Fo'castle Waltz

"But, Captain Brandt, I understood—I thought you understood—after all, I— Well, won't I get a few days off, maybe, while we're in port?"

"No, sir. Young feller, when you signed your articles, it was for every day until we drop anchor in New York Harbor."

"Then, I won't get any chance at all to do any painting down there?"

"Sure."

He clicked his teeth back in place. They had been dislodged by that sure. "Sure, you'll do some paintin' down there—and I guess lots of it. Paintin' over the side..."

12. The Magnificent Mustachios

AN AESTHETIC AWARENESS SHOULD NOT BE MEASURED with the element of time. That is to say—whereas some individuals instantly realize they are in the presence of sensitivity, beauty and all the other qualities that make up a true plastic expression, others achieve that consciousness at a more leisurely pace. Therefore, I'm not maligning Captain Brandt or his sense of values when I say he reacted very slowly. He needed a period of gestation. During the long still hours of the night, it must have dawned on him and he realized that his visit to our cabin had been, for him, an important aesthetic experience; for the very next morning we were ordered. Mush and I, to come up to the bridge and get our instruction at the wheel—come evening.

It couldn't have been that Perry's legalistic ranting on our just dues had reached him. I had a feeling those orders were a pretext. He would have liked to have me ask him to sit for a portrait. But I wasn't asking. Perhaps I overrate the importance of his visit and the effects of my work on him. Perhaps it was our just dues getting instruction in the wheelhouse, and he wanted to be sure there was something recorded in the Ship's Log that indicated he had tried to make sailors of us—but simply couldn't.

The Captain would try to explain the workings of the little brass wheel, the compass needle, etc., on those evenings, and it seemed to me he preened and posed around in a variety of costumes hoping perhaps one of them might catch my fancy so I'd be inspired to do something elegant that could be hung in the officers' mess. At least so it seemed to me. Since I didn't rise to the bait, he soon lost interest in our nautical education and never brought it up again.

Anyway, instructing us on our own time wasn't right, according to Perry.

We struck some nasty weather, cold and wet, and every evening as Mush and I went forward and climbed through the narrow passage between the ship's rail and the big boilers we had lashed down to the deck back in Bayonne, we were scared. Those damn lashing chains had loosened a bit and those big black boilers would lean over at us just as we were midway through that passage. We didn't dare climb over the hatches— the wind was terrific and would have blown us off—and now and again we'd ship a wave that would wash across the whole forward deck.

Guide lines were strung along the deck and we crawled about our business—until one day when the Bos'n said we were approaching the Argentine coast.

The water was calm and yellow and the Bos'n told me we'd been in the La Platte River for the last couple of hours. Late that afternoon, as I was still straining my eyes trying to get a sight of land, or anything of the banks, of that screwy river, I saw a ship straight ahead of us that made the hair on the back of my neck prickle. I was standing at the rail alone at the time— the La Platte River at its mouth is over sixty miles wide and you can't see its banks when you're sailing through its channel. Mush and the others had given up trying to see anything, but I'd liked to have been the first to hail Land Ho—I never tried that out loud and wanted to see how it sounded—so I stuck by the rail squinting into the sun. This ship, which must have been seen by the men on the bridge, was something!

A dirty, black-hulled, two-master, with black and blood-red striped sails dripping from her yardarms—and I saw it first on that coppery sea against the setting sun.

That bloody, black ship was anchored right in our path and we were already close enough to see her crew. Three of them stood her deck—two of them murderous-looking fellows with tremendous black mustachios, the third a giant of a man with mustachios of iron gray. The fading sun lit up the ends of his whiskers so that they flamed away from his face.

The three put out in a dingy they let over the side and the blackguards rowed toward us. Our engines had stopped and we were slowly and helplessly drifting toward this hell-ship.