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RANGER, 8 July 1928 Flying the Milwaukee Yacht Club flag Photo by Wm. O. Verburgt Click image to enlarge. From the archives of the S.P.H.S.© |
January 1940
Words by Lew Dodd (1892-1960), then of Orcas Island, WA.
Pacific Motor Boat
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R. B. BROWN at the helm of his 1914 schooner RANGER Registered L 79-ft x 17-ft 3" x 6-ft 6" Undated. Courtesy of his daughter Barbara Brown. |
R. B. Brown, a resident of Deer Harbor, Orcas Island, went on a real Odyssey last year, when he brought his 80-ft auxiliary schooner RANGER all the 8,500 miles from Milwaukee, WI, to Deer Harbor, Orcas Is., WA, by way of the Mississippi River, Caribbean Sea, Panama Canal, Pacific Ocean, and Puget Sound. Brown and his crew had a wide variety of experiences and adventures. The following account of the trip is written by Lewis Dodd of Orcas, who accompanied Brown on the trip, as a member of the crew.
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RANGER 212407 Unknown anchorage in the San Juan Islands Ca. 1940.
Wisconsin to Puget Sound
Photo courtesy of historian Kae Paterson |
A cruise that takes in freshwater lakes, corn and cotton fields, cutover stump land, muddy rivers, bayou country, tropical sea, coral reefs, coconut and banana lands, ship canals, two oceans, desert regions, and evergreen areas, is unique and dissimilar, if not strange, bizarre, and amazing.
However, my wife will aver we were in all these places (and maybe a lot more she doesn't know anything about) for, says she, we turned up missing for 104 days. I fail to understand why she has to be so exact!
After considerable preparation, the schooner RANGER, 48-tons gross, R. B. Brown, owner, and master took departure from Milwaukee, WI, at 6:25 am, Sunday 30 April 1939, with a crew of eight sprinkled here and there among the lower masts, topmasts, spars, oil barrels, lifeboats, standing and running rigging, and other articles too numerous to mention. All lashed down horizontally on deck to allow passage under many low bridges before we were to meet the open sea.
Below decks, we had the cook, 116-pounds gross, mixed in with over a ton and a half of nearly every kind of food found in the US, for the most part, air and watertight in gallon cans, together with crew duffel bags, 400-gallons of reserve diesel oil, ship-to-shore telephone, radio receiving set, radio compass, thread, needles, wax and buttons, and other odds and ends contributing to complete chaos.
RANGER is 80-ft long, 17-ft beam, and normally draws about 6-ft. She's a centerboard schooner powered with a Sterling "wobble plate" 150-HP engine.
We reached Chicago at noon after an eighty-five-mile run down Lake Michigan. We were off for an 8,000-mile voyage bound for Deer Harbor, Orcas Island, Puget Sound, WA.
Without delay, we proceeded from Chicago Harbor southwesterly through the Chicago Drainage Canal which connects Lake Michigan with the Illinois River. I recall clearly only the first of fifty bridges we negotiated. We learned now why all our spars had to be laid on deck.
1 May saw us proceeding southwesterly through the canal and into the Illinois River at Lockport and through other locks which dropped us downriver, in our descent to the Mississippi, as we passed Joliet, Ottawa, Lacon, Pekin, Peoria, Havana, and other river towns of Illinois.
1 May saw us proceeding southwesterly through the canal and into the Illinois River at Lockport and through other locks which dropped us downriver, in our descent to the Mississippi, as we passed Joliet, Ottawa, Lacon, Pekin, Peoria, Havana, and other river towns of Illinois.
We entered the Mississippi on 4 May at Grafton, about 425 miles south of our point of departure. Continuing south we soon were abeam of the mouth of the Missouri and shortly after passing it tied up briefly at St. Louis with our lines made fast alongside two ancient sternwheel river steamers, the GOLDENROD, and the GOLDEN EAGLE. We left at 4:00 pm, sailing until nearly dark, then, because the flood stage of the river makes cruising close to stumps, cornfields, and snags risky, we anchored abreast of Selma, MI, for the night.
Our ship's surgeon, Dr. Earl Cilly, of Bellingham WA, about 285-lbs in his stocking feet, complains he caught a cold from eating too much!
Up all hands at 4:00 am, 5 May, and soon we were underway down the winding and twisting of an immense river now about a mile wide filled with silt and running swiftly south. Near Gihardou Island we took the wrong channel, struck and went completely over a submerged wing-dam and dropped into just enough water to float the ship. We had to get out of that hole the way we came in! We struck the dam again angling, starboard side to, which rolled us down on that side, shoaled our draft, and with a little more "oomph" we were over into deep water and back again on the deeper course, sailing south through miles and miles of wilderness, passing cottonwoods in full bloom. Night found us anchored near the west bank of the river off Wickliffe, KY, not far south of the junction of the Ohio River, the wild woods splashed richly with pink thorn-apple all in bloom.
Doc, Bill Steinike, one time Standard Oil tankship radioman, and John Findorff, Lehigh student, went ashore in the dinghy. Johnny, from choice, manned the oars, and the whole ensemble resembled a scene in Holland, windmill, and all, as they struggled against the five-knot current to make the far shore. Most of their evening liberty was spent (as were they) trying to make the beach, and the rest of it in a supreme effort to get back to the ship. Old man river is strong! Flood stage too!
Struggling north against the stream and pushing lines of loaded barges before them, come two-stacked sternwheelers with glistening, flashing glass pilothouses and 'gingerbread' topsides, belching high columns of black smoke as they forge ahead. By now myriads of songbirds in the leafed-out trees sing and sun up and sundown, filling the late spring woods with melody.
By Sunday 7 May, 5:30 AM, we are leaving Ashport, TN, bound south for Memphis. Up to now, the sailing channels have been well marked. These channel marks are augmented by 'day marks' on the river banks, at intervals, at important channel crossings, and turning points in the channel courses. Due to flood, however, hardly any buoys remain and a great many of the 'day marks' have been swept away, leaving no indication at some points that we must take to the other side of the river. We shaved a point a little too closely once or twice, striking hard on boulders once, and again grazed what felt like a stump.
We watch levees breakthrough, trees race through the openings and charge upon the lowlands beyond. Here comes a dead pig disinterested in ever getting to Chicago. There's a cow floating along bloated without alfalfa. We pass a farm where the family is wading around up to its knees.
Memphis, a fine city of 450,000 finally hove in sight on the east side of the river and we were led in from midstream by the Commodore of a yacht club where we were courteously invited to tie up. But the RANGER was bigger than the club, a barge made fast to the levee, and it would have been more appropriate for the club to tie up to us, as we made fast alongside the Graham Boat Works.
The city was all dolled up in hunting preparatory to its annual Cotton Carnival. Even the old Parrot guns of Civil War days vied with the gaudy colors the Negroes sported.
Jake and Lew took a stroll ashore and met a very plump southern blonde with an even plumper brunette accent. The beer in her place was good. Johnny afterward got a picture of Doc talking to her. He claimed the photograph would be worth a thousand dollars, at least in Bellingham!
Leaving Memphis we bucked strong south wind, squalls, and river chop seventy miles south pulled in a Helena, AR, seventy-five miles north of the mouth of the Arkansas River, and stood an involuntary anchor watch all night on account of railroad ferries and tooting locomotives.
Greenville, MS, a city of 26,000 was reached at 6:00 p.m. 9 May and found us tied up to the Greenville Yacht Club. The next day we got to Vicksburg where it was boiling hot as we went ashore to provision. Doc, Bill, Johnny, and Curtis pepped up enough to visit the battlefields where 13,000 men lie buried, 9,000 of them unknown.
Continuing south we pass Natchez, MS, to port, and proceed further 163 miles until we anchored six miles south of Bayou Sara, about three hours run north of Baton Rouge, a lovely spot.
6:00 12 May was a magic morning and a high half-moon bearing south, dazzling planets like lanterns hung to guide the coming day. The east finished with the sun still below the jungle-like forest.
Anchor up and engine thrumming, the ship swung her head and nodded to the fog-draped river, misty and moist and smelling rich of clover and wildflowers. We joined the swirling stream. Tree trunks bordering our course are covered with mistletoe. Shortly we slid by beautiful Baton Rouge and late afternoon we entered New Orleans, passing old Shipping Board vessels chained together like doomed prisoners.
As we sail along the waterfront of this deep southern city we're yet 100 miles from sea but we pass Dutch, British, Swedish, Danish, Japanese, German, and American, craft moored, anchored, docked, or underway. We've arrived at a large world port a thousand, five hundred miles from Milwaukee! Proceeding to the Lake Ponchartrain canal locks we tie up for the night.
6:00 13 May, lines singled and let go, as we pass through the locks from the river into blue Lake Ponchartrain on our way across its eastern end, 28 miles to Bayou Lacombe up which we sound our way along the narrow channel filled with blue water hyacinths. This morning, Curtis, dressed up very nattily, and strongly resembling Sir Thomas Lipton, minus goatee and shamrocks, left us at the canal locks to proceed to New Orleans in the cool of the morning on ship's business. He appeared later loaded down with a chronometer, and small packages, remotely resembling Sir Thomas after he'd lost the International Cup Race. The day was much too hot for blue 'serge' flannel trousers and a heavy yachting cap.
Someone in the yard warned us about snakes, remarking that four out of the five poisonous varieties found in the US are in Louisiana! This information, coupled with a lot of snake yarns and alligator stories considerably cramped our style and made us all sort of jump at the slightest rattle––of anything!
Ed Price, our slot machine cook, returning from a trip to town, announced he had passed an alligator. He stated that no matter how fast he used his feet, or how much, he stayed in the same place for too long. He must have handled the truth a bit recklessly, for, upon investigation, we found a very dead alligator.
24 May, fully rigged, and in our right minds, we left the shipyard where we had been making the RANGER ready for sea, and in Lake Ponchartrain, sided by the sun, azimuth tables, two compass adjusters, and the crew, we swung ship and were presented with a deviation card (and a bill). We then retraced our course across the blue lake into the Mississippi and left southbound the next day bound for the Delta and South Pass.
26 May found us 92 miles downriver, anchored off Pilot Town in heavy squally rainy SE weather. Bill and Doc went ashore and returned with a six-pound snapping turtle. Mr. Brown butchered the same and extracted 26 eggs during the process. He said we'd have it stewed the next day with the eggs, on the side. We all thought we'd have to be stewed first before we'd eat it, but it turned out ––well––fair.
7:20 am 27 May, up anchor and away, downriver twenty miles and out to sea, a departure from the Sea Buoy seaward from South Jetty Light. We are immediately dunked in the moderate SE wind, sea, and sheets of rain. She pitches, rolls and reels. We set some canvas to help steady her but the breeze is got a leading wind and we have difficulty holding our course for Cape San Antonio, Cuba. "R. B.", Curtis, Doc, Bill, and Johnny do not 'feel so well'. That was a wet, rough, nasty passage across the Gulf of Mexico and our landfall was made some miles northeasterly of the Light due, no doubt, to the current set.
We bucked it 95 miles further eastward and on 1 June closed with the Isle of Pines and stood in for an anchorage on its south side. Along the south coast of Cuba, especially in the vicinity of Corrientes Light, the high Caribbean groundswell, bursting over the barrier reefs of coral is tremendously heavy, the breaking combers leaping skyward like terrific blasts of white dynamite.
We took a Spanish fisherman off the Cuban fishing sloop anchored in water shoaling pale blue. He talked no English. Lew's tramp ship Castillian sounded like corn popping in a pan and the shanghaied pilot looked blanker than the crew.
However, we anchored in 122 feet over bilious green coral mud. Shortly after, bearing down on us from the North, a bulging white leg of mutton sail in a blue whaleboat appeared. She came under our lee, doused sail, and came alongside. A huge six-ft, burly, brawny, dark, slant-eyed man stood up in the boat and in excellent Grand Canyon, English told us of a better and safer anchorage 12-mi east by north.
We put to sea at 5:00 on 3 June, better prepared to battle the headwind and sea we promptly got on a course SE by E, plotted to pass between Grand and Little Cayman Islands on the way to Kingston, Jamaica, British West Indies. Aside from a very heavy 'land swell' we saw neither of these, nor land nor lights, as we passed between them during the tropic moonlit night. There were sixty miles separating them. We weren't worried much concerning the water under our keel because at noon, 5 June, we were well clear in Latitude 19° North and Longitude 81° West, in the vicinity of the famous Bartlett Deep (22,788), exceeded only by the Milwaukee Deep, northwest of Dominican Republic, Haiti.
Flying fish in large numbers scaled from under our heavy bows, and frigate birds soared and dipped. Our decks are constantly wet and leaks saturated with seawater. The sunsets in gorgeous Caribbean colors, promising a fine tomorrow
Before sun-up, 5 June, rolling up out of the velvet blue, came the high distant lavender land of the island of Jamaica, the lofty mountains shrouded in the early mists, a bountiful landfall after 450 miles of blue water. Al day and all night we coasted the southerly boundary of this West Indies gem, reveling in the bright green of the tropic plantations laid out on the purple mountainsides like huge velvet rugs under deeply shadowed peaks running to 7,000 feet.
3:00 am 6 June, lights kindled and sparkled and danced on the ocean's rim as our course altered to northerly and we picked up the approach light to Kingston Harbor. Black men in three sailing canoes hailed us in staccato Jamaican English, as we barely missed them in the darkness. Finally, we hove to off Port Royal where once Henry Morgan and Captain Blood rendezvoused. Clear of the Port doctors, we doused the Yellow flag, sailed up Kingston Harbor, and anchored just off the Myrtle Bank Hotel. Coconut trees waved a greeting in the brisk onshore sea breeze which begins regularly each day at about 10:00 am, roughing the harbor at this time of year. A swarm of blacks tried to board us, offering us all manner of services.
We lingered at Kingston for 20 days absorbing both the attractive and unattractive features of the tropic island and enjoying the abundance of reasonably priced fresh seafood and delicious tropic fruits. Lobsters, King and Jackfish, turtle steaks, breadfruit, pineapples, papayas, Bombay mangos, limes, lemons, oranges, grapefruit, yams, star apples, bananas, raw cocoa, coconuts, drinking nuts, pink soup spice, and tobacco made up in coils and sold by the fathom! We feasted our eyes on the brilliant and exquisite endless variety and the specter of wonderful flowers and marveled at the productivity of the volcanic tropic soil. The Island is run by blacks well governed by the English. There's much that's strange to northerners, to see, eat, and drink in not forgetting the excellent "Three Dagger" Jamaican Rum, for which the place is famous. It curls our hair if you're not baldheaded, and furnishes you with ideas even if you are!
We left Jamaica on 2 July at Tropic dawn, standing out to sea once clear of Port Royal and the coral reefs, and immediately encountered steadily increasing headwind and sea until we got an offing and brought the wind forward of our Port beam just allowing us to carry canvas. The course was set southerly for the Panama Canal in a very boisterous typically Caribbean Sea. We wallowed across the Caribbean.
5 July, late in the morning, we raised the mountainous coastline of South America at the Farallones where huge blue combers were bursting thunderously and high over these rock pinnacles, black and forbidding. Altering our course to the west, and in company with a Norwegian vessel, we entered Limoa Bay and dropped anchor off Cristobal, Canal Zone, at 5:00 pm.
We're anchored near the embarcadero, Cristobal, next to the little Belgian schooner ASKOY, out of Antwerp, bound 'round the world, a dried shark's tail terminating her bowsprit and swinging alone to the German converted North Sea trawler STELLA, ostensibly on a shark fishing expedition and out of fuel and funds. At this Seven Seas crossroads, we watch vessels of every maritime nation calling in at this cosmopolitan port where sailors from over the world frequent 'double-jointed' Colon. Colon is a place dear to sailors' hearts, a sailor's paradise. In addition to the three things found all over the world, i.e. Swedish matches, German women, and Norwegian sailors, you discover that rum, ladies, and tobacco, are all very reasonable here.
In spite of all the 'attractions' (or 'distractions'), we had only one night ashore in Cristobal and Colon. I say we out of courtesy. Somehow Lew was kept under lock and key as sole anchor watch whilst 'R. B.', Curtis, Jake, Johnny, Eddy, and Bill, went on liberty in the evening.
Eddy returned first with a very amazing Chinese kimono bought in an Indian bazaar. Next to arrive was Bill, resembling a Bull Seal after the mating season. Johnny was conveying him and had got him clear of 'destroyers and submarines'. "R.B." and Curtis arrived decorously and turned in. Jake came down with the ice shortly before 5:00 am after unconsciously ordering enough bananas to supply Seattle markets for a week. It seems that he had traded almost everything he had to indulge his whim in his favorite fruit! We took aboard a few provisions and some slop chest articles. 'R. B.' remarked that the new overalls Lew purchased were French––Toulouse and Toulon. By 1:45 p.m. on 9 July, we were through the Canal, dropped the pilot, and were in the rolling Pacific, on a course to pass abeam of Cape Mala.
We're bound now for San Jose, Guatemala, about 600 miles up the coast in a general northwesterly trend, skirting the shorelines of Panama, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Honduras, El Salvador, and Guatemala. This entire coastline is not particularly well-lighted, and there are long, long stretches where the wild jungle beaches show nary sign of light at night of any kind, and it's a black unlit coast. We're wary and keep well offshore by night, hauling in at daylight to verify our course and distance made good and to orient ourselves, for the succeeding course lines to be laid down.
Squalls of wind and rain accompany us all along this tropical area. The Gulfs of Dulce, Nicoya, and San Juan Del Sar, pounding us and giving us a bit of a beating up to abreast of Lake Nicaragua, with strong northerly winds and rain. We stand into shore pretty close to get out of the sea. Along these seemingly interminable stretches of sunbaked, straw-colored beach, breakers race and tumble in high white surf curl, and we see leaping blue and silver sailfish, giant Rays and Mantas, and huge Hammerhead sharks. Off the mouths of rivers, we see greenish-yellow snakes, about two feet long, probably having been disgorged by the streams as they drain the cloudbursts of rain off the land.
15 July we made abreast the open roadstead of San Jose, Guatemala, and waited for dawn to douse the line of twinkling light that glimmered on the shoreline hugging the horizon. When it got light enough there lay the town sprawled a quarter-mile along the black volcanic sand beach, hardly out of reach of the heavy surf. Back of the two, lavender with distance, twin volcanoes, stood silent sentinels, 12,334 and 12,603 ft, 'Agua' and 'Fuego'. From here on we were to see many more such as mountain chains roaring, conic, and eruptive peaks.
At San Jose, via lighter, small garden hose, and hand pump, we took on about 900 gallons of diesel oil and left this dangerous anchorage 16 July, bound for Acapulco, Mexico, 570 miles away. Deeper loaded than ever before with eighteen-gallon drums of oil on deck, in addition to a deck load of ten-gallon cans, and freshwater, the Gulf of Tehuantepec with its reputation for extremely severe northerly blows, worried us some. But aside from a short severe 'Chubasco' squall or two, we followed the coastline without difficulty and on 20 July, daylight stood in for this Mexican port. The parched-appearing town of about 10,000, mostly Indian and Negro, is rather squalid and uninteresting, scattering over the foothills like a prairie dog village.
Here we met the yawl MELDURA, down from Los Angeles, bound for New Orleans, and also a new 42-ft cutter in from Boston and bound around the world.
Manzanillo, Mexico, looks better at night (when you can't see it) for it is more or less of a hovel town perched like a rockery on the high hills surrounding the harbor, the whole setting rather depressing to strangers unused to desert appearances and conditions. Early in the evening, we heard part of an excellent band concert going on ashore but a deluge crimped it and drowned the music as well as the players.
25 July, we went alongside the Mexican Government's one-time Standard Oil dock, took on a little oil and paid plenty for it, some freshwater, and dirty ice, and sailed out of the harbor and laid an NW course across the Gulf of CA headed for Cape St. Lucas. We immediately ran into increasingly foul SE weather which showed plainly right-hand, dangerous semi-circle cyclone traits. It grew steadily worse.
Morning revealed an unbroken expanse of wild, confused sea, but it became evident that the brunt of the storm was outside us, probably to the north and headed that way up the Gulf. Late afternoon, however, wind and sea increased to the point where things were looking pretty angry when we were struck by an unduly heavy squall with the usual torrents of rain. An inky sky with driving scud and bulging nimbus created a chaotic picture with the RANGER only a white chip in the maelstrom. But she never pooped or took a hissing comber and seemed to know what she was doing. Our admiration for her deepened and grew as she battled it out. We were running too fast to use oil and beyond the point where we might bring her in. We held our course and by next morning things began to ease up. By daylight, 27 July, we raised a pencil line of serrated land now we were across the Gulf.
Yawing, rolling, pitching, plunging, thrashing, in the confused and aggravating sea, we bore up to the Light at Cape St. Lucas, a red structure and tower very prominently placed on the extreme southern tip of an immense, god-forsaken, devil-deserted, barren, and mountainous desert country, the Cape itself a bare yellow buttress of sand cliffs on a coastline of 300-ft perpendicular black rock pinnacles resembling a colossal pipe-organ with the boom of the heavy breakers playing a sea-symphony upon them. On the sloping desert plains, reaching, and stretching inland to the high mountains, parched and rusty looking, are millions of tall candelabra cacti, and the desert colors and pastel tints of burnt amber, yellow, green, pink, purple, gray, lavender, rust, heather, accompany a silent, starved, thirsty region for miles and miles. We see dust storms swirl and travel off like miniature cyclones growing as they team their way northward toward the hills.
As we double the Cape and head northward for Magdalena Bay, we are viciously pursued by more hard squalls of wind and following sea.
28 July, after 580 miles from Manzanillo, we anchored in Man of War Cove, off Port Magdalena, in Magdalena Bay, in a quiet smooth spot. We were tired out and the ship needed attention. We also had to bend main storm stays'l and forestorm canvas as a precaution against what might be ahead of us.
Comparatively few people ever see this desert harbor and they don't miss much. Port Magdalena, forlorn, starved, baked, barren, an end-of-the-world port of place, boasts 20 dirty tumbledown shacks. The flat, calm bay, long lines of dry horizontal cumulus clouds, rafts of calling, arguing seabirds, millions of plummeting pelicans after shoals of sardines, and overall the pall of desert silence. The only other vessel in this 25-mile harbor is the tuna boat CALIFORNIA of San Diego seining sardines for her live bait tanks. We boarded her and were welcomed by her crew, a police dog, and a small Costa Rica monkey, half a fathom long from nose to tail.
When we went ashore to stretch our legs the cook would not leave the beach to jump through the sparse vegetation to get to the pathetic graveyard we'd come to see. All he would say was: "Lew when I feel there are rattlesnakes around I don't go far into the interior!" We trudged along at highwater mark on a solid mat five inches thick composed of the skeletons of shrimp, straw-colored, and bleached. Returning to the ship, we guarded Eddy carefully. The Pelicans seemed to look at the cook with calculating eyes but we got him back intact.
29 July we cleared the Bay bound north for San Diego, Col, 579 miles distant. July 30 came in with cold NW wind and sea enough to make life miserable with scuttle slides closed, skylight covers on, ventilators unshipped, deck plates screwed down, and ports all closed. We were thrashing about again. The cook reports he has lost 22 pounds. How he knows is beyond us.
At 3:30 pm we were forced to heave to and ride out what seemed to be an increasing NW blow. But it only held us up until the following day when we proceeded, and by 1 August we were abeam of Cerros Island in Latitude 28°-05' N, Longitude 115°-10' W. Seals bark all around us at night and the pelicans are still with us.
As we pass Black Warrior Cove, so named for a ship lost years ago here, the mainland runs out to Euphegenia Light near an old abandoned whaling station. We pass many barren islands and have a good run north of Cerros 120 miles across our last big bay to pick up San Sebastian reef. From here on we encounter fog and it is getting thicker and unpromising.
On 3 August we made Point Loma Light and entered and cleared San Diego same day bound for Los Angeles which we entered 4 August in a very dense fog, 561 miles from Magdalena Bay.
On 6 August we were out to sea again on the last leg of the voyage to Cape Flattery. The run-up the coast was foggy, cold, wet, and uncomfortable, with many southbound ships looming up out of the murk. We ran through a school of whales, close aboard, one sounded not over 30 ft from the boat, his massive horizontal flukes poised like an enormous 'Y' close alongside. The quick change from the tropics to the Columbia River climate made us pile on clothes like Eskimos. At night, off the Oregon coast, we passed millions of small protesting seabirds roosting in huge flocks. The lookout was driven off the forecastle head by being hit in the face as they rose clear of the schooner.
At 8:20 pm 11 August, we had Umatilla Light vessel abeam to port and by midnight were well inside the welcome flash of good old Cape Flattery. Our last course then was shaped for Cattle Point, San Juan Island, and we dropped our hook for the last time just off the owner's home at Deer Harbor, Orcas Island, 3:30 pm, 12 August 1939. Safe, snug, and glad to be home, after eight thousand, five hundred miles."
Continuing south we pass Natchez, MS, to port, and proceed further 163 miles until we anchored six miles south of Bayou Sara, about three hours run north of Baton Rouge, a lovely spot.
6:00 12 May was a magic morning and a high half-moon bearing south, dazzling planets like lanterns hung to guide the coming day. The east finished with the sun still below the jungle-like forest.
Anchor up and engine thrumming, the ship swung her head and nodded to the fog-draped river, misty and moist and smelling rich of clover and wildflowers. We joined the swirling stream. Tree trunks bordering our course are covered with mistletoe. Shortly we slid by beautiful Baton Rouge and late afternoon we entered New Orleans, passing old Shipping Board vessels chained together like doomed prisoners.
As we sail along the waterfront of this deep southern city we're yet 100 miles from sea but we pass Dutch, British, Swedish, Danish, Japanese, German, and American, craft moored, anchored, docked, or underway. We've arrived at a large world port a thousand, five hundred miles from Milwaukee! Proceeding to the Lake Ponchartrain canal locks we tie up for the night.
6:00 13 May, lines singled and let go, as we pass through the locks from the river into blue Lake Ponchartrain on our way across its eastern end, 28 miles to Bayou Lacombe up which we sound our way along the narrow channel filled with blue water hyacinths. This morning, Curtis, dressed up very nattily, and strongly resembling Sir Thomas Lipton, minus goatee and shamrocks, left us at the canal locks to proceed to New Orleans in the cool of the morning on ship's business. He appeared later loaded down with a chronometer, and small packages, remotely resembling Sir Thomas after he'd lost the International Cup Race. The day was much too hot for blue 'serge' flannel trousers and a heavy yachting cap.
Someone in the yard warned us about snakes, remarking that four out of the five poisonous varieties found in the US are in Louisiana! This information, coupled with a lot of snake yarns and alligator stories considerably cramped our style and made us all sort of jump at the slightest rattle––of anything!
Ed Price, our slot machine cook, returning from a trip to town, announced he had passed an alligator. He stated that no matter how fast he used his feet, or how much, he stayed in the same place for too long. He must have handled the truth a bit recklessly, for, upon investigation, we found a very dead alligator.
24 May, fully rigged, and in our right minds, we left the shipyard where we had been making the RANGER ready for sea, and in Lake Ponchartrain, sided by the sun, azimuth tables, two compass adjusters, and the crew, we swung ship and were presented with a deviation card (and a bill). We then retraced our course across the blue lake into the Mississippi and left southbound the next day bound for the Delta and South Pass.
26 May found us 92 miles downriver, anchored off Pilot Town in heavy squally rainy SE weather. Bill and Doc went ashore and returned with a six-pound snapping turtle. Mr. Brown butchered the same and extracted 26 eggs during the process. He said we'd have it stewed the next day with the eggs, on the side. We all thought we'd have to be stewed first before we'd eat it, but it turned out ––well––fair.
7:20 am 27 May, up anchor and away, downriver twenty miles and out to sea, a departure from the Sea Buoy seaward from South Jetty Light. We are immediately dunked in the moderate SE wind, sea, and sheets of rain. She pitches, rolls and reels. We set some canvas to help steady her but the breeze is got a leading wind and we have difficulty holding our course for Cape San Antonio, Cuba. "R. B.", Curtis, Doc, Bill, and Johnny do not 'feel so well'. That was a wet, rough, nasty passage across the Gulf of Mexico and our landfall was made some miles northeasterly of the Light due, no doubt, to the current set.
We bucked it 95 miles further eastward and on 1 June closed with the Isle of Pines and stood in for an anchorage on its south side. Along the south coast of Cuba, especially in the vicinity of Corrientes Light, the high Caribbean groundswell, bursting over the barrier reefs of coral is tremendously heavy, the breaking combers leaping skyward like terrific blasts of white dynamite.
We took a Spanish fisherman off the Cuban fishing sloop anchored in water shoaling pale blue. He talked no English. Lew's tramp ship Castillian sounded like corn popping in a pan and the shanghaied pilot looked blanker than the crew.
However, we anchored in 122 feet over bilious green coral mud. Shortly after, bearing down on us from the North, a bulging white leg of mutton sail in a blue whaleboat appeared. She came under our lee, doused sail, and came alongside. A huge six-ft, burly, brawny, dark, slant-eyed man stood up in the boat and in excellent Grand Canyon, English told us of a better and safer anchorage 12-mi east by north.
We put to sea at 5:00 on 3 June, better prepared to battle the headwind and sea we promptly got on a course SE by E, plotted to pass between Grand and Little Cayman Islands on the way to Kingston, Jamaica, British West Indies. Aside from a very heavy 'land swell' we saw neither of these, nor land nor lights, as we passed between them during the tropic moonlit night. There were sixty miles separating them. We weren't worried much concerning the water under our keel because at noon, 5 June, we were well clear in Latitude 19° North and Longitude 81° West, in the vicinity of the famous Bartlett Deep (22,788), exceeded only by the Milwaukee Deep, northwest of Dominican Republic, Haiti.
Flying fish in large numbers scaled from under our heavy bows, and frigate birds soared and dipped. Our decks are constantly wet and leaks saturated with seawater. The sunsets in gorgeous Caribbean colors, promising a fine tomorrow
Before sun-up, 5 June, rolling up out of the velvet blue, came the high distant lavender land of the island of Jamaica, the lofty mountains shrouded in the early mists, a bountiful landfall after 450 miles of blue water. Al day and all night we coasted the southerly boundary of this West Indies gem, reveling in the bright green of the tropic plantations laid out on the purple mountainsides like huge velvet rugs under deeply shadowed peaks running to 7,000 feet.
3:00 am 6 June, lights kindled and sparkled and danced on the ocean's rim as our course altered to northerly and we picked up the approach light to Kingston Harbor. Black men in three sailing canoes hailed us in staccato Jamaican English, as we barely missed them in the darkness. Finally, we hove to off Port Royal where once Henry Morgan and Captain Blood rendezvoused. Clear of the Port doctors, we doused the Yellow flag, sailed up Kingston Harbor, and anchored just off the Myrtle Bank Hotel. Coconut trees waved a greeting in the brisk onshore sea breeze which begins regularly each day at about 10:00 am, roughing the harbor at this time of year. A swarm of blacks tried to board us, offering us all manner of services.
We lingered at Kingston for 20 days absorbing both the attractive and unattractive features of the tropic island and enjoying the abundance of reasonably priced fresh seafood and delicious tropic fruits. Lobsters, King and Jackfish, turtle steaks, breadfruit, pineapples, papayas, Bombay mangos, limes, lemons, oranges, grapefruit, yams, star apples, bananas, raw cocoa, coconuts, drinking nuts, pink soup spice, and tobacco made up in coils and sold by the fathom! We feasted our eyes on the brilliant and exquisite endless variety and the specter of wonderful flowers and marveled at the productivity of the volcanic tropic soil. The Island is run by blacks well governed by the English. There's much that's strange to northerners, to see, eat, and drink in not forgetting the excellent "Three Dagger" Jamaican Rum, for which the place is famous. It curls our hair if you're not baldheaded, and furnishes you with ideas even if you are!
We left Jamaica on 2 July at Tropic dawn, standing out to sea once clear of Port Royal and the coral reefs, and immediately encountered steadily increasing headwind and sea until we got an offing and brought the wind forward of our Port beam just allowing us to carry canvas. The course was set southerly for the Panama Canal in a very boisterous typically Caribbean Sea. We wallowed across the Caribbean.
5 July, late in the morning, we raised the mountainous coastline of South America at the Farallones where huge blue combers were bursting thunderously and high over these rock pinnacles, black and forbidding. Altering our course to the west, and in company with a Norwegian vessel, we entered Limoa Bay and dropped anchor off Cristobal, Canal Zone, at 5:00 pm.
We're anchored near the embarcadero, Cristobal, next to the little Belgian schooner ASKOY, out of Antwerp, bound 'round the world, a dried shark's tail terminating her bowsprit and swinging alone to the German converted North Sea trawler STELLA, ostensibly on a shark fishing expedition and out of fuel and funds. At this Seven Seas crossroads, we watch vessels of every maritime nation calling in at this cosmopolitan port where sailors from over the world frequent 'double-jointed' Colon. Colon is a place dear to sailors' hearts, a sailor's paradise. In addition to the three things found all over the world, i.e. Swedish matches, German women, and Norwegian sailors, you discover that rum, ladies, and tobacco, are all very reasonable here.
In spite of all the 'attractions' (or 'distractions'), we had only one night ashore in Cristobal and Colon. I say we out of courtesy. Somehow Lew was kept under lock and key as sole anchor watch whilst 'R. B.', Curtis, Jake, Johnny, Eddy, and Bill, went on liberty in the evening.
Eddy returned first with a very amazing Chinese kimono bought in an Indian bazaar. Next to arrive was Bill, resembling a Bull Seal after the mating season. Johnny was conveying him and had got him clear of 'destroyers and submarines'. "R.B." and Curtis arrived decorously and turned in. Jake came down with the ice shortly before 5:00 am after unconsciously ordering enough bananas to supply Seattle markets for a week. It seems that he had traded almost everything he had to indulge his whim in his favorite fruit! We took aboard a few provisions and some slop chest articles. 'R. B.' remarked that the new overalls Lew purchased were French––Toulouse and Toulon. By 1:45 p.m. on 9 July, we were through the Canal, dropped the pilot, and were in the rolling Pacific, on a course to pass abeam of Cape Mala.
We're bound now for San Jose, Guatemala, about 600 miles up the coast in a general northwesterly trend, skirting the shorelines of Panama, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Honduras, El Salvador, and Guatemala. This entire coastline is not particularly well-lighted, and there are long, long stretches where the wild jungle beaches show nary sign of light at night of any kind, and it's a black unlit coast. We're wary and keep well offshore by night, hauling in at daylight to verify our course and distance made good and to orient ourselves, for the succeeding course lines to be laid down.
Squalls of wind and rain accompany us all along this tropical area. The Gulfs of Dulce, Nicoya, and San Juan Del Sar, pounding us and giving us a bit of a beating up to abreast of Lake Nicaragua, with strong northerly winds and rain. We stand into shore pretty close to get out of the sea. Along these seemingly interminable stretches of sunbaked, straw-colored beach, breakers race and tumble in high white surf curl, and we see leaping blue and silver sailfish, giant Rays and Mantas, and huge Hammerhead sharks. Off the mouths of rivers, we see greenish-yellow snakes, about two feet long, probably having been disgorged by the streams as they drain the cloudbursts of rain off the land.
15 July we made abreast the open roadstead of San Jose, Guatemala, and waited for dawn to douse the line of twinkling light that glimmered on the shoreline hugging the horizon. When it got light enough there lay the town sprawled a quarter-mile along the black volcanic sand beach, hardly out of reach of the heavy surf. Back of the two, lavender with distance, twin volcanoes, stood silent sentinels, 12,334 and 12,603 ft, 'Agua' and 'Fuego'. From here on we were to see many more such as mountain chains roaring, conic, and eruptive peaks.
At San Jose, via lighter, small garden hose, and hand pump, we took on about 900 gallons of diesel oil and left this dangerous anchorage 16 July, bound for Acapulco, Mexico, 570 miles away. Deeper loaded than ever before with eighteen-gallon drums of oil on deck, in addition to a deck load of ten-gallon cans, and freshwater, the Gulf of Tehuantepec with its reputation for extremely severe northerly blows, worried us some. But aside from a short severe 'Chubasco' squall or two, we followed the coastline without difficulty and on 20 July, daylight stood in for this Mexican port. The parched-appearing town of about 10,000, mostly Indian and Negro, is rather squalid and uninteresting, scattering over the foothills like a prairie dog village.
Here we met the yawl MELDURA, down from Los Angeles, bound for New Orleans, and also a new 42-ft cutter in from Boston and bound around the world.
Manzanillo, Mexico, looks better at night (when you can't see it) for it is more or less of a hovel town perched like a rockery on the high hills surrounding the harbor, the whole setting rather depressing to strangers unused to desert appearances and conditions. Early in the evening, we heard part of an excellent band concert going on ashore but a deluge crimped it and drowned the music as well as the players.
25 July, we went alongside the Mexican Government's one-time Standard Oil dock, took on a little oil and paid plenty for it, some freshwater, and dirty ice, and sailed out of the harbor and laid an NW course across the Gulf of CA headed for Cape St. Lucas. We immediately ran into increasingly foul SE weather which showed plainly right-hand, dangerous semi-circle cyclone traits. It grew steadily worse.
Morning revealed an unbroken expanse of wild, confused sea, but it became evident that the brunt of the storm was outside us, probably to the north and headed that way up the Gulf. Late afternoon, however, wind and sea increased to the point where things were looking pretty angry when we were struck by an unduly heavy squall with the usual torrents of rain. An inky sky with driving scud and bulging nimbus created a chaotic picture with the RANGER only a white chip in the maelstrom. But she never pooped or took a hissing comber and seemed to know what she was doing. Our admiration for her deepened and grew as she battled it out. We were running too fast to use oil and beyond the point where we might bring her in. We held our course and by next morning things began to ease up. By daylight, 27 July, we raised a pencil line of serrated land now we were across the Gulf.
Yawing, rolling, pitching, plunging, thrashing, in the confused and aggravating sea, we bore up to the Light at Cape St. Lucas, a red structure and tower very prominently placed on the extreme southern tip of an immense, god-forsaken, devil-deserted, barren, and mountainous desert country, the Cape itself a bare yellow buttress of sand cliffs on a coastline of 300-ft perpendicular black rock pinnacles resembling a colossal pipe-organ with the boom of the heavy breakers playing a sea-symphony upon them. On the sloping desert plains, reaching, and stretching inland to the high mountains, parched and rusty looking, are millions of tall candelabra cacti, and the desert colors and pastel tints of burnt amber, yellow, green, pink, purple, gray, lavender, rust, heather, accompany a silent, starved, thirsty region for miles and miles. We see dust storms swirl and travel off like miniature cyclones growing as they team their way northward toward the hills.
As we double the Cape and head northward for Magdalena Bay, we are viciously pursued by more hard squalls of wind and following sea.
28 July, after 580 miles from Manzanillo, we anchored in Man of War Cove, off Port Magdalena, in Magdalena Bay, in a quiet smooth spot. We were tired out and the ship needed attention. We also had to bend main storm stays'l and forestorm canvas as a precaution against what might be ahead of us.
Comparatively few people ever see this desert harbor and they don't miss much. Port Magdalena, forlorn, starved, baked, barren, an end-of-the-world port of place, boasts 20 dirty tumbledown shacks. The flat, calm bay, long lines of dry horizontal cumulus clouds, rafts of calling, arguing seabirds, millions of plummeting pelicans after shoals of sardines, and overall the pall of desert silence. The only other vessel in this 25-mile harbor is the tuna boat CALIFORNIA of San Diego seining sardines for her live bait tanks. We boarded her and were welcomed by her crew, a police dog, and a small Costa Rica monkey, half a fathom long from nose to tail.
When we went ashore to stretch our legs the cook would not leave the beach to jump through the sparse vegetation to get to the pathetic graveyard we'd come to see. All he would say was: "Lew when I feel there are rattlesnakes around I don't go far into the interior!" We trudged along at highwater mark on a solid mat five inches thick composed of the skeletons of shrimp, straw-colored, and bleached. Returning to the ship, we guarded Eddy carefully. The Pelicans seemed to look at the cook with calculating eyes but we got him back intact.
29 July we cleared the Bay bound north for San Diego, Col, 579 miles distant. July 30 came in with cold NW wind and sea enough to make life miserable with scuttle slides closed, skylight covers on, ventilators unshipped, deck plates screwed down, and ports all closed. We were thrashing about again. The cook reports he has lost 22 pounds. How he knows is beyond us.
At 3:30 pm we were forced to heave to and ride out what seemed to be an increasing NW blow. But it only held us up until the following day when we proceeded, and by 1 August we were abeam of Cerros Island in Latitude 28°-05' N, Longitude 115°-10' W. Seals bark all around us at night and the pelicans are still with us.
As we pass Black Warrior Cove, so named for a ship lost years ago here, the mainland runs out to Euphegenia Light near an old abandoned whaling station. We pass many barren islands and have a good run north of Cerros 120 miles across our last big bay to pick up San Sebastian reef. From here on we encounter fog and it is getting thicker and unpromising.
On 3 August we made Point Loma Light and entered and cleared San Diego same day bound for Los Angeles which we entered 4 August in a very dense fog, 561 miles from Magdalena Bay.
On 6 August we were out to sea again on the last leg of the voyage to Cape Flattery. The run-up the coast was foggy, cold, wet, and uncomfortable, with many southbound ships looming up out of the murk. We ran through a school of whales, close aboard, one sounded not over 30 ft from the boat, his massive horizontal flukes poised like an enormous 'Y' close alongside. The quick change from the tropics to the Columbia River climate made us pile on clothes like Eskimos. At night, off the Oregon coast, we passed millions of small protesting seabirds roosting in huge flocks. The lookout was driven off the forecastle head by being hit in the face as they rose clear of the schooner.
At 8:20 pm 11 August, we had Umatilla Light vessel abeam to port and by midnight were well inside the welcome flash of good old Cape Flattery. Our last course then was shaped for Cattle Point, San Juan Island, and we dropped our hook for the last time just off the owner's home at Deer Harbor, Orcas Island, 3:30 pm, 12 August 1939. Safe, snug, and glad to be home, after eight thousand, five hundred miles."
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