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I proved that the man who imposed on me must have a fight on his
hands. And doing my work well, the innate justice of the men,
assisted by their wholesome dislike for a clawing and rending
wild-cat ruction, soon led them to give over their hectoring.
After a bit of strife, my attitude was accepted, and it was my
pride that I was taken in as an equal in spirit as well as in
fact. From then on, everything was beautiful, and the voyage
promised to be a happy one.
But there was one other man in the forecastle. Counting the
Scandinavians as ten, and myself as the eleventh, this man was the
twelfth and last. We never knew his name, contenting ourselves
with calling him the “Bricklayer.” He was from Missouri–at least
he so informed us in the one meagre confidence he was guilty of in
the early days of the voyage. Also, at that time, we learned
several other things. He was a brick-layer by trade. He had
never even seen salt water until the week before he joined us, at
which time he had arrived in San Francisco and looked upon San
Francisco Bay. Why he, of all men, at forty years of age, should
have felt the prod to go to sea, was beyond all of us; for it was
our unanimous conviction that no man less fitted for the sea had
ever embarked on it. But to sea he had come. After a week’s stay
in a sailors’ boarding-house, he had been shoved aboard of us as
an able seaman.
All hands had to do his work for him. Not only did he know
nothing, but he proved himself unable to learn anything. Try as
they would, they could never teach him to steer. To him the
compass must have been a profound and awful whirligig. He never
mastered its cardinal points, much less the checking and steadying
of the ship on her course. He never did come to know whether
ropes should be coiled from left to right or from right to left.
It was mentally impossible for him to learn the easy muscular
trick of throwing his weight on a rope in pulling and hauling.
The simplest knots and turns were beyond his comprehension, while
he was mortally afraid of going aloft. Bullied by captain and
mate, he was one day forced aloft. He managed to get underneath
the crosstrees, and there he froze to the ratlines. Two sailors
had to go after him to help him down.
All of which was bad enough had there been no worse. But he was
vicious, malignant, dirty, and without common decency. He was a
tall, powerful man, and he fought with everybody. And there was
no fairness in his fighting. His first fight on board, the first
day out, was with me, when he, desiring to cut a plug of chewing
tobacco, took my personal table-knife for the purpose, and
whereupon, I, on a hair-trigger, promptly exploded. After that he
fought with nearly every member of the crew. When his clothing
became too filthy to be bearable by the rest of us, we put it to
soak and stood over him while he washed it. In short, the
Bricklayer was one of those horrible and monstrous things that one
must see in order to be convinced that they exist.
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I will only say that he was a beast, and that we treated him like
a beast. It is only by looking back through the years that I
realise how heartless we were to him. He was without sin. He
could not, by the very nature of things, have been anything else
than he was. He had not made himself, and for his making he was
not responsible. Yet we treated him as a free agent and held him
personally responsible for all that he was and that he should not
have been. As a result, our treatment of him was as terrible as
he was himself terrible. Finally we gave him the silent
treatment, and for weeks before he died we neither spoke to him
nor did he speak to us. And for weeks he moved among us, or lay
in his bunk in our crowded house, grinning at us his hatred and
malignancy. He was a dying man, and he knew it, and we knew it.
And furthermore, he knew that we wanted him to die. He cumbered
our life with his presence, and ours was a rough life that made
rough men of us. And so he died, in a small space crowded by
twelve men and as much alone as if he had died on some desolate
mountain peak. No kindly word, no last word, was passed between.
He died as he had lived, a beast, and he died hating us and hated
by us.
And now I come to the most startling moment of my life. No sooner
was he dead than he was flung overboard. He died in a night of
wind, drawing his last breath as the men tumbled into their
oilskins to the cry of “All hands!” And he was flung overboard,
several hours later, on a day of wind. Not even a canvas wrapping
graced his mortal remains; nor was he deemed worthy of bars of
iron at his feet. We sewed him up in the blankets in which he
died and laid him on a hatch-cover for’ard of the main-hatch on
the port side. A gunnysack, half full of galley coal, was
fastened to his feet.
It was bitter cold. The weather-side of every rope, spar, and
stay was coated with ice, while all the rigging was a harp,
singing and shouting under the fierce hand of the wind. The
schooner, hove to, lurched and floundered through the sea, rolling
her scuppers under and perpetually flooding the deck with icy salt
water. We of the forecastle stood in sea-boots and oilskins. Our
hands were mittened, but our heads were bared in the presence of
the death we did not respect. Our ears stung and numbed and
whitened, and we yearned for the body to be gone. But the
interminable reading of the burial service went on. The captain
had mistaken his place, and while he read on without purpose we
froze our ears and resented this final hardship thrust upon us by
the helpless cadaver. As from the beginning, so to the end,
everything had gone wrong with the Bricklayer. Finally, the
captain’s son, irritated beyond measure, jerked the book from the
palsied fingers of the old man and found the place. Again the
quavering voice of the captain arose. Then came the cue: “And
the body shall be cast into the sea.” We elevated one end of the
hatch-cover, and the Bricklayer plunged outboard and was gone.
Back into the forecastle we cleaned house, washing out the dead
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man’s bunk and removing every vestige of him. By sea law and sea
custom, we should have gathered his effects together and turned
them over to the captain, who, later, would have held an auction
in which we should have bid for the various articles. But no man
wanted them, so we tossed them up on deck and overboard in the
wake of the departed body–the last ill-treatment we could devise
to wreak upon the one we had hated so. Oh, it was raw, believe
me; but the life we lived was raw, and we were as raw as the life.
The Bricklayer’s bunk was better than mine. Less sea water leaked
down through the deck into it, and the light was better for lying
in bed and reading. Partly for this reason I proceeded to move
into his bunk. My other reason was pride. I saw the sailors were
superstitious, and by this act I determined to show that I was
braver than they. I would cap my proved equality by a deed that
would compel their recognition of my superiority. Oh, the
arrogance of youth! But let that pass. The sailors were appalled
by my intention. One and all, they warned me that in the history
of the sea no man had taken a dead man’s bunk and lived to the end
of the voyage. They instanced case after case in their personal
experience. I was obdurate. Then they begged and pleaded with
me, and my pride was tickled in that they showed they really liked
me and were concerned about me. This but served to confirm me in
my madness. I moved in, and, lying in the dead man’s bunk, all
afternoon and evening listened to dire prophecies of my future.
Also were told stories of awful deaths and gruesome ghosts that
secretly shivered the hearts of all of us. Saturated with this,
yet scoffing at it, I rolled over at the end of the second dog-
watch and went to sleep.