PRENTICE MULFORD: Autobiographical Works (Life by Land and Sea, The Californian's Return & More). Prentice Mulford Mulford
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it tires me out with its imagined ceaseless repetition. It’s there, a permanent fixture. Recollection will wake it up.
So unceasing was the gabble of these Kanakas that one day I asked Jake, the negro boat-steerer, who understood their language, what they found to talk so much about. “Oh, dey talk about anyting,” said he; “dey talk a whole day ’bout a pin.” Whereat I retired to my maritime scrubbery and kitchen and varied my usual occupation midst my pots, pans, and undeveloped plum duff’s with wondering if the simpler, or, as we term them, the inferior races of men are not more inclined to express their thoughts audibly than the superior. I do not think an idea could present itself to a Kanaka without his talking it out to somebody.
But some of these simple children of the Pacific isles used to pilfer hot biscuits from my galley when I was absent. In vain I set hot stove-covers in front of the door for them to step on and burn their bare feet. I burned myself on the iron I had prepared for my recently civilized, if not converted, heathen brother. Both the superior and inferior races often went barefooted on the Henry while in the lower latitudes.
At times, leaving a portion of the crew at the St. Bartholomew’s bay station to collect and cure abalone, the schooner cruised about the coast for sea elephant. Not far from the bay are the islands of Cedros (or Cedars), Natividad and some others. The first we saw of Cedros was her tree covered mountain tops floating, as it were, in the air above us on a sea of fog. This lifting, we were boarded by a boat containing two men. They proved to be two Robinson Crusoes, by name Miller and Whitney, who had been alone on the island nearly six months. They, with others, had fitted out in San Francisco a joint stock vessel and were left with a supply of provisions on Cedros to seal. Their vessel was long overdue, their provisions down to the last pound of biscuits, and they were living largely on fish and venison, for though Cedros is many miles from the main land, deer have got there somehow, as well as rattlesnakes. Their vessel never did return, for their Captain ran away with her and sold her in some South American port. Miller and Whitney joined our crew and made the remainder of the voyage with us. They brought on board all their worldly goods in two small trunks; also, a kettleful of boiled venison, a treat which they were very glad to exchange for some long coveted salt pork. They reported that a “stinker” was lying among the rocks ashore. A “stinker” in whaleman’s parlance is a dead whale. In giving things names a whaleman is largely influenced by their most prominent traits or qualities, and the odorous activity of a dead whale can be felt for miles. They told us, also, that they had nineteen barrels of seal oil stored on the island of Natividad. Natividad is but a bleached topped, guano covered rock. We sailed thither but found no oil. The Captain who had stolen their vessel also included the oil. Miller and Whitney proved very useful men. Whitney was a powerful talker. Miller never spoke unless under compulsion. Whether in their six months of Cedros isolation such a pair had been well mated is a matter on which there may be variance of opinion. Perhaps from a colloquial standpoint some if not many long married men can best tell. Miller was a Vermonter, and had spent seventeen years of his life roaming about among seldom visited South Sea islands. Could his tongue have been permanently loosened and his brain stimulated to conversational activity, his might have been a most interesting story. Once in a great while there came from him a slight shower of sentences and facts which fell gratefully on our parched ears, but as a rule the verbal drought was chronic. He had an irritating fashion also of intonating the first portions of his sentences in an audible key and then dying away almost to a whisper. This, when the tale was interesting, proved maddening to his hearers. He spoke once of living on an island whose natives were almost white, and the women well-formed and finer looking than any of the Polynesian race he had ever seen. Polygamy was not practised; they were devoted to one wife; and their life, cleanliness and manners, as he described them, made, with the addition of a little of one’s own imagination, a pleasing picture. Miller’s greatest use to mankind lay in his hands, in which all his brain power concentrated instead of his tongue. From splicing a cable to skinning a seal, he was an ultra proficient. Others might tell how and tell well, but Miller did it. Talking seemed to fatigue him. Every sentence ere completed fell in a sort of a swoon.
In St. Bartholomew’s, alias Turtle, Bay, we lay four months, taking abalones. All hands were called every morning at four o’clock. Breakfast was quickly dispatched, their noon lunch prepared, and everybody save myself was away from the vessel by five. That was the last I saw of them until sunset, and I was very glad to be rid of the whole gang and be left alone with my own thoughts, pots, pans, and kettles. The abalone clings to the surf washed rocks by suction. It has but one outer shell. San Francisco is very familiar with their prismatic hues inside, and the same outside when ground and polished. Heaps of those shells, three feet in height and bleached to a dead white by the sun, lay on the beaches about us. Of unbleached and lively hued shells we took on board several tons. They were sent to Europe, and there used for inlaid work. The live abalone must be pried off the rock with stout iron chisels or wedges. It was rough work collecting them from the rocky ledges in a heavy surf. Carried to the curing depot on shore, the entrails were cut away and the round, solid chunk of meat left was first boiled and then dried in the sun. An inferior pearl is often found within the body of the abalone. Our one Chinaman, Ah Sam, was chef of the abalone curing kitchen on shore. He was shipped for that purpose. One live abalone will cling to the back of another too tightly to be pulled off easily by hand, and you may in this way pile them on top of one another, and thus erect a column of abalone as many feet in height as you choose to build. These fish were intended for the Chinese market, and the projectors of the voyage expected to get forty cents per pound for them in San Francisco. When some forty tons had been cured we heard from a passing steamer that the English had instituted another of their Christian wars with China, for which reason abalones in San Francisco brought only ten-cents per pound. Then we stopped cooking abalones, hauled up our anchor and hunted the sea lion and the whale.
But while in St. Bartholomew’s Bay I was left alone on the vessel all day with no companions save the gulls in the air and the sharks in the water. Both were plentiful. The gulls made themselves especially sociable. They would come boldly on board and feast on the quarters of turtle meat hung up in the rigging. Once I found one in the cabin pecking away at the crumbs on the table. His gullible mind got into a terrible state on seeing me. I whacked him to my heart’s content with the table cloth. He experienced great trouble in flying up the cabin stairway. In fact, he couldn’t steer himself straight up-stairs. His aim on starting himself was correct enough, like that of many a young man or woman in commencing life; but instead of going the straight and narrow path up the companionway he would bring up against a deck beam. There is no limit to the feeding capacity of those
Pacific coast gulls. The wonder is where it all goes to. I have experimentally cut up and thrown in small pieces to a gull as much fat pork as would make a meal for two men, and the gull has promptly swallowed it all, waited for more, and visibly got no bigger. They never get fat. Sometimes I tied two bits of meat to either end of a long string and flung it overboard. Barely had it touched the water when the meat at either end was swallowed by two of these bottomless scavengers, and they would fly away, each pulling hard at the latest received contents of the other’s stomach. The picture reminded me of some married lives. They pulled together, but they didn’t pull the right way.
At low tide the shore would be lined with these birds vainly trying to fill themselves with shellfish and such carrion as the waters had left. It couldn’t be called feeding; a Pacific coast gull does not feed, it seeks simply to fill up the vast, unfathomable space within. Eternity is, of course, without end, but the nearest approach to eternity must be the inside of a gull; I would say stomach, but a stomach implies metes and bounds, and there is no proof that there are any metes and bounds inside of a gull. It was good entertainment to see the coyotes come down and manoeuvre to catch the gulls. There was a plain hard beach, perhaps a quarter of a mile wide, between coyote and gull. Of course coyote couldn’t walk across this and eat gull up. So he went to work to create an impression in gull’s mind that he was there on other business, and was quite indifferent, if not oblivious, to all gulls. He would commence making long straight laps of half a mile on the beach. At the end of each lap he would turn and run back a few feet nearer gull; back another lap, another turn, and so on. But he wasn’t looking for a gull. He didn’t know there was a gull in the world. He had some business straight ahead of him which banished all the gulls in the world from his mind.