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.