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Updated: May 22, 2025
Over it and upon it swarmed and clambered thousands of sea-birds, while all around and below the water was thick with gorging sharks. A dreadful, strangling decay fouled all the air. The whale was a sperm-whale, and fully twice the length of the "Bertha Millner." The work of tricing him up occupied the beach-combers throughout the entire day.
It is no mean art, and a man skilled in it is an important character in California. Many a dispute have I heard raging high between professed ``beach-combers, as to whether the hides should be stowed ``shingling, or ``back-to-back and flipper-to-flipper''; upon which point there was an entire and bitter division of sentiment among the savans.
He did not, however, make his appearance during our visit, and I imagine he must have been one of those individuals called 'beach-combers, referred to in so many of the books that treat of the South Sea Islands, a sort of ne'er-do-well Englishman or American, rather afraid of meeting any of his own countrymen, but very clever at making a bargain between a ship's crew and the natives, with considerable profit to himself.
Their skippers were honest men; but there were others "beach-combers," he called them who not only plundered shipwrecked crews, but endeavoured to allure to their destruction, by means of false lights, any vessels approaching the coast. Many a stout ship has thus been lost, their crews miserably perishing.
Even good Madame Maür, who squinted, squinted more painfully at Follet than at any one else. But his idleness was beginning to tell on him; occasionally he had moody fits, and there were times when he broke out and ran amuck among beach-combers and tipsy natives along the water-front. More than once, Ching Po sought him out and fetched him home. My first intimation of trouble came from Stires.
A trade that might have worn a repellent aspect when urged by greasy, half-drunken adventurers, boucan-hunters, lumbermen, beach-combers, English, French, and Dutch, became a dignified, almost official form of privateering when advocated by the courtly, middle-aged gentleman who in representing the French West India Company seemed to represent France herself.
He gave me an ingratiating smile. "Well, I guess I was on the beach." My friend's appearance suggested that he was now in the same predicament, and I prepared myself to cultivate an agreeable acquaintance. The society of beach-combers always repays the small pains you need be at to enjoy it. They are easy of approach and affable in conversation.
"I tink you catchum someting, smellum pretty big," said Hoang, his ferret glance twinkling about the schooner. "I catchum nothing nothing but plenty bad stink," said Moran. "No, you don't!" she exclaimed, putting herself in Hoang's way as he made for the cabin. The other beach-combers came crowding up; Wilbur even thought he saw one of them loosening his hatchet in his belt.
Borne down by depression, the day being yet at its noon, and the sun over the old point it is four miles to the town, the Presidio, I have walked it often, and can do it once more, I passed the familiar objects, and it seemed to me that I remembered them better than those of any other place I had ever been in; the opening to the little cave; the low hills where we cut wood and killed rattlesnakes, and where our dogs chased the coyotes; and the black ground where so many of the ship's crew and beach-combers used to bring up on their return at the end of a liberty day, and spend the night sub Jove.
"Look here, Jake," I said, in one of the quiet spells, "don't you think this old shack of yours isn't a very safe place to keep your money in?" "How do you mean?" he asked suspiciously. "There are lots of strange boats put in here of a night; some of them containing beach-combers who do not care who they rob or what they do so long as they get a haul.
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