andlubber was
good enough to be shipped as an able seaman. They were things of rags
and tatters--their only luggage a bottle of whiskey.
The mates were thankful if they could muster enough real sailors to
work the ship to sea and then began the stern process of whipping the
wastrels and incompetents into shape for the perils and emergencies of
the long voyage. That these great clippers were brought safely to port
is a shining tribute to the masterful skill of their officers. While
many of them were humane and just, with all their severity, the stories
of savage abuse which are told of some are shocking in the extreme.
The defense was that it was either mutiny or club the men under. Better
treatment might have persuaded better men to sail. Certain it is that
life in the forecastle of a clipper was even more intolerable to the
self-respecting American youth than it had previously been aboard the
Atlantic packet.
When Captain Bob Waterman arrived at San Francisco in the Challenge
clipper in 1851, a mob tried very earnestly to find and hang him and his
officers because of the harrowing stories told by his sailors. That
he had shot several of them from the yards with his pistol to make
the others move faster was one count in the indictment. For his part,
Captain Waterman asserted that a more desperate crew of ruffians had
never sailed out of New York and that only two of them were Americans.
They were mutinous from the start, half of them blacklegs of the vilest
type who swore to get the upper hand of him. His mates, boatswain,
and carpenter had broken open their chests and boxes and had removed a
collection of slung-shots, knuckle-dusters, bowie-knives, and pistols.
Off Rio Janeiro they had tried to kill the chief mate, and Captain
Waterman had been compelled to jump in and stretch two of them dead with
an iron belaying-pin. Off Cape Horn three sailors fell from aloft and
were lost. This accounted for the casualties.
The truth of such episodes as these was difficult to fathom. Captain
Waterman demanded a legal investigation, but nothing came of his request
and he was commended by his owners for his skill and courage in bringing
the ship to port without losing a spar or a sail. It was a skipper of
this old school who blandly maintained the doctrine that if you wanted
the men to love you, you must starve them and knock them down. The fact
is proven by scores of cases that the discipline of the American clipper
was both
|