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Updated: June 4, 2025
The women, who lived on board all the time, as is frequently the case with the families of Dutch skippers, had climbed up and obtained a hold upon the berths on the port side of the cabin. By these means they were saved from drowning; but the cabin doors, being on the starboard side, were under water, so that they could not escape while the vessel lay on her beam-ends.
There was no counter or bar, and the liquor was brought "ben" by Oliver or his sonsie wife. One Saturday morning I had to go there to see old David Flett about a boat that Captain Gordon wanted to buy from him. I found him at the inn before me, sitting there with a goodly company of Stromness men and skippers, whose ships were, like the Lydia, undergoing repairs or waiting for fair winds.
The skipper did whatever skippers do when they are invisible to their subordinates. The weapons officer, Taine, thought appropriate thoughts. In the navigation room the second officer conscientiously glanced at each separate instrument at least once in each five minutes, and then carefully surveyed all the screens showing space outside the ship.
They bought at frequent intervals, not at all like the ways of another group not cargo captains of whom one of our American warrant officers said: "You buy and buy and buy, and they drink and drink and drink. It comes time for them to buy, and when it does they submerge, and don't come up for air." These cargo skippers were always coming up for air.
She loved the little panting ferries that carried the good folk of the neighbourhood across the water to buy their goods in Southampton, or to sell the produce of their farms; she was intimate with their sturdy skippers, and she delighted in their airs of self-importance.
Back home there were a dozen masters who knew his people, who knew him and his proved ability; but out here on the Pacific Coast the skippers were nearly all Scandinavians, and Matt had to show them something besides his documents. He had failed signally to procure a single opportunity to demonstrate his fitness for an executive position.
Their skippers were Americans, the Kellogg's master as dark as a negro, burned by thirty years of tropical sun. "I used to live in Hawaii in the eighties," he said. "I used to pass the pipe there in those days. There'd be only one pipe among a dozen kanakas, and each had a draw or so in turn. They have that custom in the Marquesas, too, and so had the American Indians."
"It's a big steamer, and the captain and crew must be used to the weather down here. They'll know what to do. Probably they ran for harbor when they saw the storm coining. They say skippers in the West Indies can tell when a storm's due hours ahead." But that brought little comfort to the girls, and even Walter looked worried as the day wore on and the fury of the storm did not abate.
Had we, by-the-by, asked Mr. van Buren if he'd any skippers up his sleeve? Oh, well, it didn't matter that we'd forgotten. He himself had the names of several, besides some men he had already seen, and he would interview them all.
First, let me tell 'ee, he's a rare good one, though he mayn't look it. He seldom gets tipsy. He sometimes is stubborn, but is very pliable for all that. No, I can't tell 'ee how good he is! And such an A.B. seaman! Every new fishing season the skippers regularly fight to have him." She was quite sure of her father's permission, for she never had been thwarted in any of her whims.
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