CHAPTER III

GOVERNMENT INSPECTORS AT PEARL HARBOUR

ON our return to Honolulu there still was no word from the Naval authorities as to appointments at Pearl Harbour. We decided to stand by a few weeks longer in the hope that an opening would soon occur. As our money was running low it was necessary for us to obtain temporary jobs to insure that we would get food each day and have a place to rest our heads at night. Richardson soon fell into the berth of sales-clerk in a photograph shop on the main street of Honolulu, selling kodak supplies and fixtures at twelve dollars a week. I was not so fortunate. I scoured the town for days for something that paid a living wage. I applied to the City Health Department, hoping to get a position as mosquito inspector, ambling about town with a can of oil on my back, pouring the liquid on the various duck ponds which are operated by Chinese and Japanese and which are prolific incubators for this tropical pest. I sought work as a checker of sugar as it is loaded on ships in the harbour. I made application to the three newspapers in the hope of being taken on as a reporter and I canvassed all the houses in the wholesale district. No one would have me. However, I knew one job I could get but I was standing it off as long as there might be prospects of obtaining something else. But finally I had to take it. A re-enforced concrete jail was under construction on the water front and one afternoon, after several hours of searching in vain for work, I sauntered around to this structure. I found the Irish foreman, assumed an empty appearance and said, "I am hungry." The good man immediately agreed to take me on as a labourer at $1.50 a day.

I appeared the next morning attired in suitable raiment for the work I was about to take up and was assigned to my post. The building had been in course of construction several months and had reached the point where the concrete had set and the forms were ready to be dismantled. Equipped with a pinch bar, I worked on a scaffolding with a dozen native Hawaiians and a score of Portuguese, removing the forms from the walls and ceilings. After several days of this fascinating pastime I was placed on the end of a shovel mixing concrete on the roof and propelling a wheelbarrow laden with cement. Pushing two hundred pounds of concrete in a primitive wheelbarrow on the top of an Hawaiian jail under the glaring and penetrating rays of the tropical sun with school teacher's hands was no joke. Blisters the size of nickels arose on my hands; my back became lame, my feet swollen and every muscle in my body as tender as a baby's. To reach the apex of misfortune I ran a rusty nail through the sole of my shoe into my foot. This was a fat load of discomfort to carry for a meagre $1.50 a day. But I had to eat.

In the meantime a vacancy occurred at Pearl Harbour and Richardson received an appointment. After swearing that he would support the Constitution of the United States, the laws of the territory of Hawaii, the Ten Commandments and what not, he was duly authorised to exercise the duties of sub-inspector of dredging. Richardson's one per cent. better mark in the examination put him on the dredging job three weeks in advance of myself and during this period he earned seventy-five dollars--a costly one per cent. for me.

After several weeks as a hod-carrier, I also received my Pearl Harbour appointment, which had been cabled from Washington, and I at once abandoned the concrete business and--from hard labour--joined Richardson in a life of leisure as a government inspector.

The United States Government was spending several million dollars in developing Pearl Harbour, a beautiful land-locked bay on the island of Oahu about ten miles from Honolulu. Under the supervision of the United States Navy Department a dry dock was being constructed, a naval station was to be built with shops, barracks, parade grounds, marine hospital, etc. In order to make this natural harbour accessible the government was having the channel dredged to a width of six hundred feet and to a depth of thirty-five feet. The work was under contract to the Hawaiian Dredging Company, who employed, at this time, about six hundred men. The task was being performed by six dredgers, each of a different type,--a clam-shell, a dipper, a converted schooner, an electric hydraulic, a steam hydraulic and a drag-bucket. These machines were superintended by experienced men from America, but the general run of their crews was recruited from the riff-raff of the earth. Drunken sailors, bums and tramps, good-for-nothing Europeans, worthless hulks, swearing Britishers and high sea wanderers blew into the camp and were taken on--to remain but a few days--when new recruits would come along or men would be enlisted from the patrons of the waterfront saloons of Honolulu. As deck hands, launch men and any sort of unskilled labour they were set to work, only to be replaced in a few days by a bunch equally as worthless and degraded. It was common occurrence for the whole outfit on a dredge to quit at midnight and be replaced in a few hours by a crowd obtained from the drunken ranks of the low-down dives of Honolulu. They would arrive at the dredge, laden to the shoulders with booze, howling drunk, some of them fighting mad, and before they were all landed from the launch it was an unusual thing if two or three had not fallen overboard and had to be fished out. However, beneath the uncouth externals of many of these men was a heart as big as a fortune, an unselfishness one would hardly surmise and a disposition which it would be difficult to duplicate.

The headquarters for the camp were located in Watertown, a little settlement at the mouth of the harbour, whose inhabitants, numbering about five hundred souls, were made up of Hawaiians, Japanese, Russians, Chinese, Portuguese and a score of Americans. This small camp contained one store and fifty or more houses where the employés of the dry-dock, machinists, launch hands, labourers and native fishermen lived.

According to its regular custom, the Government employed inspectors to see that the work was done properly. Call them what you will--spies, loafers or parasites--each name characterises some phase of the job. Such appellations are no reflection on the personnel of the force, however. There were fifteen of them and it would be hard to find a more interesting set of men grouped together in one spot. The several epithets by which they have just been designated are not due to any failing of theirs, but to the nature of the job, whose chief demands on the inspectors were to look intelligent, maintain the dignity of the Government, and draw pay. There were among these fifteen inspectors an ex-dentist of Honolulu, one of the finest fellows on this earth; an ex-lawyer, a brilliant and sterling man; an ex-doctor, whose Irish wit was of the rare and clever variety; an ex-professor of Whittier College, California; an ex-sailor and several nondescripts. Besides upholding the dignity of the Government each inspector was supposed to have a thorough knowledge of the channel, its width and depth, to inspect the dredging, to supervise the dumping of the dredged material and to submit a daily report to the head inspector.

This was the lay-out with which Richardson and I had decided to cast our lot for several months. With our wages averaging one hundred and ten dollars a month, we figured that in a short time we would have a fair amount of coin laid aside which would enable us to go on to the Orient and bring us safely to another point where we could search for work.

When off duty the inspectors lived at Watertown in quarters provided for them by the Hawaiian Dredging Company and ate their meals at a restaurant conducted by Chinese. While on duty they slept and ate on the dredges which were located from one-half to two miles from shore in the channel. On each dredge there was set aside a room for inspectors' quarters. These compartments on most of the dredges were furnished with two iron bunks for beds, several dynamite boxes for chairs and a greasy deck of cards for amusement. The occupant was never lonesome nor idle, for when he had nothing to do, which was most of the time, he could spend the weary hours reducing the number of rapidly multiplying bed-bugs. These dredges were literally alive with this human pest and as soon as we would reduce the flock to the point of comfort a new bunch of recruits would be ushered in with the arrival of a new crew of men from the waterfront of Honolulu. The mess rooms with crude tables covered with oilcloth, with tin ware and lack of service, could exhibit at meal time the most unappetising display of food ever placed before any man. Stewed tripe--weeks old--lamb stew, clam-chowder, bread apparently made of cement, butter with a stench so strong that it outclassed the odours of the other provisions, fermented tomato catsup and hot cakes with the consistency of horse pads, greeted the unwashed eaters three times a day. The eaters themselves were a curious exhibition of mankind. The men employed on the dredges slept and ate their meals aboard and when they gathered in the mess room, as well as at all other times, the language and stories that wafted across the board were fit to hypnotise the devil.

One morning as Richardson, somewhat late, was seating himself for breakfast the Chinese waiter, approaching the table, inquired automatically and in an interrogative tone,

"Mush?"

"Yes," said Richardson.

"No mush," was the Chink's reply.

This is a sample of the mental capacity of the Oriental servants on the dredges. How could individuals with such brains cook anything fit for a white man to eat? These Chinese cooks and flunkeys were a greasy, unsanitary set and always wore aprons which looked more like those of a blacksmith than those of a kitchen artisan.

The inspectors' time was so arranged that every second day we had thirty-two hours off and these we used to devote to various forms of recreation. In addition to renovating an old sail boat which we resurrected out of the mud flats of the harbour of Honolulu, we went swimming off the pontoon lines of the dredges, hunted on the Government reserve or attended native luaus on the beach. The most interesting diversion was shark fishing. We always had a line out from each dredge in quest of both the hammer-head and man-eating sharks. On one occasion one of the crew observing that one of our lines was being jerked uttered a cry of "shark!" and in a moment we were all on deck pulling in the rope to land our catch. On the end of the line was a ten-foot man-eating shark and as we got the monster alongside the dredge one of the Hawaiians, an expert swimmer, dived off the deck and proceeded to tie a rope around the body of the fish to enable us to hoist him aboard. The shark struggled and whipped about with his tail to such an extent that the native was unable to manipulate the rope with one hand, his other being employed in an effort to restrain the movements of the big creature. After several vain attempts to tie on the rope, the Hawaiian held the tail of the shark between his teeth and thus, with the use of both hands, placed the line around the shark's belly and he was raised on deck. We at once set to and stripped the fish of all its flesh and in the course of a few hours the captain of the dredge was the proud possessor of a walking stick made from the circular bones of the spinal column of the shark. Such a cane is a novelty and a beauty.

My roommate was an inspector who had originally come from the back country of the State of Oregon. Each time as he returned from Honolulu I observed, as Smith--for that was his name--removed his coat, a revolver strapped over his left shoulder.

"What is the pistol for?" I asked him one day.

"I need it in my business," was Smith's reply.

"What business are you in?" I enquired, a little curious.

"I am travelling with another man's wife," said Smith.

"That's rather dangerous business, isn't it?" I ventured, refraining from offering any advice to a man older than myself and one whom I knew but slightly.

"The man is on my trail and I am ready for him," said Smith. I dismissed the incident as the boasting prank of a youth. Some months afterwards, however, the city of Honolulu was awakened from its daily routine by a shooting scrape which took place on one of the main streets at nine o'clock in the morning. Smith's talk was not mere youthful boasting. His assailant fired five shots at him, one catching him in the hip, and Smith replied with a generous bestowal of lead, firing several shots, one of which lodged in his opponent's lung. The first report was that Smith had killed his man. This was not true, however, and the two were taken to the hospital for treatment.

Sentiment in Honolulu ebbed high against Smith and, when he recovered sufficiently to leave the hospital, it was impossible for him to obtain the three thousand dollars' bail for the charge of "assault with a deadly weapon with the intent to commit murder" which was lodged against him. He spent one night in jail and his fellow inspectors finally came to his rescue. Although not approving of his actions, we felt that now was the time to help the man when he was down and especially as Smith appeared very regretful. Richardson and I put up two hundred and fifty dollars each of the bail. The case dragged on for months and was not settled until after our departure from the Islands. Sometime later we learned that Smith was fined one thousand dollars and dismissed from the service of the Government. Such was my roommate. He may have been foolish, but no one could accuse him of being a coward. He was a likeable fellow and had a world of good qualities.

After a couple of months on the job as inspectors Richardson and I had a few dollars in our pockets and, feeling rather reckless one day, decided to purchase some sugar stock in the hope of making a stake and thus being enabled to continue the trip in comparative luxury. We each bought ten shares of the Oahu Sugar Company's stock at thirty dollars a share. In order to do this we had to borrow one hundred and fifty dollars each from a Honolulu bank. While we were building castles in the air concerning the big pile we were going to make, the slump in the market, usual when amateurs begin meddling with stocks, occurred and our shares dropped six points. With the drop of our stocks came a drop in our hopes and we could picture our earnings of the past months vanishing as we stood helplessly by. We concluded that if there was no other way out of our financial difficulties we could at least stay on the job and earn what we had lost. In addition to our bail money for Smith and our loss on our high finance I had, either out of the goodness of my heart or because I was an easy mark, loaned out over two hundred dollars to acquaintances of mine who had put up tales of hard luck. With our finances in this state our trip for the present began to look somewhat dubious. However, everything turned out all right and we climbed out of our financial tangle with profit. The last week of our stay in Hawaii we were both released from Smith's bail, our sugar stocks had gradually risen to two points higher than the figure at which we purchased them and I collected every cent of my loans.

We had now been at Pearl Harbour several months and were anxious to be moving, so we started a vigorous campaign to make a getaway. Honolulu is simply a port of call and crews are not made up there and for this reason it is a poor place in which to be stranded, for it is next to impossible to sign on as a sailor on any ship. When off duty at Pearl Harbour we went to Honolulu and canvassed all the likely looking vessels for passage to either Australia or the Orient. The reception we received at the hands of the captains and stewards varied from the painfully courteous to the hardest of treatment. The skipper of a United States Army transport took us into his cabin, told us stories, gave us a drink but, true to his duty, refused to give us a lift across the Pacific. The steward of a Pacific Mail liner, whom we unfortunately caught ten minutes before the boat sailed--a busy time for a commissary chief,--disposed of us in short order. Seeing a man who filled the description given us, I hailed a greasy looking fellow as he was hurriedly ascending the gangway and asked him,

"Are you the steward?"

"Yep; what do you want?"

"May I have a minute of your time?"

"No, sir, only a half a minute." Our case looked hopeless.

"What are the chances for two of us to get a job?"

"None. I have had enough of fellows like you. Get off the gangway before I have you kicked off," shouted the chief cook as he beckoned to several deck hands to enforce his threat. There being nothing else to do, the two of us withdrew amid the laughter of the people on the pier who witnessed the dialogue. We retired to the opposite side of the wharf where we sat down, smoked a cigarette and talked the matter over. We felt pretty much subdued.

We were novices at the game of procuring maritime jobs and the old sea dogs with whom we had to deal knew it, but we concluded that the only way to get experience was to persevere. We started the trip as tramps and now, for the first time, we realised that we actually were tramps; but we always clung to the idea that we were of the refined variety.

Our next attempt towards obtaining passage was on a British tramp coal steamer plying between Honolulu and Australia. I was especially eager to go to Sydney because a friend of mine, touring the southern continent, had procured a job for me with a draying company in that city. The British tramp was to be painted on her return to Australia and as men were needed Richardson and I were signed on and our duties outlined. They consisted of knocking off the old paint on the side of the ship for twenty-one days. The skipper informed us that the boat was to get under way the following afternoon and that we ought to report for duty in the morning. We were on hand the next day but only to be disappointed, for there was no ship to be found. We learned that it had received orders to sail at once for Seattle and had left at midnight.

We were now left in the lurch. We had tendered our resignations to the Secretary of the Navy and had severed our connections with the Pearl Harbour operations. To diminish our chances for passage to the Orient there was nothing going our way upon which there was the remotest chance of getting a job. Although we felt rather opulent after several months' work as inspectors we were reluctant to look up the rates to Yokohama on the regular liners--but decided to do so. We found that on the following day the _Asia_, an intermediate steamer of the Pacific Mail Steamship Company, was due from San Francisco _en route_ to Japan and that the fare was seventy-five dollars. This was a huge sum to part with at one blow, but when compared with the regular first class fare of one hundred and fifty dollars on the larger boats looked like a saving. We also figured that by the time we had spent several months floundering around Australia, in spite of the money saved getting there, we should arrive in Manila several hundred dollars out. With these considerations we decided to take the _Asia_ to Yokohama.

We had spent a number of weeks in getting our baggage together and had reduced it to a scientific minimum. We agreed only to take a suit case and a small hand bag each. In addition to these Richardson was to bring his camera. Our baggage consisted of the following wearing apparel and fixtures: two suits of clothes each (one on our backs), one pair of heavy shoes, a cap, six soft shirts, two flannel shirts, a pair of overalls, a dozen socks, six sets of underwear, a dozen handkerchiefs, a rain coat, a few toilet articles, diaries and some stationery. The trip was not to be a dress affair and all hard-boiled shirts, linen collars and evening clothes were dismissed from the start. Even with our wardrobes reduced to this half civilised minimum, it required systematic packing and almost superhuman strength to close our suit cases.

We closed up our affairs in Honolulu, put our money into American Bankers' Travelers' checks, ate a few farewell meals, drank a few final toasts and were in readiness to depart. The _Asia_ was scheduled to leave at five in the afternoon. I was on the pier a few minutes before the appointed time, but there was no sign of Richardson. Five minutes to five--and Richardson had not arrived; four, three, two and one minute to five--and Richardson was nowhere to be found. Five o'clock--and no Richardson. The lines of the ship were being loosened from the pier. I was on board; after having made arrangements with some navy men to have the government launch bring Richardson out to the _Asia_ while she was turning in the stream or to tell him to meet me in Yokohama. At two minutes after five o'clock--just as the ship was getting under way--Richardson came running down the wharf armed with a suit case, a small leather bag, a camera, a rain coat, a hair brush extending from one pocket, a bottle of tooth powder from another and a half a dozen small bundles hanging from any place where they could stick. The gangplank was lowered and he came aboard, while a handful of friends placed several Hawaiian leis about his perspiring neck.

The Royal Hawaiian Band played _Aloha Oe_, the ship got under way and we began the second leg of our trip with seven hundred dollars each in our pockets.