George Barr McCutcheon
West Wind Drift
Published by Good Press, 2021
EAN 4057664572653
Table of Contents
BOOK ONE.
CHAPTER I.
The Captain of the liner was an old man. He had sailed the seas for two-score years, at least half of them as master. At the outbreak of the Great War he was given command of the Doraine, relieving a younger man for more drastic duty in the North Sea. He was an Englishman, and his name, Weatherby Trigger, may be quite readily located on the list of retired naval officers in the British Admiralty offices if one cares to go to the trouble to look it up.
After two years the Doraine, with certain other vessels involved in a well-known and somewhat thoroughly debated transaction, became to all intents and purposes the property of the United States of America; she flew the American flag, carried an American guncrew and American papers, and, with some difficulty, an English master. The Captain was making his last voyage as master of the ship. An American captain was to succeed him as soon as the Doraine reached its destination in the United States. Captain Trigger, a little past seventy, had sailed for nearly two years under the American flag at a time when all Englishmen were looking askance at it and wondering if it was ever to take its proper place among the righteous banners of the world. It had taken its place among them, and the “old man” was happy.
His crew of one hundred and fifty was what might be aptly described as international. The few Englishmen he had on board were noticeably unfit for active duty in the war zone. There was a small contingent of Americans, a great many Portuguese, some Spaniards, Norwegians, and a more or less polyglot remainder without national classification.
His First Officer was a Scotch-American, the Second an Irish-American, the Chief Engineer a plain unhyphenated American from Baltimore, Maryland. The purser, Mr. Codge, was still an Englishman, although he had lived in the United States since he was two years old,—a matter of forty-seven years and three months, if we are to believe Mr. Codge, who seemed rather proud of the fact that his father had neglected to forswear allegiance to Queen Victoria, leaving it to his son to follow his example in the case of King Edward the Seventh and of King George the Fifth.
There were eighty-one first-cabin passengers, one hundred and nineteen in the second cabin,—for the two had not been consolidated on the Doraine as was the case with the harried trans-Atlantic liners,—and approximately three hundred and fifty in the steerage. The first and second cabin lists represented many races, South Americans predominating.
The great republics in the lower half of the hemisphere were cut off almost entirely from the Old World so far as general travel was concerned. The people of Argentine, Brazil and Chili turned their eyes from the east and looked to the north, where lay the hitherto ignored and sometime hated continent whose middle usurped the word American. A sea voyage in these parlous days meant but one thing to the people of South America: a visit to an unsentimental land whose traditions, if any were cherished at all, went back no farther than yesterday and were to be succeeded by fresh ones tomorrow. At least, such was the belief of the Latin who still dozed superciliously in the glory of his long-dead ancestors. Not having