by E. B. White
My name, I discovered, was Mess. “Get me an orange tonight, Mess!” one of the wipers said as he left the room after my debut. I knew from the sound of his voice that this was a direct order. I perceived, too, that the wiper was less interested in the sweetness of an orange than in the sweetness of having a personal servant to bedevil. Below decks, fresh fruit was not part of the diet; to get an orange, you had to either grow one or steal one. In the days that followed, I learned to pinch goodies at the source, or from staterooms with their doors left open. This was part of the routine at sea. I became a floating Robin Hood, providing my men with delicacies by robbing the rich. It was part of the stratagem of survival, theirs and mine, and I laid my snares for a dill pickle as artfully as a trapper for a mink. The men themselves were not unreasonable. While I was carrying out my first assignment, I was in a cold sweat, fearing that the sight of one orange in the messroom might lead to a demand for oranges right across the board. This proved not to be the case. My firemen did not crowd their luck. And except in rough weather, when their deranged stomachs caused them to delve into the vast lore of seasick remedies and dreams of miracle cures effected by combining the most rare and unlikely substances, they asked of me only tasks I could humanly perform. Thanks to my former job in the saloon, I had valuable contacts in vital supply centers. In Wilbur Wolf I had an actual confederate, who saved odds and ends from the night buffet and turned them over to me as slyly as though we were pushing dope. Never knowing when a fireman would strike, I kept goodies always on hand in a hiding place by my bunk, as a man in rattler country keeps a snake-bite kit at the ready.
After breakfast the first morning, as the firemen drifted off to their duties and the Buford steamed north into the Bering Sea, I scrubbed the room, threw out the foul trophies, washed the cloth bag in the coffee urn, and stole an orange. The first day passed without mishap. I went on deck just long enough to see the Buford dive into a wall of cold white fog. A lookout had been placed on the forecastlehead, and Tony, the giant Negro watchman, was heaving the lead. Although I was busy getting squared away in my new job, my journal for that date contains a long, fancy description of the heaving of the lead. I was tired, but not too tired for a burst of showy prose.
The task of carrying the big stewpots of food down the almost vertical ladder from the galley proved to be the most formidable part of a messboy’s job—far more ticklish than stealing. These caldrons were as big as a bushel basket. They had two opposing handles riveted to the rim. Even when empty they were heavy, and when full of stew they were very, very heavy, as well as piping hot, and they required, of course, the use of both hands, leaving no hand for oneself. In a smooth sea, the trip down the ladder with one of these pots was, for a novice, sobering. In a rough sea, with the ship pitching and rolling, the descent appeared at first glance impossible. The ladder would lose its slant in mid-journey; slowly it would approach the perpendicular, then it would achieve the perpendicular. In a really heavy sea, it would go right past the perpendicular. Luis showed me how to get down. The trick was to wait at the top, stewpot gripped tightly, until the ladder presented a favorable angle for descent. Then you started down cautiously, gaining a round or two. As the ladder began straightening under you, you quickly poked one foot back between the rounds and hooked your toe around the side of the ladder, as an acrobat supports himself when hanging by his feet from a trapeze. As soon as the ladder’s cycle was complete and it started back toward a favorable angle, you disengaged your foot and gained another couple of rounds, and so on down until the trip was completed. Those moments of being suspended between decks with a heavy pot full of hot stew and with the combined weight of body and stew supported by one leg and a terrible strain on the other leg seemed interminable. But I was young, and my ankles were as strong as my opinions. Fortunately, I mastered the ladder trick before the Buford ran into a whole gale in the North Pacific on her way home. By that time, I was an accomplished artist.
In the Buford, the sailors and the firemen were two distinct societies; they lived apart, ate apart, and thought apart. A ship is no melting pot; it hardens its class distinctions until the social bones are ankylosed. Fireman scorns sailor, sailor derides fireman, on general principles. This is, I guess, traditional, and helps keep everyone toned up. In dress and appearance, the Buford’s sailors were a cut above the firemen; they shaved oftener and kept their clothes clean, thus by personal daintiness further arousing the scorn of the firemen. Each group took entire credit for making the ship go and vehemently denied that the work of the other group had any nautical significance whatever. This argument—who makes the ship go?—was pursued endlessly, until logic reeled. I heard it discussed by the hour in my mess as I stood dunking dishes. My men were, in fact, nourished more on argument than on stew meat; the most trivial subject awakened their forensic powers and stirred their passions.
At St. Paul, in the Pribilof Islands, I went ashore during a lull in the mess, trotted out to the rookery, and watched the seals. Each big bull was surrounded by his harem. Many of the cows had had their pups, and the place was like a gay, foul-smelling nursery during a children’s party, with fights breaking out among the elders. I could have watched the fun for days but had to hurry back to my urn. Luis was dispirited when I reported that seals could not fly. He was filling a ketchup jar—a moment of high drama complicated by this saddening piece of news.
At St. Lawrence Island, we anchored off the village of Gambell and set a missionary and his wife ashore, a Mr. and Mrs. Nickerson. It was the end of the voyage for them. Twenty Eskimos came aboard, loaded with ivory goods and sealskin objects. They spoke no English except for a few key phrases like “seventy-five cents,” which they uttered clearly and firmly. They could also say “napkin ring” and “paper knife” very nicely. The ladies of San Francisco, starving for loot and long absent from the bazaars, clutched wildly for the prizes and bid loudly against each other. I watched from a vantage point while a pair of sealskin slippers was bid up from a dollar to six-fifty. The Eskimo hesitated. At this moment, one of my firemen stuck his head up from a companionway, caught the fellow’s eye, and beckoned to him. The Eskimo left the ladies and walked over to my man, who thereupon produced from his shirt two dirty cakes of soap and a roll of toilet paper. These items were accepted instantly and the slippers changed hands—a severe setback for the trail blazers of the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce. The ladies were furious. A few of the more alert and energetic ones rushed off to their staterooms and returned with soap and tissue, but trade between San Francisco, Alaska, and Siberia had taken an ugly turn, and the Buford’s high purpose seemed momentarily clouded. At noon, Luis and I served lunch to the Eskimos in the sailors’ mess, Luis fairly transported by contact with savages in a strange land. Later, the six Brown Brothers unlimbered their horns, and the Eskimos danced, with surprising frenzy. None of them had ever heard a sax, and the sound made them drunk.
At St. Michael, we loaded fish. My poem for August 15 ran:
All day long barrels offish went across the sky with a rattle,
Swung up from the lighter across the sky and down into the hold of the vessel.
The quartermaster had square shoulders and he drove the winches—all day long.
And at evening, when the sky got orange, and gray clouds mustered for a sunset, the fair-haired girl came and stood at the rail to watch the square-shouldered quartermaster.
She’s his girl, I said. They’ll get married, and the boys will grow up to be square-shouldered like the father.
A sea gull lifted itself from the water and glided peacefully into the orange west.
The quality of my verse plunged steadily down as the Buford plunged steadily north. One trouble the poet had was sheer fatigue; he was a mighty tired poet at the end of a day.
On Friday, August 17, the Buford anchored off Nome; we had reached the gateway to the top of the world. The sea was rough, and for a while we were unable to unload cargo. All sorts of rumors were astir—that we were low
on water, that we were low on oil, that we would not go to the ice pack, that we would be a week late getting back to the States. The tug Genevieve came alongside, and with some others I went down a ladder and got a ride ashore. Genevieve made hard work of it, and two ladies were stricken with nausea and were in bad shape when they set foot on the beach. On Saturday night, at about nine o’clock, I stood outside the office of the Nome Nugget, across from the Nome Tailoring Company, and watched the first copies of that weekly paper come off the press. The Nugget office was full of men and dogs. I bought a copy for twenty-five cents and read the streamer head: GREAT FUTURE ASSURED NOME; NOME—SAN FRANCISCO JOIN HANDS NORTH OF 53. It was an eerie moment in mercantile history, this joining of San Francisco and Nome. The ship was dressed in flags, and the local population of the dreary little town was delighted to see visitors come ashore, even if they vomited on arrival. I do not know how fruitful the occasion turned out to be in the world of trade; the only fruit I saw with my own eyes was in the window of Mrs. Wanger’s shop, where a classy new line of fall hats and dresses that had been hustled ashore from the Buford was on display. I strolled about the ghostly town in the bright night and took in the sights—the North Pole Bakery, the Nome Sheet Metal Works, the Dream Theatre, Andrew Box’s Elite Baths & Hotel (Steam-Heated Rooms), and Mrs. Wanger’s red-hot finery.
The Nugget was celebrating the event with a special four-page supplement dedicated to amity and trade. On the editorial page appeared an apology:
TO OUR PATRONS REGARDS THE DELAY OF THE PAPER
We wish to take this opportunity to say to the readers of the Nugget that due to the fact that we have added another four pages to today’s edition we feel that an explanation is in order for our delay in having the paper out on time. In order to add this amount to the paper we worked all night Friday night not going to bed at all.
The “we” of this notice was George S. Maynard, owner and publisher of the Nugget and Mayor of Nome, a real night owl.
I’ve often wondered how San Francisco’s business giants felt when they glimpsed those tumbledown, almost deserted hamlets of the North. Nome must have been a particularly heavy shock. Nome’s rickety houses were strung out in a long line fronting the main street. Everybody in Nome lived out of tin cans, and the disposal system was simple and direct; the empties got heaved out of rear windows, and landed on the beach. The beach was an enormous dump, with the accumulated pile of cans comparing favorably with the buildings themselves as an architectural mass. I’ll say this for Nome, though: at a certain hour of the day, when the sun hit the place just right, the dump produced an extraordinary phenomenon. The top layer of cans would suddenly catch the sun’s rays, and when this happened the crescent beach, viewed from the deck of a ship in the roadstead, would appear to burst into flames, and the down-at-heel gold town for a few breathtaking moments would wear a circlet of fire.
My strongest memory of Nome is of the close shave I had while there. I went to my garbage chute one morning and dumped a big load of slops overside, not knowing that a lighter had tied up to the ship during the night. The garbage took one of the lightermen fairly in the head. He was a big man, and he came aboard bellowing that he would kill whoever had done it. I rushed up to first class and hid, and he never found me. The episode gave me quite a turn, though. I can still see him, with all that stuff in his hair and blood in his eye, coming up the ladder to get me.
From Nome, the Buford steamed to Teller, where about a dozen white men remained from a gold-rush population of ten thousand, and then passed through Bering Strait and headed for the ice pack through quiet seas. We were the first passenger ship to invade this part of the world. Here in the Arctic, I began to feel the inadequacy of my wardrobe; I hadn’t even brought along a pair of wool socks. Nights were cold and bright; the ship proceeded without running lights. One of our missions was to touch at Wrangell Island and take off two men stranded there. There had been a lot of talk about this, but the whole business fell through; at 70 degrees North Latitude our path was blocked by ice, and we never reached Wrangell. Instead, we hunted walrus.
When the ice was sighted, Captain Lane went aloft in the shrouds and peered ahead through binoculars while the passengers watched admiringly from the deck. Soon our captain came down and ordered the ship stopped. Then, to my great surprise, he left us. With ice closing in all around us, he simply beat it—went off for a hunt in a double kayak with three Eskimos we had taken aboard at Nome. It gave everybody an uneasy feeling—the ship nuzzled by ice, and no captain on board. The hunting party was gone a long while. The passengers, alert and interested at first, grew weary of watching and waiting, and when the hunters finally returned, empty-handed, everyone felt let down. Next day, the hunters had better luck; seven walruses were shot. They were swung aboard by the boom tackle and dumped on the forward deck, where they immediately began to ripen. These huge corpses stayed with us for days; the heads and skins fetched up at last in the Oakland Museum, whose curator, if the wind was right, must have known long in advance that they were coming. My whole account of the trip in the Arctic Ocean follows:
Wed. Aug. 22. The walrus hunt. Consensus of opinion. among ladies was that the icebergs were beautiful but the walruses were disgusting. Mr. Snow, sitting on walrus and thinking of funny sayings. Luis, the sailor’s mess—“Surely this world it is a beautiful thing.” The bob-haired girl went on deck just long enough to find out what walrus looked like, and then went back to the chief engineer’s room to play cards.
(There was always a card game in the chief’s room—that is one of the few things I remember about Alaska. I also remember seeing a polar bear in its natural habitat. Luis was right; surely this world it is a beautiful thing.)
At about three o’clock in the afternoon of the twenty-third, Luis darted into my messroom, flipped all valves, and made an announcement: “Come ong, boy! Come quick, quick! Assia!” He drew the name out lingeringly—“Ass-ee-a.” He was all dolled up in a clean shirt, ready to go ashore and send postcards. Together we rushed on deck, and there it was—Asia, a bleak headland called Cape Serdze, with patches of snow spotting the ground. Whales were all around us as we closed with the land; they blew and slapped their flukes. All over the deck lay the stinking walruses, the massive carcasses slashed and gouged by the knives of our hungry Eskimos, who gnawed at the raw trophies as you might work away at a cheese if you were in need of a snack. Blood leaked from the mutilated animals. It spread in rivulets across the deck and responded to the slight roll of the ship. The passengers, for their part, responded to the name Siberia; it was our Arctic pièce de résistance, justifying the trip and putting the authentic touch on the name Alaskan-Siberian Navigation Company. Mr. Snow went forward to the forecastlehead and cracked jokes about the Bolsheviki.
“No one knew what to expect,” I wrote. “There was a good deal of speculation at first about whether the ship would be fired on. In a general way, the passengers felt that there was something hostile about Russia.” Hostile or not, the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce was experiencing its most adventurous hour, and possibly its most footless, and I don’t doubt that if we had been fired on, Mr. Snow would have returned the fire with what ammunition remained after our assaults on Taku and on the walruses. Mr. Hubbard, wandering gingerly among pools of blood, saw that Siberia was represented by a couple of dozen furry Eskimos and one squaw man; they came aboard from a skin boat as soon as the Buford dropped her hook. On shore we could see dogs curled up asleep among patches of tired snow. At this point, I shall quote from that other diarist of the Buford, J. Wilbur Wolf. Wilbur managed to get ashore. “Here,” he wrote, “I witnessed the first real Eskimo huts. How shy the natives are, and how unsanitary.”
Wilbur traded a few pieces of silver for a Siberian gun holster, Mr. Snow traded an old cap for a polar-bear skin, and we were off for East Cape, which proved to be a repetition of Serdze—headlands, a gray beach, a gray shack flying a small red flag, skin dwellings, vagrant fogs, snow in patches along th
e shore, and low hills hinting at the vast continent that lay beyond the fog and beyond the power of the imagination. (It may have been memories of the utter drabness of Siberia that caused the Buford’s co-owner Mr. Ogden to seek greener pastures for his boat; her next excursion was to Samoa and the Marquesas—a financial bust like the Siberian affair, but at least a languorous one.) Emotionally, the Buford and her passengers had had it; we were ready for home. Captain Lane guided his ship across the Strait, called again at Nome, just long enough to take on ten passengers, and then started the homeward journey, with parting salutes from the Coast Guard cutter Bear, the tug Genevieve, the Hudson’s Bay Company’s ship, and a whistle ashore. We steamed to False Pass, took aboard some workers from the cannery, and struck boldly out across the North Pacific in a direct line for Seattle. We had not been at sea long when the gale hit.
