The Belted Seas | Page 8

somewhere, They ain't got good foundations."
"Aye," said Captain Buckingham thoughtfully. "It was so. I heard
Sadler tune that to his banjo the night we got to Colon. Abe's got that
kind of a memory, which is loose but gluey. It was so. Sadler meant old
man Clyde."
CHAPTER III.
THE HOTEL HELEN MAR. THE NARRATIVE CONTINUED.
Most ships trading round the Horn to the West Coast in those days
would take a charter on the Gulf Stream to clean them well, on account
of carrying guano. The Helen Mar carried no guano, and charged
freightage accordingly for being clean. Drygoods she'd brought out
from New York, linens, cottons, tinware, shoes, and an outfit of
furniture for a Chilian millionaire's house, including a half-dozen baby
carriages, and a consignment of silk stockings and patent medicines.
Now she was going back, expecting to pick up a cargo of rubber and
cocoa and what not, along the West Coast. Captain Goodwin was
master, and it happened he was short of hands, including his cook. He
hired Stevey Todd for cook, and shipped the rest of us willing enough.
It was in October as I recollect it, and sometime in November when we
came to lie in the harbour of the city of Portate.
Portate is about seven hundred miles below the equator, and has a
harbour at the mouth of a river called the Jiron, and even in those days
it was an important place, as being at the end of a pass over the
Cordilleras. There's a railroad up the pass now, and I hear the city has
trolleys and electric lights, but at that time it hadn't much excitement
except internal rumblings and explosions, meaning it had politics and

volcanoes. Most of the ships that came to anchor there belonged to one
company called the "British-American Transport Company," which
took most of the rubber and cocoa bark, that came over the pass on
mules--trains of mules with bells on their collars. But the Helen Mar
had a consignment promised her. The pack mules were due by
agreement a week before, so they naturally wouldn't come for a week
after. "Manana" is a word said to mean "tomorrow," but if you took it
to mean "next month" you'd have a better sight on the intentions of it.
That's the way of it in South America with all but the politics and the
climate. The politics and the climate are like this; when they're quiet,
they're asleep; and when they're not, politics are revolutions and guns,
and the climate is letting off stray volcanoes and shaking up
earthquakes.
But it was pleasant to be in the harbour of Portate. Everything there
seemed lazy. You could lie on a bunch of sail cloth, and see the city,
the sand, and the bluffs, and the valley of the Jiron up to the nearer
Andes. You could look up the level river to some low hills, but what
happened to the Jiron there you couldn't tell from the Helen Mar.
Beyond were six peaks of the Andes, and four of them were white, and
two blue-black in the distance, with little white caps of smoke over
them. The biggest of the black ones was named "Sarasara," which was
a nasty volcano, so a little old boatman told us.
"Si, senor! Oh, la Sarasara!"
His name was Cuco, and he sold us bananas and mangoes, and was
drowned afterwards. The Sarasara was a gay bird. The mule drivers
called her "The Wicked Grandmother."
It came on the 23d of November. Captain Goodwin and all the crew
were gone ashore, excepting Stevey Todd and me left aboard. Sadler
and Irish had been ashore several days without showing up, for I
remember telling Captain Goodwin that Sadler wouldn't desert, not
being a quitter, at which he didn't seem any more than satisfied. I was
feeling injured too, thinking Sadler was likely to be having more
happiness than he deserved, maybe setting up a centre of insurrection in
Portate, and leaving me out of it. Cuco come out in his boat, putting it

under the ship's side, and crying up to us to buy his mangoes.
Stevey Todd came out of the galley to tell him his mangoes were no
good, so as to get up an argument, and Cuco laughed.
"Si, senor," he says, "look! Ver' good." Then he nodded towards the
shore:
"La Sarasara! Oh, la Sarasara!" laughing and holding up his mangoes.
The smoke-cap over the Sarasara was blacker than usual and
uncommon big it looked to me. Just then it seemed to be going up and
spreading out. Stevey Todd looked over the side, and gave a grunt, and
he says, "Something's a-suckin' the water out of the harbour."
Then I felt the Helen Mar tugging at