Peking loafs through a quartering breeze. Below, hands stow that lofty fore royal, and at right, the main royal, seventeen stories above the sea.
Peking Battles Cape Horn By Captain Irving Johnson Captain Irving Johnson wrote memorably of his experience in two Cape Horn rip snorters in the four-masted bark Peking, in a book published more than forty years ago. The National Society is now re-publishing that book by kind gift of Captain Johnson, to benefit Peking, now at South Street Seaport Museum, and other historic ships everywhere. The new book sells for $5.95 in paperback, $11.95 hardbound, on order to the Society. It includes an afterword, "Forty-eight Years Later," which in our opinion is one of the finest pieces of writing on square-rig sailing ever penned. Here we invite you to share the awe and hard joys of a young man, who had "a hankering to make a voyage in one of the old-time square riggers. " And did.-ED . Cape Horn winds continued pretty tame in the first two days after we crossed the boundary, but I told the captain and Charlie at dinner that I wasn't going to give up wishing for a real ripsnorter before we got around. The water we were sailing through next day looked as black as ink, although perfectly clear and clean. Rain squalls hovered around, and there was much pulling and hauling, and taking in and setting of sails because of the changeable winds. One riotous squall caught us with every stitch of canvas set. Six men heaved at the steering wheel to luff her before she should go over bottom side up. Sails and yards came down on the run, but the scud soon passed.
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In one calm spell the waves made a great slapping and plopping noise by jumping up two or three feet in points like pyramids . It gave me a queer feeling with other things so quiet, even though I knew perfectly well that it was caused simply by the meeting of opposing currents. Thursday, about sixty miles east of Staten Island, the captain and mate got together and made a delicate winddirection indicator of a feather, so they could tell where the wind was coming from. What a queer occupation off Cape Horn, the reputed home of all sorts of violent storms! It was colder now than at any time in the North Sea. We started eating the Christmas fruit cake, and treasured every crumb. That morning we had what the captain called "American hash." He said:
"I think dot I viii not eat any this time." Charlie and I asked him, "Why not?" And he replied, "There is too much of fresh meat in dot hash." We wondered what he meant. Here we were two months at sea and he was talking about fresh meat, but anyhow we liked it and ate two helpings . When we finished, the captain said, "Vas dot good?" Just then the cook came in and asked him to -dress his finger again, and we learned that while grinding the hash meat, the end of one finger had been taken off by the grinder. The captain had known this all the time. "You two fellers vas cannibals," he said, and he laughed at us for the next two weeks. A killer whale, half black and half white, played around the ship for an