“We were reefing sails in a flesh-blistering rain, when it began. His name was Cat. The two of us were the two biggest men aboard, and that we had been put on the reefing team together meant that this was an important job and one to be done well and right. Water washed our eyes, our hands slipped on wet ropes. It was no wonder my cloth suddenly flung away from me in a gust, billowing down in the rain, flapping against half a dozen ropes and breaking two small stays. ‘You clumsy thing’ bawled the mate from the deck. ‘What sort of fish-fingered sailor are you?’
“And through the rain I heard Cat laugh from his own spar. ‘That’s the way luck goes,’ he cried, catching at his own cloth that threatened to pull loose. I pulled mine in and bound her tight. The competition that goes rightly between two fine sailors drove a seed of fury into my flesh that should have bloomed as a curse or a returned jibe, but the rain rained too hard, and the wind was too strong; so I bound my sail with silence.
“I was last down, of course, and with only a few lads below on deck, when I saw why my sail had come loose. A worn mast ring had broken, caused a main rope to fly and my canvas to come tumbling. But the ring also had held the nearly broken aft mast together, and in the wind, a split twice the length of my arm pulled open and snapped to again and again like a child’s noise clapper. There was a rope near, and inch thick line coiled on a spike. Holding myself to a rat line by not much more than my toes, I secured the rope and bound the base of the broken pole. Each time it snapped to, I looped it once around and pulled the wet line tight. They call this whipping a mast, and I whipped it till the collar of rope was three feet long to the top of the cleft and she couldn’t snap any more. Then I hung the broken ring on a peg near by so I could point it out to the ship’s smith and get him to replace the rope with a metal band.
“That evening at mess, with the day’s incidents out of my mind and hot soup in my mouth, I was laughing over some sailor’s tale about another sailor and another sailor’s woman, when the mate strode into the hall. ‘Hey, you sea scoundrels,’ he bellowed. There was silence. ‘Which of you bound up that broken mast aft?’
“I was about to call out, ‘Aye, it was me,’ when another man beat me by bawling, ‘It was the Big Sailor, sir!’ That was a name both Cat and I were often hailed by.
“ ‘Well,’ snarled the mate, ‘the captain says that such good thinking in times so hard as these should be rewarded. He’s seen the job and approved.’ He took a gold coin from his pocket and tossed it on the table in front of Cat. ‘There you go, Big Sailor. But I think it’s as much as any man should do.’ And then he turned and clomped from the mess hall. A cheer went up for Cat as he pocketed the coin; I couldn’t see his face.
“The anger in me started now, but without direction. Should it go to the sailor who’d called out the name of the hero? Naw, for he had been down on deck, and through rain and darkness probably he could not have told me from my rival anyway at that distance. At Cat? But he was already getting up to leave the table. And the first mate, the same first mate of this ship here, friend, that we’re on now, he was out stomping somewhere on deck.
“Perhaps it was this that caused my anger to break out the next morning when we were in calmer weather. A careless salt jarred me in a passage way, and suddenly I was all fists and fire. We scuffled, we banged, we cursed, we rolled. In fact, we rolled right under the feet of the mate who was coming down the steps at the time. He sent a boot into us and eight different curses, and when he recognized me, he sneered, ‘Oh, the clumsy one.’
“Now I’d had a fiery record before. Fights on ship are a breach few captains will allow. This was my third, and one too many. And the mate, prompted by his own opinion of me, got the captain to order me flogged.
“So, like a carcass to be sliced and bid on, I was led out before the assembled sailors at the next sunrise and bound to the main mast. I thought my wrath went all toward the first mate now. But black turned white in my head, into something that I could bite into, when he flung the whip to Cat and cried, ‘Here, Big Sailor, you’ve done your ship one good turn. Now rub sleep off your face and do it another. I want ten stripes on that one’s back deep enough to count easily with a finger dipped in salt.’
“They fell, and I didn’t breathe the whole time. Ten lashes is a whipping a man can recover from in a week. Most go down to their knees with the first one, if their rope is slack enough. I didn’t fall until they finally cut the ropes from my wrists. Nor was it till I heard a second gold coin rattle down on the deck from the first mate’s hand and the words to the crew, ‘See how a good sailor gets rich,’ that I made a sound. And it was lost in the cheer which sprang from the other men.
“Cat and one other lugged me to the brig. As I fell forward, hands scudding into straw, I heard Cat’s voice come, ‘Well, brother, that’s the
