Fo'castle Waltz

For about two days we rode at anchor while Sparks jiggled his apparatus up in his shack, begging for cargo from the ship's agents ashore. As I've written before, that guy was the sort people wanted to stay away from. Maybe on his account—the way he worded his wireless cackle—the clerks in the Universal Tropical Line offices in Rio Santiago, Buenos Aires, Montevideo, and all other ports within the reach of his radio key said to themselves: "Nuts, let's hold this load (of grain, meat or hides from the Argentine abattoirs or something else I'm sure they had stacked away in their warehouses) for the next boat. That S.S. Hermanita ain't the only tramp on the sea. That ship can't talk that way to us—who the hell they think they are? R.S.V.P., and make it snappy—"

So we didn't get any cargo. On the afternoon of the second day we flooded our lower holds with the dirty waters of the La Platte (that for ballast), dragged our anchor out of the muddy bottom, and steamed out again.

Sounds like a simple operation filling our hold with water. It was simple. It was dumb!

There were five holds aboard that ship—two large ones fore and two large ones aft and a smaller one midships. The large holds were three-storied, and the large, square opening of the hatch cut down through the center of each of them. Immense steel girders (called crossbeams) fitted into slots and stretched across the big square openings to keep the old hull from being pushed catty corner by the pressure of the water against her plates, I suppose. The three levels of the hold were floored with immense wood planks. Before we sucked up the La Platte and flooded that bottom level, we rigged our cargo booms again, and working the deck winch, we lifted those crossbeams out of their slots and lowered them to the bottom of our ship. There they were lashed to the big timbers that floored the bottom holds of the ship. The object of that was to keep those timbers down when the holds were flooded. Then we covered our hatches neatly, collared our booms again, stowed the rigging, hoisted our anchor, and steamed out—with enough of our ship held down by that water ballast to keep our propeller in the ocean where it belonged instead of foolishly fanning the surface.

Good—huh? We still could take on cargo up in Brazil in the upper two levels of the holds, or if the agents up around the Santos and Rio weren't antagonized by our ill-mannered Sparks, maybe we'd pump our ship dry again and fill up that bottom hold with coffee or something else that smelled good—not that it mattered to me. I was going to skip ship with the rest of them anyway when we hit Brazil.

We hadn't steamed out very far before we all knew every thing was not so neat and shipshape as it had looked in the calm waters of the La Platte. That first night out we hit a little weather. Those big steel crossbeams weren't big enough or< heavy enough to hold down the floor timbers. The water in the hold easily floated those huge planks and the steel crossbeams broke loose from their lashings and the whole tangled mass smashed and crashed around in the hold, threatening to ram out the rusty plates of our ship's hull and let the rest of the ocean in to play with those hell-raising timbers and rolling| steel girders.

Naturally, nothing was done about it through that dark night and nothing could be done about it the next morning—the pumps weren't working!

Their outlets were clogged from years of neglect. Scotty told us they'd been trying to work those pumps all through the night, trying to empty those holds again—but no go. The suction just clogged them even worse, until they were completely tight!

Now we were in a real mess, and everybody, even Joe and the old pink-eyed guy and a few of the others who had shrugged off our rocky passage up from Ingeniero, were bothered. Not only was the disastrous sea on the outside trying to smash into our hull; it was on the inside trying to bust out.

We uncovered our hatches and looked down into that roaring tangle of timbers, crossbeams, chains, swirling in our flooded holds. The sea was rougher inside the bowels of our ship than it was in the whole bloody ocean. We carried our own private storm with our own thunder. I'll bet that those La Platte waters had never been thrashed about like that before, and if we'd taken on any of the Argentinian fishes with that section of the ocean it must have been an incomprehensible catastrophe for them.

Every time the ship rolled even a little and that undisciplined mass banged up against the hull, everybody winced.