So, the final monthly payment for a loan, without regarding tax and other fees, is MonthlyPayment=LoanAmount*APR/(1-1/(1+APR)^YearsOfLoan)/12:
2005/08/31
The secret of loan
Recent, I was interested in the calculation of mortgage loan and car loan. Basically, the bank will give you an annual percent rate for the loan amount and years of the loan. And with a calculation program, they will figure out the monthly payment. But, here, the bankers make a tiny assumption, which is flaw for the rigorous arithmatic, but is ok for our common sense. This tiny assumption is that the monthly rate is one twelveth of annual rate:A=12M, rather than the calculated by the complicated formula: 1+A=(1+M)^12. This tiny difference makes $7,000 difference for a 30 year loan of $300,000 with 5% apr, which is about 1% of total payment. But, anyway, we have no choice, since every banker do the samething.
So, the final monthly payment for a loan, without regarding tax and other fees, is MonthlyPayment=LoanAmount*APR/(1-1/(1+APR)^YearsOfLoan)/12:
So, the final monthly payment for a loan, without regarding tax and other fees, is MonthlyPayment=LoanAmount*APR/(1-1/(1+APR)^YearsOfLoan)/12:
2005/08/19
The persons in Playing Cards
♠K: David (harp)
♥K: Charlemagne (no beard or mustache) (suicide king)
♦K: Caesar (profile) (the man with the ax)
♣K: Alexander (cross)
♠Q: Pallas (weapon)
♥Q: Judith
♦Q: Rachel
♣Q: Argine (rose)
♠J: Ogier (one-eyed)
♥J: La Hire (one-eyed)
♦J: Hector
♣J: Lancelot
♥K: Charlemagne (no beard or mustache) (suicide king)
♦K: Caesar (profile) (the man with the ax)
♣K: Alexander (cross)
♠Q: Pallas (weapon)
♥Q: Judith
♦Q: Rachel
♣Q: Argine (rose)
♠J: Ogier (one-eyed)
♥J: La Hire (one-eyed)
♦J: Hector
♣J: Lancelot
Count Luckner, The Sea Devil IV
By Lowell Thomas
Input by biajee
IV
SALVATION, KANGAROOS, AND FAKIRS IN AUSTRALIA
About the only amusement I could fine in Fremantle was listening to the Salvation Army band. They had a hall where they had preaching and where bums and sailors stood up and told lurid tales of their experiences. Then they all sang songs. It was the songs I liked. I couldn’t tell much about the words, but the tunes were lively and the big drum fascinated me. This music was altogether different from the music back home in our churches at Dresden. But what interested me most of all was that this Salvation Army post had a gramophone. I had never seen on e before. I had come to Australia expecting to find a wilderness of kangaroos and savages, and here was this marvelous product of civilization.
“By Joe, Felix,” I said to myself, “everything in the world is different from what you thought.”
I couldn’t shake off the notion that this gramophone was a hoax. I thought somebody hidden must be talking into that horn. I could not get near enough to investigate. The place was always crowded, and only those who “got religion” were allowed up front. So I persuaded a friend of mine from a German boat to keep me company, and we went up at a big meeting and offered ourselves for salvation. We gave testimony of our past sins and told what bad sailor lads we had been, and then we signed a pledge never to touch strong drink
The gramophone was O.K., I found, and that made the Salvation Army O.K. with me. I became enthusiastic, somehow, or other, with the songs and excitement. I actually “got religion.” I joined up, and they gave me a job putting moth balls in clothing donated by charitable people. At any rate, I no longer had to wash dishes, and here was an army in which I might become a lieutenant. I remembered how my father had wanted me to become a lieutenant in the German Army. Why not become a lieutenant in the Salvation Army instead? I used to daydream and build castles in the air like this while placing those moth balls in the piles of old clothes.
Since I was converted and saved and stood on holy ground, I felt I should tell the whole truth. So, one night at a meeting, I got up and testified and told my fellow soldiers of the Salvation Army that my right name was Count Felix von Luckner. That made a sensation. They immediately used me for advertisement. “Halleluiah! We have saved a German count from perdition,” they announced. “Before he came here he drank whisky like a fish. Now he is a teetotaler.”
Well, by Joe, people came from all over town to see the reformed count.
They put me in a uniform and sent me out to sell the War Cry. I sold a lot. People didn’t mind buying the War Cry from a count. I thought I could become a captain. It was no trouble to leave whisky alone, because I had never tasted it in my life. But I did like lemonade and ginger ale, especially ginger ale, which I thought contained alcohol because they offered it to me in the bars where I sold the War Cry and because it tasted so delicious. I thought I was putting something over. They got on to it in the saloons and had their joke with me.
“Count, have a ginger ale,” they would call whenever they saw me, and I would wink and drink it down. I thought they were laughing because I had put one over, and I laughed too.
I got tired of it. I got tired of everything except the sea. I was a sailor, I reasoned, and the only lieutenant I could ever be was a naval lieutenant and the only kind of captain a ship captain. The Salvation Army people were very good to me. They said I was too young to be a sailor, but that they would get me a job somewhere near the sea. So they found me a job in a lighthouse. It was almost like being at sea, they told me. All day I could look out and see fair weather or storms with ships sailing at peace or rolling and heaving.
I became assistant to the lighthouse keeper of the Cape Leeuwin Beacon, which is south of Fremantle and the biggest light on the southwest Australian coast. “Assistant”—what a fine title! And “beacon,” a word that meant everything to the ships driven by the fury of the storm. Wasn’t I a sailor who knew all about that from experience? Well, they put me to cleaning the “windows”—that is, the lenses. The thousands of prisms of the reflector astonished me not a little. Each day I wound up the weights for the revolving apparatus. The rest of the time, when I was not sleeping, I kept watch. There were three other lighthouse keepers, who lived in little houses on the cliff. They passed the days playing cards and fishing. They had pushed all of their duties on to me. For doing their work I got ninepence a day!
The daughter of one the lighthouse keepers was named Eva. She was pretty and very charming. One day I kissed her. It was an innocent kiss, but we were in a bad place, a room with a locked door, but which was open on the side of the sea and looked down on the beach. One of the men was fishing there and saw us. He hurried to Eva’s father. Soo there was a cursing and knocking at the locked door. We were terrified. The threats and banging grew more violent. I threw the door open, dashed out and away, frightened half out of my wits.
I left behind me all my belongings. That was how I lost the sea chest that ole Peter had given me. I was too bad. Late that night I sneaked back and made off with one of the horses. It was worth about thirty shillings, which I figured was about the value of the luggage I had to abandon.
I rode to Port Augusta, and for a time worked in a sawmill. The work was frightfully hard. The pay seemed good, thirty shillings a day, but the cost of living was so high—one had even to pay for water—that it left only a few shillings out of a day’s pay. The work was lucrative only for Chinese coolies, with their low standards of living. I was able to save sixty shillings and then couldn’t stand it any longer.
One day I met a Norwegian hunter who had been shooting kangaroos and wallabies and selling their skins. I gave him my money, and my watch that I had brought from Germany, and he gave me his rifle. Then I went into the forest and became a hunter, or at least tried to. After a month, the solitude got on my nerves, and I left the kangaroos in full possession of their native bush.
In Port Augusta I watched a steamer discharge its passengers.
“Oh,” I said, “what kind of a crowd is that?”
They were a trouble of Hindu fakirs. Unable to withhold my curiosity, I went up and talked to them. When they learned that I was a sailor, they said I was exactly the man they needed for pitching their large tents, currying the horses, distributing advertisements, and the like. They explained that their trade was similar to mine, since they were always on the move, only they traveled on land.
They had with them several dark-eyed Hindu girls who looked bewitching. I joined the fakirs.
We traveled from one end of Australia to the other. I pitched their tents and booths in public places. Handling the canvas did remind me a little of my work as a sailor. In Fremantle, when I went around passing out handbills, I heard on all sides:
“Hello, Count. No more Salvation Army, eh? Have a ginger ale.”
I found the ginger ale as good as ever.
The fakirs made a mango tree grow before your very eyes. It is one of the classic tricks of India. It was my task after the show was over to clear the place where the tree had miraculously grown. I could never find any sign of preparation. A bowl of water would be brought in and shown to the spectators. The fakir would sit down in such a way as to hide it from the audience. In a little while he would step aside and the bowl would be filled with live goldfish. I could never discover any mechanism for this. A fakir would say to a spectator:
“That is a valuable ring you have on your finger. You must not lose it, But, look, you have lost it already. I have it on my finger.”
And, indeed, he would have it on his finger.
There was a little Malayan girl with whom I flirted, thinking I could learn the secret of the tricks from her. At first she was very shy, but then became more friendly. She did tell me how some of the magic was done, but only some of the minor effects. I learned them quite well, and to this day can perform them. The major spectacles, she, herself, thought were miracles. It seems to me impossible for any European ever to learn the more important secrets of these sorcerers. The ole masters, accustomed to be worshipped as beings endowed with supernatural powers, hold themselves inaccessible. The two chief fakirs of our company, with their long beards and a poise made perfect by lifelong training of the will, made a sublime picture.
One Sunday morning I sat on the beach washing my clothes. Three men came up, stopped and gazed at me. They looked me over as though I were beef on the hoof. I have always been big-framed and powerfully muscled, with an arm like iron, and shoulders as wide as a barn door, bulging with sinews.
“How old are you, boy?”
I replied that I was nearly sixteen.
“How would you like to learn boxing?”
“Very much,” I replied, “because if I knew how to spar, I would be less likely to get a thrashing.”
They took me to a school of boxing, where I was submitted to another examination. They gave me six pounds sterling and agreed to train me for the prize ring. In return, I was to box for Queensland, exclusively.
That began a strenuous time for me. I was put to work with all kinds of gymnastic apparatus to harden my body, particularly chest and stomach, to resist blows. I went through three months of that kind of training before I was allowed to try a boxing pass. Then I practiced sparring with an experienced boxer. I was told that, after I had progressed far enough, I would be sent to San Francisco for additional training and would make my debut there as “the Prize Boxer of Queensland.” It all looked very rosy. I liked boxing and do to this day.
An American craft was in port, the Golden Shore a four-masted schooner plying between Queensland and Honolulu. She was later put on the San Francisco-Vancouver-Honolulu run. They needed hands and offered to take me as an able-bodied seaman at the excellent pay of forty-five dollars a month. From cabin boy to able-bodied seaman in one jump—that was an inducement, by Joe. The usual line of succession is: cabin boy, yeoman, ‘prentice seaman, able-bodied seaman. I guess I was made to be a sailor, because that promotion looked bigger than anything else in the world. I quit my boxing and shipped aboard the Golden Shore.
In Honolulu I came upon a mystery, a fantastic mystery. It sounds unbelievable. I, myself, cannot explain it. Someday I hope to meet someone who can. One of the cabin boys aboard the Golden Shore was a German named Nauke. He was a violin maker by trade who had lost all his money and put to sea. We became fast friends. At Honolulu, Nauke invited me to go ashore with him. He brought along a can of condensed milk, a delicacy he knew I liked. We went sightseeing, and one of the sights was that of royalty. We stood outside of the palace grounds and watched and Hawaiian potentate while he had tea. He sat in a reed chair, and a couple of his wives stood beside him. A well-dressed gentleman who seemed to be on a stroll came up to us and began to talk to us in English.
“Don’t waste your time on anything like that,” he said. “Why not see the hula-hula dance?”
Nauke and I said all right, because the hula-hula was just what we did want to see.
The gentleman asked whether we had any better clothes to wear, to which we responded that we had not.
“It doesn’t matter,” he said, “I will provide you with a suit each.”
He took us to a carriage drawn by four mules, and we all got in. I remarked to Nauke that the gentleman seemed to be a man of means. The gentleman turned his head.
“You mustn’t talk so much,” he said in German.
We came to the sugar plantations outside the town. The carriage stopped. Our host led us to a field path, until finally we came to a European house that had an air of distinction. Young colts grazed within a fence. Through the large windows of the stately villa I saw a row of large black tables such as are used in Germany, in a lecture room. Our host told Nauke to wait outside, and got a piece of cake for him. I whispered to Nauke not to go away.
I felt very strange on entering the house. The man showed me into a room next to the hall with the many tables. He was about to lock the door. I asked him not to. In the room was long black table like those I had seen in the other room. The man said he was going upstairs to get a measuring tape. While he was gone, I noticed that under the table were two long narrow boxes with heavy locks on both sides. What if I should end in one of those boxes! But I was confident. What had I learned boxing for?
The stranger returned with a tape. He measured my arm. Unlike a tailor, he measured from wrist to shoulder instead of from should to wrist.
“Thirty,” he announced, repeated it once, and muttered several other numbers between his teeth.
He pulled my coat halfway down my back, thus hindering my arms. He remarked that the light was poor, and turned me so that my back was toward the outer door. I could hear a creaking that told me someone was moving behind that door. I noticed on the floor below the lower part of the table a disorderly pile of old clothes which looked as though they might be sailors’ togs. The gentleman took off my belt and laid it on the table. Attached to the belt was my knife case. It was empty. I wondered where my knife might be. I remembered having it that morning. I had peeled potatoes with it. My blood froze as between empty bottles on the windows sill I saw a chopped off human thumb with a long sinew attached. The gentleman was about to let down my trousers, which would have kept me from running.
I jerked my coat back into place, knocked the man down with a heavy blow, grabbed my empty knife case from the table, kicked open the nearest door to the open, and jumped out, shouting for Nauke. He appeared, still munching his piece of cake. We ran out into the plantation and threw ourselves down among the cane. There was the sound of a whistle and of galloping horses and running men. They were hunting for us along the roads. We groped our way among the fields, and, after losing our way several times, finally reached the beach.
We looked up an English-speaking policeman and told him our story. He shrugged his shoulders and said it would take a special force of detectives to discover how many sailors had mysteriously disappeared on the islands. Our captain merely remarked that we deserved a good thrashing for going ashore. We sailors on the ship laid a plan to take the plantation by storm on the following Sunday, and gathered our weapons for the raid. But on Friday a quarantine was proclaimed, due to some infectious disease that was spreading, and the raid was off. In later times, I often inquired about the strange circumstance, and heard tales of white sailors disappearing on the islands, but never a solution of the mystery.
On board the Golden Shore was a lad named August from Winsen on the Luhe, in Germany. He and I talked over the ever-beguiling idea of serving a master no longer, but of being our own masters. We knew that fishing was considered good on the western coast of North America, and we determined to go into business for ourselves as fishermen. The Golden Shore took her course to Seattle, and there we were informed that the fishing was best around Vancouver. At Vancouver we looked things over and came to the conclusion that the ideal thing would be to live in a boat and hunt and fish by turns. That would be a state of perfect independence. We used what money we had to buy a rifle. Now all we needed was a boat.
At the fishing village of Modoville, a number of sailboats were moored off shore. They belonged to Indians and half-breeds, whose camp fires we could see and whose savage dogs barked out fierce alarms. It was about dusk. Cautiously, we launched one of the canoes on the beach and paddled out to one of the sailboats that had taken our fancy. We got aboard quietly and cut the anchor rope. The boat was set lightly for drying. There was only a slight breeze, and we drifted very slowly. Somebody ashore saw the boat drifting. A canoe came paddling out in leisurely fashion. We gave the sail a hoist to get up more speed. The men in the canoe noticed this at once. They yelled and paddled hard. We were in a fix. But as we passed out of the lee of the high mountains, we got a windfall, the sail bellied out, and the boat scudded swiftly along. From the shore they fired at us with rifles, but we were away.
We sailed to Seattle, and there the sailors of a German boat gave us a supply of food and some white lead with which to paint out boat. We hunted and fished and got along, and then grew tired of it. We were honest lads, and tried to return our boat secretly to Modeville. We were caught and haled before a Canadian judge. He was lenient and put us on probation for a few weeks.
That was my first adventure at piracy.
In Vancouver I signed on the four-masted English ship, the Pinmore, on which I was now to make the longest uninterrupted voyage of my life. It took us two hundred and eighty-five days to sail from San Francisco around the Horn to Liverpool. We had rations for a hundred and eighty days, and sea water got into our water tanks. We lay in calms for long periods on our way south, and then were held back by long-continued storms off Cape Horn.
It was as though that ship harboured a devil. We did not meet a single craft that we could ask for provisions. None of the rain clouds that went drifting past came near enough to provide us with water. Between the half rations and the brackish water in our tanks, six men died for scurvy and beri-beri, and the rest were so ill with these dread diseases that their abdomens and legs swelled up as though with dropsy. We used only the storm sails. None of us was able to climb into the rigging. When at length we sighted England off the Scillys, the last portion of peas had been distributed, and when the tug hove up to us in St. George’s Channel we all cried, “Water, water!” We drank all the water that we could hold, and still we were thirsty. Our bodies were dried up. I was a fortnight in hospital.
I gave the Pinmore a willing farewell, hoping never to see her again. Strange how coincidence turns. I did see her again, a long time later, from the deck of my raider Seeadler.
Input by biajee
IV
SALVATION, KANGAROOS, AND FAKIRS IN AUSTRALIA
About the only amusement I could fine in Fremantle was listening to the Salvation Army band. They had a hall where they had preaching and where bums and sailors stood up and told lurid tales of their experiences. Then they all sang songs. It was the songs I liked. I couldn’t tell much about the words, but the tunes were lively and the big drum fascinated me. This music was altogether different from the music back home in our churches at Dresden. But what interested me most of all was that this Salvation Army post had a gramophone. I had never seen on e before. I had come to Australia expecting to find a wilderness of kangaroos and savages, and here was this marvelous product of civilization.
“By Joe, Felix,” I said to myself, “everything in the world is different from what you thought.”
I couldn’t shake off the notion that this gramophone was a hoax. I thought somebody hidden must be talking into that horn. I could not get near enough to investigate. The place was always crowded, and only those who “got religion” were allowed up front. So I persuaded a friend of mine from a German boat to keep me company, and we went up at a big meeting and offered ourselves for salvation. We gave testimony of our past sins and told what bad sailor lads we had been, and then we signed a pledge never to touch strong drink
The gramophone was O.K., I found, and that made the Salvation Army O.K. with me. I became enthusiastic, somehow, or other, with the songs and excitement. I actually “got religion.” I joined up, and they gave me a job putting moth balls in clothing donated by charitable people. At any rate, I no longer had to wash dishes, and here was an army in which I might become a lieutenant. I remembered how my father had wanted me to become a lieutenant in the German Army. Why not become a lieutenant in the Salvation Army instead? I used to daydream and build castles in the air like this while placing those moth balls in the piles of old clothes.
Since I was converted and saved and stood on holy ground, I felt I should tell the whole truth. So, one night at a meeting, I got up and testified and told my fellow soldiers of the Salvation Army that my right name was Count Felix von Luckner. That made a sensation. They immediately used me for advertisement. “Halleluiah! We have saved a German count from perdition,” they announced. “Before he came here he drank whisky like a fish. Now he is a teetotaler.”
Well, by Joe, people came from all over town to see the reformed count.
They put me in a uniform and sent me out to sell the War Cry. I sold a lot. People didn’t mind buying the War Cry from a count. I thought I could become a captain. It was no trouble to leave whisky alone, because I had never tasted it in my life. But I did like lemonade and ginger ale, especially ginger ale, which I thought contained alcohol because they offered it to me in the bars where I sold the War Cry and because it tasted so delicious. I thought I was putting something over. They got on to it in the saloons and had their joke with me.
“Count, have a ginger ale,” they would call whenever they saw me, and I would wink and drink it down. I thought they were laughing because I had put one over, and I laughed too.
I got tired of it. I got tired of everything except the sea. I was a sailor, I reasoned, and the only lieutenant I could ever be was a naval lieutenant and the only kind of captain a ship captain. The Salvation Army people were very good to me. They said I was too young to be a sailor, but that they would get me a job somewhere near the sea. So they found me a job in a lighthouse. It was almost like being at sea, they told me. All day I could look out and see fair weather or storms with ships sailing at peace or rolling and heaving.
I became assistant to the lighthouse keeper of the Cape Leeuwin Beacon, which is south of Fremantle and the biggest light on the southwest Australian coast. “Assistant”—what a fine title! And “beacon,” a word that meant everything to the ships driven by the fury of the storm. Wasn’t I a sailor who knew all about that from experience? Well, they put me to cleaning the “windows”—that is, the lenses. The thousands of prisms of the reflector astonished me not a little. Each day I wound up the weights for the revolving apparatus. The rest of the time, when I was not sleeping, I kept watch. There were three other lighthouse keepers, who lived in little houses on the cliff. They passed the days playing cards and fishing. They had pushed all of their duties on to me. For doing their work I got ninepence a day!
The daughter of one the lighthouse keepers was named Eva. She was pretty and very charming. One day I kissed her. It was an innocent kiss, but we were in a bad place, a room with a locked door, but which was open on the side of the sea and looked down on the beach. One of the men was fishing there and saw us. He hurried to Eva’s father. Soo there was a cursing and knocking at the locked door. We were terrified. The threats and banging grew more violent. I threw the door open, dashed out and away, frightened half out of my wits.
I left behind me all my belongings. That was how I lost the sea chest that ole Peter had given me. I was too bad. Late that night I sneaked back and made off with one of the horses. It was worth about thirty shillings, which I figured was about the value of the luggage I had to abandon.
I rode to Port Augusta, and for a time worked in a sawmill. The work was frightfully hard. The pay seemed good, thirty shillings a day, but the cost of living was so high—one had even to pay for water—that it left only a few shillings out of a day’s pay. The work was lucrative only for Chinese coolies, with their low standards of living. I was able to save sixty shillings and then couldn’t stand it any longer.
One day I met a Norwegian hunter who had been shooting kangaroos and wallabies and selling their skins. I gave him my money, and my watch that I had brought from Germany, and he gave me his rifle. Then I went into the forest and became a hunter, or at least tried to. After a month, the solitude got on my nerves, and I left the kangaroos in full possession of their native bush.
In Port Augusta I watched a steamer discharge its passengers.
“Oh,” I said, “what kind of a crowd is that?”
They were a trouble of Hindu fakirs. Unable to withhold my curiosity, I went up and talked to them. When they learned that I was a sailor, they said I was exactly the man they needed for pitching their large tents, currying the horses, distributing advertisements, and the like. They explained that their trade was similar to mine, since they were always on the move, only they traveled on land.
They had with them several dark-eyed Hindu girls who looked bewitching. I joined the fakirs.
We traveled from one end of Australia to the other. I pitched their tents and booths in public places. Handling the canvas did remind me a little of my work as a sailor. In Fremantle, when I went around passing out handbills, I heard on all sides:
“Hello, Count. No more Salvation Army, eh? Have a ginger ale.”
I found the ginger ale as good as ever.
The fakirs made a mango tree grow before your very eyes. It is one of the classic tricks of India. It was my task after the show was over to clear the place where the tree had miraculously grown. I could never find any sign of preparation. A bowl of water would be brought in and shown to the spectators. The fakir would sit down in such a way as to hide it from the audience. In a little while he would step aside and the bowl would be filled with live goldfish. I could never discover any mechanism for this. A fakir would say to a spectator:
“That is a valuable ring you have on your finger. You must not lose it, But, look, you have lost it already. I have it on my finger.”
And, indeed, he would have it on his finger.
There was a little Malayan girl with whom I flirted, thinking I could learn the secret of the tricks from her. At first she was very shy, but then became more friendly. She did tell me how some of the magic was done, but only some of the minor effects. I learned them quite well, and to this day can perform them. The major spectacles, she, herself, thought were miracles. It seems to me impossible for any European ever to learn the more important secrets of these sorcerers. The ole masters, accustomed to be worshipped as beings endowed with supernatural powers, hold themselves inaccessible. The two chief fakirs of our company, with their long beards and a poise made perfect by lifelong training of the will, made a sublime picture.
One Sunday morning I sat on the beach washing my clothes. Three men came up, stopped and gazed at me. They looked me over as though I were beef on the hoof. I have always been big-framed and powerfully muscled, with an arm like iron, and shoulders as wide as a barn door, bulging with sinews.
“How old are you, boy?”
I replied that I was nearly sixteen.
“How would you like to learn boxing?”
“Very much,” I replied, “because if I knew how to spar, I would be less likely to get a thrashing.”
They took me to a school of boxing, where I was submitted to another examination. They gave me six pounds sterling and agreed to train me for the prize ring. In return, I was to box for Queensland, exclusively.
That began a strenuous time for me. I was put to work with all kinds of gymnastic apparatus to harden my body, particularly chest and stomach, to resist blows. I went through three months of that kind of training before I was allowed to try a boxing pass. Then I practiced sparring with an experienced boxer. I was told that, after I had progressed far enough, I would be sent to San Francisco for additional training and would make my debut there as “the Prize Boxer of Queensland.” It all looked very rosy. I liked boxing and do to this day.
An American craft was in port, the Golden Shore a four-masted schooner plying between Queensland and Honolulu. She was later put on the San Francisco-Vancouver-Honolulu run. They needed hands and offered to take me as an able-bodied seaman at the excellent pay of forty-five dollars a month. From cabin boy to able-bodied seaman in one jump—that was an inducement, by Joe. The usual line of succession is: cabin boy, yeoman, ‘prentice seaman, able-bodied seaman. I guess I was made to be a sailor, because that promotion looked bigger than anything else in the world. I quit my boxing and shipped aboard the Golden Shore.
In Honolulu I came upon a mystery, a fantastic mystery. It sounds unbelievable. I, myself, cannot explain it. Someday I hope to meet someone who can. One of the cabin boys aboard the Golden Shore was a German named Nauke. He was a violin maker by trade who had lost all his money and put to sea. We became fast friends. At Honolulu, Nauke invited me to go ashore with him. He brought along a can of condensed milk, a delicacy he knew I liked. We went sightseeing, and one of the sights was that of royalty. We stood outside of the palace grounds and watched and Hawaiian potentate while he had tea. He sat in a reed chair, and a couple of his wives stood beside him. A well-dressed gentleman who seemed to be on a stroll came up to us and began to talk to us in English.
“Don’t waste your time on anything like that,” he said. “Why not see the hula-hula dance?”
Nauke and I said all right, because the hula-hula was just what we did want to see.
The gentleman asked whether we had any better clothes to wear, to which we responded that we had not.
“It doesn’t matter,” he said, “I will provide you with a suit each.”
He took us to a carriage drawn by four mules, and we all got in. I remarked to Nauke that the gentleman seemed to be a man of means. The gentleman turned his head.
“You mustn’t talk so much,” he said in German.
We came to the sugar plantations outside the town. The carriage stopped. Our host led us to a field path, until finally we came to a European house that had an air of distinction. Young colts grazed within a fence. Through the large windows of the stately villa I saw a row of large black tables such as are used in Germany, in a lecture room. Our host told Nauke to wait outside, and got a piece of cake for him. I whispered to Nauke not to go away.
I felt very strange on entering the house. The man showed me into a room next to the hall with the many tables. He was about to lock the door. I asked him not to. In the room was long black table like those I had seen in the other room. The man said he was going upstairs to get a measuring tape. While he was gone, I noticed that under the table were two long narrow boxes with heavy locks on both sides. What if I should end in one of those boxes! But I was confident. What had I learned boxing for?
The stranger returned with a tape. He measured my arm. Unlike a tailor, he measured from wrist to shoulder instead of from should to wrist.
“Thirty,” he announced, repeated it once, and muttered several other numbers between his teeth.
He pulled my coat halfway down my back, thus hindering my arms. He remarked that the light was poor, and turned me so that my back was toward the outer door. I could hear a creaking that told me someone was moving behind that door. I noticed on the floor below the lower part of the table a disorderly pile of old clothes which looked as though they might be sailors’ togs. The gentleman took off my belt and laid it on the table. Attached to the belt was my knife case. It was empty. I wondered where my knife might be. I remembered having it that morning. I had peeled potatoes with it. My blood froze as between empty bottles on the windows sill I saw a chopped off human thumb with a long sinew attached. The gentleman was about to let down my trousers, which would have kept me from running.
I jerked my coat back into place, knocked the man down with a heavy blow, grabbed my empty knife case from the table, kicked open the nearest door to the open, and jumped out, shouting for Nauke. He appeared, still munching his piece of cake. We ran out into the plantation and threw ourselves down among the cane. There was the sound of a whistle and of galloping horses and running men. They were hunting for us along the roads. We groped our way among the fields, and, after losing our way several times, finally reached the beach.
We looked up an English-speaking policeman and told him our story. He shrugged his shoulders and said it would take a special force of detectives to discover how many sailors had mysteriously disappeared on the islands. Our captain merely remarked that we deserved a good thrashing for going ashore. We sailors on the ship laid a plan to take the plantation by storm on the following Sunday, and gathered our weapons for the raid. But on Friday a quarantine was proclaimed, due to some infectious disease that was spreading, and the raid was off. In later times, I often inquired about the strange circumstance, and heard tales of white sailors disappearing on the islands, but never a solution of the mystery.
On board the Golden Shore was a lad named August from Winsen on the Luhe, in Germany. He and I talked over the ever-beguiling idea of serving a master no longer, but of being our own masters. We knew that fishing was considered good on the western coast of North America, and we determined to go into business for ourselves as fishermen. The Golden Shore took her course to Seattle, and there we were informed that the fishing was best around Vancouver. At Vancouver we looked things over and came to the conclusion that the ideal thing would be to live in a boat and hunt and fish by turns. That would be a state of perfect independence. We used what money we had to buy a rifle. Now all we needed was a boat.
At the fishing village of Modoville, a number of sailboats were moored off shore. They belonged to Indians and half-breeds, whose camp fires we could see and whose savage dogs barked out fierce alarms. It was about dusk. Cautiously, we launched one of the canoes on the beach and paddled out to one of the sailboats that had taken our fancy. We got aboard quietly and cut the anchor rope. The boat was set lightly for drying. There was only a slight breeze, and we drifted very slowly. Somebody ashore saw the boat drifting. A canoe came paddling out in leisurely fashion. We gave the sail a hoist to get up more speed. The men in the canoe noticed this at once. They yelled and paddled hard. We were in a fix. But as we passed out of the lee of the high mountains, we got a windfall, the sail bellied out, and the boat scudded swiftly along. From the shore they fired at us with rifles, but we were away.
We sailed to Seattle, and there the sailors of a German boat gave us a supply of food and some white lead with which to paint out boat. We hunted and fished and got along, and then grew tired of it. We were honest lads, and tried to return our boat secretly to Modeville. We were caught and haled before a Canadian judge. He was lenient and put us on probation for a few weeks.
That was my first adventure at piracy.
In Vancouver I signed on the four-masted English ship, the Pinmore, on which I was now to make the longest uninterrupted voyage of my life. It took us two hundred and eighty-five days to sail from San Francisco around the Horn to Liverpool. We had rations for a hundred and eighty days, and sea water got into our water tanks. We lay in calms for long periods on our way south, and then were held back by long-continued storms off Cape Horn.
It was as though that ship harboured a devil. We did not meet a single craft that we could ask for provisions. None of the rain clouds that went drifting past came near enough to provide us with water. Between the half rations and the brackish water in our tanks, six men died for scurvy and beri-beri, and the rest were so ill with these dread diseases that their abdomens and legs swelled up as though with dropsy. We used only the storm sails. None of us was able to climb into the rigging. When at length we sighted England off the Scillys, the last portion of peas had been distributed, and when the tug hove up to us in St. George’s Channel we all cried, “Water, water!” We drank all the water that we could hold, and still we were thirsty. Our bodies were dried up. I was a fortnight in hospital.
I gave the Pinmore a willing farewell, hoping never to see her again. Strange how coincidence turns. I did see her again, a long time later, from the deck of my raider Seeadler.
2005/08/18
Count Luckner, The Sea Devil III
By Lowell Thomas
Input by biajee
III
SAVED BY AN ALBATROSS
The Russian full-rigged ship Niobe, bound for Fremantle, Australia, was an old craft, dirty and mean. I have seen many another like her, but she was a classic. Her captain, too, was something of a classic. When old Peter spoke to him about taking me, although I had no permission from my parents, he replied:
“I will take him provided he doesn’t want any pay!”
I didn’t want any pay, but should have preferred a more agreeable-looking shipmaster. He had a sour, sallow face with a long goatee, half Mephisto, half Napoleon III. He hated Germans.
I knew no Russian. The others knew no German, except the captain. He knew it brokenly, just enough to abuse me. The helmsman spoke a little English. I had learned a few words of English in school. I never did learn Russian. That language has always been a puzzle to me. During the long trip of eighty days on the Niobe I was among people whose talk between themselves, and nearly all of whose speech addressed to me, I couldn’t understand.
I discovered the helmsman’s knowledge of English the first day out. I was delighted to find that here was at least one sailor with whom I could converse. He asked me questions. What was my father?
“A farmer,” I replied.
“Well, then,” quoth he, “it will be just the right thing if I appoint you chief inspector.”
That sounded important, and I walked a little stiffly as he led me down the deck. We came to a pig pen where there were half a dozen large and particularly filthy porkers. The chief inspector’s office was that of cleaning the pig sty.
“And besides,” the helmsman added cordially, “I will appoint you superintendent of the starboard and larboard pharmacies.” I promptly discovered that in the language of the sea a pharmacy was a latrine.
In cleaning the sty, I was not allowed to let the pigs out. I had to go in there with them, and it was very narrow quarters. The unspeakably dirty animals rubbed against me constantly while I laboured with pail and brush. The sewage was so deep that it filled my shoes. I had only two pairs of trousers. Soap and water were not to be wasted. I grew filthier than the pigs. And then there were the “clinics.”
Everyone kicked me because I looked like a pig and smelled like one. They called me “Pig.” For food I had to go around and eat what the sailors left on their plates. They said that was the way pigs were fed. For breakfast, instead of coffee and rolls, there was vodka with stale bread to soak in it. I got the leavings of this. The salted meat, of which I got the scraps, was so strong that I could scarcely force it down my throat. I often thought of that bill of fare from the Fuerst Bismarck , which had lingered in my thoughts. I had made a mistake there, by Joe.
I was afraid of the masts. I dreaded the thought of going aloft. But I said to myself that I must get used to it. So I climbed desperately every day, a little higher, a little higher, always practicing. Finally, one day, I got to the crow’s nest, halfway to the top. I thought that was fine. I felt so proud I called down for the others to see where I was.
“Any old sea cook can get that far,” the helmsman shouted back scornfully.
That hurt me and made me all the more determined to learn how to go aloft as the sailors did. I kept trying, and I watched the other apprentices skipping nimbly high up in the rigging.
We had a storm rounding the Cape of Good Hope, followed by heavy swell. All the sails had been reefed except the storm sail, and we were ready to set the main topsail. Eager to show how much I had learned about going aloft, I climbed up to help unfurl the canvas. I forgot old Peter’s advice: one hand for the ship, the other for yourself. The sail, filled with a sudden gust of wind, blew out like a balloon. I fell. I grabbed hold of the gasket, the rope that holds the sail to the yard, but it burned through my hands. I dropped ninety feet on to the braces, the ropes that hold the yard. If I had struck the deck, I would have been killed. At that moment the ship heaved with a swelling wave, and I was thrown out into the sea.
The Niobe was tearing along with a speed of eight knots. I came up astern. The wash in her wake swirled me around, but I could sea sailor throwing me a life preserver. I couldn’t find it. The waves were too high. I sank, and when I came up I saw the ship a long, long distance away, it seemed. I threw off my heavy oilskins and sea boots, although there seemed little use trying to save myself by swimming. Even if they did put out a lifeboat, they would never be able to find me in that heavy sea.
Above me hovered several albatross, those huge white birds that seem to think everything floating is for them to eat. They swooped down upon me. I was ready to sink, but still had enough strength to fight at them, waving with one hand and then another. A great white form swooped down. A bird’s talons seized a human hand. And I in turn clutched at it. A drowning man grasps a straw, even a bird. The albatross beat the air with its wings, frantically trying to rise. I still kept my grip on its claw. The huge bird was keeping me afloat. Then the albatross began to strike at my hand with its beak. It hurt and wounded me badly. I have the scars on my hand on this day. Still I held on.
“Phelax,” I said to myself, “you will never get back to your ship, buy maybe another ship will find you if you don’t let go.”
The other albatross were flying above, circling around, watching the strange proceedings.
It seemed to me as though my hand had been torn away by the repeated striking of that beak. Then, all at once, a swell lifted me high above the other waves, and I saw a lifeboat coming. I let go of the albatross, and he was glad to get away, by Joe. He shot up into the air to join his companions. That bird had saved my life, and so had his friends. The sailors could never have found me had they not seen those birds hovering above me. They knew that I must e swimming there.
In the boat I said to myself that I supposed the captain would be happy to see me back again. When we came alongside, he stood up there above, pointing down at me.
“You, you --! Come up here! I wish to – you had stayed out there and that we were rid of you! Look, my sails are blown away, blown away.”
In the commotion caused by my going overboard, he had lost two sails. I sat down there in the little boat with the blood flowing out of my hand and trembling. The sea was high, and the lifeboat danced up and down while the sailors made vain efforts to swing it over the davits. In a wild toss the boat rose as high as the ship’s gunwales. I was so excited that I made a crazy jump, hit the deck, and was knocked unconscious.
A moment later, the boat was smashed against the ship’s side. The sailors were pitched into the water, nine of them. For a while, it seemed that some of them would drown, and it was only after a struggle that the last of them managed to catch a rope and clamber on deck.
I lay stunned. The captain leaned over me and shouted in my face.
“You German dogs like to guzzle. Wake up and take some of this!”
He put the neck of a vodka bottle in my mouth and let the liquid fire trickle down my throat. Next day I was too sick to stand on my feet. The captain ordered me out of my bunk and to work. I tried buy couldn’t get up. Then he beat me, saying I was a drunken loafer.
Later I learned that when I had fallen overboard the quartermaster immediately called for volunteers to man the lifeboat. The captain, who had never dreamed of sending help to me, shouted to him, shaking a harpoon:
“If you lower the boat, you will get this harpoon in you belly.”
As a matter of fact, they were not obliged to send a boat for me. A captain need not attempt the rescue of a man overboard if it is liable to endanger the lives of others of his crew.
The quartermaster, however, calmly walked away, got his volunteers, lowered the boat, went after me, and left the captain in a towering rage.
The shock of that experience brought on a sort of nervous spasm which made my hands shake. I was like that for four years, and even to-day I sometimes have nightmares and dream of falling from a mast, of the albatross, of the captain and the vodka.
I lay in my bunk and thought it over. I had been Count Felix von Luckner, of a titled, landowning family, descendant of a long line of military officers and of an illustrious Marshal of France. Now I was a mere cleaner of the pig sties and the latrines, fed like a pig on scraps left by others, cursed and beaten and considered by the captain to be carrion not worth saving from the sea. I said to myself:
“You put yourself in this fix, by Joe, and you’ve got to take your humiliation and punishment like a man.”
So this was the life at sea? Certainly, it was not what I had expected. I wondered if I had made a mistake. Well, mistake or no mistake, I had promised my father to wear the Emperor’s uniform with honour, and I would not go home until I wore the Emperor’s naval uniform with honour. But how far away from me now seemed epaulettes and gold braid.
The Niobe did not put in at a single port on our way out. After we passed through the English Channel, until we reached Western Australia, we saw nothing quiet or in storm. In fact, we only came in sight of land once. This was when we sighted and island somewhere off the African coast. I could see palms, rows of palms, and white houses with red roofs and green shutters. I stood at the rail and gazed. What a joy it must be to walk and breathe on that green island. It seemed an abode of all happy things. I was sure that living there must be a fairy princess. I was very much of a boy, and I had been reared on German stories. I was wretched, and yonder was a land so fair. It must be the haunt of a fairy princess. I stood with my elbows on the rail and my chin on my hands and dreamed of her.
Singular that I should have then thought of a fairy princess. A few years later, I visited that same isle. By then I had become a naval officer of the Kaiser. I wandered all through its palm groves, remembering how once I had sailed past it, the miserable cabin boy of the Niobe, and had had visions of a fairy. This time I did indeed find a fairy princess there, and promptly lost my heart to her. We became engaged, and a little later she became the guardian angel of the raider in which I sailed the seas. She was a visitor on the isle, and her name was Irma.
But my fairy princess was only a wild fancy as I stood at the rail of the Niobe. The dreamy bit of land with its graceful palms and pretty houses grew small in the distance as the wind bellied out the mainsail and swept us on toward Cape Verde. Finally, I was left gazing at a speck that vanished on the horizon. And still I remained motionless and in my trance, until a howl cracked my ears and a kick nearly split me in two.
“Get along there, you loafer,” roared the captain.
But the latter part of the voyage was not so bad as the first. I was getting used to mistreatment, and was rapidly developing into a hardened seaman. The captain remained brutal, and so did most of the men, but there were several who grew kind toward me, among them the boatswain and the helmsman. So I began to experience some of that comradeship of the sea for which a sailor will endure many a hardship.
Finally, after eighty days at sea without touching at a single port, we sailed into the harbour at Fremantle. I had always thought of Australia as a land of kangaroos, of black aborigines with bows and arrows, and of bushrangers. But Fremantle turned out to be as commonplace and bleak a port as you could hope to see. However, I met some sailors off a German ship, and the sound of my native language and association with my countrymen made me happy. They took me to the Hotel Royal. They went there to drink beer and I to share their company. But the proprietor had a daughter, and I transferred my interest to her. She was what you call a bonnie lassie, and she listened to my chatter. After I told her my story, she urged me to desert from my ship. She even talked to her father about me and got him to take me on as a dishwasher. That was all right. Dishwashing had been perhaps the most elegant of all the jobs assigned to me on the Niobe. But I could not abandon old Peter’s sea chest. So the German sailors helped me to smuggle it of the ship. The Niobe sailed presently. Luckily, the captain did not ask the police to find me, as he had a right to do. Maybe he considered himself lucky to get rid of me.
Input by biajee
III
SAVED BY AN ALBATROSS
The Russian full-rigged ship Niobe, bound for Fremantle, Australia, was an old craft, dirty and mean. I have seen many another like her, but she was a classic. Her captain, too, was something of a classic. When old Peter spoke to him about taking me, although I had no permission from my parents, he replied:
“I will take him provided he doesn’t want any pay!”
I didn’t want any pay, but should have preferred a more agreeable-looking shipmaster. He had a sour, sallow face with a long goatee, half Mephisto, half Napoleon III. He hated Germans.
I knew no Russian. The others knew no German, except the captain. He knew it brokenly, just enough to abuse me. The helmsman spoke a little English. I had learned a few words of English in school. I never did learn Russian. That language has always been a puzzle to me. During the long trip of eighty days on the Niobe I was among people whose talk between themselves, and nearly all of whose speech addressed to me, I couldn’t understand.
I discovered the helmsman’s knowledge of English the first day out. I was delighted to find that here was at least one sailor with whom I could converse. He asked me questions. What was my father?
“A farmer,” I replied.
“Well, then,” quoth he, “it will be just the right thing if I appoint you chief inspector.”
That sounded important, and I walked a little stiffly as he led me down the deck. We came to a pig pen where there were half a dozen large and particularly filthy porkers. The chief inspector’s office was that of cleaning the pig sty.
“And besides,” the helmsman added cordially, “I will appoint you superintendent of the starboard and larboard pharmacies.” I promptly discovered that in the language of the sea a pharmacy was a latrine.
In cleaning the sty, I was not allowed to let the pigs out. I had to go in there with them, and it was very narrow quarters. The unspeakably dirty animals rubbed against me constantly while I laboured with pail and brush. The sewage was so deep that it filled my shoes. I had only two pairs of trousers. Soap and water were not to be wasted. I grew filthier than the pigs. And then there were the “clinics.”
Everyone kicked me because I looked like a pig and smelled like one. They called me “Pig.” For food I had to go around and eat what the sailors left on their plates. They said that was the way pigs were fed. For breakfast, instead of coffee and rolls, there was vodka with stale bread to soak in it. I got the leavings of this. The salted meat, of which I got the scraps, was so strong that I could scarcely force it down my throat. I often thought of that bill of fare from the Fuerst Bismarck , which had lingered in my thoughts. I had made a mistake there, by Joe.
I was afraid of the masts. I dreaded the thought of going aloft. But I said to myself that I must get used to it. So I climbed desperately every day, a little higher, a little higher, always practicing. Finally, one day, I got to the crow’s nest, halfway to the top. I thought that was fine. I felt so proud I called down for the others to see where I was.
“Any old sea cook can get that far,” the helmsman shouted back scornfully.
That hurt me and made me all the more determined to learn how to go aloft as the sailors did. I kept trying, and I watched the other apprentices skipping nimbly high up in the rigging.
We had a storm rounding the Cape of Good Hope, followed by heavy swell. All the sails had been reefed except the storm sail, and we were ready to set the main topsail. Eager to show how much I had learned about going aloft, I climbed up to help unfurl the canvas. I forgot old Peter’s advice: one hand for the ship, the other for yourself. The sail, filled with a sudden gust of wind, blew out like a balloon. I fell. I grabbed hold of the gasket, the rope that holds the sail to the yard, but it burned through my hands. I dropped ninety feet on to the braces, the ropes that hold the yard. If I had struck the deck, I would have been killed. At that moment the ship heaved with a swelling wave, and I was thrown out into the sea.
The Niobe was tearing along with a speed of eight knots. I came up astern. The wash in her wake swirled me around, but I could sea sailor throwing me a life preserver. I couldn’t find it. The waves were too high. I sank, and when I came up I saw the ship a long, long distance away, it seemed. I threw off my heavy oilskins and sea boots, although there seemed little use trying to save myself by swimming. Even if they did put out a lifeboat, they would never be able to find me in that heavy sea.
Above me hovered several albatross, those huge white birds that seem to think everything floating is for them to eat. They swooped down upon me. I was ready to sink, but still had enough strength to fight at them, waving with one hand and then another. A great white form swooped down. A bird’s talons seized a human hand. And I in turn clutched at it. A drowning man grasps a straw, even a bird. The albatross beat the air with its wings, frantically trying to rise. I still kept my grip on its claw. The huge bird was keeping me afloat. Then the albatross began to strike at my hand with its beak. It hurt and wounded me badly. I have the scars on my hand on this day. Still I held on.
“Phelax,” I said to myself, “you will never get back to your ship, buy maybe another ship will find you if you don’t let go.”
The other albatross were flying above, circling around, watching the strange proceedings.
It seemed to me as though my hand had been torn away by the repeated striking of that beak. Then, all at once, a swell lifted me high above the other waves, and I saw a lifeboat coming. I let go of the albatross, and he was glad to get away, by Joe. He shot up into the air to join his companions. That bird had saved my life, and so had his friends. The sailors could never have found me had they not seen those birds hovering above me. They knew that I must e swimming there.
In the boat I said to myself that I supposed the captain would be happy to see me back again. When we came alongside, he stood up there above, pointing down at me.
“You, you --! Come up here! I wish to – you had stayed out there and that we were rid of you! Look, my sails are blown away, blown away.”
In the commotion caused by my going overboard, he had lost two sails. I sat down there in the little boat with the blood flowing out of my hand and trembling. The sea was high, and the lifeboat danced up and down while the sailors made vain efforts to swing it over the davits. In a wild toss the boat rose as high as the ship’s gunwales. I was so excited that I made a crazy jump, hit the deck, and was knocked unconscious.
A moment later, the boat was smashed against the ship’s side. The sailors were pitched into the water, nine of them. For a while, it seemed that some of them would drown, and it was only after a struggle that the last of them managed to catch a rope and clamber on deck.
I lay stunned. The captain leaned over me and shouted in my face.
“You German dogs like to guzzle. Wake up and take some of this!”
He put the neck of a vodka bottle in my mouth and let the liquid fire trickle down my throat. Next day I was too sick to stand on my feet. The captain ordered me out of my bunk and to work. I tried buy couldn’t get up. Then he beat me, saying I was a drunken loafer.
Later I learned that when I had fallen overboard the quartermaster immediately called for volunteers to man the lifeboat. The captain, who had never dreamed of sending help to me, shouted to him, shaking a harpoon:
“If you lower the boat, you will get this harpoon in you belly.”
As a matter of fact, they were not obliged to send a boat for me. A captain need not attempt the rescue of a man overboard if it is liable to endanger the lives of others of his crew.
The quartermaster, however, calmly walked away, got his volunteers, lowered the boat, went after me, and left the captain in a towering rage.
The shock of that experience brought on a sort of nervous spasm which made my hands shake. I was like that for four years, and even to-day I sometimes have nightmares and dream of falling from a mast, of the albatross, of the captain and the vodka.
I lay in my bunk and thought it over. I had been Count Felix von Luckner, of a titled, landowning family, descendant of a long line of military officers and of an illustrious Marshal of France. Now I was a mere cleaner of the pig sties and the latrines, fed like a pig on scraps left by others, cursed and beaten and considered by the captain to be carrion not worth saving from the sea. I said to myself:
“You put yourself in this fix, by Joe, and you’ve got to take your humiliation and punishment like a man.”
So this was the life at sea? Certainly, it was not what I had expected. I wondered if I had made a mistake. Well, mistake or no mistake, I had promised my father to wear the Emperor’s uniform with honour, and I would not go home until I wore the Emperor’s naval uniform with honour. But how far away from me now seemed epaulettes and gold braid.
The Niobe did not put in at a single port on our way out. After we passed through the English Channel, until we reached Western Australia, we saw nothing quiet or in storm. In fact, we only came in sight of land once. This was when we sighted and island somewhere off the African coast. I could see palms, rows of palms, and white houses with red roofs and green shutters. I stood at the rail and gazed. What a joy it must be to walk and breathe on that green island. It seemed an abode of all happy things. I was sure that living there must be a fairy princess. I was very much of a boy, and I had been reared on German stories. I was wretched, and yonder was a land so fair. It must be the haunt of a fairy princess. I stood with my elbows on the rail and my chin on my hands and dreamed of her.
Singular that I should have then thought of a fairy princess. A few years later, I visited that same isle. By then I had become a naval officer of the Kaiser. I wandered all through its palm groves, remembering how once I had sailed past it, the miserable cabin boy of the Niobe, and had had visions of a fairy. This time I did indeed find a fairy princess there, and promptly lost my heart to her. We became engaged, and a little later she became the guardian angel of the raider in which I sailed the seas. She was a visitor on the isle, and her name was Irma.
But my fairy princess was only a wild fancy as I stood at the rail of the Niobe. The dreamy bit of land with its graceful palms and pretty houses grew small in the distance as the wind bellied out the mainsail and swept us on toward Cape Verde. Finally, I was left gazing at a speck that vanished on the horizon. And still I remained motionless and in my trance, until a howl cracked my ears and a kick nearly split me in two.
“Get along there, you loafer,” roared the captain.
But the latter part of the voyage was not so bad as the first. I was getting used to mistreatment, and was rapidly developing into a hardened seaman. The captain remained brutal, and so did most of the men, but there were several who grew kind toward me, among them the boatswain and the helmsman. So I began to experience some of that comradeship of the sea for which a sailor will endure many a hardship.
Finally, after eighty days at sea without touching at a single port, we sailed into the harbour at Fremantle. I had always thought of Australia as a land of kangaroos, of black aborigines with bows and arrows, and of bushrangers. But Fremantle turned out to be as commonplace and bleak a port as you could hope to see. However, I met some sailors off a German ship, and the sound of my native language and association with my countrymen made me happy. They took me to the Hotel Royal. They went there to drink beer and I to share their company. But the proprietor had a daughter, and I transferred my interest to her. She was what you call a bonnie lassie, and she listened to my chatter. After I told her my story, she urged me to desert from my ship. She even talked to her father about me and got him to take me on as a dishwasher. That was all right. Dishwashing had been perhaps the most elegant of all the jobs assigned to me on the Niobe. But I could not abandon old Peter’s sea chest. So the German sailors helped me to smuggle it of the ship. The Niobe sailed presently. Luckily, the captain did not ask the police to find me, as he had a right to do. Maybe he considered himself lucky to get rid of me.
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