christmas," I said to Steve. "Better than I ever expected when I was standing out there on that rainy wharf. But I'd feel a lot better if you would listen to Annabelle." 

The maid called us in the morning for breakfast. Our clothes, now dry and clean, were draped over a chair near us. After breakfast Annabelle called a taxi.

"Take care of my friends," she said to the driver. "And charge it to me." Annabelle and her ladies wished us a "Merry Christmas" as they saw us to the door.

Annabelle took Steve's hand; she kissed him. Reluctantly she let him go. The taxi drove off. I left Steve at the railway station. "I hope you never put a foot on the deck of the Rosecrans," I said.

"See you in Liverpool," he called as the car drove off.

I never saw him again.

As I recall now it was after New Year's when the Wms. F. Herrin headed north fully loaded, bound for the Columbia River Bar once again. About three hundred miles ahead of us is the Rosecrans, bound for the same destination. We have passed Point Reyes with a southeast gale making up. But who worries? This is seafaring with no sails to set or to furl or to trim. Luxury to a sailing ship man - and a little incredible. It is near quitting time. 

My quarters are aft, where I live in a pleasant room together with the bo's'n. I have a look around before supper. Rolling from side to side under a low threatening sky, the tanker snores along. Great seas pursue her. They leap to assault the high poop but it rises ahead of them. They overtake the ship and flood the maindeck, swirling along the plating under the midship house and finally spending themselves under the open fo'c'slehead.

I hesitate at the chief engineer's door for a chat. Near his bunk the steam and vacuum gauges and revolution counter are up to their marks. I go on, and look in at the radio shack. "Sparks" is now awake and busy. He does his work at night, when there is better reception. Phone on his head, he sits near his set. A big battery of Leyden jars, the condensers topped by the helix, a coil of copper tubing.* Above him is a bakelite ring with some points inside "the anchor gap." This was to ground the set if lightning strikes the ship's antenna. Radio sets in those days did not fetch very far, and most messages were relayed by a ship midway between the sending and receiving station.

Sparks becomes alert. With his right hand he adjusts the "cat's whisker" detector; he throws the big double pole switch in front of him from receiving to sending.' He presses his sending key; a big spark jumps across the spark gap in the middle of the helix; it lights up the radio shack, and with many a rasping - daw - day - daw - (I have forgotten the code) he answers the signal. Sparks is busy, so I wander on again as he gives me a wave of his hand.

Smith, the First Assistant Engineer, is another friend. I keep him company for a while above the turning crank of that beautiful engine." I look in at the fire room, and its four white-painted scotch boilers. Each has three fires, fitted with atomizing oil burners." The steam gauges are up to the red mark, and the fireman is lounging, sitting on a box. Everything here glistens - the brass is shined, and even the floor plates are burnished. I look in at the storeroom. There is a new storekeeper, but I miss my old friend Steve O'Hara. There is little for me to do - before supper I again make sure that the doors to the main deck are well dogged down.

There is plenty to eat, steaks and chops, but the Herrin crowd relishes the chief cook's mulligan stew. The meal over - mulligan tonight - the mess man clears the table. There are some who are going to sit up all night playing poker. The cooks scrub their white ash counters and table top and wash the red brick

deck of the galley. They turn in.

Before I call it a day, I buy myself a bottle of beer from the steward. Talk about seafaring - this is the life! A snug room, varnished decks and carpets, a bunk with white bedsheets. And there I lie - a pipe, a good book in my hand, and a bottle of beer, The sea outside leaps at times up and past the portholes.

But who cares? This is the life, compared with windbags.

My bottle is spent. I drop my book as a quartermaster, his oilskin dripping.

sticks his head in the door. "Sparks picked up an S.O.S. The Rosecrans is ashore on the Columbia River Bar!"

I jump out of my bunk. "Is that all he got?"

"That's all he got."

The bo's'n in the other bunk is now awake. No one knows exactly where and why the ship stranded. There was that one stark message and then silence. And it is still many hours until daylight. We talk about the probabilities in short sentences, an uneasy horror lurking behind them.

The Herrin is now hurrying to the rescue, but there is little she can do. There is no more news about the Rosecrans during the night, but Sparks picks up a message that it is blowing 90 miles an hour at North Head off the Columbia Bar. My heart sinks.

We turn back in to our bunks, awake, smoking - but there is now no comfort in a pipe.

It is near noon the next day when we hear further news. Sparks has the full story now. We gather at the door of his shack:

"The Rosecrans ran ashore on Peacock Spit, and she did not last very long. At daylight only the mainmast was visible, with three men clinging to it. The tug Fearless came as near them as she dared, but could not rescue them. But she had towed out the lifeboat, and they managed to pick up the three - the carpenter and a fireman alive and another from the engine room, dead. A quartermaster was found unconscious on the beach, where he floated with a piece of wreckage, and he is recovering. There were no other survivors."

"Too bad," someone said bitterly, "that they ever salvaged that scow when she went ashore at Gaviota, And why didn't she blow up when she got afire. Look what she's done now .

I thought of Annabelle - if only Steve had listened to her.

We crossed the Bar two days later, when it became smooth enough to do so. Our flag at half-mast, we passed the wreck. Or what was left of it. Only the mainmast stood defying the surging foam and breakers. Still securely tied to the top of it was a Christmas tree.

The captain was washed ashore, dead. They found no one else. Our other shipmates - Steve and all the rest - went down locked in that iron coffin. The girl MacPherson was engaged to offered a thousand dollars to anyone who found his body, but it was never recovered. His turbulent and unreachable grave was, for awhile, marked by the mainmast. On top of it was that token of peace, the tree. 

It was but a short time later that I again walked the streets of Monterey. I noticed a stately lady in black, dressed in Spanish style, like the daughter of a grandee of Dana's time. She raised her veil as I approached; it was Annabelle. I stopped by her, hat in hand. Tears came into her eyes. "Poor Steve," she said, "he's gone. What could I have done to stop him from going on that ship? I love him - I pray for him. The good book says 'Though be be dead, yet shall he live.' And he'll live in my heart." She dabbed her eyes with her handkerchief, and taking my hand, she kissed me. "That is for Steve," she said. "Good bye."

She turned and went on. I looked after her, recalling her pleas on that Christmas Eve. If only be had heeded her!

I never went again to Annabelle's.

I never saw her again.

Notes to the 

1. At sea, all the brass caps of the rails and the copper domes of the lighthouses were covered with neat canvas covers to protect them from tarnish and erosion.

2. About ten years ago, T served as second mate on the Navy tanker Mission Santa Barbara, which we were taking from San Pedro to Portland for the run - that means our job was just to move the ship between the two ports That job done, we were flown back to San Pedro. While on watch I became acquainted with the river pilot, an old chap who must have been eighty if a day. I spoke about the Columbia I had known, and the two beautiful sternwheelers that I knew so well, the Harvest Queen and the Ocklahama. He told me then that be had been captain of both of them. I recalled the incident when the Harvest Queen moved two sailing ships at once, the Egon and the William Olsen. He did not recall this very rare occasion, but told me that at one time he had moved three of them, one being pushed ahead. The old gent's name was Lowry, and he is dead and gone now some time.

5. Two clips on the helix adjust the wave length of the set. Inside the helix are two brass rods mounted vertically with a space between them of about three quarter inches, the spark gap.

4. Radio sets at sea were still very primitive, and although De Forrest had invented the radio tube, ships still depended on the primitive "cat's whisker" detector.

5. The engines were built by Hamilton, Owens & Rentschler somewhere on the Great Lakes 

6. The steam atomizing oil burners were manufactured by Staples & Pielfler, a San Francisco firm, but they were becoming obsolete. They used too much water, a scarce commodity on board a ship. Ships rapidly changed to burners that used air for atomizing, and in a few years Union Iron Works burners that wed air instead of steam were substituted.

*****

Mains'l Haul, December 1972

Caption: Forty-seven days from the Tuamotus, the barkentine S.N. Castle comes

alongside the Coal Bunkers Wharf in 1911. - Historical collection, title insurance & Trust Co.

One good ship deserves another 

A recent item in Mains'l Haul about the bark Homeward Bound has brought memories of that vessel, and of San Diego Bay in 1911, from one of our members who is an authority on West Coast maritime history.

By Capt. Fred Klebingat 

In April of 1908 I was alongside the Homeward Bound many a time, at Newcastle, N.S.W. ... where she was lying in the "Basin" awaiting cargo. I was leaving the German four-masted bark Anna very soon; they would have to pay me off as I was then 22 months on board, and the articles required me to serve only 18.

The Homeward Bound was a handsome ship. The white hull did not show any dirt, the brass was shining and the poop was covered with an awning and side curtains of canvas to keep out the coal dust. Truly a ship that looked like a yacht. But, although my time at sea was only three years, I had a good education when it came to ships and realized that this vessel, although she looked like a yacht (and because of this) was surely a "work-house." Knowing this, and shying clear of "Bucko Mates", I never applied for a job. Years later, after she became the Star of Holland, I worked as a rigger, unbending her sails, and can assure you that she was a heavy brute.

My intention when I paid off was to look for an Island Trader, but a seamen's strike headed me off and I became a member of the crew of the five-masted American schooner Crescent, then just four years old and loading her first cargo of coal. We were bound for Honolulu for orders and we arrived there in about 54 days and dropped anchor off Waikiki, just east of where Rear Admiral Bob Evans' "Great White Fleet" was anchored. A day later we sailed for Makaweli, where we discharged our coal and proceded to the Columbia. I paid off Sept. 22, 1908, and later shipped in the Americana.

About 13 months after leaving Newcastle, I found what I was looking for - a South Sea trader. She was the barkentine S. N. Castle, the only steady South Sea trader out of San Francisco, and her commander was Capt. J. H. von Dahlern, who had been in the same trade as chief mate in the Tropic Bird. Long before that, as one-eighth owner of the brig Sea Waif, he had engaged in salvage work on the U.S.S. Trenton and U.S.S. Vandalia, wrecked in the hurricane of March 1889 at Apia, Samoa

My first visit to San Diego was when we arrived, in the S.N. Castle, Oct. 11, 1911, 47 days from Makatea, in the Tuamotu Archipelago. A little tug called the Santa Fe towed us in and we tied up at the Coal Bunkers Wharf. I recall how clean the water in the bay was in those days, and all the fish, and the wharf thick with fishermen, all having big catches of mackerel. They would not move when we came alongside, in spite of warnings that they might get hurt. The water was so clean that crayfish abounded, and the old man who was in charge of the Marine Railway on North Island had some traps which he set out, right on the end of the cradle, and he always had a good catch.

We brought a cargo of phosphate rock to San Diego, and after we unloaded and had a haul-out at North Island, we left in tow of the steam schooner Excelsior. There must have been at least four American cruisers anchored in the middle of the bay, and I remember we dipped our ensign to them as we towed out.

The phosphate deposit at Makatea is now exhausted and the works abandoned.

(Note - The Americana, mentioned above, was a steel, four masted tops'l schooner, which visited San Diego around 1910; she went missing on a voyage from Astoria for the South Pacific in 1913. The S.N. Castle, disguised as a Tripolitan pirate, was blown up in filming the silent picture "Old Ironsides". The late Don M. Stewart recalled the Sea Waif as "the only true brig (square-rigged on both masts) that I ever saw in San Diego." - ED.)

*****

Sea history, Fall 1976

Schooners at Sea

To the Editor:

I have sailed quite a few years in West Coast Lumber schooners, and I may say that I consider these when lumber-loaded to be some of the best sea boats afloat. I have written tomes about my experiences in these vessels and copies of nearly all of it is on file with Mr. Karl Kortum, director of the San Francisco Maritime Museum

Parker wrote a fine book, The Great Coal Schooners of New England, but these are only a few of East Coast Schooners. He never got that far to write about those that traded south.

East Coast Schooners had their troubles, but at least at times they could find anchorages, to weather out some gales. West Coast Schooners did not have any ports to go to, there was no wide shore shelf on which to anchor as some East Coast Schooners did at times. They had the gales of Hatteras and we here had Cape Flattery and breaking bars.

I recall Captain Carl Flynn, a native of Machias, Maine, telling me that he rode out a hurricane off Charleston, South Carolina, in a four-masted schooner he commanded at that time, with both anchors down. The vessel dragged all over the shop, but she weathered the hurricane in good shape. The anchors

were as bright as polished steel when hove up. Captain Flynn worked for years for Howard Hughes as his captain in charge of the Diesel Yacht Hilda and the Steam Yacht Southern Cross which was formerly Lord Inchcape's Rover. The last vessel that Hughes owned was the Oceania, a Diesel yacht. This was taken over by the US Navy when the country entered the war. Hughes did not have a boat after that, but he paid Captain Flynn's wages until he died.

Back to the schooners. All wooden ships leaked some, I have been in some that were quite tight for many years, and gradually they loosened up.

I am not a scientist as Mr. Gerr evidently is, I never notice that the gaffs put excessive strain on the hull. And of course you looked out, that you did not jibe the schooner over when running heavy with the wind on the quarter, You do not want to break gaffs and booms.

I have written Karl Kortum many a time, what was done when it dropped calm. We did not have vangs, so we lowered sail. With good sails and gear and of course good pumps, I would not hesitate to go anywhere with a lumber-loaded West Coast Schooner, the cargo well stowed and secured.

Captain Fred K. Klebingat

San Francisco, California

*****

Sea history, Winter 1977

Caption: Looking forward from the Anna's poop deck. The cro'jik (crossjack) yard, from which the author fell so the deck, is in use as a cargo boom

It should have been a peaceful passage, after all it was Summer-North Atlantic

By Captain Fred K. Klebingat

NOTE: Captain Klebingat retired from the sea at age eighty a few years back. "I do not know," he said once talking with Karl Kortum, director of the San Francisco Maritime Museum, "when I first made up my mind to go into the Southsea trade. It may have been in the Anna on a voyage from Antofagasta to Newcastle, when we passed through the Austral Group and met Southsea schooners .... " He went on to  serve in the barkentine S.N. Castle out of San Francisco to the Marquesas, Tahiti and Samoa. In 1916-17 he served as mate in the Falls of Clyde, now preserved in Honolulu, Hawaii, by the Bernice P. Bishop Museum, who have published a remarkable memoir of his entitled Christmas at Sea. Here he tells what it was like in his first voyage in the Anna, from Dunkirk, France, to Brooklyn, New York, in the summer of 1906 .- ED.

"All hands lay aft," said Gau, the chief mate of the four-masted bark Anna, formerly the Otterburn. "The port captain wants to speak to you." 

The Anna had recently returned from Australia with a full cargo of wheat and was lying now in the port of Dunkirk, in France. The wheat had been discharged, a broken fore upper topsail yard had been repaired and a half cargo of chalk taken aboard. It came from a quarry in the form of chalk rock. Two thirds was stowed in the lower hold in a mass that reached from the floor of the hold to under the "tween deck beams. The other third was in the 'tween deck, also a mass, in the middle of the ship, that reached to the beams of the deck above. On either side of this partial cargo of chalk there was an empty hold and an empty 'tween deck.

In the after hatch, the French longshoremen had dumped about a hundred tons of quarried granite; some of the lumps may have weighed 100 or 150 pounds. We distributed this in the bilges abaft the mizzenmast and the bilge pump suctions. The cargo was well stowed, and that was to play its part in this voyage. Some of the sails were bent, stores were on board, and we would have been ready for sea except that we were short of crew. A boardinghouse master in Antwerp had supplied the men and we were full-handed a few days ago. But some of these had deserted a day or so later, We were short six mem. 

We assembled aft, the older AB's in front and the ordinary seamen, of which I was one, somewhere behind and half out of sight. Capt. Kuhlmann, the port captain, a man about six feet tall, be-

whiskered and stout, was there to receive us. Beside him was Capt. Koester, the ship's commander, of the same build and whiskery face, In back of them was Mr. Gau, the steuermann, as we called him, a man about five-foot-six with a straggling moustache but of husky build.

It was a motley crew that stood before them. There were a few Germans but most of them were men of all nations. Some of them had come on board with just what they stood up in; overalls, a shirt, a coal; one wore carpet slippers. 

"Are these all your men?" said Kuhlmann to our captain, pointing a finger from man to man as if to count them, Capt. Koester answered in the affirmative.

"Men," said the port captain, collecting himself, "you know why I have asked you to lay aft." His gaze went from man to man as if mentally to assess each man's worth and capabilities. (Could this little group handle this big ship?) "Men," he said finally, "your Capt. Koester just has told me that you are the finest crew he ever shipped on board here. I agree with him. No one has to tell me that each of you knows his stuff." The crew straightened a little and looked proud.

"Men," said Capt. Kuhlmann, resuming, "you know why I wanted to speak to you. It is on account of those men that we are short." He hesitated, and then said, "Capt. Koester here has tried his best to replace those men, but without result."

There was a pause, Some of the men now nudged George, a German, who was in front of the crowd and was the most talkative man in the fo'c'sle. They whispered and urged him to make a reply.

"I hope you get those men," said George to Capt. Kuhlmann finally. "This is a heavy ship."* Those men that deserted thought so, too... "

"There is no time to get more men," said Capt. Kuhlmann, "but Capt. Koester says he would not mind to go to sea short-handed with men like you. He is sure that you can handle the vessel. I may point out too that it is summer on the North Atlantic."

"We appreciate your worth," Kuhlmann brought his harangue to a climax.

"When the Anna comes to New York, Captain Koester will divide the wages of those men we're short among you."

That did the trick.

"Three cheers for Capt. Kuhlmann," said George. "Hip-hip-hooray" " ... "

"And by the way," said Kuhlmann to Capt. Koester, "please tell your steward to give these men a couple of bottles of rum to celebrate this occasion."

The bottles duly came forth and the crew trooped forward. We finished bending sails that day, took in the last of the stores, and topped off the fresh water tanks. Next morning the French tug Atlas took a line from our fo'c'sle-head, and a smaller tug made fast on the quarter. We let go our lines and, as they were dry, stowed these hawsers below. Slowly we passed through the different basins heading for sea. The docks were full of sailing ships. It would be a long time before we again would see the beauties of the A.D. Bordes Company assembled again - the four-masted ship Tarapaca, the four-masted bark Atlantic, the Loire and the Wulfran Puget of the same rig. The Anna passed out between the two jetties that marked the harbor entrance. We set the sails, and in another half hour the tug let go.

The wind in the Straits of Dover came From the west and southwest, moderate, but it soon turned into fog. How long we beat in the marrows between Calais and the English shore I do mot know. We were in the fog for at least ten days. It was only a matter of luck that we escaped collision in these narrows, the main highway of the sea, where ships of all nations funnelled through into the North Sea.

Whistles and the sound of foghorns were constantly heard on all sides. With apprehension, the captain or the mate listened to the bass tone of some ocean liner as it approached, and showed his relief when the sound receded in the distance. Another horn would be heard somewhere ahead of us. From the poop,

"Keep that fog horn going there on the fo'c'slehead!"

*)The Otterburn (now the Anna) was like the Springburn, Celticburn and other four-mast barks built for the Scottish shipowner Shankland in the '90's in that she did not cross royals. She only had double topgallant yards. But there was enough canvas in those upper "gans'ls" to make any number of royals. The t'gallant yards were tremendously long and she was lofty at the same time - you knew that when you were up there in port looking around at the other ships.

Caption: The four-masted bark Anna, ex-Otterburn.

It was pitiful to hear that instrument, the "Norwegian piano" as we called it. We knew that it could not be heard at any very great distance. At times we might hear the three blasts of another sailing ship using a similar foghorn that told us that nearby was a windjammer returning to her port. Then it ran through our thoughts that it could be years before we in this ship, the Anna, would be homeward bound.

As we groped our way through that gray and sightless realm, our chief preoccupation, apart from tacking ship - we went about every couple of hours or so - was heaving the lead. That put us in touch with something. It was a reassuring contact with the bottom of the sea.

Heaving the lead is no easy task on a windjammer. The tub with the leadline, 120 fathoms, is carried on deck along with the lead, thirty-five pounds. Next we turn to the ship herself.

"Let go the cro'jick tack and sheet... cro'jick clew garnets."

The men haul the clews of the sail up.

"Weather cro'jick braces!"

The mate lets go the lee cro'jick brace, the mizzen lower topsail, upper topsail, and 'gallant braces as well. The men to windward hauling the braces. It is a hard pull at first, but as the sail starts to pass through the wind, the work becomes more easy. 

The sails are now aback on the mizzen. "Belay cro'jick braces!"

"Keep her close ... " the captain gives the order to the man at the wheel.

A seaman carried the lead to the fo'c'sle head; others pass the leadline along the weather side of the ship, outboard of everything, and hitch it to the lead.

A man is stationed at each mast in the weather rigging-he has a few bights of the line in his hand.

The ship loses way. She is now just drifting ahead.

"Drop the lead!"

The man on the fo'c'sle head lets go. As the lead sinks towards the bottom, the men stationed at each mast let go in turn, warning the next mast to be ready with the cry, "Watch her, watch!"

The plunging line comes past the mizzen rigging. "Watch her, watch!" The man lets go his coil.

In a moment it will be perpendicular under the chief mate, stationed at the last mast, known as the jigger.

The mate pays out the line rapidly until it touches bottom. He reads the mark on the line.

"Take in the line ... "

The crew drops the line into a small lead block made for this purpose, and then race along the deck, heaving it in.

The lead breaks water.

"Easy now!"

The mate studies the arming of the lead as it rises to the rail - the arming is tallow, pressed into a hole in the bottom. It shows whether the lead has touched sea bottom, and what kind of a bottom - sand, mud, gravel or shell.

"Lee, cro'jick braces!"

The yards are swung; the sails fill.

"Set the cro'jick ... let go the lee cro'jick garnet ... cro'jick sheet!"

The watch hauls in the sheet.

"Let go the weather cro'jick garnet... cro'jick tack, now ... "

The sail fills, and the ship continues to gather way. The mate enters the fact that the lead was dropped and at what time, in the logbook. Also the depth of water and what kind of bottom. This is compared with the dead reckoning position on the chart, and if the depths and bottom match with the depths on the

chart, then it is reasonably certain that the dead reckoning position is correct.

It is far more difficult for a ship coming up the English Channel, racing before a gale. Say the wind is southwest and the visibility poor. They are uncertain of the fix, but they are sure that they are on soundings. The ship is under a press of sail... she has too much canvas on her. They know that they should drop the lead. But in order to do so, they will have to first shorten sail and then heave to ... the ship's speed has to be reduced before taking a sounding.

That means shortening down to lower topsails, in all likelihood. And it may be dangerous to heave to; the Old Man has been avoiding it. She will take heavy seas on board, sweeping the decks, as she comes up to the wind before losing speed. It is an uneasy position for the ship's commander.

Let's say he carries on and counts on luck. The weather stays thick.

Suddenly, "Breakers ahead!"

By now it may be too late to save the ship.

It was almost two weeks before we had worked our way out into the Atlantic. We never saw land. By this time the after guard and we ordinary seamen as well (novices or greenhorns at sea though we were) had found out that those who had signed on the Anna as able seamen were not so able. Some could have been called seagoing imposters.

There was George, the noisiest one of the gang in the port fo'c'sle. Judging by his looks when he first came aboard, there could be no better sailor than George. He was of medium height, well-built, and dressed in a rigger's overalls held mid-ships with a belt and sheath knife. He had homemade canvas shoes on his feet and on his head was a tam o'shanter. No one could look more like a sailor than George. But what a fraud and coward he turned out to be! A few years in Kaiser Bill's Navy, so we heard, was the only experience at sea that George ever had. He tried to lord it over us ordinary seamen but did not get very far with that.

There was a stray cat on the ship, a cat of quite good size that had shanghaied itself aboard at Dunkirk somehow. The cat stayed wild. No doubt it had plenty to eat as there was quite a multitude of rats on every grain ship - grain was the Anna's previous cargo. At night the cat would scoot along the fo'c'slehead, very likely on the lookout for water. This ghostly creature darting about in the night nearly scared George to death. He talked about the ship being haunted. An unusual noise would scare him, such as a piece of gear that was not properly secured and which thunked about in the forepeak as the ship rolled.

- - -

"Dear God, if this is a hurricane I hope you never let me see another one."

- - -

Three weeks after we left Dunkirk the wind finally turned fair. It increased in force and with a clear sky the ship was making course for New York. Our watch left the deck at midnight with all sails set. Anna was going at least 12 knots. At 2:00 AM there was the call, 

"All hands on deck!"

It didn't take us long to jump into our clothes and get out of the fo'c'sle.

We found a moonlight night, a full moon, with scattered clouds driving past its face. The wind had increased to a gale.

"Take in the upper 'gans'ls!" was the order.

We had trouble getting in these sails. Something was up - a wind this strong so suddenly upon us.

"Clew up the cro'jik and the mainsail!" was the next order. There were few hands to do this as some men were still aloft trying to furl the 'gans'ls.

"Take in the flying jib and the outer jib!" came next. Then, "Take in the lower 'gans'ls."

The wind continued to increase and the sky became overcast. The moon disappeared. The sea grew in size. The wind was from the starboard quarter, and the ship was travelling at great speed. Frequent flashes of lightning lit up the eerie scene. The wind was now abeam and while I worked, a five-masted schooner appeared like an apparition in a lightning flash and then was gone. She was right on top of us. I noticed the men on deck working in a hurry to take in sail. It was a miracle that we escaped collision.

Although we had a few men still aloft trying to furl the 'gans'ls, this didn't account for the feeling that some of our hands were missing. There was a scarcity of men to do the work ... could that blowhard George and some of his sulky followers be hiding? Scared to death? We were all frightened; the ship was plainly in the grip of a malevolence whose power was increasing minute by minute. What would happen next? It settled one's nerves a bit to have work to do. I clung to the mizzen upper topsail yard, working. Near me on the spar, trying to save the topsail, was the mate, Gau, and Capt. Koester.

Daylight appeared slowly and lit up this turmoil-an angry sea, the wind shrieking through the rigging, the squalls and clouds scudding overhead. The Anna had only a half cargo in her, so she took little water aboard, but she rolled and pitched violently. We had managed to furl the sails, but it was exhausting work. I came down the main rigging and jumped from the rail to the deck. The mate came up to me and said, cupping his hands close to my ear, "Go down in the cabin, Fred, and secure whatever has gone adrift."

"I hurried aft into the cabin by the after companionway and found some barrels out of the storeroom rolling across the deck. I secured these. 

On a bracket secured to the after bulkhead of the saloon was the mercurial barometer, a long, upright shaft of rosewood. It was swinging wildly in its gimbals.

Capt. Koester, in streaming oilskins and southwester, appeared suddenly in the cabin. He crossed to the barometer, studied for a moment, and left for deck again with a worried look on his face.

On the cabin table, propped up, I saw a volume-Findlay's North Atlantic Directory - and I glanced at it. The book was open to the chapter: "Hurricane."

Now I knew what we were in for.

About 8:00 AM, the sky all at once cleared and the sun shone and the wind ceased. The ship was laboring violently. A wall of water came from right ahead and half buried the jibboom. The men working on the boom, furling the sails, jumped on a stay to save themselves. 

"Wear ship!"

But there was little wind and the vessel was nearly unmanageable.

We labored away at the braces and had got the yards square-all of a sudden the wind came from the opposite direction. It hit the sails with a force no canvas could stand. The chain sheet of the lower topsail broke and dropped amongst us.

"Stand out from under!"

My watch partner and I got onto the poop and lashed ourselves to the pinrail. A human being could not stand against the wind. The spume that filled the air and drove over the ship was more salt water than rain.

Now our best canvas, the foresail and the three lower topsails, blew away. The sound they made as they went was like the big guns in a sea battle. The tearing away of the rags and the remnants that followed had the sound of a mass of machine guns firing. (Even when I left the Anna twenty months later, hemp fiber pounded together like papier mache could be found in the eyes of the rigging.)

The sails that we had made fast followed after these sails that had been set. The wind would worry a corner loose and then get a further grip and finally the gasket loosened and off went the sail. In a few minutes the yard was bare. The main yard took charge. The topping lifts carried away and one end of the ninety-foot spar rose high in the air, the other end struck the rail a might blow. As the ship rolled, the opposite yardarm would swing down to the rail - and the other end would rise to the topsail yard. A wild disorder had taken charge of our orderly ship that was fearful to see. We could secure nothing as the force of the wind prevented us from moving. I prayed as I stood there lashed fast to the pin rail on the poop. I said, "Dear God, if this is a hurricane I hope you never let me see another one."

About noon, the wind tapered off and died out entirely. A tremendous sea, like a boiling cauldron, was now on every side. The ship rolled and pitched. In the calm we secured the main yard. The ship rolled as I have never seen a ship roll before or since. We thanked the Lord that the cargo below was stowed so well that it did not take charge and put us on our beam ends.

- - - 

"I was the last one out on the yard and we were hurrying down because there were pancakes for breakfast. I jumped for the rigging and missed... They picked me up for dead and put me on a hatch cover... "

- - -

We had labored, we had done our utmost, and we lay down for an hour or so now, exhausted.

Our masts stood. We rose and set to work to reeve off new gear .... But there is an end to everything -even a West Indian hurricane. There is an end if your ship survives ....

Only two sails were left of those that were bent. The courses and topsails and topgallants that we had painstakingly furled had been clawed off the steel yards by the hurricane. The two that remained were staysails that had been lowered throughout the gale. We broke out spare sails now and sent them aloft. Less than twenty-four hours later, everything was set and the Anna laid course for New York.

Caption: Capt. Klebingat greeted his old ship, the Falls of Clyde, at Honolulu when she arrived there in 1963 to be rerigged as a museum ship. - San Francisco Maritime Museum

About a week later, I fell from the cro'jik yard and miraculously was not much hurt. I fell all the way to deck from close to the slings on the starboard side. I was the last one out on the yard and we were hurrying down because there were pancakes for breakfast. I jumped for the rigging and missed.

I landed on my feet; I struck my hip on the fiferail. They picked me up for dead and put me on a hatch cover; I was unconscious. They carried me in to the sail locker, a spare cabin under the poop. At the back of the room were a couple of bunks. These were filled with onions. These were hastily emptied out

of one of the bunks. When I came to, a couple of hours later, it was onions that I smelled - my first sensation of life.

Captain Koester looked after me and there were no bones broken. I was back at work in a week.

Ten days later I was sitting in the fo'c'sle door eating a plate of beans, breakfast, and here comes the second mate plummeting down. Off the fore-yard.

He fell from a crane line that leads from the after part of the top to the t'gallant backstay. As I remember,

some men were swifting in the rigging-taking the slack out of the lower shrouds. (This gear can be seen abaft the mizzen top in the deck photograph of Anna.) The crane line was rotten and it gave way. I saw the second mate drop; luckily he landed on one of the boats - went right through the wooden cover. It broke his fall, but he broke his jaw. The second mate was paid off when we reached port.

Another hurricane approached and we reduced sail down to goosewing lower topsail. But the storm changed track and was only a false alarm.

- - -

"The captain drew some money next day .... It was divided evenly among all the men and amounted to, $3.17."

- - -

The cook on the Anna was named Pagel; he had sailed in the Rickmers ships and used to brag about how they carried sail. These were Bremen vessels, too, and they had a reputation for fine upkeep, good gear, and skippers who cracked on. One of them, the Peter Rickmers, was, in the opinion of many, the most beautiful steel sailing ship ever set afloat. She was launched at Port Glasgow by the firm of Russell & Co., whose Falls of Clyde still survives as a museum ship in Honolulu. The Peter Rickmers was of 2,989 gross tons, the Clyde is smaller, 1,807 tons .* With her green hull, white superstructure, and four soaring masts, each crossing seven yards (she had double topgallants, royals and skysails), the Peter Rickmers was always spoken of admiringly by seafaring men.

But to return to Pagel, our grub spoiler: We had reduced sail to lower topsails; the Anna had encountered one more gale toward voyage end. The watch trooped past the galley door; all of a sudden the upper part (it was in two halves) opens a little and Pagel peers out:

"Hello, what is this? Packing in the upper topsails? My God, you will never reach New York that way. Why, in the Peter Rickmers we would be carrying upper t'gallants in all four tops ... "

Bang! The iron door slams shut.

The champion of the Rickmers line left us in New South Wales. He had fed us badly, and nobody shed a tear .**

"And where was George? I heard the captain ask one afternoon. The Old Man was pacing up and down the deck. "I don't recall that I ever saw him on the night of the hurricane."

The captain was addressing the mate.

"And there were others missing, steuermann."

There had been a sullenness in the fo'c'sle. Not on the part of those who had grappled with the hurricane on the yards of the Anna, but on the part of those who hadn't. It was the young men, the boys, the quiet men who had been up there. George and his followers, the talkers, the bluffers, had not. They had malingered and put the heavy burden of a heavy ship on the rest of us. The younger element had a new confidence. The hurricane had "separated the men from the boys," in the modern expression - and it was the men who were found wanting. Or at least some of them.

I was interested to hear this discussed at the other end of the ship.

"The man at the wheel was there at least six hours," said Capt. Koester to the mate. "He should have been relieved in that time."

"I tried to locate them, but there wasn't time to really search the ship," said Gau.

"Hoboes," said Capt. Koester.

"Cowards and hoboes!"

On the 45th day, we sighted the pilot boat outside New York. A tug came out and got hold of us. There was a short squabble about the price. We towed to Brooklyn and made fast at 5th Avenue Pier. We unbent the sails that day and the stevedores came on board and rigged up the cargo gear to discharge the

cargo of chalk.

The captain drew some money next day and all hands laid aft to get the extra share that Capt. Kuhlmann promised. It was divided evenly among all the men, and amounted to $3.17. This would go a long way in this man's country, if one was a little careful. A schooner of beer cost only 5¢ with all the free lunch you could eat.

"And you are the watchman, Paul," said the captain to one of the AB's.

"Well, if anybody in the crew wants to beat it, don't stop him. If anything, give them a hand."

"Turn to," the mate said next morning, but there were only six or seven left.

"Most of the men have deserted," said the mate to the captain.

"That's fine," Captain Koester replied, "I'm glad I have seen the last of George and the others like him. They aren't the best shipmates for summer on the North Atlantic."

The irony in his words wasn't all for the shirkers; he saved some of it for that blithe phrase of the port captain's long ago in Dunkirk.

*) I joined the Falls of Clyde as chief mate ten years after the voyage described

**) The Rickmers ships loaded coal in Wales, or case oil at New York, or Point Breeze, Philadelphia, for

the Orient or Australia. After discharge of their cargo, they would sail to Bangkok or Rangoon to load a cargo of rice for the mills that the firm owned in Germany.

In looks, upkeep, and in their reputation for fast passages, the Rickmers vessels were the equals of the Laeisz ships of Hamburg, the famous Flying P Line engaged in the nitrate trade around the Horn. I have met many men who sailed for Rickmers and they were proud of the fact, but none were quite as boastful as our cook.

*****

Sea History, Summer 1977

Letters

To the Editor

In 1906 when I visited New York in the Anna (see voyage narrative, SH 6, pages 34-38) steam had already captured the export trade, and square riggers were a rare sight. Our learned friend Andrew Nesdall says I am mistaken. But in shifting ship, and later at anchor in Stapleton and while loading at Bayonne. I never sighted a square rigger.

While we lay at 23rd Street in Brooklyn, where we discharged our cargo of chalk into lighters or barges.

ahead of us there was docked the little Danish wooden bark Emilie, from Fano. She was so yacht-like, and we often longed to be in a vessel of that kind, where the ropes were so lithe, the blocks so small, comparing her to the Anna she was a toy. And there was the American barkentine Bruce Hawkins of Boston; She was there only about fourteen days. The Mate tried to entice some of us to desert and ship with him, but I thought I was too young and had to learn more about my trade as a seaman. On a wharf a short distance away, they were dismantling a Down Easter - I never knew her name, it was too far away to read. They made a coal barge of her.

You may be interested in how I spent the $3.17 the skipper gave us for bringing the Amna across short-

handed. I went to New York on a Sunday and gaped at the skyscrapers. But of course on a Sunday downtown Manhattan was dead. I bought some California grapes and that was a treat, and came back on board with $2 still left.

Captain Fred K. Klebingat

Eastside, Oregon

To the Editor:

When our good friend Captain Klebingat arrived in New York in the Anna. September 12. 1906, there were 120 steamers, 258 schooners and, of square riggers, 9 ships, 28 barks (including the Anna) and 2 brigs (really half-brigs). This is shown in the excerpt from the September 19 issue of the weekly New York Maritime Register I've sent along.

You will note some confusion in the list: the four-masted bark Drumeltan is listed with the ships. while the four-masted barks Anna, Lawhill and Port Stanley are among the barks. In those days it was American practice to call a four-masted bark a "shipentine," or "ship" for short, but they weren't consistent about it, and apparently could never decide whether they belonged with the ships or the barks. There was no separate list for barkentines and they are with the barks. Your will note the Bruce Hawking there, confirming Captain Klebingat's excellent memory.

The Down Easter he mentioned in being charged must have been the M.P. Grace. Or it might have been the John A. Briggs at Morse's Drydock - I don't know where that was. The Anna was at Antott's Docks at 23rd Street and 3rd Avenue until sometime during the week prior to September 26, when she shifted to the Tidewater Docks at Bayonne. She sailed for Yokohama on October 28th. I am sure that the last square-rigger to load case oil there was the Spanish bark Guadlhorce about 1935. I read in the paper that she was there at the time, and went over to see her but was denied entrance to the pier. She went missing that trip.

Abbreviations used in the list: EB-Eric Basin (Brooklyn); LIC-Long Island City: So Bk-South Brooklyn

(where Anna lay): JC-Jersey City: N Ck-Newton Creek: Hbn-Hoboken. The list includes vessels well outside New York Harbor, at Port Jefferson. Long Island and Stamford, Connecticut, for instance. You will note in the list of ships that the Occidental had just arrived and was anchored off Quarantine, completing her final voyage under sail.

Among the Hester photos I got from Karl Kortum in San Francisco was one of a captain and wife in the after cabin of what was, judging from the paneling, a Down Easter, not identified. The master's license was framed on the bulkhead, and with a glass I made out his name, William Kessel. Knowing the approximate years that Hester took the pictures and with what little information there was about Kessel in Mathew's American Merchant Ships, I followed him around in the New York Maritime Register. He had the Allen Besse. Emily Reed (lost her in 1908), and Henry Villard but since while he had them they didn't visit Puget Sound where Hester worked, the picture couldn't have been taken in any of those ships: in must have been taken in the Occidental just before she sailed from Port Blakely on March 1, 1906 for New York, where she was barged. I was aboard her about 1935 at Port Johnston, Bayonne, where she lay with several old schooners, abandoned. 

Andrew J. Nesdall

Waban. Massachusetts

*****

Sea History, Fall 1979

Top caption: The four-masted bark Anna ex-Ottoburn at Commencement Bay, Washington. Photos courtesy National Maritime Museum, San Francisco

Bottom caption: Christmas tree branch

Christmas in the Fo'c'sle by Captain Fred K. Klebingat

In the summer of 1906 the big bark Anna came across the North Atlantic to New York, meeting a hurricane enroute. Sixteen-year-old Fred Klebingat was in the crew, and gave an account of that crossing in SH 6. He stayed in her and celebrated Christmas as she ran her easting down in the Roaring Forties in the South Atlantic. Captain Klebingat was 90 this October 7, and is a leading historian of West Coast shipping under sail. Here he recalls that Christmas in the Anna seventy-three years ago.

"We ought to celebrate Christmas right, and make a Christmas tree," said Carl Schroeder, Top Dog and the oldest sailor of the port fo'c'sle. "We have plenty to be thankful for." And that we had, for just a few nights before, about midnight on December 17, 1906, we had barely escaped being wrecked on Tristan da Cunha, a lone and solitary volcanic island planted just about in the middle of the South Atlantic Ocean between Cape Horn and the Cape of Good Hope. The night was dark and misty, and the four-mast bark Anna, ex-Otterburn was logging more than twelve knots with all sail set. And it was only due to the vigilance of the Old Man, Captain Koester, that we escaped shipwreck-by the width of a cat's whisker. It was a miracle, that is sure, and it was a miracle that all were able to celebrate this Christmas. In that surf and on that high rocky shore, not all of us could have reached the beach alive.

"And come here, Fred," said Carl, addressing himself to me. "You go and see 'Chips' and tell him that we want to make a Christmas tree. you are the only one who can get anything out of that old curmudgeon. See if you can talk him into loaning us some tools..." Chips was more than willing; he also had caught the Christmas spirit. At once he went to work to make a first-class base, and he handed me a piece of pine about two inches square and about four feet long. "Take a hatchet," said he, "and taper this stick a little and plane it off." Next we picked a piece of straight-grained soft pine about a foot long. We split this up in fine pieces and now notched the edges of these slivers to resemble pine needles. By this time I had finished tapering the stick and smoothing it with a plane. Chips now took his carpenter's pencil from the pocket of his overalls. He marked the tapered stick for three sets of holes. "Here is an auger; bore some holes" he said. "Bore them at an angle-you know how the branches of a Christmas tree look." That done, he fitted the stick to the base he had made. The rest of the sailors were notching pine slivers with their sheath knives like this:

We managed to get hold of some green paint and thinned this out with turpentine and painted the branches. Now we assembled the tree. Chips cut a nice star out of an empty margarine can-this we mounted on top. Those days everyone was familiar with cutting chains out of paper; we did the same. We made neat little baskets out of the silver-covered wrappers of our tobacco packages. We had no nuts to insert in these, so we used iron ones. "We should hang some cookies on the tree, too," someone said. "I have it," another answered. "We can cut them out of this piece of yellow laundry soap. For sugar, we can pound up some of that rock salt from the salt meat barrel." They looked good enough to eat! Then someone came along with some cotton, which we draped on the tree so that it looked like snow. From the steward we managed to bum some big candles. They were not exactly the size we wanted, but we cut them up in chunks and seized them to the tree with wire seizing. The tree was now complete, and a fine tree it was, if I say so myself. The Anna had two fo'c'sles under the fo'c'sle head, one to port (where I had my bunk), and one to starboard. After finishing the tree, we moved it into the starboard fo'c'sle, although this watch had no hand in making it. 

Christmas Eve came. The ship was in the "roaring forties," racing before a light westerly gale with all sail set. She rolled heavily, and seas boarded her from port to starboard, at times filling the decks up to the rails. The man on the wheel was busily spinning the wheel trying to keep her before the racing seas. But in the starboard fo'c'sle all was snug. With the candles on the tree lit, "Merry Christmas," it was - but what to do about Christmas cheer? "Let us go aft and wish the Old Man a Merry Christmas and invite him to have a look at our tree," Carl suggested.

Drawing top by Charles Rosner 1921

Caption below: Fred Klebingat, seaman, aboard the barkentine S.N. Castle, 

standing on the deck cargo of Oregon pine.

He did this; the ship had a fore and aft bridge, a cat walk, so one could get aft without any trouble. A short while later the Old Man and the mate appeared (we had no second mate). Both of them removed their caps as they stepped into the fo'c'sle. "A Merry Christmas to all and what a beautiful tree," the Old Man said. 'The best I have ever seen." The mate agreed. 

"And how about Santa Claus?" (And nobody could look more like him than the captain. His smiling face, his long whiskers, his generous girth and tall boots-all that was missing was the red suit.) "I notice that you have no refreshment," said the Captain. "I should have thought of that before-send a couple of the boys aft with buckets, and I'll see that you do." 

The boys soon returned with buckets of rum punch, and they also brought a box of cigars. Now can you beat this Christmas in the middle of the South Atlantic-a fine, lit-up Christmas tree, a mug of the skipper's famous rum punch and the smoke of a fine Havana! Too bad the man on the wheel could not join us, but he would be relieved as soon as his wheel turn was up. And there was also the man on the lookout, but he sneaked down from the fo'c'slehead now and then to fill his mug and take another drag at the Old Man's Christmas cigar. It was a "Merry Christmas and Good Will to All  Men."

From Christmas at Sea by Fred K. Klebingat, published by the Bernice P. Bishop Museum, Honolulu, Hawaii, 1974.

*****

Sea Letter, Winter 1979

Christmas on an Atoll

by Fred Klebingat

Christmas on an Atoll

by Captain Fred Klebingat

"Time ticks" received by wireless were not known in the era of sail and the ship's longitude depended on the accuracy of the chronometer the vessel curried. Ships many days at sea and therefore not sure of their position would attempt to make a "landfall" before approaching their port of destination. A high island was preferred. For instance, vessels coming from the South Atlantic, and bound for the English Channel, would sight one of the high islands of the Azores. Then, comparing the true position of the ship (obtained by bearings of objects ashore) with the one obtained by celestial observations, they would deduct the error if any and were able to tell if the ship's chronometer had kept its rate of gaining or losing. If the chronometer had not maintained a steady rate of loss or gain - so many seconds a day, say - the navigator was able to compute this changed rate.

Experienced navigators, bound from a Pacific Coast port to Tahiti, would make a point to sight one of the islands of the Marquesas before nearing the low atolls of the Tuamotus or Dangerous Archipelago. But navigators of ships bound to Australia or Tonga or Fiji were not so fortunate; there were no high islands on their track when they entered the South Pacific. There were only the two wooded atolls. Rakahanga and Penrhyn Island. Approaching such an atoll you see the top of the palms peeping above the horizon when you still have ten or twelve miles to go.

The first landfall such a schooner might make was Malden Island, but careful navigators gave this crumb of land a wide berth. With no crest of coconut trees, it was far less visible than even Rakahanga or Penrhyn Island. Many tales are told of those shipwrecked on barren Malden Island - a guano island surrounded by erratic currents.

The coconut palms of Rakahanga and Penrhyn Island, as well as the pandanus and other shrubs and low trees, flourish in a soil of coral debris - the sand, gravel, and coral slabs that form the motus. The motus are small "islands" that build up every so often around the rim of the coral reef. The reef surrounds a lagoon. The motus are separated from each other by channels into the lagoon, some shallow, and a few navigable.

A mass of white breakers surrounds the whole - they break on the reef that created the island in the first place. The reef is a dangerous barrier to those who are foolhardy enough to try a landing, Brown Polynesian people dwell on these islands; they make a living off the sea. They are expert fishermen, swimmers and divers and can navigate the surf when no one else can.

Isolated as these two islands are, still they were on the track of those windships with their high deckloads of lumber that sailed from the Pacific Northwest to ports in Australia, the Fijis and the Tongas, Prudent skippers in charge of these vessels sighted one or the other to check the accuracy of the ship's chronometer.

While in command of the American four-masted schooner Melrose I made a point of using these islands in the fashion I have described.

* * *

It must have been at least thirty days since I had said goodbye to Mr. Henry, general manager of the Hastings Sawmill, which was owned by the B. C. Mills, Timber & Trading Co. of Vancouver, British Columbia. I had on board a full cargo of lumber for Morris Hedstrom Ltd., a big trading firm at Suva, Fiji Islands. The Red Stack tug Sea Monarch had towed us to sea. The last humans we had seen were Captain Thompson and the crew waving. followed by three long blasts of the tug's steam whistle that said "farewell." 

Caption: Towser, the ship's dog

With a wheeze and rumble of gears, the towing winch reeled in the steel towing hawser; Captain Thompson reached for the bell pull to order "Full ahead" and the swirling wake of the tug formed a wide arc as she changed course for Cape Flattery and home, rolling easily in the long westerly swell. In a half an hour she disappeared behind Tatoosh Island, the entrance to the Straits of Juan de Fuca.

Thirty days at sea is not long for those who sailed ships in the era of sail, but at that a sight of earth and green trees fills one with delight. We had to reef down for a southeast gale shortly after we had let go the tug. But then the wind turned to northwest, the sky cleared, the green of the coastal ocean turned to deep blue; and as we steered south, the northwest wind gradually hauled into the northeast trades. The gooneys, the brown albatrosses of the North Pacific, left us as we entered the tropics. The sky is somewhat hazy near the Pacific Coast with northwest winds, but this cleared and cumulus clouds sailed by overhead, throwing deep shadows on the blue sea as they went by.

A pair of tropic birds might now and then be seen, all white but for a spike of red tailfeather. With a raucous cry - "ark - ark" - they flutter nervously, high above the mastheads. As we near dangerous Malden Island, some booby birds might also meet us. They are master fishers and seldom venture more than a "bird flight" away from land. We will be on the latitude of Malden during the night, so to be safe I change the ship's course to west at sunset and resume the southwest course at sunrise. During the next

night we pass to the west of Starbuck Island, low and barren, also worked for guano many years ago. Towser, the ship's dog, has been below all night. At sunrise she gets up on the poop, and, front paws on the rail, she snuffles to windward. She turns her head to look at me, as if to say, "Do you know there is land there? I can smell it."

It may have been two days more sailing when the palms of Rakahanga rise over the sea rim at dawn. The trade is blowing steady, and I set a course that will put the schooner close to the reef on the lee side. We may be lucky; there is always good fishing close to the reef. A wahoo.or tuna, or maybe a dolphin, as seamen call the mahimahi fish, might mistake the white rag with the barbed hook on the troll line towing astern for a squid. The sea gets smooth as we get under the lee of the atoll.

The natives of the island also have seen us. It might have been months since Captain Viggo with the schooner Tiare Taporo departed, and, day in day out, they have gazed at an empty sea devoid of any sail. They hasten to launch their canoes.

Several of the craft are visible ahead of us, as we near the village. We clew up the gaff topsails, and drop the spanker to ease the schooner's speed. The natives make their canoes fast alongside. The green coconuts they bring off are more than welcome - u fresh drink for us. They have plenty of them and pass these on board. They also have some shell necklaces for barter and maybe a pearl or two. One of them has brought off a small pig: I have to decline this. There is no room for a pig on a schooner's deckload. But their goods for trade are scanty; there is no fruit growing on most atolls. Bananas, oranges and mangos do not thrive on the coarse coral soil. The islanders are anxious to obtain denim overalls, tobacco, soap, matches and bread - and we are not parsimonious: Well satisfied, they board their canoes as we come out of the lee of the island, The schooner sets all sail as the natives wave goodbye. You can be sure that the Melrose will be remembered, and 1 have suddenly become a friend of these simple folk.

Caption: The schooner-yacht Fisherman at Auckland, New Zealand, on January 20, 1927.

Two years had passed since I last sighted Rakahanga. The schooner Melrose had been sold and I, her former skipper, was fortunate to land a job as third mate on the S.S. Melville Dollar. The Dollar was a large freighter that had been built in China in World War I as the Oriental. She was now engaged in the inter-coastal run. After we visited the east coast, the ship returned to San Pedro. This was in 1926. A friend said to me "Zane Grey wants a skipper for his schooner, the Fisherman. She is fitting out for a voyage to New Zealand and the Southseas to go sportfishing."

"Jobs are hard to get," I said to my chum, "and I landed this job on the Melville Dollar without looking for it. I intend to stay."

"Write an application to Zane Grey for the job anyway," my friend says, "and see what happens; write a letter tonight."

"Alright,"I replied, "I'll write from San Francisco."

I did and the job was mine.

Zane Grey, noted writer of westerns, was then at the height of his fame. He was also an ardent fisherman with an obsession to land the largest and heaviest game fish ever caught. To do this he must travel to distant seas. Therefore he bought a suitable vessel to carry his boats and gear. This was the three-masted schooner yacht Fisherman, a former commercial schooner, built in Luneburg Nova Scotia as the Marshal Foch. The Nova Scotian builders had launched her in 1919. a vessel of nearly 500 gross tons. A pair of Fairbank Morse Co. engines had been installed by Zane Grey; these helped in light winds and made it easy to enter and leave ports. She carried four launches. Below decks there was a large tackle room with cases of fishing rods, reels of wire for leaders, cases and cases of fish line, fishing reels galore, many of them built to the author's order. The assortment of fishing gear and quantity would put most sportfishing gear stores to shame. The owners of Abercrombie & Fitch would have looked at this assortment of fishing tackle with respect.

But the author never travelled on his ship for long distances; he resorted to her only on the fishing grounds. So he said to me: "We are going to explore the seas around New Zealand and Tahiti for game fish, my party and I. I will go to New Zealand with the United Steamship Co. liner. So be sure to meet me at Auckland on January 22nd.

He continued: "And on the way to New Zealand, you may pass some islands where some worthwhile movie film and still photos can be taken. Don't hesitate. Just stop and take the time to make them." Then he handed me five thousand dollars to disburse for the ship. We shook hands, and with "I am sure you will have a pleasant voyage," my employer departed

There were seventeen men in the crew of the Fisherman. That included the professional photographer and a radio man.

The ship's track passed near the dangerous Malden Island as we entered the South Pacific. But with a radio man this landfall was a different story. He provided time ticks to confirm my chronometer's rate. My observations were made under perfect conditions and there was no doubt as to the ship's position, so I did not hesitate to close with Malden. We sighted the atoll one day near noon. It was a beautiful day with a moderate breeze. The land was low land circled by a ring of surf. A lone palm and a few buildings of the settlement stood at the west end. The Cook islanders that worked the island for guano came off to visit the schooner. We slowed down, there was plenty of time.

Later on I heard that a short while after our visit, the island was to be abandoned, the guano was worked out. I did not think it worthwhile to make movies of guano collecting, so we sailed on after our visitors departed. Starbuck Island, a desolate atoll formerly worked for guano, was quite near, so going slow under easy sail we sighted it next morning after daylight. Ships must have been wrecked here, but there was no sight of them and such disasters must have happened long ago. There were few signs that humans had ever been here. Heat waves rose from this expanse of white coral. A high surf, misting as it rolled ashore, seemed to guard the place against anyone who wanted to invade this scene of desolation. A white beacon built of coral and some ruins of huts made out of the same material gave proof that man had been here, at least for awhile.

There was time to spare, so I shaped course for Rakahanga; I might see my old friends. It was now the hurricane season in the South Pacific. The sky became overcast and the wind shifted to northwest with rough seas, the usual weather at this time of the year and this part of the ocean. I watched the "glass" for something worse, but fortunately no hurricane developed.

We sighted Rakahanga about noon. With the wind in the northwest, the east side of the island was now the lee and so we steered for it. Natives in droves, with a dozen out-rigger canoes, were hastening off to the ship. We reduced sail to make it easy for my island friends to come on board. They greeted me warmly. But in the group was a man I had not met before, a Caucasian. He introduced himself: "My name is Murray and I am the local trader." We talked about some men we both knew in the islands and where the Fisherman was bound.

Caption: The schooner-yacht Navigator at Traitor's Bay, Fatuhiva, 

in the Marquesas Islands, ca. June 1938.

Finally I said: "Christmas is near. I will see what I can do to remember it is coming."

Smithy, the steward, was standing quite near me and so I said, "Make up a parcel for Mr. Murray here. Cut off a nice steak and give him some onions and potatoes to go with it. I note you baked this morning; we should also give him a loaf of fresh baked bread and a square of our butter." 

The steward hastened toward the chill room below,

"Hold on a minute, Smithy," I said.

"Who else is on the island?" I asked Murray.

"Well, there is a crazy priest who wants to build a church," he replied.

"Smithy," I then said to the steward, "Make up a parcel just like that one for the 'crazy priest," too!"

In a short while Smithy appeared from below with a sack in either hand. He passed these to Murray. "I am sure both of you will have a nice Christmas with this," he said.

As the ship neared the south end of the island, the sea started to increase, so Murray and my native friends said "Goodbye" in the Cook Island dialect. They cast off their canoes.

The wind had dropped quite light, so we set all sail. I rang "full ahead" on both engines and the Fairbanks Morse Co. engines started up with a roar and a cloud of black smoke from the exhaust pipes through the transom. The schooner gathered speed, the natives waved awhile and finally made for the shore. By nightfall Rakahanga was out of sight.

The weather turned bad. Rain fell in torrents at times. There were heavy squalls and it did not improve much until we reached the coast of New Zealand. The Auckland pilot came on board. It was morning on December 31st, we dropped the hook on the Waitemata, the beautiful harbor of Auckland. The year 1926 was drawing to its end.

* * *

Twelve years passed. I was now skipper of a little schooner-yacht called Navigator and her home port was Honolulu. She was owned by G. Harton Singer Jr. of Sewickley, Pennsylvania and also Honolulu. Singer was a man somewhat like the newspaper publisher Scripps, owner of the yacht Ohio, who was never happy unless at sea. Annually we made a voyage from Los Angeles to the South-seas. Returning from Tahiti and the Society Islands and bound for Hawaii, I would always call at Penrhyn Island, which I have described. The natives and their administrator are always hospitable to all visitors, yachtsmen or just traders. And no one could be more kind than the administrator, Captain Viggo Rasmussen (the natives used to call him "Papa Viggo"). Mr. Singer and his party always had a nice time, what with native dances and other entertainments.

It was on one of these visits that a native came on board and handed me a note. It said:

"Can you help me. I am the Catholic priest. I am suffering from diabetes. Have you some fresh fruit or vegetables to spare? I would be grateful."

Fruits and vegetables are plentiful on the high and volcanic islands in the South Pacific, but hard to come by on an atoll. The slabs of coral and sand tossed up by the sea onto the reef forming the motus are poorly adapted to horticalture. Only the coconut and the pandanus thrive in such poor soil.

Caption: The bustling waterfront of Papeete, Tahiti, in 1938, as seen from the deck of the two-masted schooner yacht Navigator. From a contemporary San Francisco newspaper: "G. Harton Singer Jr. Monday will dispatch his two-masted schooner yacht Navigator to New Zealand for a fishing and hunting cruise which will take the craft to numerous infrequently visited atolls of the South Pacific. Capt. Fred Klebingat will command the craft, accompanied only by a crew of six. After hunting in New Zealand for deer, moose, chamois and thar, the party will cruise leisurely back .. " - Ernst Adermann, photoprapher

Leaving Tahiti this time, we had visited Moorea, Huahine, Raiatea, and Bora Bora, all islands of the Society group. Consequently, although the Navigator was a small vessel, we were well stocked with bananas, oranges and limes, also yams and other root vegetables. We were sure a selection of these would be appreciated by the diabetic.

In my travels in the South Pacific I have met many that preached the "glad tidings" - men of all denominations. Some were blessed with worldly goods and lived in comfort, and others I saw existing in abject poverty. I have met many that only thought of themselves and still others who were only devoted to their faith. Be that as it may, I was sure that this priest, whoever he was, was in sore need of

what we had on board. I loaded up two shopping bags with fruit and vegetables.

One of the crew took me ashore in the dory, to a little mole built out of coral. A bag in either hand, I stepped ashore. The trades rustled the palm fronds overhead. Myriads of land crabs scurried ahead of me, their pincers towards me, as in a defending position. In a grove of pandanus, a small house was visible.

The doors and winds were open to let in the cooling trades. I entered. The place was bare except for a cot. At a plain table sat the priest. He was a man in his sixties, a little on the stout side, his hair somewhat thinned. He wore a neatly trimmed beard on a face that showed premature age. His face brightened at the sight of me.

He rose, I motioned him to sit down and placed the two filled bags of fruit near him. I sat down on the only other chair in the room.

"They are yours, Father," I said, motioning to the sacks.

His thanks were profuse in u voice heavily uccented, He

said, "What is your name?"

"Klebingat," I said.

At that his face lit up with joy, as if he recalled something

"Kle-bin-gat - Christmas - Oui! Oui! Fee-sher-mawhn," he exclaimed.

Then it dawned on me that this must be "the crazy priest who wanted to build a church" on Rakahanga.

He had not forgotten what he called the best Christmas he ever had, so he told me. His name was Joachim Kerdal, a native of Belgium, and he had long suffered from diabetes.

"We are bound to Honolulu," I said. "I am sure the Mission there will be glad to hear about you and see that you get the needed medication."

"I belong to that very same, the Sacred Heart Mission," he said. "Please see Father Vincent, and tell him of my condition." I assured him that I would look up the Mission when I got to Honolulu.

The Navigator sailed the next day. We called at Christmas Island and the resident radio man and his wife came on board. There was good fishing, but-next day we went on our way.

Caption: Hakahetau, in the Marquesas. To check their chronometers, navigators preferred to make a landfall at a high island .- Ernst Adermann, photographer

Our yacht berthed at Pier Seven, Honolulu. After entering the ship at the Custom House, I looked up the Catholic Mission, which was then on Fort Street opposite the Blaisdell Hotel.

Father Vincent seemed to be the business manager. I told him about the plight of Father Kerdal at Penrhyn Island.

"We have written Father Kerdal repeatedly to give up his post, and come here for medical attention. But he will not listen ....

"He wants to build a church," I said. "He hopes that treatment with insulin will stay the disease and make him able to carry on. There is a native medical practitioner on the island who surely can take care of him."

"It is too bad that he will not listen," said Father Vincent sternly. "We could give him the best of care here. The building of the church can wait."

Then his severe tone relented. "The New Zealand man-of-war Achilles will visit the island soon. So I will telegraph Auckland to ship an adequate supply of insulin. Also other things Father Kerdal will need. It should get there before Christmas.

A letter from Father Kerdal some time later told me that his medicine did indeed arrive before Christmas.

* * *

And did the good priest build his church?

Well, World War II was declared a few years later. I became skipper of a T-2 tanker called Apache Canyon. Loaded with fuel oil for the U.S. Navy, I crossed the tropical South Pacific many a time loaded, bound west, and in ballast bound to Balboa, Canal Zone, for another cargo. I was never close enough to sight Rakahanga or Penrhyn. When I was in that part of the world I always thought of Father Kerdal, the Fisherman and the Navigator and a couple of Christmases that I had been able to make better for an unselfish man.

I learned that the Lord was kind to his servant, Father Kerdal. Under the care of a capable native medical practitioner who administered the insulin he lived many a year. Enough time, indeed, to build the church. The walls of his edifice of coral lime rose slowly above the undergrowth. Captain Viggo Rasmussen, the administrator, died, but the "crazy priest" carried on.

Many Christmases came and were gone. One day Viggo's old schooner, Tiare Taporo - now under Captain Andy Thomson* - landed the corrugated iron for the roof and the stained glass windows that kind souls had donated. And finally a bell.

It took time to roof the church and to fit the windows. Slowly the steeple rose above the swaying palms. They built an altar of native woods and inlaid it with mother of pearl shell, They hung the bell in the belfry. 

Come a day when the natives, all in their best finery, slowly wended their way towards the edifice. All the congregation seated, Father Kerdal in his vestments says Evening Mass. The congregation sings - as only islanders can sing -"Silent Night" in the native tongue.

I am glad that the schooner Melrose and the schooner yacht Fisherman and also the little Navigator contributed their "mite" to all this.

Amen.

At the age of 90 I can say that my own days in the Southseas are done. No more will I sail the great Pacific in the heart of the trades. Most of my friends down there have passed on. Never again I will make an island landfall as day dawns, nor see the palms of Rakahanga lifting above the horizon's rim.

But it has been a good life. I wish you a Merry Christmas.

*) Nordhoff and Hall, residents of Tahiti and authors of Mutiny of the Bounty dedicated that book "To Captain Viggo Rasmussen, Schooner Tiare Taporo. Rarotonga and Captain Andy Thomson, Schooner Tagua, Rarotonga, Old friends who sail the seas the Bounty sailed."

Caption: Captain Fred Klebingat and Mr. Bunkley in front of Maxwell's store, Papeete. 

Some Old South Sea Hands

Oscar Nordman set up in business for himself in Papeete. He supplied ships with vegetables and other stores; here he is with his truck. He used the name "Oceanic" a lot in his enterprises, and also "Sonoma." He had been baggageman for the Oceanic Line on the old Mariposa, a brigantine-rigged steamer, and later he was on the Sonoma. His father was cook with Captain von Dahlern.

The building in the background is typical of the Papeete waterfront. It was the store and headquarters of Societe Commerciale de l'Oceanic and also the German consulate before the first world war. The S.C.O. company was a German enterprise a million-dollar outfit, took up a whole block. It was a South Sea island store that could supply anything from a needle to an anchor. Masts for a schooner. Any kind of foodstuff. They owned schooners to transport their goods to the various islands. And in return they bought copra and pearls. After World War I the French took over the building,

This photo was made about 1928. Oscar was leasing a part of the building for his saloon, called the Sonoma Bar. Over the bar was a sign: "Ask Oscar, He knows." The trouble was he knew too much. He started buying and chartering old schooners, loading them with bogus cargo, then sinking them and collecting the insurance. He would load "gasoline" that was just water, "sugar" that was just sand, autos without engines, The insurance company was suspicious of course, and finally he sank a schooner in water that was too shallow, only 20 fathoms instead of 100. So the insurance company sent down divers and found him out.

He was convicted and sentenced to Devil's Island, but Oscar had political influence. He managed to stay in Tahiti, and his wife went to work for him, finding lawyers. I always admired his wife, Margaret. A good dressmaker. She got lawyers and got Oscar out in about three or four years.

This photograph was made outside of the S.R. Maxwell & Co. store in Papeete about 1929. I am sitting there with Mr. Bunkley, the general manager of the store. I had the picture made to send to Capt. von Dahlern of S.N. Castle, because this bench is where he used to sit, talking to Bunkley. A couple of old South Sea hands, both of them.

Caption: A Tahitian girl. - Adermann Collection

Bunkley told me once how he came to be down there in the first place; it must have happened before the turn of the century 

He was in San Francisco and out of a job. He heard about a job open with Crawford (one of the oldest Papeete firms) to go as bookkeeper to "Tahaytee", That is the way Bunkely understood it. He had no idea where Tahaytee was. They sent him aboard the Galilee. He thought that he was bound for the island of Haiti in the West Indies. A week at sea, he found out that he was bound to Tahin, an island he did not even know about.

Bunkley knew nothing about bookkeeping either, but before he left San Francisco he bought himself a little book on this subject for which he paid 50 cents. This seems to have provided all he needed to know; as long as I knew Bunkley he was General Manager of S.R. Maxwell & Co.

* * *

Memories of Captain Klebingat

Those Old Happy Days In Tonga

(A letter from Miss Mildred H. Free, published in Pacific Islands Monthly, June 1957)

So Captain Klebingat is still on deck! Now, there is a man with real material for a book. He probably is one of the few men left who spent all his life in sail.

Captain Klebingat came along Tonga way with the Melrose, in 1925, when I was a member of the Morris Hedstrom staff there. He brought a cargo of lumber and oil and 1 think he made two or three trips. But that first trip nearly ended in disaster.

After unloading at Nukualofa, the Melrose set off for Niuafo'ou, to pick up a return load of copra for San Francisco; and our head manager and a branch manager decided to take the opportunity to go along on a visit of inspection. They took only enough food for a week, but had in addition a few supplies for Ramsay, the "Tin Can Mailman," including two cases of whisky - presumably to revive his gaspy throat after swimming out to the Tofua.

The Melrose got blown south to the Kermadecs, and was lost for six weeks. By the time they got to Niuafo'ou there was very little left to eat - and still less of Ramsay's whisky.

It was about this time that the Manukainiu got blown from Tonga to the New Hebrides, with a couple of

natives on board, a couple of coconuts, and a lot of hope. No one seemed to think that it was such a dreadful thing as it might appear to-day. They were lost for three months; but natives apparently were used to that sort of thing. 

Another time when Captain Klebingat was in Tonga he had a near mutiny on board. He was an immense man - kindly, strong, with something of the personality of Van Luckner - a born leader. For crew he had, as you can well understand, some of the worst that can be picked up in San Francisco; and they played up a bit in Tonga. Being months at sea, coming from San Francisco, may have added to the trouble.

One night, when the captain came on board, as soon as he stepped on the deck a seaman hit him with a belaying pin.

Of course, the police came into this, and Captain had to make a statement about the matter. He dictated the statement to me (I was the stenographer in the firm); and it was short and to the point, something on these lines;

"When the master boarded the ship, the said seaman came at the said master and struck him with a belaying pin (looking at me with a twinkle in his eye), said master defending himself."

This was a masterly understatement for, as a matter of fact, the said master hit that fellow so hard that he was unconscious for two days, and I think the ship sailed without him

Caption: Fair wind, and Captain Fred Klebingat takes his ease on the cabin companion as Melrose begins her voyage. Ernst Adermann, photographer

On his next trip, there happened to be in Nukualofa harbour a small yacht, containing a New Zealand family. They lived on the sea in this yacht and tripped around from place to place - a delightful life, but one that could not be lived to-day, with the form-filling-in and currency restrictions and other things that make a traveller's life a misery.

The family consisted of a father and mother, a young boy of about twelve, and a beauteous girl about seventeen, with a bounteous mop of hair, the colour of ripe wheat on the Darling Downs, in Queensland, a New Zealand complexion und a sun-tan, made by the sea and the sun und not got out of a bottle as today.

She apparently was the "crew" - I do not remember if the small vessel carried any other crew - and the minute she sailed into Captain Klebingat's horizon, it was a case with him.

The boss said to me one day: "Captain Klebingat says he is in love with that girl, and is going to come back and marry her." True enough, a couple of months later, he sent us a letter to be forwarded on to her (the yacht had gone, long since), with the remark: "My hat is still in the ring, as you see."

Sure enough, he did go back the following year to New Zealand and marry her.

Then, what about all those other colourful characters that flitted across the scene in Tonga in the late 'twenties - old Ned Sandys, from Nomuka (a direct descendant of an early Archbishop of York, of that name) who used to come to town in his cutter, and draw a couple of hundred pounds, which he took away in a little canvas bag, and then proceed to go to the Tonga Club for a festive night; but Ned was never known to lose that money, which he eventually took back to Nomuka to buy copra.

And then there was Ross Murray, who was merry one dark night, and jumped on a white horse which happened to be roaming around. This animal apparently belonged to the Queen; for, feeling the unaccustomed burden on its back, it promptly bolted and threw Ross Murray off in the Palace yard.

All those colourful and happy days are gone now in Tonga; people come down for a couple of years on a contract, and never get the atmosphere of the place like we did in the old days.

*****

Capt Klebingat on San Francisco in 1979

He had sailed into San Francisco in 1908, as a seaman-donkeyman on the S.N. Castle. In 1979, at the age of 90, he walked the city front recalling life through the years on what was East Street in his youth. He studied the four-part 1913 panorama: "Well, it was like this, you see." and the Captain was off on a fresh memory.

Over the years, starting in 1953, Karl Kortum, Director of the San Francisco Maritime Museum, listened intently to Captain Klebingat, setting down the captain's detailed recollections of 57 years at sea – mostly in the Pacific, "My home from home." From seaman to captain of square-rigged vessels in the South Seas; he mastered a range of vessels, from Hollywood yachts to Liberty ships. Captain Klebingat died in Coos Bay, Oregon, aged 95 – his words set here and are the real thing - "Well, maybe I was wrong 2% of the time."

Captain Fred Klebingat recalled, "San Francisco in those days was known all up and down the Pacific Coast as 'The City'; the Embarcadero was known as East Street; and all this part of town was known as 'The City Front'. It was here that the work of the city was done. If you walked in the Ensign Saloon and called "Captain" – half the men in the place would look up. If I was in the money, I'd get oysters at Herman Dree's, washed down with lager, and have a steam-towel shave and shine on my boots. You'd know it was summer in this picture – June 1st was Straw Hat Day – but I never wore such a thing. It was like this – the big talk around 1913 was the Panama Canal – due to open in 1914. Think what it meant for San Francisco shipping, if you didn't have to fight your way around Cape Horn with freezing seas over the deck."

You could buy a house cheaper than a car

"Horses still did most of the heavy pulling on the waterfront," Klebingat recalled. "Big iron wheels made a terrible racket on the paving." Also noted, "During April, emigration from Hamburg and Bremen is heavier than in years, 43,000 people left Germany for the United States." "Well," said the Captain. "I was only 16, when I left on the German ship D.J. Watjen, bound for Chile by way of Cape Horn in 1905. Sailed into San Francisco in 1908. I'm not one of those fellows with one foot in Germany and one in this country, what we used to call 'white-washed Yanks'."

*****

Sea History, Spring 1981

A Fine Day in the Southeast Trades

I do miss our mutual friend Captain Archie Horka. I never met him, but at one time we were only a mile or so apart, at sea. I did not know then that we were going to correspond years later.

It was on a Sunday afternoon, a fine day in the Southeast Trades. The American schooner Melrose, deep-loaded and with a high deckload of lumber, was making good tracks toward her destination, Suva

in the Fiji Islands. A sail came up on the starboard quarter. It gained on us rapidly and a couple of hours later the American 5-masted barkentine Katherine Mackall was abeam. Although adapted from a steamer hull she was a magnificent sight.

There was no doubt as to why it was possible for her to outsail us, since she was sailing light with a tremendous freeboard. Aboard, as it later turned out, was Archie Horka, then sailing as AB. I was making my last trip with lumber as skipper of the Melrose.

In later years, I always closed my letters to Horka: "May all our days be as happy as that Sunday, when we met at sea in the Southeast Trades."

Few of us now survive from that era, but my old ship Falls of Clyde does, in Honolulu. She has had her troubles but she will get over them I am sure. We should organize a Friends of Falls of Clyde to help. I look forward to the day when Falls of Clyde will have all ropes rove off and sails bent, a real representative of those argosies of windships that crowded the wharves of Honolulu in days long gone.

Never again will she and other tall ships leave the wharves of Honolulu under sail and never again will the harbor be so beautiful.

Captain Fred K. Klebingat

Coos Bay, Oregon

*****

Sea Letter, Winter 1981

Photograph from Dr. Jurgen Meyer, Hamburg "Although a modern ship in most ways, built in 1892, the Watjen was behind the times in having no steam donkey engine to handle cargo and in steering with tiller ropes instead of a patent worm-screw ... " The cloud of steam in this photograph is issuing from the tug hauling the D.H. Watjen alongside the wharf, probably in Brooklyn.

Christmas Afloat: My First and My Last

by Capt. Fred Klebingat

On Christmas morning with a rising southeast gale, the so-called "steam schooner" Coos Bay - actually a war surplus L S T efficiently adapted for the lumber trade with Southern California - is hurrying ahead; the exhausts of her twin diesels roar, she leaves a wide wake astern in the rising seas and gloom. At breakfast time the ship is only thirty miles away from her destination; she is trying to salve as much of the holiday as possible. To be sure, there will not be any longshoremen waiting on the dock, for this is one of the few days in the year on which they refuse to toil.

Rainfall and seas increase as she progresses. At last here is Coos Bay bar, which she must cross, but it is

not very rough with the wind from this quarter. Going in with a flood tide, the vessel does not take long to reach the Bayshore dock and its stacks of packaged lumber.

The Coos Bay turns around, one engine ahead, one astern, and ties up portside to the wharf. The gangway is lowered and as most of the crew have their homes in California, they hurry ashore to greet their loved ones from the dock phone booth. The time I am writing about is the late 1960s. 

It now begins to rain in torrents. This is quite usual for this part of Oregon, even if it is not blowing a gale outside at sea. For myself, chief mate and sometimes relieving master, I decide to linger on board and see what Guy Dalton, the steward and cook, will put on the table. Guy is a man nearing sixty, a crucial member of the ship's company, tall and slender. The best kind of shipmate, a man of few words and master of his craft.

The messmen set the table. Baked ham and turkey with dressing and mashed potatoes arrive. Followed

by cake and pies and nuts and raisins. There is wine on the table - unusual - and on a separate sideboard

all the workings of a cocktail for those who could not call the day Christmas without one.

Clarence Krueger, the man in charge of the wharf, had taken our lines when we neared the dock. Clarence now enters the messroom, "Merry Christmas!" says he.

"Have a drink, Clarence," someone calls to him.

"You look cold and wet."

"I may at that," says Clarence, shedding his lumberjack's "tin coat."

Ken Lewis, the paymaster from the lumber company that owns the Coos Bay, enters the mess room;

"Here is the money you requested," he says to the captain. "You will want some dough for the crew - a

Merry Christmas to everybody."

Ken is greeted.

Clank, clank, clank - the sound of steel-shod shoes on the steel deck outside.

"That must be Crumpacker."

"Merry Christmas," says Crumpacker, coming through the door. "I was just passing and saw you were in." Crumpacker, the sales manager of the organization, must have been a saving man; the little steel plates nailed to the heels of his shoes are there to save the leather heels from wearing down. We can always tell that he has arrived by that clank, clank, clank of his heels.

A jolly mood prevails. The fine food and drink contribute. And it helps that we have managed to make port and save some part of Christmas day after all.

With a satisfied feeling, a cup of coffee at hand, I sample the apple pie. Clarence Krueger, the first of the Coos Bay's Christmas guests, sits down near me, nursing a brandy.

"You must have passed many a Christmas afloat," says he conversationally. "Some must have been cheerful and some must have been not so good." (I am the patriarch aboard, eighty years old and still going to sea.)

I could see that Clarence was ready for a yarn. "That is true," I reply. " ... I was just thinking of my first  Christmas afloat. As this is likely to be the last Christmas I ever will celebrate on shipboard, I might just as well tell you about it." 

This is what I told him.

In May of 1905 I shipped as deckboy on board of the German full-rigged ship D.H. Watjen at Port Talbot, Wales. I had wanted to go to sea ever since I could remember, inspired, I suppose, by the rich variety of shipping in the harbor of Kiel, the town where I grew up. There were old down-Easters in the ice trade with Norway (for some reason called "ice klippers"), an iron Indiaman delivering teak from Burma, topsail schooners from Portmadoc bringing slate for roofs, Baltic fore-and-afters, and sometimes an old brig, fetching granite curbstones; Kiel has no native stone. It was a booming city.

The waterfront hummed and I hung around the docks. My mother did not want me to go to sea - it was mostly a hard and dangerous life in those days - but she died when I was thirteen, and my father, who had a good job in the post office, acceded to my wishes a couple of years later. He wrote to a great number of companies, but they all wanted money from him to take me as deckboy, 350 to 500 marks. The German deckboy system of making a start under the eye of the ship's afterguard was not all that different from the British apprentice system (apprentice officers). With few exceptions the deck-boys, the ordinary seamen, and the younger German A.B.s were there because German law required that they serve twelve months in a square-rigger - a schooner wouldn't do - as able seamen before being eligible to pass the examination for ship's officer. That is what I wanted to do. You had to be deckboy first, then you advanced to ordinary, and finally you became one of that exalted class in the fo'c'sle of a German ship, the able seamen (or A.B.s). To be an able seaman for one year meant maybe three years working up to it. If you didn't have in mind becoming an officer, there was no point in going to sea as deckboy in German sailing ships. It was an easier life in steam.

Somebody told my father about D.H. Watjen Co. of Bremen which had a policy of taking in young men born on the waterfront at no charge; in fact, they paid the deckboy ten marks a month rather than the five marks which other companies paid. 

This photograph, from the collection of Dr. Jurgen Meyer (Director of the Altonaer Museum in Hamburg), shows the crew of the ship D.H. Watjen, though not on the voyage that is here described. Three deckboys sit cross-legged in front.

Watjen at one time was the largest sailing ship firm in Germany; they owned forty sailing ships in the early 80s; by 1905 they still operated sixteen ships and barks. When I went to their offices in Bremen, even as a boy I was impressed with the antiquity of the place. An old, old brick building shaded by trees; I noticed how thick the walls were as I entered.

The firm accepted me and I was told to join the D.H. Watjen in Wales, a steel square-rigger of 2185 gross tons. Most of the deepwater sailing ships were built of steel in those days, except that some of the

older ones were iron. I paid my own fare across the North Sea from Germany in the steamship Argo. We

tied up in St. Katherine's Dock, London, and I made my way across that famous city to Paddington Station and took the Great Western Railway for Wales. Port Talbot was an unimpressive place, coal dust all over, not much vegetation, bare shale hills behind and a tidal harbor where vessels entered and left through dock gates only at high tide. 

But Port Talbot was not what interested me, it was the ships - the sailing ships. The docks were full of them taking on cargoes of Welsh coal for the various industries and depots of the world (Welsh coal was considered the finest by steamship engineers). Some of the coal had been pressed into a form of patent fuel called "briquets." 

There was an energy shortage in the world in those days, too, but it was regional. San Francisco, for example, had no native energy source of any consequence - its coal came around Cape Horn from Newcastle-upon-Tyne and Wales in a steady stream of sailing ships; others crossed to the Golden Gate from Newcastle, New South Wales. New England was supplied from the mines inland from Chesapeake Bay and the Delaware by what Capt. Lewis Parker, the maritime historian, quite rightly calls "The Great Coal Schooners of New England." They included the six-master Wyoming, the largest wooden ship ever built at something over 3700 gross tons. She was launched as late as 1909, four years after the voyage I am going to describe.

The most deprived part of the world of all, as far as energy went, was the coast of Chile. And that's where the Watjen and a good many of the other sailing ships that I found in Port Talbot's grimy docks were bound. Alan Villiers says that at any one time in 1905, the year of which I am speaking, it was reckoned that at least four hundred square-rigged ships (of the five thousand such ships of all nationalities in world trade) were making Cape Horn voyages.

But we saw few of those vessels; that speaks for the size of the ocean. We loaded a full cargo of briquets and carried it to Pisagua and Iquiquie, anchorages on the northern coast of Chile, off the Atacama Desert. (The desert provided the nitrate that was our homeward bound cargo. Nitrate was brought to Europe in great quantities for use in munitions and as fertilizer.) 

We battled for five weeks off Cape Horn with gales and ice and snow and mountainous seas. Our decks grew a green slime. And when we arrived ... all this to bring a cargo of briquets to this God-forsaken shore? We got rid of the briquets, took in some nitrate at Iquiquie, and towed to a place called Caleta Buena to take in the bulk of our homeward-bound cargo. There were about four or five sailing ships an-

chored with us here in a cove, some discharging coal and some loading nitrate.

Everything was done by hand on the D.H. Watjen - she was what sailors called a "hand puller." That meant there was no steam donkey engine, which some sailing ships had. At Pisagua and Iquiquie we passed every single briquet from hand to hand into the lighters that carried them ashore. There must have been over 3500 tons of them and every briquet weighed about twenty-five pounds. The things are made of coal dust, using coal tar as a binder. The dust covers your face; sweat and the coal dust together

irritate your face and the tropical heat adds to this and the skin peels off. If you rub your eyes, they will close up. There were always a few of the crew laid up, and some of them needed medical care at the so-called hospital ashore (I doubt it deserved that name). I took good care that I never rubbed my eyes and so I was the only one in the crew who worked every hour in the cargo. I was fifteen when I joined the D.H. Watjen, going on sixteen. As I was a husky kid, the tallest person on board at a little less than six feet, I was the only deckboy singled out for cargo work. Well, thank the Lord, we finally got to the end of the messy briquets. They were out of the ship; we were now at our loading port and taking aboard nitrate. At least, working the hand winch was clean.

Let me tell you about this contraption, commonly called a dolly winch for some reason. 

In the fore 'tween deck, out of sight, we stored three of these devices. Though out of sight, they were always available. No paint was wasted on them; they were for utility only and they were so constructed. Two iron standards, each like a "V" upside down and about four feet high, were mounted on wooden planks, we will say 3-by-8s, which again were braced together. At their apex these V-irons supported a drum about eight inches in diameter, which on each side had an iron handle long enough to give two men a chance to act as motive power. A short piece of about three-inch circumference rope acted as a brake.

This contraption was not bolted down or mounted. No, about eight or ten bags of nitrate moored the machine to the deck. To keep the wooden drum in motion five men were needed, four men to supply the necessary horsepower, while one was in reserve to spell the others about every 40 bags.

A platform sloping towards the hatch was built from rail to hatch. The second mate works as hatch tender on this platform. The rope fall from the hand winch is rove through a block up on the lower yardarm and it is fitted with a peculiar hook, quite light, sharply pointed, and shaped to a right angle. This is so it can be withdrawn even with weight on it. Another such hook is fitted to the end of the burton* that is rove through a block on the span over the hatch. The burton man is usually a Chilean; he

checks the lowering of the sack from the end of a brass-covered wood spar that is secured to the fore-part of the hatch coaming.

The stops used on the sacks, "chokers" you call them, are made of gasket stuff; they are also of a particular shape. They are rove around the middle of the sack. It must be the middle, otherwise the sack would drop out of the strop; in other words it would not "choke."

The man in the lighter (the lanchero he is called) has passed the strop around the sack; the second mate has shot down the end of the winch fall to the lanchero; a man on the winch has stopped the fast rotating winch drum with the rope brake as the hook reaches the lanchero's hand. The lanchero hooks the fall in the choker. "Up!" the second mate orders. The four men at the winch now carry on like madmen cranking those winch handles around as fast as they can. The sack rises up to the breast height of the hatch tender ... he holds the hook of the burton in his left hand. He grabs the nitrate sack with his right hand, with his left he hooks on the burton. The burton man sets his rope tight.

"Let go!" the second mate orders. The four men at the winch let go the handles, the winch drum starts to spin and the second mate with a deft extraction of the hook shoots the end of the winch fall down to the waiting lanchero.

*) The burton is a second cargo fall rove through a block aloft. After the regular cargo fall, led to the drum of the winch, has lifted the sack of nitrate above the level of the ship's rail, the sack's weight is transferred to the burton by setting the burton taut and slacking the cargo fall. The burton block is located on what is called the cargo span, rigged over the hatch, so the sack swings over and aligns itself with the hatch, ready for lowering into the hold.

The dolly winch in action aboard the steel bark Invercauld, built in Scotland the year before the Watjen was launched in Germany. Notice the sacks that "moored this contraption" to the deck. Here six men man the cranks to hoist up a basket of coal. The hatch tender stands on a platform running from rail to hatch, as described on the D.H. Watjen. - Photograph from Captain P. A. Grueland, Denmark 

The lanchero hooks the strop and "Up!" goes the next one. The sacks weight a hundred kilos - over two hundred pounds by our way of measuring.

A nitrate cargo is heavy and so you have to distribute the weight in the hold. The nitrate is stowed tier by tier - each tier a little narrower than the one below so that, after the lower hold is full, the tiers slope up from either side like the roof of a house. Only in a few places is the nitrate cargo extended to reach the side of the ship; this is to brace it. The same formation was used in the 'tween deck on a smaller scale.

* * * 

"But hold on there - my coffee is getting cold. It is a long story!" I rose from my chair. "Let me get another cup of coffee and a little more of that fine apple pie."

"You are telling me about the good old days," Clarence ventured.

"You said it," I replied. "Ten hours of cranking in nitrate under a broiling sun. I wonder at times how much horsepower we actually put forth to hoist up those sacks at the crazy speed we always used. And I

have forgotten how many sacks it took to make a cargo."

* * *

But let me tell you a little about how we got to this place. After all, 1905 is the year that Basil Lubbock cites in The Lest of the Windjammers as the first of a "disastrous" cycle of three off the Horn with a number of ships and men being lost. Alan Villiers based his most recent book The War With Cape Horn on the same fateful 1905 - he says that fifty square-riggers were damaged or forced back that year. Wm. H.S. Jones' The Cape Horn Breed gives a harrowing description of what happened to the full-rigged ship British Isles when Capt. Barker got her into far south latitudes. We were in Pisagua when she arrived with crew members losing feet and hands to frostbite - terrible. A number of her men lost their lives.

None of this happened in the D.H. Watjen, a well-run ship, well-handled, although in a severe winter like 1905 we could not expect to escape hardship. We had been preparing for Cape Stiff since reaching the latitude of the River Plate. All the old, patched and quilted sails that we had used in the trade winds had come down and had been replaced with the best suit, mostly brand new.

Caption: "We battled for five weeks off Cape Horn with gales and ice and snow and mountainous seas..."

A well-found ship like ours had three suits of sails, and probably four sets of lower topsails. In the trades all the footropes and blocks were overhauled and new running rigging rove off where thought necessary. South of the Plate the spare spars were secured with extra lashings and each of the three hatches had an extra layer of three-by-twelve planks lashed on top to prevent their being stove in. Each hatch wedge was seated on a small square of canvas that was then folded around it and the cleat that held it and stitched together with palm and needle. This was to make sure that a sea didn't wash the wedges out and so free the hatch battens. A wire manrope was stretched taut from forward to aft so a man would have a continuous grip as he worked his way along the main deck in heavy seas. As we actually closed with the Horn two men were sent to the wheel and two other men manned relieving tackles hooked into the tiller on each side.

Although a modern ship in most ways, built in 1892, the Watjen was behind the times in having no steam donkey engine to handle cargo and in steering with tiller ropes instead of a patent worm-screw  attached to the rudder head. (I understand she later got a portable donkey that was rolled from hatch to hatch.) The tiller ropes were protected with a teak-wood cover practically the whole width of the ship. It was all very ancient and one of the disadvantages was that when a sea struck the rudder the shock or "kick" was transmitted directly up to the helmsman through the tiller ropes. The relieving tackles were rigged as "preventers," as a sailor calls them. A man squatted on either side, protected somewhat by the canvas dodger around the taffrail, and watched the helmsman, taking up or slacking on his tackle as necessary. This saved the man at the weather helm from being suddenly flung over the top and down on the other side, landing on his head, when a sea struck the rudder blade and the wheel began a sudden spin.

In the Watjen we deckboys were not quartered in the fo'c'sle with the ordinary seamen and the able seamen. The four of us had a house to ourselves, just like the apprentices had in a limejuicer, right abaft the mainmast and in sight of the poop. The British would call this structure the "halfdeck." A fine enough habitation in fine weather, but the worst place in the ship when the weather turned bad. Most of the seas boarding the ship when hove to or head-reaching came over the rail right here. There was scarcely a moment under these conditions when this portion of the deck was sufficiently free of water that we could even get into or leave our habitation. Doors in those days were not watertight, nicely fitted with rubber gaskets and dogs to hold them shut. 

We now found we had to spend time on watch below bailing out the place and looking for a chance to open the upper half of the door to empty the bucket outside. The seams on the lower half of the door we had caulked with oakum to stop at least some of Drake's Strait from getting into our quarters.

Not that alone, but we had to carry our food along to our home from the galley in the forward house. Very often it was lost before we could get inside the door. The ship had no fore-and-aft bridge, or "cat-walk." We lived in a bad and dangerous place.

The sailors in the fo'c'sle saw our plight. The Watjen had a good crew that voyage, for all that there were a couple of troublemakers amongst them, real sea lawyers. But sailors are warm-hearted and they took us into their quarters where we occupied the bunks of the A.B.s who were on watch. That was a great improvement although the fo'c'sle was not a palace cither; some water was always sloshing around on deck. There was no stove and the steel partitions and beams overhead were always sweating, making even the bunks damp. But at that, it was heaven in comparison to the little house on deck that we had abandoned. The galley door was only about ten feet aft of the fo'c'sle, and there was a chance to get the food into the fo'c'sle while it was still hot and not doused with salt water.

During the voyage, the ship had developed a list, due to the cargo of briquets wearing somewhat when rolling about. So when we were on the port tack, the cargo would slide to starboard and do the opposite thing when going about. There was about a foot of space between the cargo and the side of the ship in the 'tween deck.

On the occasion I am going to tell about, the Watjen was on the port tack. We had just had coffee in the morning, and I was going to wash the mugs, a task strictly for a boy in a German sailing ship. I looked out of the upper door of the fo'c'sle; the ship was momentarily quiet and there was about 18 inches or two feet of water in the lee scuppers. So I slid the bolt on the inside of the lower half of the door, closed it behind me (reaching inside to slide the bolt back into its socket), and rushed across the deck to fill a wooden bucket. At this very moment the ship gave a tremendous heave to leeward - she already had a list. I looked up and saw a solid wall of water at least ten feet high looming above me.

Feeling her motion, the sailors inside had quickly closed the upper half of the door to keep the fo'c'sle from being washed out. They could rescue me later - at least, I suppose that was their reasoning. I was locked out - I could not get back in without scooting across the deck and fumbling with the latch, which had a ring or nob on the outside, I just forget which. There wasn't time.

When the ship had entered these high latitudes, emergency arrangements were made for the braces so that the men could get at them to haul when heavy seas were sweeping the decks. The braces for the crojik were led from the main top to the rail in front of the poop. The fore braces were led to a spar on either side, lashed from the ship's rail to the fore fiferail, just abaft the fo'c'slehead. These braces were at hand and I grabbed them as that great wave finally fell.

I was under water forever. I came near to drowning right on the fore deck, or so it seemed to me. I hung onto the braces like grim death, and the icy Cape Horn salt water whirled me around, whirled me around ... It took quite a long time for the ship to free herself of that tremendous load of water. Meanwhile the sailors could not get near me. Of course I survived, or I wouldn't be sitting here. They finally reached me, gagging on the salt water I'd swallowed, chilled, frightened. That was my souvenir of the famous Cape Horn and I've never forgotten it.

We had an excellent cook in the Watjen, about as good a man as you could ever hope to find in the galley of a European sailing ship. He was washed out repeatedly. The galley on the Watjen, like most sailing ship galleys, was a narrow passageway that ran from side to side of the deckhouse. That way there was always a lee door to use in heavy weather. The doors in all the deckhouses were in two halves, an upper and lower. When he felt it was safe to do so in heavy weather, the cook would open the upper part of the lee door to get some air into the place. But now and then a larger sea than usual boarded the ship from alee, poured in the open door and drowned the galley fire. Quite a few times I saw the galley fill up to nearly the top of the range.

But our cook was resourceful. So his galley is flooded. He gets busy with a bucket ...

One time I was on my way along the poop, a sea boarded the ship, the galley door must have been open, a white plume of steam came out of the galley stack.

"There goes our hot dinner," said the captain.

But no, the cook got busy right away with his bucket; somewhere up under the deckhead he had some kindling in a dry place, a shot of kerosene, and up blazed the fire. The captain (and the rest of us) had a proper dinner. Our remarkable cook never failed to produce a hot meal in all those five weeks we were off Cape Horn.

Under these conditions the tiles that formed the galley floor were too slick to stand on, and so a plank was brought in that ran from side to side and which had cleats on it. His pots were all deep and they were lashed to the racks on the top of the range with spun yarn so that they would stay in place. 

He had to have deep pots or his food would spill over whenever the ship took a heavy heel to leeward.

Another thing - this particular cook would dry the men's clothing, as much as he could, and one of the deckboys (not me) was detailed to keep the galley fire going at night. Now this was unusual. Sailing ship cooks did not encourage use of the galley by the crew. Ordinarily it was locked after the day was done .* I am sure that on the Watjen it was arranged between Captain Gerdes and the cook that the galley fire was kept going in order to dry the men's clothes. Gerdes was a captain who was considerate of his crew.

The cook helped himself to provisions as he needed them. Now, in German ships it was customary that the second mate was in charge of provisions. We called him the Speckschneider or "bacon cutter." But on the D.H. Watjen the second mate held the cook in respect:

"That man could sweep out the storeroom and make a pudding."

The cook knew how to make use of the provisions to best advantage. If the ship ran fast, dish out a little

more. If the ship ran slow, cut down a little. Nothing was left when we got to port. 

So on the Watjen the second mate whacked out only the margarine. (On the articles it was provided that we got "butter or best margarine.") The boys went aft to get their whack once a week, and the ordinary seamen went and got it for the sailors. You go to the storeroom at so-and-so time on so-and-so day. The second mate weighs it out. Into any old tin. Four boys ... alright, get a can that holds four pounds. Then get four smaller tins and divide it up later. It was kept in your bunk or in your sea chest. 

The cook hailed from Bremerhaven. He was a man in his forties; he had been cook at one time I remember he told us in a cable-laying ship. My watchmate - Willie - also hailed from Bremerhaven so we were in favor. If the two of us were on watch, the cook might say about eight o'clock in the evening, "Reach inside the lee door." There we would find a couple of rolls spread with cabin butter or an extra piece of meat. After that he would lock up the galley; he locked it at night during the good-weather part of the voyage. 

Sea stories depict Fo'c'sle Jack lolling about in the Trades and smoking his pipe. But it could be altogether different; life can be very monotonous on a long trip and if there is a trouble-maker aboard, things may come to a head. If one wants to find fault, why not take it out on the cook? No matter how good he is ...

It happened one day on the D. H. Watjen; the gang was going to beat up the cook. It happened that he was making yeast that day and was bottling it. The men at the galley door spelled trouble. Quick as a flash, the cook knocked off the bottom of one of the bottles and with the neck of the bottle in his hand and the jagged edges pointing at his tormentors, he made for them.

"Move, you bastards!"

And they moved. And never at any time after that did they come near the cook or speak disrespectfully  of him.

I must now tell you a little more about the Chilean port that we labored toward in the fashion described to finally take in our homeward-bound cargo. Caleta Buena. The steep sides of the cordillera, nearly vertical, rise from the water's edge. There is only a narrow foreshore that holds the warehouses, the shacks of the laborers, and a cantina or two. It is a dry, hot, and desiccated scene. There is not a blade of

grass or even a cactus growing. No rain falls for years. I have been told that when that strange thing happens- when it does rain - the mountain covers itself with flowers. But they wilt in no time at all.

The nitrate is lowered from the level of the Atacama desert to the foreshore by an incline, a full car going down hauls an empty or partly loaded car to the top.

To give you an idea of how desolate we found the coast of Chile, I will point out that myself and the other boys were only ashore about three hours and we were glad to get back on board. Imagine that - boys! Always ready for an adventure. Our shore visit was at Iquiquie, the largest town on this stretch of coast. We bought some chocolate and tinned milk. The place wilted us in the same way it wilted the flowers.

There was not even a proper landing at Caleta Buena. Just to get from a small boat to shore was hazardous. There was a thick rope hanging from a beam above the boat landing. The boat rises on the swell ... you grab the rope and swing yourself to the pier. I recall Captain Gerdes one day was leaving shore. He grabbed the rope, but let go at the wrong moment - the boat was falling on a diminishing swell. Our captain dropped about six feet and one of his feet went through the fancy teak grating in the stern sheet of the boat. The old carpenter had a lot to say about clumsy skippers who break gratings maybe just to aggravate busy ship's carpenters.

The carpenter in the D. H. Watjen was 72 years old. He never washed himself. When one shirt wore out he put another on - moving the old one to the outside to take the wear and tear. Nobody bothered him very much, except that once in awhile the captain interrupted his leisurely carpentry duties and sent him aloft to help the rest of the crew take in sail.

*) On a west coast schooner, the cook's cabin was an extension of the galley; the galley did not run through, side to side.

The carpenter wasn't keen about this. He forged himself a snap hook out of steel and made it fast to himself with several turns of ratline stuff around the waist. When he got out on the yard he snapped himself fast onto the jackstay. It was an early version of the safety belt now worn by industrial workers.

We were still loading the ship come Christmas Day. The cook did his best to celebrate the holiday. Recently my sister in Germany found a letter dated December 27, 1905, that I wrote to my father:

... there certainly was enough to eat with us. Christmas Eve we had some punch (rum punch, courtesy of Captain Gerdes) and the cook baked a Kloben. He used citron, milk, sugar and some cabin butter. Each of us boys got one slice and it tasted better than Baker Lindemann's with his currants and raisins. It was a large slice and had plenty of figs and walnuts. 

At Iquiquie I bought a can of cocoa and two tins of condensed milk and some sugar. I have some left. The first Christmas Day we also received a tea kettle full of wine. The first Christmas Day quite a few of the crew were drunk. We, the boys, also received a mug of grog. In the afternoon the men came aft to wish the captain a Merry Christmas. 

"We wish you a Merry Christmas. But it is rather dry." 

So the captain laughed, and gave them two bottles of rum.

The cook made a stew out of prunes and served preserved potatoes, and he roasted canned beef for Christmas dinner. (This was an offering that we always called "rope yarns".) With the mug of grog inside us and that splendid meal at an end, we boys - four in number - are found sitting on our sea chests, each smoking a cigarette. We are now back in the little house abaft the mainmast; no seas are crashing against the door. We are in the best of humors.

Boys are not allowed to smoke on board German sailing ships. Otto Gau, the Steuermann (mate), looks

in the door:

"Merry Christmas," he says, "Smoke your cigarettes. I hope you enjoy them." Contentment sat on the D.H. Watjen.

But there are two Christmas Days to celebrate in Germany - and aboard its ships.

On the second Christmas Day at about seven o'clock in the morning arrived the stower, the burton man, and the man who handles the sacks on the table in the hold. In the distance appears a loaded lighter.

"Well, we have to work this day after all; I hate to do it. But tell the men to turn to, Steuermann," says the captain. 

"Turn to!" the Steuermann orders.

"This is Christmas!" Ernest, the big shot in the fo'c's'le, replies. "There is not work on Christmas."

"We have to work, we cannot turn the lighter back," says Gau.

"Forget it. We don't work on Christmas Day."

"You cannot refuse duty," the captain says after he has called the crew aft. "I'll be obliged to log you. It will cost you a month's pay."

"We do not work on Christmas Day," says Ernest, "and that is that."

But by now the lighter is alongside. It must be discharged. The crew won't do it so the deckboys are mustered and the "idlers" or petty officers. Four boys crew the winch, and the old carpenter and the steward help out. It is slow work; Chips is not much help, and Willie, my watch mate, is not one of the huskiest. He had not been ordered to this work at the cargo for this reason. As I remember, we discharged two lighters before the day was over.

In the evening I was one of the boat crew that put Captain Gerdes on shore.

"It must have been a good Christmas for you boys," says he. "Look, you earned three marks." Three whole marks for ten hours of grind in the tropical sun! Three marks; that was 75 cents as the exchange was those days. Well, we thanked the captain for the chance to make it. The whole day was overtime.

Ordinarily we worked two hours a day overtime. I made more in the two hours overtime each day than I made in the eight hours at regular pay." It was forty Pfennig overtime rate an hour for A.B.s and thirty Pfennig for boys. (There are 100 Pfennig to a mark.) I do not see to this day why I, as a boy, employed as one of the "horsepowers" at the hand winch, should have got ten Pfennig less than the A.B.s, especially as I produced real horsepower and some A.B.s rested on the handles. But I did not even think of laying up. This was my first ship; I was determined to succeed in my profession.

*) On the pay table at the German consulate at Dunkerque when the voyage ended I was paid for 136 hours overtime at thirty Pfennig an hour, two hours each day. (German law forbade the crew working cargo for more than eight hours a day in the tropics without being paid overtime.) Taking off the ten hours at Christmas time, that means that I worked 63 days in the cargo, plus Christmas; that makes 64. In that time I worked - without missing a day - in moving by hand a total of seven thousand tons of cargo: the outward-bound cargo handled briquet by briquet, the homeward-bound cargo lifted in at the cranks of the iron hand winch.

Caption: In the wheelhouse of the "steam schooner" Rolando, Chief Mate Fred Klebingat (right) conns the helm. Like the Coos Bay, the diesel-powered Rolando was a World War II surplus craft converted for the lumber trade. The Rolando was a former LSM, or "medium landing ship."

The day after the second Christmas Day Ernest and Carl, the spokesmen for the crew, had another trick up their sleeve. The captain had told them he was logging them a month's pay for not working on the second Christmas Day - they were going to get even. They both declared themselves sick. 

The captain called the doctor out from shore to check on their faked symptoms. 

"Whatever it is," the doctor said, "I have never seen anything like it."

"Some Christmas!" Clarence Krueger said, sitting in the snug saloon of the Coos Bay. "Celebrated with what we would call now a labor beef."

"Well, not the worst Christmas," said I. "After all I made three marks."

"Come on - seventy-five cents is practically nothing."

"It is when your day's wage is a little over eight cents."

"Eight cents a day?"

"Eight decimal one five, to be exact."

The figure was so small that it impelled Clarence to make some remark about the wage I was getting at the end of my seafaring career - now. Instead of the ten marks, or $2.50 a month I received as deckboy on the D.H. Watjen, I was paid $1485 a month when I relieved as skipper on the Coos Bay.

"But money ... " I said, "I'll tell you what counted more than all that overtime I earned in the D.H. Watjen, not that I didn't gloat over every Pfennig.

"On the voyage home Captain Gerdes said in the presence of the mate as I passed that way:" 'Steuermann, that man earned more overtime than anyone in the ship.'

"That was the first time I was called a man - that's when I felt grown up for the first time. I had worked every ton of briquets and nitrate."

"We have advanced quite a bit in cargo handling since those days," I said, after a pause. "There is a diesel crane mounted on board the Coos Bay and forklifts down in the hold to move the cargo - not a Chileno trained to stagger along with a 200 lb. sack on his back."

"There is a difference ... " Clarence said.

"Yes, there is. There is another difference. That day at Caleta Buena, I had a chance to look ahead, a life before me, a boy's view.

"Now, I can look back, my life is behind me; there will be no more Christmases afloat. My sailing days

are nearly done."

"Which Christmas was the happiest?" asked Clarence, changing the subject.

"This is a pretty good one. Guy makes good coffee, and have you tried his apple pie?"

"You are easily satisfied ... "

"After all, I'm here."

"You wouldn't prefer to be sitting on your sea chest in the boy's house on the D.H. Watjen, a good dinner inside you, smoking an illegal cigarette, and all of life before you?"

"Not particularly. There is another way to look at it. Bill Adams, the sea writer, put it well."

I rose and went to my cabin and got the quote:

"If a man has spent his boyhood by the sea and the best of his years upon it, he'll have a grand picture gallery to wander in when he is old and awaits his pilot."

Clarence nodded and smiled.

"Guy," he said to the steward, "I think I'll join Fred in a piece of that apple pie."

The so-called "steam schooner" Coos Bay was actually a World War II surplus LST ("tank landing ship") efficiently adapted for the lumber trade between Coos Bay and Southern California. The term "steam schooner," referring to a previous generation of lumber-carrying vessels, died hard on the Pacific Coast. - Photograph by Victor C. West

About the Author

Capt. Fred K. Klebingat was born near Kiel, Germany, in 1889. In this year's Christmas story (the captain has written eight of these stories, true accounts, for the San Francisco Maritime Museum - now the National Maritime Museum), the captain tells how he first came to go to sea. 

Five of his Christmas stories have been republished by the Bernice P. Bishop Museum of Honolulu in a book called Christmas at Sea.

"I realized at an early date that there must be some seafaring going on where one did not have to round Cape Horn in the middle of the Southern winter ... " Captain Klebingat wrote me in later years. He found it on the Pacific Coast in lumber schooners and barkentines and rose to command, although his first trip as captain was from Kobe to Manila in an exotic old Dutch bark, teak over iron ribs, with a cargo of empty gin bottles and carboys of acid on deck. "Reckless Ross" Millman, the first man to ride a

motorcycle around the inside of a barrel, traveled as passenger (his cycle and barrel were in the hold) - he had to get to Manila by Carnival time. That was in 1918, after Klebingat had spent two years as chief mate of the Falls of Clyde and later had been wrecked on the coast of Japan in the four-masted bark Star of Poland.

In 1919, Capt. Klebingat took command of the four-masted schooner Melrose and continued in her until the mid-twenties; the Melrose was the last regular Southseas-man out of San Francisco carrying lumber to Fiji and Tonga and returning with copra from Rotuma, Tonga, Niuafoo (Tin Can Island), and Niuatobutabu. The captain subsequently spent the 1930s as master of large schooner yachts in South Sea voyaging, commanded Liberty ships and tankers during World War II in both the Atlantic and Pacific and, after the war, spent over two decades in the "last steam schooners" as described here.

Capt. Klebingat is in all likelihood the most remarkable sea captain left in this country - possibly in the world. The story here published he wrote this year at the age of 91.

-K.Kortum

*****

Sea Letter, winter 1982

Caption: The Liberty ship Henry Lomb makes heavy weather of it in a convoy. 

Painting by Anton Otto Fischer, courtesy of Bausch and Lomb, Incorporated, Rochester, New York.

Christmas in a Convoy by Capt. Fred Klebingat

Going to sea had become dangerous - enemy U-boats had been sinking merchant vessels by the  hundreds and many, many seamen went down with their ships or perished in open boats in stormy and icy seas. But ashore, shipyards were building ships faster and faster ... faster than the enemy could sink them. Experienced seamen, especially navigators, had become scarce. This is the story of a Christmas where nothing was the best Christmas present you could receive. In a convoy of 120 ships crossing the Atlantic in mid-winter with enemy subs around (although this was 1943 and we were beginning to get the best of the enemy), all you pray for is that one day is like the next.

* * *

I had returned from Savannah, Georgia, where I had left the Liberty ship William Mulholland as chief mate.

Bottom caption: "We do not even know if the keel plate has been laid." The first day's work on a Liberty at the Permanente Shipyard extends beyond the keel into the shell plating. - National Maritime Museum, San Francisco

Top caption: The Oliver Evans, Captain Klebingat's command, nears completion, April 29, 1943. A pair of gun tubs and the mount for her 5-inch gun can be seen in this view from aft. - National Maritime Museum, San Francisco

She had delivered a full cargo of nitrates in bulk from Tocopilla, an open roadstead in Chile. I might just as well look for a skipper's job, I thought. But San Pedro, where I was then residing, was the wrong place for that - San Francisco was the hub for such employment. And why pay a fare? So I shipped on another. Liberty ship, George Chaffey, as chief mate bound for the Bay City. The Chaffey had just returned from New Zealand with a full cargo of wool and tallow. She was not a happy ship, but that did not concern me. I was only to be a short time on board, a week at most.

The despatcher at the union headquarters in San Francisco was glad to see me. Skippers especially were less than plentiful. But as I did not land a job on the day of my arrival, he despatched me as night relief mate on another Liberty ship (the name I have forgotten). The night relief engineer was George Cronk, the only surviving officer of the Liberty ship Stephen Hopkins, which was sunk by the German raider Srier, But this Liberty ship managed to sink her attacker by gunfire so that she also went down.' Cronk

told me about the voyage in the boat to Brazil from the scene of the tragic fight and sinking. I hoped to see more of this man, but the next day I landed a job as skipper with W. R. Chamberlin. 

This well-known old steam schooner firm had an office in the Merchants Exchange Building on California Street. With a note from the union in my hand that would introduce me, I entered the deep-carpeted office of the president of the firm, Mr. W. R. Chamberlin, himself. Seated behind a large desk, he was a man in his sixties at least, quite corpulent, clean shaven, with a ruddy face. He asked me about my experience:

"Do you drink?"

I answered no (I surmised that he did not believe me). I was hired.

"What is the name of my future command?" I asked.

"We do not even know if the keel plate has been laid."

I looked surprised.

"You go home to San Pedro. We will call you when the ship is ready to leave the yard."

It must have been about five weeks later when they ordered me to come to San Francisco. I checked out at the San Pedro union office.

"And by the way," says the union agent, "Lenahan would like to go with you as chief mate."

This was one of the most gallant actions in the sea history of our nation. See account by John Bunker in

United States Naval Institute Proceedings, November 1954

Stephen Hopkins presumably was named for the signer of the Declaration of Independence. An earlier Stephen Hopkins came across in the Mayflower and was a leader and survivor at Plymouth during the first winter, 1620-21, when half the Pilgrims died.

Caption: Liberty ships are here seen at the outfitting dock in 1943; the vessel in the foreground is the Richard Yates. -National Maritime Museum, San Francisco

Now I did not know that I had ever laid eyes on Lenahan, and I never got around to asking him why he had asked to ship with me. He had but recently been torpedoed on the tanker Larry Doheny, sunk by a Japanese U-boat near Cape Blanco, He was mate there. Lenahan was a cheerful Irishman in his forties - somehow I had the impression that in his younger years he had been a chief petty officer in the Navy. It was a pleasure to be shipmates with him. We rode up to San Francisco together on the train. I was complimented by Mr. Chamberlin; not every skipper was able to bring his own chief mate.

My command was the Oliver Evans, then lying alongside the outfitting wharf at Henry Kaiser's Permanente Shipyard in Richmond across the bay from San Francisco. The Oliver Evans was named for an 18th century American inventor* whose plans for a high-pressure steam boiler (such as ships have as their source of power) were developed simultaneously with those of the famous British steam pioneer, Trevithick. In fact, it is said that Evans' plans were sent to England and influenced Trevithick. Our government, in the selection of names for its Liberty ships, was honoring the country's great, not all of them well known. The first Liberty ship was named the Patrick Henry.

Steam was up when I came up the gangway. A tug came alongside shortly after. Pedersen, the tugboat captain, stepped on board. Pedersen was going to act as pilot on her trial trip. It was late that night when we traversed the degaussing range in the south bay and tied up at a wharf north of the Ferry Building, ready to load in the morning. I found out later that our pilot was one of the three sons of the notorious, latter-day "hell ship" captain, master of Rolph's barkentine Puako - "Hellfire" Pedersen.

The destination of the Oliver Evans was supposed to be a secret. "Sh ... sh ... the enemy may be  listening!" But all the cases were plainly stencilled "Bombay" or "Calcutta." It must have taken fourteen days to load the ship; some of the weights were quite heavy. There was also a deckload composed mostly of chassis for Ford and Chevrolet motorcars. There were secured with chains. The Chamberlin firm insisted on this; they were familiar with deckloads in peacetime, as their own ships carried lumber. W. R. Chamberlin Co. for years had bought and sold lumber cargoes, as well as transported them.

During this time I saw quite a bit of the man who had hired me and I became familiar with the office, Chamberlin appeared to run things, but that was not so. The firm owed its success to a woman, Mrs. Nina S. Keswick, She had a reputation as the shrewdest lumber buyer on the Pacific Coast.

The "Boss" himself did not believe that I was a total abstainer, as I have mentioned. So he says one day, "The sun is over the yardarm. How about joining me in a drink?"

"I may at that," I replied, "but my drink is Coca Cola!"

Chamberlin said no more. I stepped out of his sanctuary and saw Mrs. Keswick, who had just a small cubbyhole as office. I related what W. R. had said. She laughed.

"Yes, we have another skipper who doesn't drink, He finds it hard to believe that there are skippers who shun the brimming cup."

When the ship was loaded I signed on the crew with the Shipping Commissioner, cleared the ship at the Custom House with the aid of the broker and proceeded to the Routing Office. The Routing Officer was Commander Petersen, a Naval Reserve officer out of the merchant service.

"You are bound to Bombay and Calcutta," says he, "by way of Hobart, Tasmania."

"How did you know," I answered, "that I would like to go there? I have wanted to visit Hobart for thirty years."

The Liberty ship was to use Hobart as a way-point in the same way that the French "bounty" ships did in the early years of the century. There was a boom in French shipbuilding at that time and more than two hundred steel square-riggers were built in France with the government subsidy. They got a further subsidy for every mile sailed, so, in ballast, they used to take the long route around the Cape of Good Hope to San Francisco and Portland to load grain. I had seen these ships in France in my youth and greatly admired them. Hobart, at the bottom of the world, was perfectly situated as a stopping point for water and stores, and funnel-shaped Storm Bay permitted easy boards, increasingly shorter, as they tacked the thirty miles up to the town. No tug had to be hired.

"My command was the Oliver Evens, then lying alongside the outfitting wharf at Henry Kaiser's Permanente Shipyard in Richmond ... "

*) Oliver Evans built for Philadelphia in 1803 (four years before Robert Fulton's Clermont) a combined scow and dredge which ran as a steam automobile on land and as a steamboat in the Schuylkill river.

A generation before the French "bounty" ships, American and other whaling vessels had found Hobart equally convenient.

We spent a fortnight refitting in Hobart and went on to Calcutta. When we arrived there, hundreds of corpses were being picked up every morning. A cholera plague was raging. The Oliver Evans was given a cargo of tea and three hundred Rhesus monkeys in cages on deck for New York. These were for the Society for the Prevention of Infantile Paralysis. There were several other Liberty ships in port, all with orders for South Africa to load ore. "How do you get a fine cargo like that?" their skippers asked me. But there is not room here for the story of that passage to India.

* * *

New York, 1943. November was coming to an end. Just a day or two after paying off the crew who had taken the Oliver Evans to India, the American President Lines changed the berth of the ship to Bush Terminal in Brooklyn. The next cargo she was to carry was piled up in the shed. It was marked with the code name "Ugly." That meant that it was a cargo for Great Britain. I knew by this time that we would not be bound for Murmansk. They would have installed a gyro compass if that were the case and put better insulation in the deckhouses and quarters to stave off the cold.

The weather that had seen us up the Atlantic Coast had been exceptionally warm and it continued so. It had helped us carry those Rhesus monkeys in good health. Now it turned cold. I invested in a heavy overcoat. My quarters abruptly were cold, the steam in the heating system seemed to condense before it could get up to the level of the skipper's quarters. I was cold and lonesome. For companionship, I had only the relief mate and the stevedores, and at night the relief mate and engineer, on an otherwise empty ship.

But slowly the new crew drifted on board. There was the new chief engineer, a man born in Denmark; his name was Block. He was the first. Then there was an interval - Christmas would be approaching before the ship was loaded and I wondered where they would pick up additional officers and men. It is always difficult at this time of year; it has been my observation that seafaring men respect Christmas more zealously than their brothers ashore. It is the annual affirmation of their claim on the land; they, too, can be sentimental and remember their origins. And some of course are family men.

But a crew was rounded up. Next on board was the first assistant engineer, a man born in Greece, who had been twenty-three years working at the Brooklyn Navy Yard. Then came the second assistant, a Norwegian by birth. He had served seventeen years in the same Navy Yard. And finally the third assistant, a former New York cop who had worked for Uncle Sam for seven years in that same place. The authorities just went through the Brooklyn Navy Yard and looked around. Wherever they saw a marine engineer hiding, they handed him a little slip of paper. With all the ships being built, engineering talent, like navigational ability, was in short supply. 

Things were a little better with my deck officers; these, at least, had been afloat in recent years. The first mate was a young man with a second mate's license, the second mate had no papers at all, and the third mate, a man who had held master's papers at one time, had lost them due to alcoholism.

The men in the fo'c'sle were all Danes, a reliable crew, sober, and they kept the ship in excellent shape. They seemed to be satisfied with everything on board and they stayed with the ship until peace was declared.

For many years I had been in the Hawaii and Southsea trade and at one time I had declared, "Anybody who goes north of San Francisco in wintertime is a fool." With this background and these sentiments, I found it hard to put up with the Eastern seaboard cold. It was intense. On business connected with the ship I regularly visited the American President Lines at their offices on Broadway. A northerly blizzard might be blowing as I walked up the cold canyon of Whitehall Street - a mountain pass in the Himalayas couldn't be chillier. Overcoat tightly buttoned up, I would pass Isbrandtsen's display of coffee in the basement windows. A new cold blast would hit me as I rounded into Broadway. I was glad to enter the agent's warm offices and I rented a room in a hotel nearby where I would be nice and warm at night.

Slowly the ship was loading. There was ammunition of all kinds. In fact, everything that is needed to wage a war. Trucks were hoisted on board already loaded with battle material. This was not a cargo of tea. The hatches were covered and secured, big cases with airplane parts were fastened down on top of them. Abreast of Number Four hatch (the monkeys' hotel), a diesel locomotive was lashed on either side.

The chief ordered the bunkering barge. He himself tended to the filling of the double bottoms and the deep tank in Number Four. I found out that the new chief was very short-sighted. I was told that all at once his tanks in the forepart of the ship overflowed through the vents. What a mess! It took some time before they stopped the pumps on the bunkering barge; due to the cold the oil congealed to the consistency of taffy. That was lucky as it did not flow overboard. It took a gang from ashore a couple of days to clean up the overflow.

The Shipping Commissioner came on board and signed on the men. The deckload was secured. Tugs came alongside and the pilot moved the Oliver Evens to an anchorage abreast of Stapleton. Other Liberty ships were also swinging to their hooks, that close that at times they fouled each other at change of tide.

It must have been December 20th when I cleared the ship at the broker's and Custom House. I was ordered to attend the convoy conference next day.

The conference hall was a large room on Broadway. About a hundred skippers, men of all ages, had assembled there when I entered. I found an empty seat. The commodore, the man in charge of the convoy, entered. We all rose from our seats, as you do in a court when that luminary, the judge, enters the room. He motioned us to sit down. He was a Britisher of medium height and I would say near retirement age. His name was White, Ranking Commodore in the Royal Naval Reserve. He stepped up to a podium.

"This is Convoy (he gave the number) bound for Great Britain. It will make up outside New York tomorrow, December 22nd. Each of you will get a number and also a diagram showing your position in the convoy. I am sorry," he said, "that we have to sail so close to Christmas, but war is war." Then he lectured us on sailing blacked out, dispersing upon enemy attack, and how to reassemble at the next rendezvous. And of course no smoke emitted from our funnels.

"Although radar is invented," Commodore White went on, "we are not equipped with it. It may take some years before it is properly perfected. I urge upon you the importance of station-keeping. And in foggy weather stream the fog buoy so that the ship behind you can follow you. I hope we have a good passage. Good luck to all of us!"

Saying this, he closed the conference. Leaving the hall, each of us received a plan that showed the convoy and the ship's position in it. The plan also gave the name of each ship and its cargo. Then there was the secret code book and another book of wartime instructions. Finally a stadimeter so that you could measure the distance of each ship from your own command. Altogether it made quite a heavy load to lug back to the ship along the cheerless streets of lower Manhattan.

December 22nd dawned with fairly good weather but - cold. Slowly one ship after another hove up anchor and in charge of the pilot made for Ambrose Channel lightship. It must have been about ten a.m. when the Oliver Evans was ordered to heave up and proceed to sea. We dropped the pilot. Ahead of us in the distance was the commodore's ship flying the convoy number. She was going slow to give her flock time to come up and assume their numbered positions. This was what was called a "slow convoy," not faster than its slowest ship. It was near evening before we had all assembled. Five ships following in each other's wake, three rows abreast of each other, and extending north and south as far as the eye could reach. Right in the middle of the pack was a baby flattop, the commodore leading all. A couple of deep-sea tugs were trailing behind and about four corvettes scouted ahead and on each wing. Planes from the baby carrier scouted overhead. Every ship was armed to the teeth. Next day some vessels from Philadelphia and Boston joined us. There must have been about 120 ships finally, all travelling at the same speed, all evenly spaced, taking up many square miles of ocean. A grand sight.

My mates, so I found out, were old hands at convoy work and were to be trusted. Although they kept watch on the open bridge, they were well supplied with winter gear, especially my young chief mate, a handsome chap (I am sorry that I don't remember his name). He was engaged to a beautiful lady who held a good paying position. She looked out that her beau was well supplied with an outfit to contend with cold and gales - a quilted coat and pants, heavy fur cap, and boots with heavy soles.

We were lucky to have a fine steward department. I missed my former steward, a black man from Baltimore, but this man was equally efficient. The cooks were busy making ready for the coming holiday. The Oliver Evans was under Sailors Union of the Pacific agreement and so she carried a baker. At night he would bake bread, cakes, and pies.

We were somewhere in the right wing of the convoy, the commodore's ship about three points off the port bow. Ahead of us was a British vessel, the Empire Nugget, and astern a Liberty flying a Greek flag. The flag was only as big us a dishcloth, but it gave our first assistant, the Greek, much pleasure and joy.

The weather worsened. It was blowing a westerly gale on the 24th. We were rolling heavily and trying to keep station in the rising gale.

I have always had a policy of trust in those under my command unless I found different. And so I told the mates, "Call me in plenty of time, but take action yourself when it is needed." So saying I went to my quarters and stretched myself out, my abandon-ship kit hanging ready in case it was needed.

Christmas Eve - the ships roll on eastward in the gathering gloom. I am up and about several times. The helmsman on the lower bridge, out of the weather, is in contact with the mate on watch on the upper bridge by means of the speaking tube. I walk to the wing of the bridge. The phosphorescent bow wave and wake stand out against the surrounding murk. I talk to the mate - all is well.

Or so I thought. But somewhere on board there was a Christmas celebration going on out of sight. I did not find out about it until the purser told me the next morning. I was certain there was no booze aboard except what I had in my safe. But somehow the third assistant, the ex-policeman, had become intoxicated. He put on his uniform and made for the gangway, ready to go ashore. It took some effort by his shipmates to subdue him and secure him in his bunk.

"Where did he get the booze?" I asked the purser when he told me about it.

"There is no liquor on board," says the purser. "But the third assistant asked me for some aspirin and I gave him a handful of tablets."

"It is news to me." I said, "that a man can go off his rocker by swallowing aspirin, but in the future go easy on that stuff."

At dawn on Christmas Day I made my way up to the flying bridge, keeping a tight grip on the handrails against her rolling. The chief mate is pacing back and forth, steadying himself now and then with a hand on the bridge railings.

I glance around - the ships are in formation, somewhat ragged here and there, but nevertheless in formation, The Empire Nugget is in his position ahead of us. But he had been out of position ..

The mate comes up to me and with his face close to mine, out of the wind, says in a shaken voice, "I missed that guy by that much."

He holds up his thumb and forefinger to indicate the distance.

He is a calm young man, but it is plain that the close shave in the dark has unnerved him a bit. I pause only a moment to take it all in:

"Don't worry about it, mister. The main thing is that you missed him ... Merry Christmas!"

He said no more, but continued to shake his head a little in disbelief.

Caption: A north Atlantic convoy in heavy weather. -National Archives

And that was the Christmas gift I received in the year 1943. I treasured it. Exactly nothing. Nor to suffer a terrifying crash, not to hear the rending of metal, not to be spilled out of my bunk. Not to be holed and possibly sunk. Out there in the North Atlantic on a gale-whipped Christmas morning, who could ask for anything more? I lifted my binoculars and searched out the commodore's ship. From her flag halliards was flying the signal: "Merry Christmas To All."

* * *

Because the weather continued stormy and visibility poor, we could not determine our position by celestial observations. And so the convoy was ahead of its dead reckoning by about 120 miles. The corvettes scouting out in front were the first to sight land, the coast of Ireland. 

The convoy dispersed as we rounded the north of Ireland and I was ordered to proceed to Liverpool. I never had a minute's trouble with the British authorities, Before arrival (and I was there many times later), I had the steward make up a set of presents of things that I knew those ashore were short of. A pound of sugar or so, a couple of oranges, a square of butter, and a few cigarettes. All the parcels were equal. "Take a package each," I would say as the various shore functionaries completed their business on board. And when I went ashore I always handed the bobby on the dock gate an orange or two: "Thank you," he would say with a salute.

I do not recall in which Liverpool dock we discharged, but on the way there I saw a dock now empty that held what was left of a munition ship. A direct hit by a Luftwaffe plane had done her in. It was lucky for the city that the vessel was in a dock; the explosion blew directly up. Her anchor was somewhere way up town and what was left of the ship was just her keel plate and some parts of frame.

The people I met were getting by, although there were many shortages. If you had lunch ashore, you could not order potatoes if you had at the same time bread or rolls. I liked their bread, wartime bread, baked out of flour that was not sifted or bleached. It had a grey color. I made friends while the Oliver Evans was discharging and was invited many a time for dinner. But in that case I brought the main ingredients; I asked the steward for a roast. Although I had become a total abstainer, I always had a case of whiskey on board. "If a case of whiskey can buy you anything, by all means get a case of whiskey," Dr. Oliver, the owner of the Melrose, had told me one time when I was in his employ. So, on this run, I always had some whiskey in the Oliver Evans safe. Booze was rationed in Great Britain, so I never went ashore to my friends for dinner without bringing a bottle of the "highland dew."

"Why don't you drink?" they would ask me.

"I am afraid of the stuff," was my answer.

I was once a heavy drinker. Prohibition, that was supposed to prevent it, hurt me more than anything else. You drank when you could get it - you poured it down your throat. It cost me $100 a night many a time out drinking with friends.

There came a time when I was lying in that bed and the doctor said, "Acute alcoholism." I came to the conclusion that there was no middle way for me. I had both shoulders to the mat. I had friends who saw what was going on and who were ready to help me out. And a good doctor. He said, "You have it in you to quit - or you don't."

I quit. It wasn't easy.

I mention all this because alcoholism is a factor in seafaring. There were plenty of examples always on hand. Jack Larsen - I sympathize with that man to this day. He was skipper of the Star of Poland and I was mate. 

Caption: A laden Liberty ship has arrived from America at Gourock, Firth of Clyde, Scotland, December 1944, A sketch by Oswald Brett on a calm winter forenoon from the decks of the Queen Elizabeth, where he served as able seaman.

He was one of those who had reached a state where I don't think he truly could have existed without liquor. And the devilish thing was that he could drink all day and never show it. He lost the ship on the coast of Japan when he ran out of booze.

The cargo was discharged and they gave the Oliver Evans a modicum of ballast for the return voyage to New York, 1600 tons of sand dredged out of the Mersey river. It was up to the skipper: you could take six hundred tons in the t'ween deck if you wanted to (to soften the roll) and a thousand tons down below. But in truth the whole 1600 tons wasn't enough to prevent the empty ship from floating on the surface of the ocean like an empty barrel. 

There was the usual convoy conference. The same commodore in charge. The convoy was supposed to make up in the Minches, between the Hebrides and Scotland. But what with poor visibility, for a while I was in the wrong convoy. There were two convoys coming out of England; I followed one for a half day before I found out it was bound to Sierra Leone. I spent a day chasing to catch up to the right one. I heard later that one ship followed the wrong convoy all the way to Africa.

The second day out the Oliver Evans developed trouble with the steering gear. A nipple on the telemotor gear just dropped off. The ship that followed us was commanded by Otto Hengst, a former Pacific Coast steam schooner shipper, one of McCormick's. He complained about my station keeping.

"I'll fix that," I said to myself. I didn't have a gyro-compass or an iron mike and I didn't want to be pilot fish for Hengst in any case. The signalman ran up the signals:

"Trouble with steering engine. I am asking permission to drop behind the convoy."

"Granted," was the reply. Hengst did not wave as he passed us. After the column went by, I signaled that I was still having some trouble. The answer came to follow the last ship.

Hengst was always a complainer. He lost the Munleon on Point Reyes. His Liberty ship was also operated by W. R. Chamberlin. I heard that he fussed and fussed about getting a pilot house built on the flying bridge. It was never done, but they built one on the Oliver Evans without my ever asking for it. At any rate Hengst did not have to put up anymore with our poor station-keeping. The convoy rolled on, the weather became bad again, a western gale with very poor visibility. The ships - most of them altogether empty - were heading into a heavy sea that was increasing hour by hour. Their bows would rise out of the water, the bottom would become visible and then they would drop with a shattering bang into the sea. No ship could keep this up indefinitely, that was certain. It was dark by this time; the convoy was nearly stopped. Comes an order from the commodore: "Increase speed to 9.5 knots."

He was ordering us to full speed! The man didn't know... didn't use any brains. We had insufficient ballast and I was concerned about the ship's wild dance. I was worried that she might break up. Alright, to hell with the convoy! I decided it was insanity to force her any more. I decreased the speed. We dropped out of the convoy. Within half an hour the radioman is hearing "S.O.S." on his phones from

dozens of ships. "Breaking in two" ... "Bottom punched in, floating on tank tops."

Caption: "An engineer must be always standing by the throttle to slow her down when the propeller comes out of the water ... ". Liberty ship running before heavy following sea in snow squalls. A painting by Oswald Brett, as seen from the Queen Elizabeth in the North Atlantic and painted on board, 1944.

I remember some names in the convoy - Amelia Earhart, William Manning, William Prescort. One "S.O.S." after another: "Request permission to proceed to Madeira" ... "Proceeding to Azores" ... "Returning to England." One ship wound up in Halifax. 

The Oliver Evans, disregarding orders, was now somewhat out of danger, but I knew I had to stop her crazy capering pretty quick or she would injure herself. You get up power, more and more, to hold her bow into the wind. But the pounding is too heavy, so you slack down a few turns - whoosh - the wind blows the bow away.

In my years at sea I have come to the conclusion that the ship knows in what position it wants to weather the storm. She may not want to be head to sea; she may want to lay to with the stern facing it. A Liberty is not as full aft. The stern is of a shape to cleave the seas; it also flares to give lifting power. And she has more weight - more substance - there in contrast to the bow, which is high and empty.

"Stop the engine," I order. I decided you simply can't hold a Liberty ship, empty like that, to a gale of this force.

We will soon see what she wants to do.

Slowly, rolling heavily at times, the ship rounds before the wind. She stops her madcap antics and presently lies as quietly as if in a drydock.

She has turned herself 180 degrees.

"Slow astern," I order.

The engine just turns over enough to make sure she would stay where she was, not enough to start moving her. The wind and sea controlled her, really; like a sailing ship hove to, the bow would be blown a little this way, then that - but the ship gave no trouble. We could have been lying in Oakland Creek.

In the morning all the engineers came up to me and shook my hand and thanked me for the way I had handled the ship - the chief and the reluctant graduates of Brooklyn Navy yard, class of 1943. They were that pleased - they had never seen anything like it. It was no joke down in the engine room when you are forcing the ship against a head sea... it could be frightening. You are closer to her bottom than anyone else aboard - when the ship rises up and comes smashing down, it goes right through you. And an engineer must be always standing by the throttle to slow her down when the propeller comes out of the water - otherwise you may do damage to the engine or lose the wheel. They had heard about those S.O.S.'s all around - the radioman kept coming out of his shack with another message, another message, another message. The commodore told the ships to shut up, to keep radio silence (the enemy may be listening). But they wouldn't do it.

The weather improved. We changed the course to come up with the convoy. steering towards what should be the rendezvous. But the convoy was gone. I could now have steered a straight course for New York, but doing so we might have run into a convoy bound eastward. So we tried the next meeting place, but again we fail to sight the convoy. On we steam, sometimes zigzagging, and other times straight course. Nearing Halifax, Nova Scotia, I sight smoke on the horizon. We were not supposed to let any smoke emerge from our funnels. The commodore's orders were very specific about that in both convoy conferences. But the smoke was coming from the commodore's own stack! I laughed. We had found the convoy.

We had been nine days catching up. We noted that there were only half of the ships that formed the convoy in the Minches. We took our place again.

We near New York, about a hundred miles east of Ambrose Channel lightship. It is a fine day, clear and cold. The commodore takes into his head that what was left of his flotilla needed some training.

In comes the order by walkie-talkie, "Emergency right turn altogether 90 degrees at the whistle!"

The commodore's ship blows her whistle. We wheel to the right. Then a ninety-degree turn in the other direction. Ridiculous, parade ground stuff! But the remnant of his convoy - about fifty ships - performs to his satisfaction.

After these unnecessary maneuvers, next morning a howling snowstorm hit us. You couldn't see anything. The order:

"Try to get to Ambrose lightship and anchor."

Just imagine all those ships in the snow seeking an anchorage! In other words, his whole damn convoy was in a mess. I proceeded cautiously. I got a radio bearing on Ambrose lightship so I knew where I was. I pushed on through the snow, taking soundings, and dropped the anchor a couple of miles off. The Atlantic coast shelves down easy; it is no trouble to anchor offshore. 

I lay there a half day waiting for orders.

No orders came.

I hove up and went in. The weather cleared as we dropped the hook off the Battery.

A man from Naval Intelligence comes on board to see me. "Hello," I say, "a complaint that I lost the convoy?"

"Not at all," the Navy man says, "We want to know about the commodore. We want to know what happened to that convoy. It has been a disaster and not from enemy action."

I was relieved. I gave him my thoughts on the performance of our commodore. I am sure that he heard similar opinions from the other skippers he interviewed. But I also took the opportunity to point out a basic problem for the westbound convoys - that it is no fun to make a passage in that direction in midwinter in an empty Liberty ship. The Liverpool sand I had in the hold was inconsequential.

There was only one export cargo out of the British Isles during the war years and that was Scotch whiskey. But that was too valuable, they thought, to trust to a Liberty ship. A C-1 in the convoy, the American Builder, had a partial cargo. I might remark that there were two Norwegian tankers in the eastbound convoy filled with good quality alcohol to assist in the making of that Scotch, It may seem a little surprising that an occasional tanker was used to ship alcohol into Scotland, but if grain for distillation had been shipped instead, think of the string of Liberties that would have taken.

"Well, we wondered what had happened," said the Intelligence officer, apparently satisfied with my testimony. "I don't recall any convoys that made worse weather of it. The William Manning, one of your Liberties, went ashore on Fire Island in that final snowstorm. Another Liberty made St. Johns, Newfoundland and is frozen in. She will have to lie there until spring. In any case, she is broken in two."

To dispel all this gloom I put in a kind word for the Oliver Evans.

"Liberty ships loaded are good seaboats." I said. "I have in mind to make a trip or two more with this one. If I get into a spot like the last time maybe I can coax a little more of that Mersey sand out of the agents before setting out. But thinking it over, I have an idea that what would suit me best would be a tanker, When you have tanks, all the ballast in the world is at your disposal, the ocean itself."

Next I had a visit from the Coast Guard. A young lieutenant wanted to know all about our steering failure.

"The nipple on the telemotor just worked loose and dropped off," I said. "It was probably a bit of carelessness by a machinist in the shipyard, maybe a ninety-day wonder of some sort. Everything else was fine - the ship performed well."

But the lieutenant smelled sabotage all over the place. In a day or two I got a formal summons to appear before his superiors. I went up to Coast Guard headquarters on Broadway. The Coast Guard commander before whom I appeared was a woman. She was grey-haired and struck me as quite capable. I went over what I had told the lieutenant about the nipple falling off - a bit of carelessness, a bit of bad luck.

She smiled and dismissed the matter: "Captain, you have to have a little patience with these young fellows - they really don't know anything."

L'Envoi

I did make another voyage across the Atlantic in the Oliver Evans and it was considerably less violent. For one thing our convoy was not in charge of Commodore White. But the tanker idea stuck in the back of my mind and I went up to the office of the Masters, Mates & Pilots on Whitehall Street to get some information on my chances of getting command of one.

Someone slaps me on the shoulder: "Hello, Fred!"

It was roly-poly Oscar Belling. From the West Coast. I first met Oscar about 1910.

Caption: "I first met Oscar about 1910. He was laying back to join the Coronado, but she never started up." - National Maritime Museum, San Francisco

He was laying back to join the Coronado*, but she never started up. Other fellows had the same idea; she was lying off Goat Island. She lay there a long time, but was finally rigged down and made into a barge.

Oscar had a habit that you sometimes found among seafaring men, particularly the frugal Scandinavian and German skippers and chief engineers of the Pacific Coast steam schooners - he liked to make money. An utter devotion to money was much rarer than an utter devotion to liquor among seafaring men, but it did crop up. You will find mention of Oscar in one of my early stories, "A Christmas off Meiggs Wharf." He comes along East St. carrying his seabag and ready to make a pierhead jump on the old down-Easter Henry Villard, by now a tow-barge behind the Red Stack tug Hercules"** and bound for Panama. Oscar was an able seaman in those days.

Oscar got caught by the police under a wharf in Vancouver when he was a sailor on the old cutter Bear. He was being passed a consignment of opium out a porthole by a Chinese bosun on a Canadian Pacific liner. The police ran Oscar out of town. That didn't work, but other things did and in time he became a curb stockbroker and left the sea. He was determined to make a million dollars. But the stock market backfired somehow, he lost his shirt. and when he had only $89,000 left, he went back to sea. For years he was skipper of the tanker Manataway running to Trinidad in the creosote trade.

Sieling & Jarvis gave him command of the old tanker Toteco in the Venezuela trade when the war came along. That's what he commanded when I met him at Masters. Mates & Pilots. Oscar bought enormous numbers of cigarettes for speculation at the South American end. The subs still had it their way those days; they would pick off a tanker ahead or astern of Oscar's old crate in the convoy. But the Toteco wasn't worth wasting a torpedo on and Oscar sailed on with his slop chest. He disposed of it to the Collector of Customs at his port of discharge in Venezuela at enormous profit.

I would like to report that Oscar's devotion to money making came to a sublime end. But the truth is that he didn't make the million he intended. When he died of a kidney ailment in Marine Hospital in San Francisco, he left $800,000. Poor Oscar - he never married as he was afraid his wife would run away with his dough. In his will he remembered all the wives of his seafaring friends (except mine), $500 to this one, a thousand to that one, and the rest of it to a sister in Germany who couldn't get it (at least she couldn't last I heard; she was in East Germany) and a brother in Australia who didn't need it. 

"Oscar, just the man I'm looking for," I said to him in the union hall. "You know all about tankers. I want a tanker ... "

"Why?"

I'm tired of crossing the Western Ocean in empty Liberty ships standing on end."

A tanker, returning empty, simply pumps into her tanks that amount of the ocean that she feels she needs to put her down in the water and keep her steady. It is free ballast - the sand or soil or mud loaded in a dry cargo vessel by clamshell bucket is seldom free and it costs money to get it on board. And more money to get it off again.

"It should not be so hard to get a tanker." said Oscar, matter-of-factly. And sure enough, a month later, I was skipper of the T2 Apache Canyon. My first voyage was to Venezuela and then we took our place in several fast convoys - 14.5 knots - across the Atlantic. One to Liverpool, but most of them to Scotland, up the river Clyde. All tankers, about sixty of them at a time.

The firm that operated the Apache Canyon was Amoco. I was ordered to load in Curacao and then proceed through the Panama Canal to the South Pacific, the first of their fleet to do so. I carried my oil to Manus in the Admiralty Group (the former Seeadler Harbor of the Germans, now a giant U.S. Navy repair facility) and later once to Ulithi in the Caroline Islands, the advance base for the assaults against the forces of Japan. The greatest armada the world has ever seen*** was anchored in that vast harbor ... and tankers by the dozen bringing oil in, fifty or sixty of them. 

The Apache Canyon never went further west than Ulithi. At different times I delivered my cargoes to Hollandia. Langemak, Dreger Harbor. and Milne Bay, I still wonder how we managed to get through to those places safely - dark nights, no lights, rain, running full speed. I recall one nasty run with no pilot from Dreger Harbor to Milne Bay, doubling Cape Nelson on the coast of New Guinea - all twisting channels through the reefs.

The Apache Canyon provided me with the most comfortable berth I ever had. At the same time there was a sense of accomplishment - she was an efficient ship and we kept her that way. She had a friendly feel; you liked doing things for her.

*) The iron barkentine Coronado was formerly the bark J.C. Pfluger and originally the ship Waikato belonging to a celebrated firm in the colonial trade, the New Zealand Shipping Company. She was built in Sunderland. England, in 1874.

**) The steam tug Hercules, 414 gross tons, built 1907, is preserved by the National Maritime Museum, San Francisco, at the Hyde Street Pier.

***) Admiral Morison says in Leyre that in mid-March, 1945. just before the Okinawa operation, there were 617 vessels anchored in Ulithi lagoon.

The Apache Canyon made dozens of runs across the Pacific with oil loaded at Balboa. Sometimes we locked through the Canal and loaded at Curacao. We didn't have any trouble; the other tankers had trouble. One reason was Mr. Hegelberg, the chief engineer. He was an old Associated Oil Co. chief, a West Coast man. The main difficulty with the T2 tankers was leaky condensers. A tanker put into Papeete and declared that she couldn't go on until she got new tubes. They had to fly in the tubes and fly in the men to install them, but I still smell something fishy about the timing of this breakdown - in Tahiti a good time would be had by all.

When our tubes started to seriously fail, Mr. Hegelberg declared that the Apache Canyon could not make another voyage unless they were replaced. Not with ordinary tubes, but cupra nickel tubes, the very best kind. (Still in this day the CuNiFe alloy is the best pipe material one can put in a ship. Editor)

The port engineer for the War Shipping Administration at Balboa came aboard and this serious matter was broached to him.

"Have you got any whiskey in the safe? Hand me a couple of bottles. We'll talk about it .. "

At the end of a lengthy afternoon's discussion it was agreed that the chief would have his cupra nickel tubes.

A tanker can be generous in deck space and the quarters aboard the Apache Canyon were not crowded. The radioman and I had the boat deck to ourselves. I had a sizeable office, a big bedroom, and an oversize bathroom. A beautiful ship, well finished, built in Mobile, Alabama. Good furniture.

As long as I went to sea, I always had flowers. In the schooner Melrose I had hanging plants and potted plants in the skylight and elsewhere in the cabin. As I settled down on the Apache Canyon I outdid myself in this regard. Putting to sea from Balboa, I carried out flowers, too, The tanker was, in the old sailor's expression, a true "home from home." I had canaries. One of the A.B.'s. a former Navy man, was also an ex-tailor, and my quarters were made comfortable with drapes, fancy covers for the furniture and fancy cushions. And books - there was lots of time for reading on those long hauls across the Pacific.

As a schoolboy in Germany, I excelled in botany and it has remained an interest of mine. I visited the United States Botanical Experimental Station at Summit, Canal Zone, and took with me Haden Mango plants, breadfruit trees, and also what are known in Honolulu as "Rainbow Showers" or "Golden Showers," varieties of Cassia Fistula. Through an agronomist, a Lieutenant Maxwell in Dreger Harbor, New Guinea, the mango plants were presented to the Catholic Mission in Langemak Bay. I went back to the Botanical Station in the Canal Zone many times and developed quite a nursery on Apache Canyon.

The naval officers boarding the ship in the Southwest Pacific never seemed to want to leave my quarters, what with the plants, the canary birds, the carpets and upholstered chairs and settees. It made them homesick. 

We kept the ship up. I had good crews - one crew for more than a year, until we were ordered to San Pedro one time. I had a fine mate, a Russian, Mr. Magnisson, an A-I tanker man. But all things come to an end - ships and men. That thought didn't prevent me from being bitter when, after all that work, my fine ship was turned over to Niarchos, the Greek tanker king, brother-in-law of Onassis. There wasn't a speck of rust on her. Niarchos renamed her World Triumph. I heard she was broken up in Italy a few years later.

It's funny, that tanker. I think a lot about her. She represented a certain kind of perfection. I am basically a sailing ship man - I stuck with them to the end; I thought they would last me in my time. But I have a soft spot in my heart for the Apache Canyon. I have a hunch that ship had a soul, for all of being mechanically propelled. 

The Oliver Evans, I have an idea, had a soul, too. It had something to do with durability - the growing realization that this assembly-line ship, one of two thousand seven hundred all built the same, was not going to fail us - she was going to get us there and get her cargo there. And perhaps it was not her doing, but she did stay out of trouble that Christmas morning.

Oliver Evans (for whom the ship was named 150 years later) may have invented a high-pressure boiler, and the high-pressure boiler may have eventually driven my first love - sail - from the seas, but I say that a steamship can also find its way into a man's affections.

Airplane pilots will tell you that even an airplane has a soul, so maybe my hunch is right.

This recollection by Captain Klebingat was written in 1982 at the age of 93. He lives in Coos Bay, Oregon.

*****

Sea history, winter 1982-83

Fire at Christmas

by Capt Fred Klebingat

The second Christmas afier Pearl Harboe was drawing near. Shipyards in the United States were building ships by the hundreds. They were now building ships faster than the enemy U-boats could sink them.

It was a blustery day in San Pedro when I shipped as chief mate on the Liberty ship William Mulholland. The wind was from the southeast - our storm quarter - and increasing as I stepped out into the street from the Masters, Mates & Pilots hall. The main started. Big drops splattered onto the sidewalk, mushrooming into spray. It rained all that night.

Many of my friends were working at the outfitting dock, where the William Mulholland was making ready for sea. That evening I picked up the phone, called one of these chums and told him that I was going to join the ship in the morning.

"Hell," said he, "I don't know how you can do that. She is not even painted, and it is raining pitchforks."

The people who had told me to join the ship must know what they are talking about, I said to myself. She should be ready in the morning, or they would have told me. I reached for the phone again and called another friend of mine, Otto Mathies", who had a job on the launching ways.

"Don't worry about it," he said, "Rain or no rain, that ship will be painted by 8 A.M. and ready to go on a trial trip."

The next morning the rain had eased as I joined the "rat race" making for the gates of the California Shipbuilding Company at Terminal Island, Los Angeles Harbor. A flood of shipyard workers - men and women. There was the William Mulholland in a glistening coat of dark grey, immaculately painted. How did they do it? They told me a gang with burning gas torches dried the plates of the wet ship - rain pouring down - and right behind the burning torches, the spray painters applied the paint to the hot plates. That's the way we did things in this country in 1942.

I stepped on board and found the captain's quarters and introduced myself to the captain, a downeaster by the name of Smith. He was an old-time shipmaster who had traded to West Africa in the days of sail for mahogany and palm oil when the Barber Line - which was going to operate this ship - was still young. The captain had come out of retirement to again assume command. The chief engineer was of an entirely different stamp, although also a New Englander. At home somewhere in the State of Maine, he had a an early day gone to sea which his dad, who owned a schooner. As he was going to sit for his examination for mate, it was found that he was color blind. So he put away his sextant and became an engineer. His name was Rowndy. He stayed in this ship until the end of the war.

And of course there were my two partners, the second mate and third mate. The second, evidently born in Germany - although he denied this - had adopted an English name. Although a capable navigator, he had the unfortunate knack of making himself cordially disliked by everybody. And then there was Jahren, the third mate, in his forties. He was a reliable man of medium build; although Norwegian born he was swarthy. These were the men who managed the ship - the officers. All those before the mast I have now forgotten.

I always have been an admirer of beautiful machinery. But if I was looking for what might be called fine engines, I surely had come to the wrong place. This was a triple expansion engine, but there was nọ power ram to put the engine in reverse, no separate vacuum pumps, and the whole thing was roughly finished-well, I suppose they just did not have enough machinists who could do first class work.

"Otto came around Cape Horn in the British four-masted bark Howth. He was for many years skipper on John Barrymore's yacht Mariner.

The Mulholland had only one anchor ready to use. There was not enough chain for the other hook, so it was welded fast to the deck, a most efficient way of keeping it from shifting - or being used. The missing chain was discovered months later, loaded on flat-cars that were sidetracked on a waystation somewhere in Texas.

The lower bridge of the Mulholland was fairly well fitted out, as was the chart room. But the upper bridge had a wheel exposed to all weathers, like the old colliers. But they did improve some of them later on; a meat wheelhouse was built above the bridge to shelter the helmsman, who then regularly steered from up there.

The captain's quarters were nothing that worthy would want to write home about. Right up on top, near the ship's stack, built of bare steel plates, his rooms were stifling hot in the tropics and bitterly cold in the winter. Some skippers in Liberties that had a wheelhouse built on top, as I have described, then made their living quarters on the ship's bridge.

My own quarters as mate on the Mulholland, one deck below the captain's, may actually have been a little better than his, even though a mass of steam pipes thickened by lagging encumbered the overhead.

After I had looked over the Mulholland, I thought to myself, "And now you are condemned to sail in tubs like this one for the rest of your seafaring career. They were built to win the war and there is no doubt, as the expression has it, that "they did their part." "And a large part it was. They were simple ships simple to build. That was the point; it was wartime. Once, I understand, they built one in five days, But as a professional seafaring man, I cannot pretend than I was thrilled when I encountered my first Liberty ship.

The ship had five hatches, all covered with wooden hatch boards. And of course she was armed to the teeth. As I remember, there was a five-inch caliber gun in a tub on a house near the stern, and one of three-inch caliber in a guntub forward. At least eight 20-mm anti-aircraft guns were mounted on high pedestals amidships.

It was about ten in the morning when the trial trip crew came on board. In charge was Captain Halvarsen, the shipyand's Port Captain, and Captain Cederloft, Trial Trip Captain in command. We steamed to the Outer Harbor, Engines on full ahead and on slow, rudder on the different angles, hard left and hard ... All seemed to be satisfactory. We dropped the anchor - windlass in good working order. The ship was swung for compass adjustment and later put on the degaussing range.

Early in the afternoon we were done with that and we moored the ship at Pier 47, the former Matson Terminal. The William Mulholland was officially delivered to the Barber Line, who would operate her hereafter.

The trial crew went ashore. Longshoremen came aboard and raised the cargo booms; winchdrivers secured extensions to the control handles of the winches, so that one winchdriver could operate both of them, a venerable West Coast way of doing things. The ship's crew came onboard and by the end of that busy day all hands had reported.

Although it was late December, the weather turned fine. Loading was going on in all five hatches. A gasoline-driven crane was mounted on deck on the after part of Number Two hatch on the starboard inshore side to speed the cargo in.

For security, some members of the Navy gun crew patrolled the ship an regular intervals, and a gangway watchman was supplied by the Pinkerton Agency.

On the morning of December 24th, the day of Christmas Eve, I arrived from home about half past seven in the morning and showed my pass to the watchman at the wharf gate. 

Caption: Captain Klebingat (standing) as second mate of the MS Rolando about 1955. He continued at sea into his 80s and now lives overlooking the harbor at Coos Bay, Oregen. This memory of wartime  Christmas was published in fuller form in 1980 by the Friends of the National Maritime Museum San Francisco.

He was a new man, and I could see that he was highly nervous. Fear of something showed in his face and behavior. Steam locomotives were shunting boxcars, all marked "EXPLOSIVES." Screeching of wheels, puffing of locomotives' exhaust and clanging of bells made an ungodly din. Unconcerned, I walked toward the ship. I had to pass close to some boxcars loaded with ammunition.

"Halt!" a voice behind me shouted, and I felt a gun stuck against the small of my back. I turned.

"Can't you read?" the gate watchman shouted. He had run after me. "Explosives!"

"What about it? I replied, "I am not going to hurt them. I am the chief mate of that ship over there." I went on, "And I am going to be riding the top of 3600 tons of explosives. Clear across the ocean."

The watchman put his gun into his holster and turned without a word. I never again saw him at the gate.  They must have found a less nervous type.

Christmas Eve - wartime - one tried to remember the spirit of the season as it had echoed in happier  times. Captain Smith and also Rowndy, the chief engineer, had been invited ashore to celebrate with some friends. I was supposed to be relieved at five o'clock by the second mate so I could go ashore, but he never showed up. Relief mate on the holidays were scarce, I didn't like it, but it was plain that I was stuck with the duty, Christman Evening in dockland - no cheer, no warmth, no blazing yule log (I am speaking figuratively - yule logs were scarce in San Pedro). But I would soon have a substitute - a blazing Liberty ship.

By now the ship was at least two-thirds loaded with ammunition of all kind in most of the lower holds. Number Two hatch had explosives nearly up to the 'tween decks and hay was stowed in the space up to the hatch combing of the hold. 

At about one-thirty on the morning of Christmas Day, I was near Number Three hatch, talking to the relief night engineer. All at once - WHOOSH - a flame shot up into the air from the crane standing on deck near Number Two hatch. A gasoline crane - a gasoline fire!

"Start your fire pumps!'" I shouted to the engineer. He plunged below. "Ring the alarm!" I hollered to the longshoremen, We were lucky - a dock hydrant was just abreast of the hatch. The longshoremen did not need urging, and in no time at all they had water shooting at the flaming crane. There was-another hydrant in front of the midship house and by the time the hose was stretched, the engineer had the fire pump going full blast. We pointed this hose down the hatch to soak the ammunition in the lower hold. We played it on the hay in the 'tweendeck.

We must control the fire, we must extinguish it - we didn't dare think what would happen if we failed. Fire in an ammunition ship .... you don't think under these circumstances, you act. You act - attack - or you flee. It is akin to war, I suppose.

We weren't short of men, and as luck would have it they were good men. One rang the fire alarm and then the ship's bell. Another blew the steam whistle. Another ran to a telephone booth a few yards away. There was a fireboat across the harbor. The rest were at the hydrants and directing the writhing hoses at the fire. Anxious moments - the flames of that burning gasoline tank shooting high into the air, ammunition all around us in the ship's hold and in boxcars alongside the vessel. And the oil and grease that had dripped from the crane now also was starting to catch fire.

The men did not panic - they were made of different stuff than was the watchman at the gate that morning. Slowly the flames lessened. We found out later that a fool crane driver had filled the gasoline tank of his crane while his engine was running. The tank ignited.

It all took about twenty minutes. After the fire wan out, the fire boat arrived. It was stationed nearby on the other side of the harbor and in sight of the ship. They were slow to respond and I surmised that we had broken up their Christmas celebration. The fire chief stepped aboard, and I thanked him for coming. There may have been a faint overtone of sarcasm in my voice.

"Sorry that we called you," I said, "As you can see, we managed to put out the fire, so go have a merry Christmas."

They lost no time in departing. and a few minutes later had their boat safely moored at their boathouse and fire station.

The night settled into routine again. The longshoremen resumed loading; some men cleaned up the burnt crane and tried to get it started. "And have a Merry Christmas!" I called after them.

There was time for a little shuteye before eight A.M. At that hour "Tiny" Kruger, the stevedore boss, came around. He was a man about sis foot two, and husky. The Army had commissioned him as Major, so that he had more authority and dispatch getting wartime cargoes afloat. He had already been briefed on the fire.

"Here is a note to the captain" I said. "It says to stop all loading. Order of the Captain of the Port."

"We will just ignore the order of the Captain of the Port," said Tiny. A few minutes later all hatches were at work.

I was relieved by the master and went home to get some sleep. My Christmas had not been drear and chill; it had not been without warmth ...

* * *

It was a couple of months later that I saw Tiny Kruger again. We spoke about the fire on Christmas morning.

"You know, it made a good Christmas after all," said Tiny.

"Your prompt action and some good men aboard saved the ship - and the town of San Pedro. Even the Captain of the Port came out ahead. They promoted him, and he is now in charge of the Greenland Patrol."

"That ought to cool him down," I said.

We chuckled over that. But we were aware that this Christmas story could have had a different ending.

Written by somebody else.

Hallelujah!

*****

Sea Letter, Winter 1983

In Command of the Chinese Bark Chin Pu: Swifting the Rigging on Christmas Morning

by Capt. Fred Klebingat

Caption: The Chin Pu in her younger years. This photograph, made in Amsterdam harbor in the early 1880's, shows the vessel port-painted and under her original name, Amstel. - Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

Caption: Melrose, 615 tons, built 1902 in Hoquiam, Washington, by Hitchings & Joyce. 

(All photos are from the collections of the National Maritime Museum except where otherwise credited.)

By 1925, the year my story begins, the era of sail bad lasted many thousands of years. Sail was discovered when primitive man found that bis dugout could be moved before the wind by using a mat, or perhaps even before that by spreading an animal skin. In due course, the Phoenicians circumnavigated Africa in much improved sailing ships and later the Polynesians with their catamarans and mat sails discovered the islands of the great Pacific and settled them.

European seamen in their windships ventured forth and found distant oceans. They discovered two great continents and transported the first settlers. Steam, when it came, did not have an easy time in ousting sail. The windships improved and culminated in the American clipper ships,(1) the British tea and wool clippers, and finally in the steel "nitrate clippers" - those of A.D. Bordes of Dunkerque and the great German Flying P Line. They battled their way westward against the Cape Horn gales to load nitrates at open roadsteads along the Chilean province of Tarapaca. The Flying P liners were so well handled that they virtually kept a schedule - not easy to do when you don't have an engine. I saw their mighty Preussen (2), square-rigged on all five masts, slip into Iquique under sail in 1905 - a sight never to be forgotten. Eight days later she was loaded and gone. The last sailing ship built for the Flying P Line, Padua, a steel four-masted bark, was launched in 1926.

It was now 1925. I was employed by Dr. Joseph Oliver of San Francisco, a physician and surgeon who had put away his scalpels and turned to the sea. He was known up and down California Street as Dr. Oliver, the managing owner of several sailing ships. I had just brought his Melrose, a four-masted schooner, back from the South Seas where we had delivered the largest cargo of lumber she had ever carried. Nevertheless, she lost money. Not much, but some. Dr. Oliver saw the handwriting on the wall - the era of sail was drawing to a close. He sold the ship. It was insurance that ate up the profits as much as anything. Dr. Oliver could get insurance, but the broker was not particularly anxious to do business:

"You see that chart on the wall, doctor? See those red dots all over the Pacific? 

1) Not to mention the "down-Easters," the New England-built square-riggers that followed the clippers; larger vessels for the most part and far more numerous. I will come to one of them, the Santa Clara, in this narrative.

2) "The Preussen was without a doubt the greatest sailing-ship the world has seen." - Alan Villiers, The Way of a Ship, New York, Charles Scribner's Sons, 1953. A large-scale model of the Preussen by Eric Swanson greets the visitor entering the front doors of the Museum.

Well, each one of those is the wreck of an American schooner. We'll write you a policy, but it's only because you're an old customer ... "

With the sale of the ship all this had ended. The Melrose, along with the other West Coast built ships populating the mudflats of Oakland Creek, would never crowd on canvas again. No more would the trade routes of the Pacific be crisscrossed with wooden schooners and barkentines carrying their high deckloads of lumber - vessels built in Puget Sound, Grays Harbor, Eureka and San Francisco. Until the 1920's they were a common sight bound for ports in the Orient, the South Seas, New Zealand and Australia while others were destined for the harbors and roadsteads of Chile and Peru. A number rounded Cape Horn on the way to South Africa.

There was no time for regrets - I was out of a job. I had to look for a berth in steam. But jobs were hard to find in San Francisco. It was the headquarters for all the steamship companies and that was fine if you were a company man. If you weren't you had to cool your heels in the outer office and be super-nice to some measly clerk. I was a company man all right, but it was a sailing ship company that had gone out of business. Dr. Oliver had been managing owner for a number of investors, including himself, in the schooners Melrose, Prosper, Oceania Vance and A. F. Coats well into the 1920's. The shares in a schooner were divided into 64ths; that was the way it was always done. I had bought into the Melrose; I owned 1/16th of her. I should have bought General Motors.

I found myself in increasingly straitened circumstances.

"Why not go to San Pedro, Fred?" a friend said to me on the City Front one day. "There are all

kinds of jobs down there."

"There are? It's pretty dead around here. Particularly for a windjammer captain."

"Sure," he continued, "you might land a job as mate in an intercoastal ship or in a steam schooner, or get a job as a skipper in a big yacht - there is a lot of money down there and a lot of yachts. You could go as a "paper captain" and navigator in a tuna boat.(3) Also for a man like you with sailing ship papers there are jobs in the movie ships.(4) All you have to do is sit in the Mission Smoke House and the job will come to you."

I made up my mind to go to San Pedro to keep from starving.

There was one other way to get a seagoing berth in San Francisco besides hanging around steamship offices. This was through a waterfront tailor shop. News and gossip travel fast in San Francisco and nowhere more so than on the City Front.

"Fred wants to go to San Pedro."

So it came to pass that as I was walking past Abraham's clothing store, one of the owners sees me and comes running out: "I hear you want to go to San Pedro. I've got a berth for you - the Hammond steam schooner Astoria has a job going as relief third mate."

I thanked him. Just what I needed, "But you will have to go by way of Grays Harbor," he went on. "The chief mate is stepping off to get his San Francisco pilot's endorsement." (As it happened, I was shipmates with this man in later years. We called him "Sour Puss" Anderson.)

"That's all right," I said, "I'll take the job anyway." So I joined my first steam schooner and took my first job as a mate on a steamer's bridge.

In San Pedro the Mission Smoke House had taken its name from a large cigar stand outside the premises that had until a few years before been a saloon. The place was partly owned by a former mate in coastwise ships. Most seafaring men bought their sea stock of tobacco here. But Prohibition - the "Noble Experiment" as President Hoover chose to call this period in our history - had not dealt kindly with the former saloon. It became a pool hall. Nevertheless, there were chairs for visitors hospitably placed along one wall and a bar that served something called "Near Beer" and Angostura Bitters. Of course, these drinks were only for those innocents who had not been able to locate a speakeasy or bootlegger.

3) American fish boats must be owned by American citizens but most of the people engaged in the tuna business were aliens. So they registered their infant children as owners, children born in the United States. But the children were obviously too young to enter and clear a fishing boat for the open sea, therefore the need for a "paper captain." Of course, in this case he would also have to be a navigator. There were the Portuguese fishing boat owners in San Diego, most born in the island of Madeira. There were the Yugoslavians and the Japanese in San Pedro. The Japanese were probably the best to work for: "You tend to your navigation," they would say, "We'll do the fishing." You did not even have to eat Japanese food. A special fare was cooked for you.

4) For the larger movie ships they had to hire a man with papers that certified him as Master of Sailing Ships of over 700 gross tons.

Top caption: The Melville Dollar, 7032 tons, built 1921 in Shanghai 

by Kiangnan DK & Eng. Wks.

Below caption: Katherine Mackall, 2262 tons, built 1919 in Wilmington, California 

by R. J. Chandler & Co.

Although mostly alcohol, Angostura was rated as a medicine. It therefore had the virtue of being legal. The Mission Smoke House was a large establishment. It went right through a space between Front and Beacon Street with a door on either thorough-fare. I found that what I had been told about this place was true. Sitting in a chair at the Mission Smoke House, I did land a job as third mate in the Melville Dollar, a steamer of 7,000 tons engaged in the intercoastal trade. I found Alexander Beatty aboard as second mate; he was a veteran Pacific Coast sailing ship master who had started out as a hunter in the sealing schooners. Just a few years before, the barkentine he commanded, the big Katherine Mackall, had passed my Melrose one Sunday afternoon near Vauvau in the southeast trades. Times had changed - we were both glad to get a berth in the steamship.

After this voyage and return to San Pedro, Billy Maggio, vice president of the C. J. Hendry Company, a large firm of ship chandlers, offered me a job as captain of his tuna clipper Hermosa. Maggio didn't need a paper captain; he needed a real fishing boat skipper. I turned it down. "I would take it, Mr. Maggio," I said, "if I was a fisherman. But I don't know tuna fishing or any other kind of fishing. Thanks for your offer, though." Then I was lucky. Because I had the right sailing ship license, I got a job as master of the ship Santa Clara in a picture called Evangeline starring Dolores Del Rio. The Santa Clara was a fine old wooden square-rigger, a veteran of the Cape Horn trade - ten times around Cape Stiff to San Francisco before the turn of the century. At one time the famous David Rivers, later of the A.G. Ropes, was her master.(5) I knew her subsequently as part of the Alaska Packers fleet in Oakland Creek - she sailed to Alaska each spring with fishermen and cannery hands until the early 1920's. But you wouldn't recognize her now - although the original ship was inside, she had been encased with a replica of Lord Nelson's ship-of-the-line Victory. This was for a previous film about the British admiral and his paramour, Lady Hamilton, called The Divine Lady.

The Victory was the most spectacular movie ship ever created, a three-decker (6) - and very well done, too. Row after row of wooden cannons that looked exactly like cast iron, each lined with a length of steel oilwell casing so it could be fired, and all of them triggered by electricity. Elaborate decorations done in papier-mache in imitation of the original carvings - and you couldn't tell the difference. The Evangeline film needed a British man-of-war too, so Santa Clara's guise as Victory was unchanged.

5) Captain Rivers' sea letters describing the maintenance and discipline aboard the down-Easter A.G. Ropes can be found in Frederick C. Matthews' American Merchant Ships, 1850-1900, Salem, Mass., Marine Research Society, 1930.

6) Another old down-Easter famous on this coast was the Llewellyn J. Morse, also a Cape-Homer in her day. A few years before the Santa Clara was made into the Victory, the Morse had been rebuilt as "Old Ironsides" for the picture of the same name with Wallace Beery, but "Old Ironsides" was only a frigate, a two-decked man-of-war. My old barkentine, the S. N. Castle (where I had swifted the foremast rigging), played two roles in this picture. She was first made over into a smaller frigate, the Algiers, belonging to the Barbary Coast pirates. Then her end came during the Tripoli Harbor scenes at Catalina Island when she was burned in the role of the Philadelphia, which was set afire in an historic raid by Stephen Decatur in 1804.

Caption: The stern of the old down-Easter Santa Clara can be seen inside the replica of Lord Nelson's Victory that has been built around her for the motion picture The Divine Lady. After further use in Evangeline, when Captain Klebingat commanded her, this impressive movie ship was laid up. Dismantling has begun at the stern.

The vessel alongside her is the Redoubtable, a movie ship built on the hull of the well-known Alaska Packers barkentine, formerly full-rigged ship, Centennial (built 1875 in East Boston), whose figurehead is on display on the second floor of the museum. The Centennial's round trip to Australia, ending in 1928, was the last commercial voyage ever made by one of these old New England-built wooden square-riggers.

The small schooner on the outside, Lily, was later rebuilt as HMS Bounty.

My task was simple - to motor the ship (engines had been installed and tugs were in attendance) down the coast a ways to the "location" where they were shooting the film, a little north of Newport. Then I went down to my cabin and read the Saturday Evening Post. If there were evolutions involving sail, it was all handled by the Movie Riggers union. I didn't have to go on deck and they didn't want me. It was the best job I ever had.

The trouble was it only lasted a few months.

The "golden age of yachting" had not quite passed at this time - the end of the twenties - and so I decided there was a future for me there, in the big sailing yachts. 

Caption: The Pike, amusement park at Long Beach. - Historical Society of Long Beach

For a decade I worked for east coast capitalists, men with unlimited capital; some of them kept their yachts on the Pacific coast. They hired men to run their office and take care of their investments; they hired someone to take care of their polo ponies, others to run their estates, someone to run their household, and a skipper to run their yachts. The captain was the boss. He hired his own crew, he took care of the boat and he paid the bills. It suited me just fine.

I was working for a man who liked me to take him and his friends on long voyages. Still there was quite a bit of idle time between these extended trips to the South Seas. I became interested in books, rare books on the exploration of the Pacific by others who had travelled there. I compared their observations with mine. Most of these books came from dealers in rare tomes such as Francis Edwards in London and Dawson's Book Shop in Los Angeles. But I also became a frequent visitor at a book store in Long Beach. A sign over the building said, "Bertram Smith, Acres of books." No doubt there were acres. At times I would discover a rare volume that had been overlooked by other dealers who, if they had it, would charge me a steep price.

Bertram Smith, the owner, was an older man, tall, slightly stooped, and of rather scant build, dried up, a pleasant man - a man who belonged to and knew books. At times he would make a trip to England and return with carloads of books.

One book lover spots another and seemingly Bertram Smith had the same taste in books as myself. He would draw my attention to books just arrived at the store and especially those by an Australian author, a man who knew the South Pacific, by the name of Louis Becke.

"Here are some books by Louis Becke," he would say, "I am sure you have not seen these."

He would also draw my attention to articles about Becke he had collected, and also a sea writer who called himself C. Fox Smith. One would think that C. Fox Smith's salt water poems were written by a seaman. Not so - Bertram Smith showed me an article that said C. Fox Smith had passed on and that the "C" stood for "Cicely." She was a British writer - hailed by Joseph Conrad. It was her brother who was the sailor.

It was nearing Christmas. I had made another pleasant pilgrimage to Bertram Smith and his Acres of Books. It was only a short distance to the bus stop at the corner of Ocean Boulevard and Pacific Avenue, where I used to catch the bus to Terminal Island. From there I took the ferry home to San Pedro. But I just missed the bus. It would be quite some time before the next departure, so I figured I might as well pass some time at "The Pike," the Long Beach amusement park located near the beach. I had only to cross the street to get there.

I was roaming about, just passing time, when a voice from behind me called "Hello, captain!"

I turned.

"Don't you know me?"

"Of course I know you - 'Reckless Ross' - Ross Millman, how in hell did you get here?"

Millman had been a passenger with me in an old bark called the Chin Pu on a passage from Kobe to Manila. He had not changed in the ten years or so since I parted company with him. He still had a smile on his face, but now he was in his working rig, highlaced boots, shoulder pads; he carried a crash helmet under his arm. Ross' profession was riding a motorcycle around the inside of a giant barrel - of course he would be on The Pike. Or some other midway like it.

"See my barrel set up over there," he said pointing to the right. "Note my trusty Indian motorcycle. I just got through with a performance; I'm going over to get myself a bite. Come and join me. We have a lot to talk about."

In front of Ross Millman's barrel, now labeled "Motordrome," was a barker crying, "Hurry, hurry! Avoid the rush! Get your tickets here! Reckless Ross, the Human Fly, he rides his bike around the inside of a barrel! Hurry, hurry!"

Caption: "Reckless Ross" Millman (in helmet) sits astride his "trusty Indian motorcycle." He can be seen over the back wheel of the bicycle in this photograph on The Pike. - Historical Society of Long Beach

"You need a guy like that to sell tickets," said Millman somewhat apologetically as he saw me turning my head. "The more sold the better, though. After all there is a limit. I am getting older and the time will come when I won't be able to do stunts anymore."

I had long ago formed an impression that Ross Millman was thrifty and he had to be - he probably still had the first nickel he ever carned. My companion was a man of small stature, not much over five feet tall with a small athletic build. He looked like a miniature football tackle, but it would take two Ross Millmans to make one of those.

We entered an eatery close by and sat down. A waitress hurried to our table and smiled at Millman.

"Let me introduce you to Captain Klebingat, Debbie, the captain of the sailing ship that carried my barrel, Indian motorcycles and myself from Kobe, Japan to Manila, on my world tour."

"Pleased to meet you," she said, holding order pad and pencil in her hands, "Ross has often told me about the time he took a voyage in a sailing ship. I can't quite imagine him on a sailing ship - he's not the type. You're the type, captain."

She took our order after some further banter.

"I still recall that morning in Kobe when I came on board," said Millman. They had loaded my barrel and motorcycles and the rest of my belongings on a lighter. It was towed out to the anchorage. We rounded the back end of the ship, 'stern' I think you call it. Near the top of what you later told me was the 'transom' were some Chinese letters at least two feet high. About two feet below them there were smaller Chinese letters and then some feet below that again was a translation: Chin Pu, Shanghai.

The Editor of the Sea Letter is David Hull, Principal Librarian of the National Maritime Museum.

Caption: Plans of the Amstel, later Chin Pu, from the Maritime Museum Prins Hendrik in Rotterdam. Note detail at right showing trunnel fastening through lead sleeve.

I looked up and on the mast there was a flag that must have been Chinese. It had five colors. I wondered what kind of a strange old thing I was trusting myself to - not to mention my barrel and bikes."

"Yes, that was the Chinese ensign on the gaff," I replied, "the flag of the Chinese Republic of Sun Yat Sen. I don't remember the colors. My reaction when I saw the Chin Pu wasn't much different than yours and it wasn't too long before ... It must have been near the first of November of 1918 when I took command. It was my first job as captain; I was twenty-nine years old. The ship was to be made ready to sail within fourteen days. My new boss - an elegantly attired British-looking gentleman - so directed me. He had just bought the ship from the Japanese and had organized a one-ship, fly-by-night (as I learned later) company called the Pacific & Oriental Shipping Co. This was so that the phone could be answered 'P & O,' the initials of the long established Peninsular & Oriental Shipping Co., the famous British firm."

The Chin Pu was built as the composite full-rigged ship Amstel in Amsterdam in 1873. She was a three-decked vessel of unorthodox construction, built of steel but sheathed with a layer of 3'2" teak up to the load waterline. This in turn was sheathed with yellow metal to keep out shipworms and prevent marine growth. The builder had fastened the teak planks to the steel hull by boring holes through the teak and steel, then fitting lead pipes through just the steel, and finally driving trunnels right through. I don't know whether this method of fastening was a protection against electrolysis, or simply "softening" to protect the wooden trunnels from the steel. The odd construction of the Amstel was completed by a wooden stem, a wooden keel, a wooden sternpost, and a wooden rudder.

For the best part of her long life, she was a "country wallah" called the Barendine Osiria, plying between the ports of the Malay Archipelago with salt and other cargos. Until sold to the Japanese during the war, her home port was Batavia on the island of Java. The salt cargos had gradually eaten away at the steel plating that formed her bottom. When I joined her, this damage had been repaired with a four-inch layer of cement reinforced by chicken wire.

The frames - ribs - were also wasted; at the turn of the bilge they had been fitted with doublers to beef them up. I did not know this when I joined her because she was more than three-quarters laden and I could not inspect her hold. I found it out later when she was empty in Manila.

Just before Chinese registry as the Chin Pu, she was the Kaishin Maru, registered in Dairen, Manchuria. She was then under the Japanese flag, and there was a plan afoot - because of the wartime shortage of bottoms - to turn her into a motor- ship. Her rigging was dismantled, and then it was decided that she was too old for this purpose and an engine would shake her apart. The masts and yards were put back in her in haphazard fashion, no sailing ship men being available. It was at this point that I took command.

"The ship doesn't even have compasses," I told the owner. "Any school kid will tell you that a ship needs a compass to find her way across the sea. And look at the rigging ... it is all wrong." I tried to keep my frustration in check, as I told my employer about the ship's shortcomings. 

I had relieved a Japanese captain, who had no intention of going to sea; he was just drawing wages. While this man had not bothered to find compasses for the ship, he had insisted that a Japanese wooden bathtub with a house to cover it be built aft. A copper pipe led all the way from the donkey boiler to heat this. The donkey boiler was at the other end of the ship, forward of the foremast. Steam was supposed to be kept up night and day to keep this bath hot for the officers. It takes fresh water to do this - a short commodity on a sailing ship - but he seemingly did not worry about that. Three men were signed on to keep steam up in the boiler for the officers' baths. I laid off two of these donkeymen immediately. Steam

would be to run the winch hereafter.

The waitress served the meal and lingered to hear us reminisce. 

"It was a godsend that I found you just the same," continued Millman. "I could not get out of Japan. All steamers were booked months ahead. I wanted to get to Manila by Carnival time. I made oodles of money down there. More money than I ever made on any stand. I don't care if she was an old tub."

"She wasn't a 'tub'," I said a little huffily, "but she was - unusual. Chin Pu had her good points. Her trouble was that she was getting up in years.

One thing I can tell you now is that we came mighty near not making it because of the masts. You could have been late for your Carnival. "We sailed from Kobe on December 23; you may remember the steamers that crowded the harbor. In command of my first ship, I was acutely aware of them. The windlass had needed fixing, but the owner did not think this important. As a result we were not able to get the mudhook up after we had set sail. With the anchor dragging, you cannot steer the ship. The Chin Pu dragged out of Kobe harbor, luckily missing the steamers while we were struggling with the windlass. Finally I gave her more chain and stopped her abreast of the Shinsaki Iron Works, a couple of miles outside the harbor proper. This firm had outfitted the ship and the manager knew what was the matter; in a few hours the windlass was repaired.

"Again, we proceeded to sea with a strong, fair wind," I said, warming to my story for the waitress' benefit. "By morning we had left the bay that holds Osaka, Kobe and Hiogo and by 8:00 a.m. on December 24 we were abreast of Murotasaki. That was the last we were going to see of Japan. We had been jogging along, but now I set all sail.

"There was no cause for worry as I turned in on Christmas Eve, 1918. I felt good. My first command was going well. The wind was fair, the sea was fair."

"I don't know anything about that," said Millman, "I was not feeling too well those first days at sea. I didn't care much what was going on."

"Well, what you missed was that at about 2:00 a.m. on Christmas morning Degerlund, the mate, came down and called me. The ship had started a bad rolling.

"'Hurry up, captain, the masts are going to roll right over the side!'

"It took me a short second to depart my bunk and rush on deck. The night was dark. The ship was rolling to alarming angles. The rigging on the masts was slack and as the ship rolled one way, the rigging on the opposite side tightened with a loud crash and thump. Hesitating for a moment, the Chin Pu then rolled the other way and the shrouds and backstays tightened with a crash and thump on the other side.

"I ordered the ship put on a course where she wouldn't roll so violently. 'Get some lignum vitae bullseyes,' I said, 'Splice a rope tail on each one.' This took a little while. 

Caption: The former British tea clipper Lothair, photographed by H. H. Morrison on the Pacific Coast, shows swifting in place about two-fifths of the way up the mainmast. The swifting appears as dark, horizontal lines just above the half circular top platform.

'Now get up on the crane line on the foremast, and hitch one of these tails on each of the backstays on each side, topmast, topgallant, and royal. Take the end of a three-inch rope up with you. Start reeving it through the bullseyes. Make a kind of cat's cradle up there.'

"'Number One' bosun - a Japanese, and one who spoke English - was watching all this, together with the rest of the Japanese crew. Only the two mates in Chin Pu were Caucasian, you recall; they communicated with the sailors through Number One and Number Two bosuns.

"'Now set it up,' I said after the snakeline was rove. By heaving on this three-inch line, zig-zagged back and forth between the two sets of backstays, the rigging was nipped in at a point about one third of the way up the mast. The rope rendered easily through the hardwood bullseyes.

"'Now, go and do the same thing on the mainmast,' I told Number One bosun."

The waitress went to serve another customer who had just come in; she left the sea story at our table reluctantly.

"I missed all that about saving the masts," said Reckless Ross, sitting in the coffee shop on The Pike.

"Everybody to his specialty," I told him.

The mate, Degerlund, told me at the time that he had never seen this method used before.

I gave Degerlund the old-time name for this improvisation, "swifting."

I had seen it done on the Anma when I was ordinary seaman and I ordered it done myself once before, when I was mate in the S.N. Castle. Captain von Dahlern was tickled; the old barkentine was laden with phosphate rock and there was danger that the foremast would go overboard with her rolling. In the Anna the rope itself was passed around each backstay and a couple of men had to go up to render it around them when we hove tight. The bullseyes made it go much easier.

"She didn't stop rolling, I remember that," said Millman over a cup of coffee. He looked at his watch. "It is about time for another show; I've got to go. I remember the cabin stove getting loose from its moorings and jumping over the table onto the settee. I often thought about the Chin Pu after I unloaded in Manila; I wondered what happened to her. And to you. How did you get back to the States?"

"Give me your card," I said. "I'm about to begin a long swing through the South Seas with my owner and his party. I'll write you a letter. It will give me something to do. How I got back to the States is a story in itself."

Here is the letter I wrote to Millman, as best as I can reconstruct it.

* * *

Dear Ross,

I enjoyed our chat on The Pike. I'm glad to see that you haven't broken your neck. I don't know which is the most dangerous, an old sailing ship or a new Indian motorbike.

In any case, here is what happened to the old sailing ship.

After your gear and the rest of the cargo - empty gin bottles and carboys of acid - were discharged, the vessel changed flag from Chinese to Philippine Register. I was compelled to pay off the Japanese and hire a crew of Filipinos. But bona fide seamen of that race were then hard to get. All except two of those hired had never made a trip to sea. Even those two had nothing but steamship experience. For these reasons I was allowed to keep my two Caucasian mates and the Japanese chief cook and carpenter. I figured that I would be able to train the crew in handling sail and the ship while we were heading north along the lee side of Luzon where there are smooth seas and light land and sea breezes.

The ship was loaded with a cargo of copra meal, highly combustible and liable to catch fire due to spontaneous combustion. I checked at the local fire station; they told me that five weeks after the stuff got wet in local warehouses with leaky roofs it burst into flame. Copra meal was used as fuel under the boilers of local tugboats, I noticed. I never gave a thought to the possibility that there was a sinister effort on the part of the owner to have the ship disappear at sea.

The war was over and the bottom had dropped out of the freight market. The ship was highly insured, for a quarter of a million dollars. She was being sent to sea with a bunch of landlubbers who had never seen the ocean - they did not even speak English, but Tagalog - and a cargo that would catch fire easily if it got wet.

Well, I was young. It was my first command and I wanted to make a success of it. We trained the crew.

Aft we were not even armed, and here we had a complement of Filipinos who for all we knew were unacquainted with law and order. But somehow they respected us and we were able to handle the ship when we struck the northeast monsoon at the north end of Luzon. Strong winds started to blow.

The ship began to leak as the seas got rougher and now the pumps broke down. They were ancient antediluvian pumps; Magellan and Captain Cook surely had better ones.

We had to look for a port where these pumps could be repaired. We tried to make Keelong, Formosa (the Japanese called this port Keerun and of course the island is today known as Taiwan). I hove her to off the port on a moonlit night, but in the early hours of the morning the wind increased to a northeast gale and the Chin Pu was fast going ashore. It was make sail now and claw off, never mind her tired old rigging and sails. With all the canvas she would stagger under we crept along the line of breakers. A steamer sighted us and we were so close in that they reported on their wireless that a bark was ashore on Formosa .(7)

This report reached Manila and the owners must have been rubbing their hands. Chin Pu was the only vessel in those waters that met that description. The insurance money was all but theirs.

We fooled them. We didn't go ashore. One of Chin Pu's virtues was that she was weatherly. That's what kept us off that Formosa beach. Another quality she had was the ability, when loaded, to come about in almost any kind of sea.

Anyway, we reached Nagasaki. Some cargo was discharged to get at the pump suctions. Then - as predicted - the ship caught fire due to spontaneous combustion. Water had found its way through the ancient decks to the copra meal. The ship was beached and scuttled. The salvage tugs pumped her out and towed her back to her anchorage. The owner appeared, went to Shanghai and hired another captain and two mates. I was fired.

It was no secret in the maritime circles of Nagasaki that I was discharged for doing my duty and saving the ship. I still have the indignant letters written by D.F. Robertson, the Lloyds Surveyor for the port, so that the owner's caper would be no blot on my professional escutcheon. The American consul, Edwin L. Neville, took my part as well. I received three months' extra pay and money for first class transportation to San Francisco; he demanded this settlement from the owner.

But passage to San Francisco was hard to get; it all had to be booked months ahead. I overhauled the consulate flagpole, a proper seamanlike affair with a fidded topmast. I loafed around Nagasaki, feeling like a millionaire, plenty of money in my pocket.

"Do you think she will reach San Francisco, captain?" they asked me at Lloyds Agents one day.

"If she gets out through Van Diemen Strait and into the Pacific, she should," I replied.

"But will she?"

I could not answer that.

Finally into port came steaming the U.S. Army Transport Sherman. These ships used this harbor to fill their bunkers with coal. Mr. Neville secured passage for me and my two mates as "destitute seamen."

We sailed for Manila with about two thousand troops on board that had been shipped at Vladivostok. They had been fighting the Communists, but the folks in the U.S. were tired of war and these troops were withdrawn.

We arrived at Manila. All three of us had a stateroom on the passage south. After two weeks in port, additional troops were shipped and some sailors from the USS Brooklyn. Room was scarce and now all three of us were suddenly reduced to the circumstance of common sailors and lodged in the 'tween deck of No. 5 hatch. We were deprived of officer privileges; we could no longer circulate on the upper decks and in the public rooms. But we were not alone. With us were American captains and mates, as well as crews, who had delivered three auxiliary schooners to foreign owners in the Orient and were now on the way back to the U.S. Auxiliary schooners - the Orient was alive with them at that time. Under the stimulus of the war, these large wooden schooners - some with auxiliary oil engines and some with auxiliary steam engines - were built by the scores in the Pacific Northwest; more than fifty were built for the French, and about half that number for the Norwegians.

7) The Ship Press Chappel, aboard the Museum's Balclutha, has printed a limited edition of broadsides in which are described the curious connections between a similar incident on the southbound voyage of the Chin Pu, Captain Klebingat, a painting by W.A. Coulter of another vessel in like danger, Karl Kortum, and the rescue of the four-mast bark Falls of Clyde (now a museum ship in Honolulu) .- Ed.

Top caption: Twenty years before, the U.S. Army Transport Sherman had arrived from Manila in San Francisco Bay crowded with troops returning from the Spanish-American war. The city outdid itself in a homecoming celebration.

Below caption: The auxiliary schooner Monterey was built in the Pacific Northwest. This vessel is typical of the "more than fifty built for the French ... about half that number for the Norwegians." Her original name was Adrien Bodin and she was built in Portland in 1917.

The transport was really commanded by the so-called Quartermaster Captain. Where his authority left off and that of the ship's skipper, Captain Kerr, began, I do not know. The food on the Sherman was awful, mostly a kind of stew they called "slum," a mixture of chunks of meat and potatoes, the whole mess thickened with flour. But what could you expect? Many of the people in the steward's department were not interested in their jobs at all. They were professional cardsharps out to fleece the troops in poker; in order to get the berth, they had paid the chief steward. A poker game was going on every night in an empty coal bunker.

There was no fresh water for any of us or for the troops. It was saltwater showers, even salt water for shaving. But I was in luck. One of my former shipmates had noticed me.

"Hello there, Chips," says he.

My former shipmate was "Bingo" (as we called him), the electrician on board the tanker William F. Herrin, where I had served as carpenter for nearly a year.

"We have plenty of fresh water for the engineers' crew," says Bingo, who was part of the Sherman's engine room gang.

"Just use the engineers' shower when you need it and let me know if you need anything, I may be able to help you."

It made life more bearable for the three Chin Pu's in No. 5 hatch. But I pitied the troops. These were not enlisted men who made a profession of the military; these were drafted men. I had received a card myself that said, "Greetings," and ordered me to appear at a certain date for induction in the Army. It was signed "Woodrow Wilson." But I was a bona fide seaman; I wasn't drafted. I thought there was very little to choose between those that were drafted under the iron heel of Prussianism and the troops here on this transport in charge of indifferent martinets.

There was one in particular, Lieutenant Taylor. He dared not show himself in the troop deck unescorted; he knew better. Someone would have pulled the lightswitch and Lieutenant Taylor would have been grabbed and thrown out of an open 'tween deck port.

There was one soldier in the brig. He was there because he could restrain himself no longer and had said to Taylor in front of the company, "It's worth ten years, no, it's worth twenty years just to call you a damn son-of-a-bitch, you God damn son-of-a-bitch." He should have known better and waited to speak up until the Sherman reached San Francisco and he got his discharge. He was in the dungeon on board - the brig - awaiting court martial.

And we had another, an officer in disgrace. He was supposed to have been guilty of conduct un- becoming an officer and a gentleman, a tall Texan named Major Buck.

During the night, some of the troops would break into the bakery to steal bread. So a sentry was stationed there.

On we steamed, now bound north, back to Nagasaki to get more coal. Nagasaki was the major coaling port in that part of the world. Coal and fresh water were constantly expended - the Sherman was losing stability. We neared the north end of Formosa. The seas were smooth, an easy swell from the eastward was making up. Fair weather, you may think. A beautiful sunset, rosy, and the sunrise just as gorgeous. Long streamers of cirrus clouds radiating from a point in the heavens to the eastward.

"You are running into a typhoon," I told Bingo, "We will pass through or near the center. I do not need a barometer to foretell a typhoon - I have been through enough of them in the year past."

The ocean swell increased. The horizon darkened to the east. The wind increased after dark. The transport still plowed on her northward course. It seemed to me that Captain Kerr was not aware of what he was running into and was taking no action to avoid the center of the typhoon.

The night was dark, the wind increased to hurricane force. The ship rolled heavily and seemed to have trouble recovering from a heavy list. Those of us battened down in No. 5 hatch secured ourselves in our pipe bunks. Anxiously we listened to the turmoil on deck. The coal trimmers had trouble getting coal to the furnaces. Coal was rolling from side to side on the slick fireroom plates - it was hard to catch a shovelful on the fly and throw it into the open furnace door.

Some firemen on furlough from the USS Brooklyn were ordered to help out in the fireroom. They were valiant; I am convinced that their help keeping up steam saved the ship. For my part I worried, but what could I do?

Captain Kerr knew by this time what he was in for. His position was now somewhere near Okinawa. He called for moral support. On board as a passenger was a skipper who had commanded the former Dutch liner Tjikembang. I heard that he helped out Kerr. They could have asked me, and if they had, the ship would not have been in this predicament.

Just before joining Chin Pu, I had been through one typhoon after another as mate and navigator of the four-mast bark Star of Poland. The captain, Jack Larsen, lost the Poland on the coast of Japan when he disregarded my advice. I had urged him to get clear of the land when we finally got a favorable slant - a strong norther for a day. We were making twelve knots; we should have used the slant to achieve a "commanding position," as mariners call it, a hundred miles to windward of the approach to Uraga Channel. Uraga Channel led to Tokyo Bay, our destination.

Our situation in the Poland now became increasingly dangerous because we were on a lee shore and the current was setting that way, too. The worst kind of lee shore. And another typhoon. I got a star sight at dawn on the morning of the ship's last day; I didn't trust it. I kept the master informed. At noon I got a sight that I had to trust - it confirmed the bad news from the star observation. At the supper table I told Larsen that I wouldn't give him 10cents for the ship.

Caption: The Star of Poland ashore on the coast of Japan, 1918.

Ordinarily Jack Larsen listened to my advice, but this time he hadn't and the typhoon drove the Star of Poland ashore before morning.

My shipmates aboard the U.S. Army Transport Sherman and I, relegated to inactivity below decks, listened helplessly to the rising storm. At one point the ship heeled over to starboard - over she went, over and over. All of us held onto the pipe berths, out bunks, and hoped that they were secured safely. She heeled to a dangerous angle and then stopped. On the bridge, Captain Kerr and his Dutch advisor had the ship going full ahead on one engine and full astern on the other (I have not mentioned that she had twin screws), hoping she would recover and slowly right herself.

In the troop deck we heard a heavy crash. A batch of pipe berths had broken adrift with their occupants and dropped berths and men into the starboard wing. Luckily not many were hurt. For all that she was high out of the water, the doors to the houses and cabins on the upper decks failed to keep out the sea and rain driven through their cracks and around their edges by the force of the wind. Even the bridge was not impregnable.

I could picture the two skippers up there anxiously watching the ship. Slowly she recovered and came back to an even keel. It was a narrow squeak.

By morning the wind moderated quite a bit and by noon it was nearly calm. It took hours to secure all that had broken adrift. There was no breakfast - the steward's crew was trying to establish some order. One of the officers' wives was particularly obnoxious. She demanded her morning coffee. Someone in the steward's department found out that the firemen in the fire room had made themselves some coffee, using a coal shovel as a container to brew it in. So this steward got hold of some of the coffee brewed in a coal scoop and served it to the officer's biddy. It was afternoon before food could be served to troops, passengers and crew.

As the ship's bunkers became empty, the engineers had to resort to coal stored in the lower hold of No. 5 hatch. To move the coal there were wheelbarrows. They called for volunteers among the troops to wheel the coal from the hatch to the bunkers. There were no takers. Again the men from the Brooklyn came to the rescue, but with a proviso: "You have to serve us food in the crews' mess. We are tired of eating slum." This was agreed upon and they wheeled coal to the bunkers, just enough each day for the ship's twenty-four hour needs.

The weather stayed fair after this and we arrived at Nagasaki. The Japanese doctors came on board to clear the Sherman out of quarantine. In the ship's hospital they notice a man, a member of the crew.

"That man has cholera."

Nobody is allowed ashore, and the ship is anchored off. In eight hours the man was dead. Seemingly the Navy doctors aboard had no experience with this discase. They took his body ashore and cremated it. Portable latrines were hoisted on board the ship. No human feces were allowed to be discharged into the bay. Samples of stool of all the troops and passengers were taken and sent ashore. Subsequently, several men were taken ashore to the quarantine station as suspect. More than once all the troops were rushed in

batches to the station and bathed in large tanks spiked with some disinfectant. Day after day passed while I and the two Chin Pu mates gazed at the familiar shore.

Meanwhile the coaling proceeded, with the ship in quarantine. There were sentries posted so that nobody could get off the Sherman. Lighters of coal were sent out to us, and from them stages were rigged up the ship's side. Men and women swarmed up the stages and each basket of coal was handed up from stage to stage to stage - and finally dumped in the bunker. That's the way it was done in Japan at that time; a case oil cargo would be discharged the same way. It was something to see - a human elevator at work hour after hour after hour.

Caption: Nagasaki was the major coaling port in this part of the world. From lighters alongside, a "human elevator" passes baskets of coal up from stage to stage to stage in bunkering a steamer.

Major Buck, the officer in disgrace, managed to have a case of whiskey delivered at the gangway, but Captain Kerr got wind of it. He went down and took hold of the case of whiskey and dropped it into the drink.

We must have been two weeks in port when I heard a voice in a sampan cry out: "Captain Klebingat of the Chin Pu!"

I went on deck. The man searching for me was Mr. Shimizu, the banto or business manager of the ship chandler I had traded with when the Chin Pu had made port those many months before. "I have news," he said, "The Chin Pu never reached the open Pacific. She was picked up dismasted about a hundred miles from Shanghai and she's in port there, a derelict."

Dismasted. Of course.

I must admit that the news gave me a certain satisfaction. The owners now would not be collecting the quarter of a million dollars' worth of insurance. The underwriters would have paid the salvors' bill to tow her into port and then they would have told the owners, "Here is your ship," and washed their hands of her. Pacific & Oriental Shipping Company was broke. Captain Raab, who relieved me, was a pleasant young Swede. He was a member of the China Coast Officers' Guild, but he had been serving in steamers. He had only been a deckboy on a sailing ship; he had never been a sailing ship master or even officer. The owners did not want a man who knew his business. Raab wanted to pump me on handling the ship. I told him that I paid for my learning, that from now on the Chin Pu was his affair. I was bitter, as you may well imagine. He asked me one time how I prevented the masts from going overboard.

"Well," I said, "that is my secret. You may have a method of your own." Seemingly, he did not have one.

The swifting, very much a jury arrangement, had been sent down in Manila. The ship's rigging had tightened up when we took in cargo; I had seen this happen on other ships. The Japanese crew had been sent home - they would have known how to save the masts as I had taught them. 

Caption: "Dismasted. Of course ... " Here is the Chin Pu after being towed into Shanghai, with  minimum cost to the insurers because she was not a total loss. The Philippines were a dependency of the United States at this time, so vessels registered there flew the American flag. The Chin Pu was subsequently made into a storage hulk at Shanghai for the Robert Dollar Co. of San Francisco.

But the owners had changed the flag for their own reasons and it was now a Filipino crew. The plot to lose the ship had come to naught. 

Slowly all cholera suspects returned aboard the transport. They had been found to be clean. Next they coaled the ship, and another supply was taken aboard in No. 5 lower hold. 

We sailed; it must have been twenty days before we sighted Point Reyes.

Eight hours later the immigration officers boarded the ship.

"Returning Destitute Seaman," says I.

"Pass on, Destitute Seaman," says he.

Back on East Street many of my friends had heard that I was skipper of a bizarre old craft called the Chin Pu.

"Where is your ship?" they asked.

"Well, it is a long tale," says I, "How about a scoop of beer?" "Beer?" says they, "Haven't you heard? This is Prohibition. All they serve now is an imitation called Near Beer ."

A bitter disappointment to a returning mariner.

It was a few weeks later that I landed the job as skipper of the four-masted schooner Melrose, this time through my friend Julius Mendelsohn, manager of J. Cohen's waterfront tailor shop. Mendelsohn and Capt. Von Dahlern had stood up for me five years before when I had got my citizenship papers. Speaking of Christmases at sea, the one aboard Melrose - just a year after swifting the rigging in Chin Pu - remains in my memory a blur of hard work. The ship was sinking. We weren't thinking about Christmas - we were too busy working the hand pumps and sawing up wood from the deck cargo to feed the boiler that kept the steam pump working. All this in a hard southeaster somewhere southwest of the Straits of Juan de Fuca. In the end we kept the ship from filling and eventually reached the Hawaiian Islands. But 'nough said; that is another story,

I hope you continue to go round and round - don't break your neck. With best wishes against that happening, I remain your friend and captain. 

Fred Klebingat

It is fifty years since I posted this letter and I wonder if Reckless Ross is still with us. He was about five years younger than I, and I write this at the age of 94. There is a chance that he is; he may see this story. So therefore Merry Christmas to you, Reckless, and the same goes for the rest of my friends.

*****

Sea history, Winter 1985-86

The Melrose, built from this forest and just launched, sets out down the Hoquiam River in the State of Washington with a full deckload of timber. Radiating the virility of West Coast schooner design in every line, this handsome vessel found a truly appreciative skipper in Capt. Klebingat in the 1920's. Courtesy, National Maritime Museum, Sun Francisco,

A square rig sailorman builds a new life on a South Sea schooner

A One-Trip Command That Lasted Six Years

by Capt Fred Klebingat

Dr. Joseph F. Oliver, for whom I worked, was a medical man who had hung up his stethoscope and put away his scalpel to manage and own ships, He was an easy man to work for because he had faith in the men who sailed his schooners. If anybody else from the ship came to him with requests or complaints, he would say:

"I don't know you. I don't know anybody but the captain. When I don't have faith in the captain, I'll get rid of him.

It came about in this way that I got my job in the Melrose.

Julius Mendelsohn (proprietor of J. Cohen's tailor shop on the City Front, son-in-law of J. Cohen) sai done day. "Want to go skipper in the Melreoe?"

-No-o-o...

I had plenty of money. I was just back from the Orient with my wages from Chin Pu and I also had a pay day waiting from the Alaska Packers from the Star of Poland - about $800.

I told him I didn't like schooners.

He waited about fourteen days, (My money was going down.) "How about the Melrose?"

"All right. I'll take her for a trip." I stayed six years. I wasn't required to buy into the Melrose when I took command. Nobody was anxious to take the schooner, they knew Captain Treanor. She would be all run down. Jobs were still plentiful at this point, a year after the war had come to an end. I bought into her a couple of years later of my own volition-one-six-tenth as I remember. A schooner was divided into sixty-four shares. I joined Melrose at one of the San Francisco piers south of the Ferry Building; this was in November of 1919. Captain Bill Treanor - "'Peg Leg" - was giving up the command on doctor's orders. There was danger of a heart attack. Sitting at the cabin table was his nephew, Austin Keegan, also a schooner captain. He had commanded the Melrose some years before and he would have liked to have his old job back. But Treanor wouldn't even give his own son, Charlie, the job. Despite the fact that Mrs. Treanor had a share in the vessel. In other words. Treanor wouldn't force any of that bunch on

Dr. Oliver.

The original managing owner of the firm that owned the schooner, before Dr. Oliver, was a Nova Scotia man, well known in San Francisco shipping circles, by the name of McKinnon. Treanor was skipper of a McKinnon schooner, the J. M. Colman, in the early 1890s. However, as time went by it was Treanor's vote when he had accumulated enough shares - that ousted McKinnon.

Most of these people were related: Keegan, the McCarrons, the Murchisons, the Treanors. That particular clique was from Prince Edward Island, Keegan actually owned some shares in the ship still. Although Keegan was a nephew of Bill Treanor, Treanor wasn't going to give him the Melrose.

Mike McCarron, the first skipper of the Melrose, was later killed by the Japanese cook when he had command of the Sophie Christenson. Those skippers who were murdered by Japanese cooks... it was always the same thing. McCarron was a mean sort of man. He would get drunk and hard-time the cook. Get him out at all hours of the night when the schooner was in port to wait on his guests. The Japanese were funny that way. They got morose and waited for their chance. The cook cut McCarron's throat as he lay asleep in his bunk.

The author and Shorty (in hat) making a new fore topmast for the Melrose at Port Angeles, Washington in 1920. Photos on this page by E. Adermann, from the Martha Petereit Collection, National Maritime Museum, San Francisco.

Above. Capt. Klebingat making a maple settee an top of the schooner's deckload of lumber. At left, in the cabin at the Melrose, Chrstmas 1927. Capt Klebingat (right) shares a Christmas toast with a friend at Port Angelese.

This was a couple of years after I took charge of the Melrose. About ten years earlier we had a Japanese cook in the five-masted schooner Crescent where I was sailing before the mast. In Makaweli the cook claimed he was sick and refused duty. Captain "Hungry" Olsen (also called "One-eyed" Olsen), another hardcase, kept the cook locked up in the lazarette for three days. He just disappeared; we didn't know where he was. When the Old Man let him out the cook looked as if he had one foot in the grave. Olsen had to give in and have the doctor look at him.

"He's not sick," said the doctor, "bet you might as well discharge him anyway."

Ten years, maybe more than that, went by. I needed a cook for the Melrose and Harry Thornton, who supplied officers and cooks to the schooners in Seattle, sent me a Japanese.

"I won't say I was convinced at the time. But gradually I began to appreciate a schooner - a Pacifie Coast lumber schooner - more and more."

I saw him looking at me.

"Well, steward (I usually called my cooks that), what is it?"

"I know you"

"You do?"

"You boy, schooner Crescent."

It was the same man, Nagasawa. I asked him if he was really sick that time.

"Oh, no. Me want to get married."

Well, Nagasarea was a fine cook, In a month's time he never repeated the menu once. A lot of the Japanese cooks in the schooners came from Bainbridge Island. They were in the business of strawberry farming over there, The reason for Japanese cooks being so common was that white cooks for the most part were tramps und drunks. Even the union couldn't stand behind them. Men have to eat.

The schooner had the name of Melrose from the tows of Melrose in Nova Scotia where McKinnon was from. The Morris boys, including "Jumping Jack." skipper of the A. F. Coats, came from Havre which was a short distance from Melrose.

I told Keegan sitting at the table that I wasn't much on schooners. I liked the square-riggers - more men and all that. But Keegan spoke up for schooners. His first voyage to sea was before the mast in the clipper ship Dashing Wave and he was mate of the Newburyport full-rigger John Currier. Later he served in and commanded several fore-and-afters. In 1906 he had the big four-master William Nottingham around the Horn to Boston with a cargo of spars - for two days he abandoned her in the ice off the Horn after collision with an iceberg. But they went back aboard when they saw that the Nottingham wasn't sunk by all the ice that came crashing on deck off the berg. The deckload had saved her - it prevented the deck from being stove in, Keegan at different times had commanded the schooners Solano, on a trip to Australia, and the four-mast Cecilia Sudden.

"The worst thing that can happen to you on a schooner is that you carry away the boom tackles." be told me.

He meant if you catch aback. If that happens to you in a square rigger you might - under the worst circumstances - be caught alee and capsize. In a schooner you just lose the boom tackles. Even with moderate winds, being caught aback in a square-rigger was no fun. You've got a lot of work. You can't

just brace around. You've got to run before the wind... you've got to square in the crojik, square in the main, and finally square in the foremast. And then you've got to come around again.

That's a hell of a lot of effort. In a schooner you just let go the boom tackles (assuming it wasn't blowing that fresh that they actually carried away) and you're on the other tack. Of course, you've got to clew up the topsails and set them on the other side.

What Keegan said made a certain amount of sense, although I won't say I was convinced at the time. But gradually I begun to appreciate a schooner - a Pacific Coast lumber schooner more and more. Over the years I have been reading about accidents to European sailing ships and to American Downeast-built vessels how they behaved in bad weather in the Atlantic and the damage they suffered. I have come to the conclusion that our West Coast - built vessels like the Melrose were probably better sea boats. West Coast-built vessels went through hurricanes and survived with less damage, I am sure, than would have been incurred by these other craft I mention.

I would not be afraid to take a vessel like the Melrose - lumber laden, cargo well stowed and secured - anywhere on earth in any kind of weather. Even with a below-deck cargo (and no deck load) they were sea kind. This may be due to the fact that a great deal more timber was built into Pacific Coast ships. I admit that I may be prejudiced and I am only going on what I have read and heard about these other craft. I have never sailed in a Downunder or a European wooden ship.

Keegan was in his fifties; I had just turned thirty. I could not help but feel that he resented my taking command of a ship that he believed he should have had. He told a story on himself:

It seems that he had a supply of whiskey aboard the Melrose and it distressed Mrs. Keegan. She  searched and searched and finally found it, saying nothin. All he knew was that his bottles disappeared one day. Now it was his tum to search. Knowing his wife, he was sure that she would not have thrown the whiskey overboard. So he quietly ransacked the after quarters of the schooner. "Now, let's figure this out. It can't be far...."

In the bathroom there was hanging on a hook a big copper tea kettle. Thinking in terms of what kind of container could accommodate that much booze, the kettle came to mind. He craned his neck and gave a good sniff. End of the trail. That made it very convenient for him for some weeks to come. Just tip the kettle a little... take a swig at the spout. Much better than looking after a bunch of bottles, corking and uncorking.

Treanor had been a figure on the waterfront for thirty or forty years by the time I took command. The Melrose was Peg Leg's schooner, everybody knew that (although Mike McCarron had her first and one of the Murchison's later). But now he was minded to take a trip off... and what a mess he left behind. The Melrose had arrived in San Francisco with a cargo of copra from Fiji and it was still being discharged when I went on board and found her leaking like a basket. Doors were off the hinges or missing altogether. There was a turd in the second mate's bunk.

So when I got to sea I kept myself busy. I was handy with tools. Is addition to sailing the schooner and carrying cargoes and making money with her, I set to work to put her to rights. I made a new topmast and booms. I recaulked and puttied the poop and planed it off to look like a new deck. I renewed frames in the lifeboat and pat in new planks where the boat needed them. I built myself a new bunk, a settee and a new desk. Over a period of time I also built new bunks and desks in the mate's and second mate's rooms.

I was young. I worked hard. I built doors, I built tanks - I made two of these big oval shaped deck tanks out of redwood 4 by 6 by 8 feet. I sheeted the deck in the galley and caulked same. I built new bins and tables in the galley and a bunk for the cook. I told Dr. Oliver to order me a length of California laurel from the blockmaker Gallois. Gallois had a tin building standing pretty much by itself between Spear and Main Streets on Mission. (I think that all around him was burned out during the fire.) From this laurel I made three lower sheet blocks like the one made into a lamp in Karl Kortum's living room. California laurel, of course, is the same wood as Oregon myrtle - supposed to grow only in those states and in the Holy Land, I must have forgotten a few things in this list, such as making picture frames and framing pictures.

When a schooner got to leaking bad, when he had run her down to rags, then Treanor got off. When, after a period of time a new captain - this time me - had her fixed up again, new sails, recaulked - then Bill Treanor would come hack.

"Have somebody else fix it" - that was his middle name. Peg Leg had got his reputation that way as an economical captain.

To be continued

*****

Sea History, Spring 1986

Above, the mnewly launched Melrose sets out down the river Hoquiam with a deckload of lumber. A close-up of the photo, below, shows two men on the deckload near the mizzen, and two men on the quarter deck.

Part II

A One-Trip Command That Lasted Six Years

by Capt Fred Klebingat

Coming into the Pacifie the hard way, round Cope Horn in the German bark Anna in the tempestuous year 1905 (Alan Villiers wrote The War with Cape Horn about that year), young Fred Klebingat decided he would stay in that ocean and sail in schooners. An idyllic period in his life was his commend of the schooner Melrose in the 1920s. Here he remembers his time in her. Captain Klebingat died in March last year, aged 95. "He was a poet at heart," said the novelist Ernest K. Gann. "He saw things I'm sure other sailors didn't see."

Dr. Oliver was a tall, skinny man with a fair complexion and a short cropped mustache. He looked like you'd expect a doctor to look. He had had part of his stomach removed and took medicine every four hours as a result. 

He was a fine owner, the best you could have. As I was about ready to start home from the islands, he would write or cable: "Do you need any sails?" I would tell him what I thought the schooner had need of and he would order them from Prior - they would be ready for me on arrival in San Francisco. Same with ship chandlery. No stinting.

But if I was out in some South Sea island port and got in trouble and there were facilities to send a cable, he never answered it. He would cover the costs, but it was up to me to bail myself and the Melrose out of whatever difficulties we found ourselves in.

Dr. Oliver wasn't very happy about the loss of one of his schooners, the Prosper, shortly before. She was wrecked in the Hanapepe River (Pont Allen), island of Kuaui, in 1916. A shackle worked out of the anchor cable in a Kona gale. Dr. Oliver blamed it on the skipper, one of the Murchison brothers. The Prosper went ashore just when freight rates wore going up and Oliver could have made a fortune with the schooner. But I don't think it was Neil Murchison's fault. It was an exposed anchorage and sometimes things like that just happen. But it happened at the wrong time for the owners.

Degerlund, my mate in the Chinese bark Chin Pu in 1918-19, was in the barkentine Hawaii on a voyage from the Pacific Coast to Cape Town when Neil Murchison was in command. Murchison seemingly thought that he could make a faster passage to Africa by going south of South Georgia. He became surrounded by ice and was there for about five weeks. One of the bow ports in this steel barkentine was stove in by the ice and the forepeak filled. They thought that they might have to abandon the vessel for awhile, bat they persevered and someone was able to build a box around the bow port, working in that icy water. They filled this with cement; it set fine in the water, and in due course they were able to free the forepeak of the South Atlantic and continue the voyage.

I remember the Hawaii's figurehead; it was an exceptionally beautiful carving of a hula dancer. The lady, on this voyage, was a long way from her native clime.

However, on the Melrose I was enjoying myself too much!

"You should get a year in the cooler for that... I suggest to his honor... that is what should be done."

I have never been happier at sea than when I had command of that four-masted schooner. It was too good to last, and, sure enough, there came a time when Captain William "Peg Leg" Treanor decided to take her back. It was announced that this would be when the Melrose arrived in Port Angeles.

What a bitter blow this was to me after all that I had put into the vessel! But I knew there wasn't anything I could do about it. Oliver couldn't say no to the man. Treanor's vote had made Oliver managing owner of the company and thrown out McKinnon. Treanor's shares, whatever they were, were

enough. He was sixty-nine years old, and in no shape to go to sea. Oliver knew it.

I received a letter aboard the Melrose in Hawaii telling me that I was going to be relieved of the command on arrival in the Pacific Northwest. This was about the gist of the letter:

Captain Treanor has asked us for his old command, although we are reluctant to comply on account of his age and his health. His doctor has advised him to avoid excitement as he has a heart condition. But as he has asked us, we can't refuse him as he is an old friend of the firm. Such being the case, allow us to use our efforts in your behalf to find another vessel for you.

Joseph A. Oliver

It may not have been put in so many words, but when I took over the schooner it was clear that if I wanted it, I could keep command. It was understood that Treanor was at long last going to retire. But now he had decided to come back. And apparently nobody was willing to stand in his path. I brooded about the unfairness of it all on my voyage up the coast.

There were a lot of stories about Peg Leg Treanor, most of them bad. He lost his leg as the result of a shipwreck; an infection set in. It was in the Winnebago, a steel steam schooner stranded on Point Arena, that Captain Treanor got his leg in between the boat and the ship.

At one time there was a bus running from the sawmill to Port Angeles. Buses in those days were frequently converted touring cars with a lengthened chassis. Peg Leg takes the bus to go to town. The space between the seats was insufficient for his peg, so he sticks it out the window, When they arrive in town, his peg is missing. He can't walk. So the bus takes him back out to the mill.

Near the mill gale there were a couple of men trimming lumber. Treanor hollers to them to come over. He instructs them to saw off a two by three to the right length, then with a hatchet he trims it to the right size for the socket. The piece of wood is inserted in the socket. Treanor rises and stomps down a few times-a perfect fit. Back to town... When he got off the bus, there was his real peg leg lying on the running board. (Cars had running boards in those days.)

The Port Angeles paper ran a story about all this: "Shiver My Timbers, I Lost My Peg Leg."

Treanor used to make money on the side by bootlegging. He used to smuggle a little okolehau (made in the Hawaiian Islands from the ti root) into the Pacific Northwest. Washington went dry early. His second mate by this time was a Chilean, Olegario Aguilar who was a sailor with me later in the ship. 

"Here is a suitcase. You take this and bring it to this address in town," says Captain Treanor. (The address was one of his customers.) Of course Ole knew that the suitcase was full of booze. It was two miles from the mill at Port Angeles to the town of Port Angeles. The day was hot. Ole sits down beside

the road. He takes out a bottle and takes a couple of swigs Then another. Finally he is not sober. The sheriff arrests him. Nest morning he appears before the judge.

And here comes Peg Leg. He marches into the courtroom and shakes his oaken cane at Ole: "Ah, here you are! Have I not told you again and again that you are breaking the law with your bootlegging? But you won't listen - I am glad that the law finally caught up with you.

Of course, the judge and the sheriff were taking all this in. so he went on: "You should get a year in the cooler for that. You deserve it, and I suggest to his honor, the judge here, that is what should be done."

"On the other hand," Treanor continued, ""I would be short a man in my crew. I cannot afford to have the ship lying here without enough men to man her...

Peg Leg turned to the judge: "I have to ask you to go a little easy with this man, your honor. You see he is a foreigner. Seemingly he does not know the laws. I can tell you this much: I will see to it that he doesn't do it again. I don't care to have bootlegging going on in my ship."

The performance continued:

"Ole, I am asking the judge to be lenient with you. For the ship's sake." He paused a moment. "Perhaps he will let you off with a fine...

The upshot was that the judge let Ole off with a fine of fifty dollars and, of course, confiscated the booze. Aguilar was released into the captain's custody. As soon as they were out of earshot of the judge, Peg Leg turned on Ole and threatened, raising that knobbed oak cane: "Don't you ever get caught again, you bungling son-of-a-bitch, or I'll kill you."

But now, when we got in past Flattery and anchored at the lumber mill, I had to give up command. Peg Leg would take over the Melrose. We made the Cape with a light fair wind and were reported from Tatoosh Island to have passed in. But with the ebb tide it dropped calm. We were reported by the signal station to be drifting out again. At noon the Melrose passed Tatoosh once more when the northwest wind freshened. All of these delays were, or course, reported to Captain Treanor who wis awaiting my arrival at the Merchant's Hotel. He had come up from San Francisco to meet the schooner. He got more and more excited.

We sailed on and about ten o'clock that night anchored in Port Angeles. The nest morning I went to the mill office and spoke to Bill Covert, the superintendent.

I said, "Where is Peg Leg?"

"He's dead," Covert said.

"Dead!?"

"He dropped dead yesterday afternoon on the front steps of the hotel waiting for you to get in."

"Well, then I keep my job." I said.

It dawned on me that I should not have said that. For many years the remark was held against me; it was thought that I was a very callous individual. People didn't understand.

Dr. Oliver sent up orders to spare no expense. The widow may need advance money. Pay the undertaker and secure the floral offerings that were appropriate. Amend the funeral if my religious beliefs did not stand in my way. I attended the funeral, but did not stop work on the ship while the funeral was in progress as Oliver had suggested I could if I thought it proper.

It was not for several years that Covert ceased to regard me a hardcase. My friend Knad Svinding of the schooner Taurus put him right. I suppose they had a bottle of booze one time and were talking. Svinding must have told him that I was not such a bad guy after all, because I could see in Covert's attitude towards me after that that he had changed his mind

In any case, I had my reasons.

Captain Klebingat on the schooner Melrose newly arrived at Kakulai on June 25, 1920. Talking about the photo in 1975, he made the following comments. This shows the height of the deckload. I am 6" tall, the rail is about 4 feet 6 inches above deck. There my be about three inches of water on deck. The row of oblong holes above the waterways is at least ten inches above dock; the holes are on top of the waterways.

The hatches were caulked with oukum after the hold was filled, and were then cemented. Three tarps were then pet on each hatch and were battened down. There is no chance of water getting into the hold through the hatches.

The ship was loaded at the Puget Sound Mills & Timber Co.'s dock. The deckload was secured and I was going ashore to pay my bills and clear ship at the custom house. We did not use a gangway:

generally a two-by-twelve inch plank was shoved as board from the deck. There always was some such stuff around on the mill dock.

I noticed an elderly looking gent he looked like a retired naval officer sizing up the ship and her load. He said to me:

"How far ace you going with that pile?"

"We are going to Kahalai on the island of Maui," says I.

"Don't give me that stuff," the old gent snorted. "I reckon Cape Flattery is about in far as you will get before you lose it."

"I hate to disappoint you." I replied. "Give me your address and I will send you a postal card when we arrive."

With a grunt, the old chap turned and walked away. I never saw him again.

*****

Sea History, winter 1989-90 

Hermes's Destiny

by Frederick Klebingat

It is a surprising thing that a German trading company with its headquarters in Jaluit in the Marshall Islands had its schooners built by a San Francisco firm. But the ships were excellent and I am certain that they were better suited to the trade than anything German shipbuilders could have produced. San Francisco was for many years the gateway to the South Seas and I have always felt that the schooners built here for that trade were the most beautiful - just imagine what a great fleet it would have been if all of them could have assembled at one time in the bay! Old Matthew Turner turned them out by the score, as did Frank Stone. Anderson & Christofani and other builders also built some.

There was a Stone schooner at Manila in 1919 when I arrived there in command of the bark Chin Pu. This must have been the Triton, owned by the Pacific Commercial Company. Earlier I had encountered the Hermes in Honolulu when trading there in the Falls of Clyde. The Hermes was a Jaluit company schooner, she left in mid-July, 1914, on a trip to the Marshalls. When she returned to Honolulu in October, her skipper, Captain Schmidt, sighted the Japanese warship HIJMS Hizen cruising just outside Oahu's three mile limit. She was on blockade duty to intercept any German craft trying to reach sanctuary in a neutral port and had already captured the German schooner Aeolus.

Captain Schmidt stayed inside the three mile limit, but nevertheless the Japanese man-of-war sent launches to board him and haul down the German flag. Schmidt took note of the US Revenue Cutter Thetis arriving on the scene with her three pounders unlimbered. He hauled the German flag back up again and the Japanese withdrew The Hermes lay for three years at the Railroad Wharf in Honolulu along with the German steamers Holsatia, Prinz Waldemar. Staats-Sekretar Kraetke, Longmoon, Locksan and several others. We arrived and departed from the other side of the wharf in the Falls of Clyde during these years. When the United States entered the war these vessels were seized. The schooner was sabotaged by her German captain, who had orders to saw through her keelson and to saw off the masts below decks. But of course, these things were easily set to rights and she was soon USS Hermes, patrolling for the Navy with a lieutenant in charge.

She was declared surplus after the war and fitted with a 40 ton freezing room for tuna and the ocher types of fish which the expanding Japanese population in the Hawaiian Island liked to eat raw. But there was a whispering campaign started that frozen fish was not wholesome and the Lanikai, as she was now named, was sold to an Alaskan fisherman. She turned up in the Samuel Goldwyn movie "Hurricane" made from the Nordhoff & Hall book, well cast in the role of an island trading schooner. Two days before Pearl Harbor she was in Manila, flying the commission pennant of the US Navy again. She was engaged on a suicide mission - presumably to provoke the Japanese into war - as a result of an order from President Roosevelt to the Commander in Chief of the Asiatic Fleet. It is a remarkable story. Admiral Kemp Tolley tells about it in his book Cruise of the Lanikai, Incitement to War. He eventually escaped in her to Australia, a 4000 mile voyage under hardship conditions.

Captain Klebingat left Germany in his teens to go to sea, eventually settling on the West Coast of the US, where he died in 1985.

*****

Sea History, Autumn 1995

Caption: The German bark Anna ex, Otterbum, on which this episode recalled by Fred Klebingat took place, is seen here at Commencement Bay near Tacoma, Washington, sometime between 1893 and 1905.

Christmas in Antofagasta

by Fred Klebingat

Christmas is comin' soon." said Captain Koester, skipper of the four-masted bark Anna, ex-Otterburn once belonging to Shanklund-Burns, but now sailing from Bremen.

"Yes." said Gau, the Mate or Steuermann."this will be the second Christmas away from home."

"And God only knows where we'll be the Christmas after that." the Captain replied in a reflective mood.

It was December 1907. The Anna was anchored at Antofagasta, a port in Chile just south of the tropics. She had come from Newcastle, New South Wales, with a full cargo of coal, and after a somewhat boisterous voyage of forty-five days, she had anchored at this roadstead in the lee of the barren foothills of the Andes. A large white anchor painted on the mountainside had given us the location of the port.

About forty ships, square riggers and a few schooners, too, were anchored here in four tiers, their bows headed westward toward the open Pacific, anchored and secured fore and aft, They put me in mind of an array of curtseying circus horses, as their bows rose and fell in unison to the tremendous westerly swells

that never seemed to end.

Most of these vessels had come here with coal from Europe or Australia, but there were quite a few ships loaded with lumber from the Pacific Northwest. After discharging, some of these would load nitrate for home, but others were condemned to a neverending run between Australia and Chile.

There was the Whitliebarn astern of us loading nitrate, and she would have the lust sack on board before Christmas and be bound foe Europe. On the other quarter was the Tarpenbek unloading lumber, and she also would leave before the holidays and go to California for a load of wheat and then sail to Falmouth, England, for orders. There was a scarcity of lighters this morning, although the crew still was standing by ready to discharge coal and the steam was up in the ship's donkey. It was only a matter of time before a lighter would come and the cargo would begin to be discharged again and great clouds of coal dust would envelope the ship. So, temporarily free of dust, Captain Koester enjoyed his morning walk on the ship's poop. He was a man of average height, corpulent, and in his fifties. His face was adorned with great whiskers. His deportment commanded respect. Gau, the mate, was a few inches shorter, well built, a man with a walrus moustache. He had a kind disposition for a mute and was about ten years younger

than the Captain.

- - -

In this [area), we set the tree - our tannenbaum memory of a forested land in another hemisphere a continent and an ocean away.

- - -

"I wonder what the men have up their sleeves this Christmas, Steuermann?"said the Captain to Gau. He slowly stroked his whiskers and said, "It was certainly a great Christmas they thought up last year when we were "running the easting down somewheres south of the Cape of Good Hope."

"This bunch never does things by halves," said Gau.

"I recall that Equator-crossing celebration about a year and a half apo," said Captain Koester. "That was something."

Gau lit his pipe and walked to the rail and threw the match overboard, then replied. "At times, I've wished they were less belligerent and not so hilarious, especially when they're ashore and return on board,"

I happened to hear all this as "Chips." the carpenter, had detailed me to put in a graving piece in the deck before I'd be sent in the hold to shovel coal.

"You are talking about the fight they had in the boat last Sunday," said the Captain. "A thing like that can be a turning point, a serious matter for a vessel's discipline. I - you - could find that our authority begins to slip."

I was one of the men who pulled the boat that day and so I knew all about it. The starboard watch began to fight among themselves while coming off from shore, and pretty soon they didn't know who was hitting whom. They put up a grand scrap for all those on the different ships to see, and it was a wonder they did not capsize the boat. Some of the ships' crews thought that would happen, so they jumped into their boats to rescue us, if that should be necessary. Drunk as they were, the Anna crew finally came to the conclusion that the boat was not the place for a fight and postponed it until they came aboard. I did not see the last part of it, as I was detailed to secure the gig.

The Captain relit his pipe and carried on. "It's that damn Pisco,' Steuermann. That is the cause of it. When they get drunk on it, it sets them nuts but does not lay them out."

The Mate watched a passing empty lighter for a minute or two .... "Our men have gained a reputation." he said. "They are supposed to be the toughest birds that ever manned a ship."

"Not only at this port." replied Captain Koester. "but also at Caleta Coloso and Mejillones. And even Stevenson, the stevedore, has asked me how I manage to handle a bunch of gallows birds... I tell

everyone that if they leave the 'Pisco' alone, they're the best crew I ever had."

There really is not much to go ashore for at these so-called harbors situated between Valparaiso and Callao on the west coast of South America .... This is the Atacama Desert, a parched coastline where even a cactus would have a hard time to survive. And harbors? These are only indentations in the coastline, all are open to the westward.

Caption: Sailoes had to provide their on music, mostly with small instruments like pennywhistles, concertinas, tambourines and the occasional fiddle. The fellow on the left has made a drum out of half a keg, while another holds a simple triangle. This photo was taken about 1900 on an unidentified British sailing vessel. Courtesy, San Francisco Maritime National Historical Park.

It is here that the settlements are situated. Some, such as Iquique and Antofagasta, are quite large. But most are small. All of them have these in common-unpaved and dusty streets, wooden houses in want of paint, pine boards that form their walls curled up in a merciless sun. A few structures are in better shape, such as some of the stores and the homes of those store owners. There are a few cantinas and fandango

houses, too, where drinks and ladies of easy virtue may be had by men who have the price. It is cool during the night, but during the day a pitiless sun blazes down on these ports of sin, sweat, and stink. Water is expensive and hard to ger. It is supplied by vendors who sell it by the gallon from a barrel mounted on a mule-drawn cart.

Small as some of these towns are, they all have a so-called "plaza," where a few trees are planted and watered by that expensive fluid, reminding the residents that there are places on earth where one can grow trees and flowers and grass. I spent few hours ashore in these harsh ports. I may have been a poor judge, after months at sea, but on those brief visits I was amazed to find numbers of truly gorgeous and beautiful women.

- - - 

"Some of them brought their musical instruments-accordions, some fiddles, and homemade drums... "

- - -

They were well-groomed, vivacious, sparkling eyed, each with a tasteful hairdo accenting a beautiful complexion. I wondered how so much feminine beauty could flourish in such a dismal situation.

* * *

"I found a Christmas tree," said Willie, my watch partner. He was a member of the crew of the Captain's gig and did not have to shovel coal. "We put the Captain on board a Kosmos Liner and I found this tree flouting alongside. It is quite dried up and without needles, so the crew of the steamer thought that it was of no further use and threw it overboard. But it is a Christmas tree!

"Let's make a real Christmas," said Paul, the big shot in the port fo'c'sle, "a Christmas that will be remembered in this port long after we have gone." He looked approvingly at Willie's find.

There was a store in Antofagasta that sold Christmas tree ornaments and tinsel and candles, too, I borrowed tools from Chips and made a base for the tree. We managed to get some green paint and some turpentine to thin it out, and painted the dried-up tree.

An awning had been stretched above the fo'e'slehead to keep off the hot sun but a chill wind would come up from the sea in the afternoon, so we rigged side curtains of canvas to keep it out. In this apartment, we set the tree - our tannenbaum memory of a forested land in another hemisphere a continent and an ocean away. We added tufts of cotton for imitation snow and draped the tree with ornaments and tinsel and fastened the candles in place on the ends of the brittle boughs. We thought in the prettiest tree we ever saw, although it had no needles at all.

* * *

When Christmas Eve came the crew of the Anna was well prepared for it. They had bought cases and cases of Chilean beer. They wanted to make sure that they and their sailor guests would not thirst on

this Christmas holiday. And the Old Man also anticipated having visitors, so to make sure that they would not starve, he had ordered a quarter of beef and an abundance of fruit and vegetables.

It was before noon on Christmas Eve when Gau said to me, "Take this Union Jack, Fred, and tic it to the gallant backstay as high up as you can po. It will tell the Captain's friends at Caleta Coloso that they are invited on board."

It was quite a distance to Caleta Coloso. The tops of the masts on the ships anchored there were just visible from our deck.

Caption: Fred Klebingat photographed aboard the S.N. Castle between 1909 ad 1915, on the Pacific Coast. Photo courtesy the San Francisco Maritime National Historical Park

But the boats belonging so the ships there had been rigged with sail, and before dark we saw several of

them heeling over to the strong sea breeze. They rounded to smartly at our gangway, one after the other, and the captains stepped on board followed by their boat crews.

We did not know where they all came from. They came from all ships in the harbor and were of all seafaring nations. There were Germans and Dutch and Nordics. 100-Norse and Swedes, Finns and Dansks. And there were Scots and Irish and English. Some were French and they would not feel lonesome as we had some fine linguists to keep them entertained. There were no native Americanos they were rarely seen in the ship fo'c'sles those days. So our visitors from the American ships were "Whitewashed" and "Baltic" Yanks - men who first saw light of day on the shores of northern Europe. They were the men who now manned the Yankee windships. But did it matter? It was Merry Christmas for all of us, this miniature League of Nations.

...And they were all welcome and we were there to receive them. The decks had been washed and all was shipshape. There were many more than a hundred guests. Some of them brought their musical instruments - accordians, some fiddles, and homemade drums-enough to form two musical bands.

After dark we lit the Christmas tree and it was admired by all. We hang lanterns on the maim deck. The hands started to play Christmas carols and waltzes for those who wanted to dance. Sailors danced with each other; it was an old sea custom.

The other ships were dark, except for an anchor light. A moon, part full, rose slowly over the mountains, filling the bay with silvery gleams. It dimmed the anchor lights of our neighbors. 

A tour invitation Captain Koester and his guests came forward to admire our Christmas tree. They were delighted, and one of them said, "Captain, I compliment you, you have a fine crew, I am jealous, I must say, With men like these I could surely crack on when bound westward off Cape Stiff."

And Captain Koester said, "Merry Christmas to you all, the treat is on me. Send one of the boys aft for some "cheer."

"All this is just fine and dandy." I said to Paul.

"Where do you get that stuff?" he answered in a somber tone. "You call this dancing: where are the lady partners?" He seemed to be lost in thought. "No hope for lady company in a dump like this," he said. Paul did not know it then, but a Christmas deity must have heard his sigh.

It was near midnight. The hull of a steamer passed by close astern. It rounded to on the port side of us. There were some bells, an order, down went the hook; some more bells, the ship dropped astern, the rattling of chain and clank, clank, clank as the cable left the hawsepipe and then down west the stern mooring. He hove in again and the hull was near abreast of us.

There was a call, a chain-locker voice, "Ship ahoy! My passengers have seen your Christmas tree and wish to come on board."

Our Captain answered,"We are waiting for you. Please come on board." We heard the screeching and chirping of blocks, then a splash-a boat had been lowered on the steamer. A short tine later it appeared at our gangway.

Nearly all the passenger in the boat were ladies! Unbelieving, we helped them aboard. Most of them were young, some not quite so youthful, and all were pretty to our eyes. The boat made several trips with guests and it brought also a couple of musicians with their guitars. Later on it returned with some refreshments and eats.

Our guests made themselves at home and admired our Christmas tree. "You had you Christmas wish," I said to Paul. "These are the prettiest ladies I ever saw."

These was no scarcity of lady partners to dance with. And they danced for us their fandangoes to the beat of castanets. The Captain's guests joined us on the main deck to share dances with our lady friends.

Scotty escorted a girl to a seat on a spar near the rail and came towards me. He cupped his hand near my ear. "Talk about Christmas!" he said. "I have been sailing on board of British ships for thirty-five years, but never a Christmas anything like this!"

Christmas would net be real without singing "Silent Night." Pete from the Emmanuel, and our Paul saw to its presentation. No one ever heard a grander symphony than this orchestra and choir of seafarers-an orchestra where accordians predominated (there were some mouth organs, too), and this choir of seamen of all nations, many fine voices among them.

Our visitors from the steamer seemingly did not know this carol, but after the first verse they caught on and their guitars added accent to our seagoing instruments. Female voices blended with our male chorus.

"Silent Night" had been sang at Antofagasta many times before the Anna dropped anchor, but I am sure that at no time was an orchestra and choir of this magnitude assembled to send this great Christmas song over the waters.

"Silent night-ho-o-ly night - All is calm. The sea breeze had died down. and it was calm. Even the steamers were dark: they had shut down their dynamos for the night. The moon silvered the masts and yards of the sailing ships. The foothills of the Andes astern of us stood out in light gray, the stars sparkled, and it appeared to me that those darkened hulls around us also seemed imbued with the message of this song. Of course, I knew it was not so, but to me it seemed thot the ships rose and fell and their spars swayed to the rhythm of the old Christmas song.

It was near morning when our guests left with "Adios amigos ... Feliz Navidad" But our sailor friends from the other ships went to sleep wherever they could find a place. The sail locker was about the best that we could offer them.

Born near Kiel, Germany, in 1889, Capt Klebingat sailed in the Cape Horn trade in his teens. He rose to command lumber schooners in she Pacific and then Liberty ships in WW II, after which he went into the coasting trade on America's West Coast. He died aged 95 in Coos Bay, Oregon. This story is extracted from his Christmas at Sea, published in 1974 by the Bernice P. Bishop Museum, Honolulu.

*****