Adventure Magazine Cover, October 1911 — page 125: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

Real Romances of the Sea quantity of shellfish, on which we subsisted. Also, we captured a small seacow, which proved to be decent eating. ‘““As a chance of making our condition known, we caught three albatross alive and set them free with bark cards tied around their necks, stating our plight in French and English. But day after day passed and help failed to come. ‘We resolved to make the best of our condition, because we feared—and rightly so—that we might be left on the island for months, even years, before we could in some way or other attract the attention of a pass- ing vessel. The vessels, we knew, gave the particular island we were on a very wide berth. ‘“‘So we got up a little government ‘all of our own and called ourselves the ‘Ship- wrecked Kingdom.’ We had a sort of king, or boss, a cabinet of advisors and all that sort of thing. Our ‘army’—or exploration party—was dispatched into the interior of the island and the ‘army,’ consisting of eight men, discovered some wild sheep. ‘They established a sort of fold in which to keep the animals for use as necessary. Our royal tailoring department made clothes for us out of the sheep-skins, and boots out of the same stuff together with wood. ‘Signals of distress were hoisted at differ- ent points along the coast to attract the attention of shipping. New Robinson Crusoes, we lived an extraordinary life, fishing, hunting, eating our food sometimes In a Cave, sometimes on a rock, and sleeping where we could. A great deal of the weather was very bad. “On May 7, after we had been on the Island Kingdom for over three months, the New Zealand Government steamer Hinomoa rescued us. This vessel had on board the two daughters of Mr. Mills, the New Zea- land Minister of Commerce, who superin- tended most of the work of helping us back to our natural civilized state and, as a token of our gratitude, we gave them the cat that had been saved from the wreck of the Anjou and that had gone through all our troubles with usas the mascot of our little Kingdom.” e9 port, there is the simple statement that ten large vessels before the Anjou had been wrecked at the same spot during fifteen years, among them the Gen- eral Grant with a loss of seventy-five lives. AT THE end of the Captain’s re- 1071 It is inferred, too, that some of the crews and passengers of the other nine vessels had experiences fully as curious as that of the citizens of the ‘Shipwrecked Kingdom.” And there are scores of true tales like this that have never come to the eyes of the great reading world, actual romances and dramas of the deep that rival the attempts of fiction. I have them from the mouths of the old sea-dogs at Sailor’s Snug Harbor on Staten Island, from George McPherson Hunter, a man who has spent his entire life on the sea and among the sailor communities of the world, from C. C. Pinneo, of the American Seamen’s Society, and from the records and reports of that organization. HOW MRS. SKEWERS QUELLED A MUTINY Hi PEveN years ago, the American sailing vessel 7. F. Oakes, with a crew of thirty- six men and bound for American ports from the Far East, was posted for lost after it had been overdue one hundred and twenty-five days. After twenty-five more days with- out a word from the vessel, the relatives of Captain Skewers and his wife, who was on the ship with him, and of the crew, went into mourning for their presumably dead kin. On the one hundred and fifty-ninth day, however, the 7. F. Oakes was sighted and boarded, and this is the tale it disgorged: While in the Indian Ocean, Captain Skewers had been seized with an attack of paralysis that had rendered him helpless. The crew was not especially fond of the mate and, despite the fact of the emergency, be- gan, in no unmistakable manner, to indicate their displeasure over his promotion to the position of command over them. Captain Skewers, although aware of the impending mutiny, could do nothing except have the men brought to his cabin and weakly urge them to remain orderly. But the men told Skewers they would obey no one but their regular captain. Mrs. Skew- ers, who was forced to remain by her hus- band’s side, similarly beseeched the crew to help get the T. F. Oakes to its destination, but to little avail. Presently, just as the mutiny was about to break, one of a series of fearful storms broke and for days the vessel was tossed about like a little chip of wood. Tempo- rarily, the crew were held from rebelling by the elements that momentarily threatened to batter the ship to bits. No sooner, how- CO MICLOOKS C©