In many ships, captain and mates never fail to use their "handles" in addressing each other, and this was so on the Fuller, in fact there was as little familiarity aft, in the personal relations of our officers, as one might expect to find between the representatives of two armies meeting to arrange a truce. And the wonderful part of it was that they left the ship at the end of the voyage as coldly distant as the day they stepped aboard; that is all but the second mate, which is again running me ahead of the lawful progress of this yarn.
However, to get back to the deck and to the lives of our particular little sea community, plowing their painful way over the cruel surface of the many wrinkled ocean, we resented the underhanded flavor of the affair between the mates and Tony. With all the excuses for hazing granted and allowed for, there is nothing to be said in favor of lying about a fight. The imputation of the knife, held as evidence by the mate, and the whole character of the mixup left a bad taste in our mouths for many weeks.
From that time on we entered upon a stage of the voyage notable for its hardship. The officers were drivers from the time we dropped the Navesink Highlands, but for a long time after the incident off the River Plate, nothing but harsh words found any place in their vocabulary. Weather conditions became more unsettled and severe and one blow followed close on the heels of another. We were in oilskins for weeks at a time, soaked to the skin through the worn out "slickers." Most of us developed salt water boils and one formed on my left wrist, through the constant chafing, and has left a scar to this day, as I had the habit of stopping the sleeves of my coat with a few turns of marline to keep the water out. It was impossible to dry things in the brief four hours below, and the "slop chest" was soon depleted of its stock of new oil clothing. It would be hard to picture a more depressing period than that through which we passed just before entering the real weather off Cape Horn.
In one of our brief periods below some of us were patching the tears in our oilskin coats and pants, resulting from a tussle with the fore upper tops'l, the downhauls having carried away, and left the sail a bellying fighting mess of canvas that four of us were ordered to subdue. Sewing oiled cloth is a poor job, and a loosened finger nail on my right thumb, added nothing to the cheerfulness of the sewing party.
"I'll bet few lads would go to sea if they could look in here for a half hour," I remarked, following a turn of thought that revolved more or less about my own folly.
"An' I don't think you would stay in 'ere or out on deck or anywhere else in this leaky old bucket if you knowed what is afore us," chipped in Jimmy. "You 'aven't never gone round the Horn yet, so God 'elp you, is wot I says."
"Yes, Gott help all of us," said Scouse with a heartfelt grunt from the sea chest at the forward end of the fo'c'sle where he and Joe were playing checkers on a new "heavy weather" board just made by the resourceful Joseph. This board was covered with a piece of canvas, the squares being marked off with pencil. The checkers (and here is where Joe prided himself) were made by sawing pieces from an old broom handle, and Joe had driven a sharp brad through each one of them so they would cling to the canvas on the checker board.
On deck chanties had ceased to enliven us, and we went through the hard watches in a dogged spirit of endurance. We felt like martyrs, a state of mind not altogether without its compensations. In the watch below, in a steaming atmosphere of gloom, lighted by a single oil lamp set into a hole in the partition bulkhead between the two sides of the fo'c'sle, we slept as much as possible, which was not half enough, ate our rude meals, and had our dreams of happier days to come. Each man respected the rights of his neighbors and each bunk was a sort of damp narrow castle. Here in the smelly air, in the dim light, cold, tired, and often hungry, we lived, or rather, existed.