Cappy Ricks

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CAPPY RICKS

or The Subjugation of Matt Peasley

by Peter B. Kyne

TO THE IDEAL AMERICAN SAILOR

As exemplified in the persons of my good friends,

Captain Ralph E. Peasley,
of Jonesport, Maine,

Who skippered the first five-masted schooner ever built, brought her,
on that first voyage, through the worst typhoon that ever blew, and
upon arriving at the Yang Tse Kiang River for the first time in his
adventurous career, decided he could not trust a Chinese pilot and
established a record by sailing her up himself!

Captain I. N. Hibberd,
of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania,

Sometime master of the American clipper ship, Cyrus Wakefield, who, at
the age of twenty-five, broke three world's records in one voyage: San
Francisco to Liverpool and back, eight months and two days; Liverpool
to San Francisco, one hundred days; from the equator to San Francisco,
eleven days. The clipper ship is gone but the skipper remains, an
undefeated champion.

Captain William P. Cantey,
of San Francisco, California,

Sometime mate of the brig Galilee, who, with his naked hands,
convinced in thirty-five minutes nine larger men than himself of the
incontrovertible fact that you cannot keep a good man down.

TO THE AMERICAN SHIPOWNER

As exemplified in the persons of my good friends,

John H. Rossiter,
Manager of W. R. Grace & Co.,
of San Francisco.

Edwin A. Christenson,
President of the Sudden & Christenson S.S. Line,
of San Francisco.

John R. Hanify,
President of the John R. Hanify Company,
of San Francisco.

TO THE PACIFIC COAST LUMBERMAN

As exemplified in the person of my good friend,

Augustus J. ("Gus") Russell,
California Manager for the Portland Lumber Company, and my personal
representative, without salary, in the wholesale lumber trade, ever
since I abandoned lumber for literature.

TO FREIGHT, SHIP, AND MARINE INSURANCE BROKERS

As exemplified in the persons of my good friends,

Messrs. E. B. Smith, Oscar J. Beyfuss, and Allan Hayes.

This volume is dedicated, without charge for the advertising but with
profound appreciation of the part they have made in making this book
possible. With the author they must bear an equal burden of whatever
of praise or censure shall entail.

CONTENTS

I. Master of Many Ships and Skipper of None
II. The Man from Blue Water
III. Under the Blue Star Flag
IV. Bad News from Cape Town
V. Matt Peasley Assumes Office
VI. Wordy War at a Dollar a Word
VII. Cappy Ricks Makes Bad Medicine
VIII. All Hands and Feet to the Rescue
IX. Mr. Murphy Advises Preparedness
X. The Battle of Table Bay
XI. Mr. Skinner Receives a Telegram
XII. The Campaign Opens
XIII. An Old Friend Returns and Cappy Leads Another Ace
XIV. Insult Added to Injury
XV. Rumors of War
XVI. War!
XVII. Cappy Forces an Armistice
XVIII. The War is Renewed
XIX. Capp Seeks Peace
XX. Peace at Last!
XXI. Matt Peasley Meets a Talkative Stranger
XXII. Face to Face
XXIII. Business and--
XXIV. The Clean Up
XXV. Cappy Proves Himself a Despot
XXVI. Matt Peasley in Exile
XXVII. Promotion
XXVIII. Cappy Has a Heart
XXIX. Nature Takes Her Course
XXX. Mr. Skinner Hears a Lecture
XXXI. Internal Combustion
XXXII. Skinner Proposes--and Cappy Ricks Disposes
XXXIII. Cappy's Plans Demolished
XXXIV. A Gift From the Gods
XXXV. A Dirty Yankee Trick
XXXVI. Cappy Forbids the Bans--Yet
XXXVII. Matt Peasley Becomes a Shipowner
XXXVIII. Working Capital
XXXIX. Easy Money
XL. The Cataclysm
XLI. When Pain and Anguish Wring the Brow
XLII. Unexpected Developments
XLIII. Cappy Plans a Knock-out
XLIV. Skinner Develops into a Human Being
XLV. Cappy Pulls Off a Wedding
XLVI. A Ship Forgotten
XLVII. The Tail Goes with the Hide
XLVIII. Victory

CHAPTER I

MASTER OF MANY SHIPS AND SKIPPER OF NONE

A psychologist would have termed Alden P. Ricks an individualist, but
his associates in the wholesale lumber and shipping trade of the
Pacific Coast proclaimed him a character.

In his youth he had made one voyage round Cape Horn as a cabin boy,
his subsequent nautical experience having been confined to the
presidency of the Blue Star Navigation Company and occasional voyages
as a first-cabin passenger. Notwithstanding this apparent lack of
salt-water wisdom, however, his intimate knowledge of ships and the
men who go down to the sea in them, together with his very distinct
personality, had conduced to provide him with a courtesy title in his
old age.

It is more than probable that, had Alden P. Ricks been a large,
commanding person possessed of the dignity the average citizen
associates with men of equal financial rating, the Street would have
called him Captain Ricks. Had he lacked these characteristics, but
borne nevertheless even a remote resemblance to a retired mariner, his
world would have hailed him as Old Cap Ricks; but since he was what he
was--a dapper, precise, shrewd, lovable little old man with mild,
paternal blue eyes, a keen sense of humor and a Henry Clay collar,
which latter, together with a silk top hat, had distinguished him on
'Change for forty years--it was inevitable that along the Embarcadero
and up California Street he should bear the distinguishing appellation
of Cappy. In any other line of human endeavor he would have been
called Pappy--he was that type of man.

Cappy Ricks had so much money, amassed in the wholesale lumber and
shipping business, that he had to engage some very expensive men to
take care of it for him. He owned the majority of the stock of the
Ricks Lumber and Logging Company, with sawmills and timberlands in
California, Oregon and Washington; his young men had to sell a million
feet of lumber daily in order to keep pace with the output, while the
vessels of the Blue Star Navigation Company, also controlled by Cappy,
freighted it. There were thirty-odd vessels in the Blue Star
fleet--windjammers and steam schooners; and Cappy was registered as
managing owner of every one.

Following that point in his career when the young fellows on the
Street, discovering that he was a true-blue sport, had commenced to
fraternize with him and call him Cappy, the old gentleman ceased to
devote his attention to the details of his business. He was just
beginning to enjoy life; so he shifted the real work of his
multifarious interests to the capable shoulders of a Mr. John P.
Skinner, who fitted into his niche in the business as naturally as the
kernel of a healthy walnut fits its shell. Mr. Skinner was a man
still on the sunny side of middle life, smart, capable, cold-blooded,
a little bumptious, and, like the late Julius Caesar, ambitious.

No sooner had Cappy commenced to take life easy than Skinner commenced
to dominate the business. He attended an efficiency congress and came
home with a collection of newfangled ideas that eliminated from the
office all the joy and contentment old Cappy Ricks had been a
life-time installing. He inaugurated card systems and short cuts in
bookkeeping that drove Cappy to the verge of insanity, because he
could never go to the books himself and find out anything about his
own business. He had to ask Mr. Skinner--which made Skinner an
important individual.

With the passage of five years the general manager was high and low
justice in Cappy's offices, and had mastered the not-too-difficult art
of dominating his employer, for Cappy seldom seriously disagreed with
those he trusted. He saved all his fighting force for his
competitors.

However, Cappy's interest in the Blue Star Navigation Company did not
wane with the cessation of his activities as chief kicker.
Ordinarily, Mr. Skinner bossed the navigation company as he bossed the
lumber business, for Cappy's private office was merely headquarters
for receiving mail, reading the newspapers, receiving visitors,
smoking an after-luncheon cigar, and having a little nap from three
o'clock until four, at which hour Cappy laid aside the cares of
business and put in two hours at bridge in his club.

Despite this apparent indifference to business, however, Mr. Skinner
handled the navigation company with gloves; for, if Cappy dozed in his
office, he had a habit of keeping one eye open, so to speak, and every
little while he would wake up and veto an order of Skinner's, of which
the latter would have been willing to take an oath Cappy had never
heard. In the matter of engaging new skippers or discharging old ones
Mr. Skinner had to be very careful. Cappy always declared that any
clerk can negotiate successfully a charter at the going rates in a
stiff market, but skippers are, in the final analysis, the Genii of
the Dividends. And Cappy knew skippers. He could get more loyalty
out of them with a mere pat on the back and a kindly word than could
Mr. Skinner, with all his threats, nagging and driving, yet he was an
employer who demanded a full measure of service, and never permitted
sentiment to plead for an incompetent. And his ships were his pets;
in his affections they occupied a position but one degree removed from
that occupied by his only child, in consequence of which he was mighty
particular who hung up his master's ticket in the cabin of a Blue Star
ship. Some idea of the scrupulous care with which he examined all
applicants for a skipper's berth may be gleaned from the fact that any
man discharged from a Blue Star ship stood as much chance of obtaining
a berth with one of Cappy Ricks' competitors as a celluloid dog
chasing an asbestos cat through Hades.

The reader will readily appreciate, therefore, the apprehensions which
assailed Cappy Ricks when the Blue Star Navigation Company discovered
it had on its payroll one Matthew Peasley, a Nobody from Nowhere, who
not only had the insufferable impudence to apply for a job skippering
the finest windjammer in the fleet, but when rebuffed in no uncertain
terms, refused to withdraw his application, and defied his owners to
fire him. Such a preposterous state of affairs borders so closely on
the realm of fancy as to require explanation; hence, for the nonce let
us leave Cappy Ricks and Mr. Skinner to their sordid task of squeezing
dividends out of the Blue Star Navigation Company and turn the
searchlight of inquiry upon the amazing Matthew.

CHAPTER II

THE MAN FROM BLUE WATER

If, instead of advancing the theory that man sprang from a monkey,
Darwin had elected to nominate the duck for that dubious honor, there
is no doubt but that he would have pointed to the Peasley family, of
Thomaston, Maine, as evidence of the correctness of his theory of
evolution. The most casual student of natural history knows that the
instant a duckling chips its shell it toddles straightway to the
nearest water. The instant a male Peasley could cut his mother's
apron strings, he, also, made for the nearest water, for the Peasleys
had always been sailors, a statement which a perusal of the tombstones
in Thomaston cemetery will amply justify. Indeed, a Peasley who had
not acquired his master's ticket prior to his twenty-fifth birthday
was one of two things--a disgrace to the family or a corpse.
Consequently, since the traditions of his tribe were very strong in
Matthew Peasley VI, it occasioned no comment in Thomaston when, having
acquired a grammar school education, he answered the call of his
destiny and fared forth to blue water and his first taste of dog's
body and salt horse.

When he was fourteen years old and very large for his age, Matt
commenced his apprenticeship in a codfisher on the Grand Banks, which,
when all is said and done, constitutes the finest training school in
the world for sailors. By the time he was seventeen he had made one
voyage to Rio de Janeiro in a big square-rigger out of Portland; and
so smart and capable an A.B. was he for his years that the Old Man
took a shine to him. Confidentially he informed young Matt that if
the latter would stay by the ship, in due course a billet as third
mate should be the reward of his fealty. The Old Man didn't need a
third mate any more than he needed a tail, but Matt Peasley looked
like a comer to him and he wanted an excuse to encourage the boy by
berthing him aft; also it sounds far better to be known as a third
mate instead of a mate's bosun, which was, in reality, the position
the Old Man had promised Matt. The latter promptly agreed to this
program and the skipper loaned him his copy of Bowditch.

Upon his return from his first voyage as third mate Matt went up for
his second mate's certificate and passed very handily. Naturally he
expected prompt promotion, but the Old Man knew the value of
experience in a second mate--also the value of years and physical
weight; so he informed young Matt he was entirely too precocious and
that to sail as second mate before he was nineteen might tend to swell
his ego. Consequently Matt made a voyage to Liverpool and back as
third mate before the Old Man promoted him.

For a year, Matt Peasley did nicely; then, in a gale off the Orinoco
River, with the captain too ill to appear on deck, the first mate went
by the board, leaving the command of the ship to young Matt. She was
dismasted at the time, but the lad brought her into Rio on the stumps,
thus attracting some little attention to himself from his owners, who
paid his passage back to Portland by steamer and found a second mate's
berth for him in one of their clipper ships bound round the Horn.

Of course Matt was too young to know they had their eyes on him for
future skipper material and were sending him around Cape Horn for the
invaluable experience he would encounter on such a voyage. All he
realized was that he was going round the Horn, as became one of the
House of Peasley, no member of which would ever regard him as a real
sailor until he could point to a Cape Horn diploma as evidence that he
had graduated from the school for amateurs.

Matt Peasley lacked two months of his twentieth birthday when he
stepped onto a San Francisco dock, in his pocket a highly
complimentary discharge as second mate from the master of the clipper
ship--for Matt had elected to quit. In fact, he had to, for on the
way round the mate had picked on him and called him Sonny and Mother's
Darling Boy; and Matt, having, in the terminology of the forecastle,
come aboard through the hawse pipes, knew himself for a man and a
sailor, despite the paucity of whiskers on his big, square boyish
chin.

Accordingly he had advised the mate to address him only in the line of
duty, on which occasions he desired to be referred to as Mr. Peasley,
and, the mate demurring from this program, the customary maritime
fracas had ensued. Consequently, somebody had to quit on arrival at
San Francisco; and since, Matt was the last to come, he was the first
to go. On the strength of his two previous discharges he shipped as
second mate on the bark Andrew Welch, for a voyage to Honolulu and
back; then, his services as second mate being all in, he went before
the inspectors for his first mate's ticket and was awarded an
unlimited license.

Matt was now past twenty; and, though not fully filled out, he was big
enough to be a chief kicker anywhere. Six feet three in his bare
feet; two hundred pounds in the buff; lean, lithe and supple as a
panther, the mere sight of his big lumpy shoulders would have been
sufficient to have quelled an incipient mutiny. Nevertheless,
graduate that he was of a hard, hard school, his face was that of an
innocent, trusting, good-natured, immature boy, proclaiming him
exactly what he knew his men called him--a big, over-grown kid. He
hated himself for his glorious youth.

"You're pretty much of a child to have an unlimited ticket, my son,"
the supervising inspector informed him. "However, you've had the
experience and your record is far above the average, so we're going to
issue the license; but if you'll take a bit of advice from an old
sailor you'll be content to go as second mate for a year or two more,
until your jowls blacken up a bit and you get a trifle thicker in the
middle."

With the impudence and irreverence of his tender years, however, Matt
Peasley scorned this well-meant advice, notwithstanding the fact that
he knew it to be sound, for by shipping as second mate and remaining
in the same ship, sooner or later his chance would come. The first
mate would quit, or be promoted or drowned, or get drunk; and then his
shoes would be waiting for Matt tried and true, and the holder of a
first mate's ticket.

However, there is an old saw to the effect that youth must be served,
and young Matt desired a helping totally disproportionate to his
years, if not to his experience; hence he elected to ignore the fact
that shipmasters are wary of chief mates until they have first tried
them out as second mates and learned their strength and their
weaknesses. Being very human, Matt thought he should prove the
exception to a fairly hard-and-fast rule.

He had slept one night on a covered dock and skipped three meals
before it occurred to him that he had pursued the wrong tactics. He
was too far from Thomaston, Maine, where the majority of sailors have
gone to school with their captains. Back home there were a dozen
masters who knew his people, who knew him and his proved ability; but
out here on the Pacific Coast the skippers were nearly all
Scandinavians, and Matt had to show them something besides his
documents.

He had failed signally to procure a single opportunity to demonstrate
his fitness for an executive position. After abandoning his plan to
ship as chief mate he had sought a second mate's berth, but failing to
find one, and with each idle day making deeper inroads into his scant
savings, he had at length descended to the ignominy of considering a
job as bosun. Even that was not forthcoming, and now his money was
entirely dissipated.

Now, when a big overgrown kid finds himself penniless three thousand
miles from a friend and minus three meals in succession, the fourth
omission of the daily bread is not likely to pass without violent
protest. Matt was still a growing boy, with a growing boy's appetite;
consequently on the morning of his second day of fasting he came to
the conclusion that, with so much of his life before him, a few months
wasted would, after all, have no material bearing on his future; so he
accepted a two months advance from a crimp and shipped aboard the
American barkentine Retriever as a common A.B.--a most disgraceful
action on the part of a boy, who, since eighteenth birthday, had been
used to having old sailors touch their foretop to him and address him
as "Mr. Peasley, sir."

CHAPTER III

UNDER THE BLUE STAR FLAG

Matt had been attracted to the barkentine Retriever for two very
potent reasons--the first was a delicious odor of stew emanating from
her galley; the second was her house flag, a single large,
five-pointed blue star on a field of white with scarlet trimming.
Garnished left and right with a golden wreath and below with the word
Captain, Matt Peasley knew that house flag, in miniature, would look
exceedingly well on the front of a uniform cap; for he now made up his
mind to enter one service and stick to it until his abilities should
receive their inevitable reward. To ship as a foremast hand and rise
to captain would be a proud record; so Matt throttled his pride and
faced the future with confidence, and a stomach quite filled with very
good beef stew.

From the cook he learned that the Retriever carried a million feet of
lumber; that she was owned by Cappy Ricks; that Cappy Ricks was the
president of the Blue Star Navigation Company, and the most
contemptible old scoundrel in all the world; that the skipper was a
blue-nose and a devil and a fine man rolled into one; that the
barkentine could sail like a yacht; and that presently they would
up-hook and off to Grays Harbor, Washington, there to load a cargo of
fir lumber for Cape Town. And would Matt mind slipping ashore and
buying the cook a bottle of whiskey, for which the latter would settle
very minute he could get an advance out of the Old Man. No?
Disgusted, the cook rattled his pans and dismissed Matt as one
unworthy of further confidence.

Just before the tug came alongside to snake her outside the Heads, the
mate came aboard with his leerail pretty well under and was indiscreet
enough to toss a piece of his lip at the Old Man. Five minutes later
he was paid and off and kicked out on the dock, while the cook packed
his sea bag and tossed it overside after him. The captain, thereupon,
bawled for the second mate, who came running. Matt noticed this and
decided that should the Old Man ever bawl for him he would come
running too.

"Mr.Swenson, you have a chief mate's license, have you not?"

"Yes, sir."

"Very well. You're the first mate. Mr. Lindstrom"--turning to the
bosun--"you've waited a year for your chance, and here it is. You're
the second mate. Bosun!" He was looking straight at Matt Peasley as
he spoke. Matt did not stir. "Hey, there," the skipper roared, "you
big mountain of meat, step lively!"

Matt stepped lively.

"I am not the bosun, sir," he explained. "I'm just A.B."

"How dare you contradict me?" the Old Man growled. "I tell you, you
don't know what you are yet, barring the fact that you're an American,
and the only one, with the exception of myself, in the whole damned
Scowegian crew. Do you think you could get away with a bosun's job?"

"I could get away with your job if I had the chance, sir," Matt
declared, almost impudently.

"There she blows!" the Old Man declared. "Bless me, if you're not a
Native Son! Nobody but a Native Son would be that fresh. I suppose
this is your second voyage, you puling baby?"

Matt Peasley's dander was up instantly.

"I'm sailor enough to know my way alow or aloft in any weather, sir,"
he retorted.

The captain saw his opening and struck.

"What's the ring-tail?" he demanded.

"It's a studdin'-s'l on the gaff of a fore-an'-aft, sail, sir. You
haven't got one on the Retriever, sir."

"Huh! You've been reading W. Clark Russell's sea yarns," the skipper
charged. "He was quite a pen-an'-paper sailor when it came to
square-rigged ships, but he didn't have much to say about six-masted
schooners. You see, they didn't build them in his day. Now then,
son, name the sticks on a six-legged schooner, and be sure and name
'em right."

"Fore, main, mizzen, spanker, jigger and driver, sir," Matt fired back
at him.

"Bully for you, my son. You're the third mate. Cappy Ricks allows me
the luxury of a third mate whenever I run across a young fellow that
appears to be worth a whoop in hell, so grab your duds, and go aft,
and don't bring any cockroaches with you. I'll dig up a bosun among
the squareheads."

"Thank you, sir."

"Name?"

"Mr. Peasley, sir."

Since he was no longer an A B., young Matt concluded he might as well
accord himself the respect due him as a ship's officer; so he tacked
on the Mister, just to show the Old Man he knew his place. The master
noted that; also, the slurring of the sir as only a sailor can slur
it.

"I shouldn't wonder if you'd do," he remarked as Matt passed him on
his way to the forecastle for his dunnage.

On his way back he carried his bag over his shoulder and his framed
license in his left hand. Two savages were following with his sea
chest.

I do declare!" the skipper cried. "If that lubberly boy hasn't got
some sort of a ticket! Let me see it, Mr. Peasley." And he snatched
it out of his grasp.

"So, you're a first mate of sail, for any ocean and any tonnage, eh?"
he said presently. "Are you sure this ticket doesn't belong to your
father?"

"Sir," declared the exasperated Matt, "I never asked you for this job
of third mate; and if I've got to stomach your insults to hold it down
I don't want it. That's my ticket and I'm fully capable of living up
to it."

"I'm glad to hear that, Mr. Peasley, because if you're not I'll be the
first one to find it out--and don't you forget it! I'll have no
marine impostors aboard my ship. Where do they ship little boys
before the mast, Mr. Peasley?"

"On the Grand Banks, sir."

"I beg your pardon," said the skipper; "but really I thought you were
a Native Son. My father was drowned there thirty years ago."

"The Peasleys have all died on the Banks sir," Matt replied, much
mollified.

"We'll go down into my cabin and drink a toast to their memory, Mr.
Peasley. It isn't often we skippers out here meet one of our own."

It is hard for a Down-Easter, even though he may have lost the speech
of his people, not to be, partial to his own; and Captain Noah
Kendall, of the barkentine Retriever, was all the cook had declared
him to be. He scolded his Norsk mates so bitterly while the vessel
was taking on cargo at Grays Harbor that both came and asked for their
time an hour before the vessel sailed. However, the old man was aware
they would do this, for he had handled that breed too long not to know
that the Scandinavian sailor on the Pacific Coast quits his job on the
slightest pretext, but never dreams of leaving until he knows that by
so doing he can embarrass the master or owners. Even if the mates had
not quit, Kendall would have discharged them, for it had been in his
mind to try Matt Peasley out as chief mate, and acquire a second mate
with a sweeter disposition than that possessed by the late incumbent.

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