Frank with his two brothers Maurice and Geoffrey work the summer of 1925 on the Canadian prairie, then take the train to Vancouver, BC in late fall. Jobs are hard to find and on Christmas day, Frank throws in the towel and catches a train east. He is England-bound. In Montreal, he greases the palm of a sleazy Swede in the railyards and gets on with the cattleboat Manchester Producer as a cattleman, feeding and handling the cattle on board. His passage home is assured …or so he thinks.
A brutal January storm breaks the ship’s rudder and for three weeks the ship drifts broadside to the breaking seas. Fearful of capsize, the captain orders all cattle and pens on the decks be thrown overboard to reduce windage. Calls for help bring nearby vessels but all attempts to secure a tow line in the heavy swells fail.
The tug fought through a Thousand Miles of Ocean Gales to Succor the Crippled Tramp – And We Sipped Hot Tea While the Cook Slept
I steadied myself against the edge of the iron bunk while the ship rolled heavily to port; as she regained the vertical, I l;eft the forecastle and stepped on deck into the cold wind. Inside, my fellow cattlemen slept uneasily in their clothes, breathing stertorously a close, damo atmosphere loaded with the mingled smells of cow, unwashed clothing, stale tobacco and the apples we had borrowed from the cargo below.
The night sky was brilliantly starred: the January wind still blew strong and steady over the Atlantic from the northwest. The ship, her rudder quadrant broken, lay as she had drifted for three weeks now, helplessly rolling broadside to the heavy swell. Each tremendous wave, rushing at the ship as she listed under the pressure of the wind, dealt her a smashing blow, and passed beneath us. Down the wind-fretted back of the wave she slid, trembling into the trough; listed again and waited for the buffet from the next onrushing wall of water.
Now or Never!
Pulling up the collar of my old army greatcoat, I hung over the lee rail to watch the dim white crests of the waves leave the ships’s rail and with a hiss and a heave, leap away into the darkness.
I was pretty sure it was a hail that had brought me on deck; but we were in mid-Atlantic where hails are few. Sure enough, lights were dancing to leeward. Stately, swaying, they rode for a moment on the wind, then plunged with a sideways swing, and the next moment were again flung skyward. I dived back into the forecastle and punched a shapeless mass of blankets, clothes and sacking on an upper bunk. “Hey Bill! Goldern you; wake up. Here’s the tug.”
Groaning protests, Bill rolled out, yawned himself into cap and sweater. We went outside together.
The watch was already on deck. The tug had come a thousand miles and more to fetch us, had found us at night in mid-ocean. She was ready now to hook onto us in a sea that we had already seen during the previous two weeks, break like twine the three inch steel hawsers passed to us by other ships, salvage bent.
The tug came in close, hailed us again and told us to stand by to receive a line. Her searchlight showed our Old Man on the bridge, megaphone in hand. He yelled in a hoarse but surprisingly loud voice that it couldn’t be done – better wait til daylight. The answer, blurred by the wind, came booming back: “You take my line now or I’ll leave you.
The Old Man’s “OK” was the last of that laconic argument.
A Mighty Flail
Up forward, the crew were busy with the anchor winch. Spare hawsers were already coiled on the foredeck. Two days before, as another ship was preparing to tow us, the heavy hawser had parted. The end of the steel hawser converted instantly into a mighty flail, whipped around the bollard and disappeared overside, leaving the carpenter’s mate in a huddle on the deck with one leg nearly severed at the ankle.
“I’ll cut your throat”
I felt in an inside pocket for cigarettes. Bill and I leaned against the rail next the cowshed and watched the crew lugging cables for’rard along the heaving steel deck. From the after-deck, littered with smashed cowshed and a tangle of wire ropes, with the dead steers still wedged between the winches and the hatch, they dragged the heavy rope. Past the galley door where we were wont to wait for the inevitable stew and the tea with coffee grounds; past the engine room door whence the negro stoker had flown by me with his razor the night before while the second engineer dived into his cabin for a gun, appealing to me over his shoulder as a witness:
“You heard that black devil say he’d cut my throat, didn’t ye, hey?”
Past the fiddley they lugged the heavy cable: the fiddley where in bad weather we let go our hold on the lifelines rigged along the deck and dived for the warmth of the stokehold, only to be soaked again as we descended by flying masses of brine from windward, which plunged throught the gratings and dripping steel ladders to the shining deck of the dim stockhold below. Past the steward’s pantry they dragged they dragged the cable forward, where we would go to draw rations and where the floor was still wet with the water that had flooded down from the smashed chartroom through the sacred saloon.
Bill and I smoked and gladly watched the crew working.
The wind pressed coldly upon us, but not with the solid, irresistible force it had shown during the worst of the weather.It had blown then miraculously from a clear steel-blue sky upon a grey and racing sea. It hadblown with incredible intensity and steadiness; now flatenning the seas with it weight, now whipping the flying spume up over the windward taffrail, heaved high as the ship listed, whipping it horizontally across the deck.
Bill and I finished our smokes.
Fishing for the line
Very soon the tug would send a line aboard. She would do it by the simple process of slinging overboard to windward a lifebuoy with the line attached. the ships would drift faster than the buoy and we would fish for it with lines weighted with iron shovels or bars as soon as we had drifted down upon it. We began to get cold; our interest in the proceedings waned with every chilling moment.
Apple Pie
“Tea Bill,” I said, and we moved off in the direction of the galley. Making tea had to be done at some time between midnight and three in the morning, when the vituperative, whisky-ridden cook was snoring in his bunk. Ham, our tame cattleman-actor had even baked an apple pie at these unearthly hours. To be sure, the apples had been stolen from the cargo and cooked without sugar; and the crust made from the cook’s flour without fat, but in the circumstances it was a culinary triumph. Ham himself had brought me a piece and awakened me to eat it. After the first enthusiastic bite, one ate the rest out of love for Ham and respect for his remarkable achievement.
While Bill stoked up the big iron range with its railed top, I took a small saucepan, slid forward again to within earshot of where the mate was still grunting orders, and slipped below. I moved quickly aft along the rows of cattle between decks, assailed by the cloying smell of the animals, and of wet hay, and from the already rotting apples in the hold.
Near the end of the long line of weary, weaving animals stood the little Black Angus cow that had presented us with a shiny black calf a week before. With this single gesture she had attained a popularity with the entireship’s company, who whoile glad of the calf as a pet, were still more pleased at the prospect of having fresh milk in their tea.
Competition for the milk waxed fierce between thesaloon, the sailors and the cattlemen. Fortunately for the calf, it was a point of honor among the warring foster brothers to see that the calf was fed first. After that, it was anybody’s milk. Hence, it was as necessary to do our milking while the crew worked and the steward slept, as it was to wait until the fat and unmpleasant cook wassafe in the arms of Morpheus before making tea.
The calf was fed
It should be explained that tea as Ham made it, or as we made it, and as the cook mad it for Ham and us, were not recognizable as the same beverage.
The calf was fed. I took a cupful of milk in the saucepan, tied up the calf to the stanchion, fed the little black cowcrushed apples in a pail and hied me with my booty to the galley.