ear and record for myself
the wonderful incidents of the El Dorado's wreck. The insurance was
doubtless long since paid on her, and masses said for the repose of the
soul of Alex Simoneau. The world would not know of their being saved,
or her owners of the manner of her sinking, until these three arrived
in San Francisco, or until a few days before, when the steamship
wireless might inform them.

Steve came back with a memorandum book in which he had kept day by day
the history of the voyage. But it was in Dutch, and I could not read
it. I made him comfortable in a deep-bottomed rocker, and I jotted
down my understanding of the honest sailor's Rotterdam English as he
himself translated his ample notes in his native tongue. I pieced
these out with answers to my questions, for often Steve's English
was more puzzling than pre-Chaucer poetry.

The El Dorado was a five-masted schooner, twelve years old, and left
Astoria, Oregon, for Antofagasta, Chile, on a Friday, more than seven
months before, with a crew of eleven all told: the captain, two mates,
a Japanese cook, and seven men before the mast. She was a man-killer,
as sailors term sailing ships poorly equipped and undermanned. The
crew were of all sorts, the usual waterfront unemployed, wretchedly
paid and badly treated. The niggardliness of owners of ships caused
them to pick up their crews at haphazard by paying crimps to herd them
from lodging-houses and saloons an hour or two before sailing to save
a day's wages. Once aboard, they were virtual slaves, subject to the
whims and brutality of the officers, and forfeiting liberty and even
life if they refused to submit to all conditions imposed by these
petty bosses.

Often the crimps brought aboard as sailors men who had never set
foot on a vessel. On the El Dorado few were accustomed mariners,
and the first few weeks were passed in adjusting crew and officers
to one another, and to the routine of the overloaded schooner. When
they were fifteen days out they spoke a vessel, which reported them,
and after that they saw no other. The mate was a bucko, a slugger,
according to Steve, and was hated by all, for most of them during
the throes of seasickness had had a taste of his fists.

On the seventy-second day out the El Dorado was twenty-seven hundred
miles off the coast of Chile, having run a swelling semicircle to
get the benefit of the southeast trades, and being far south of
Antofagasta. That was the way of the win