The events man; being an account of the adventures of Stanley Washburn, American war correspondent

Preface

THIS book is not fiction; it is not war correspondence; not history; not memoir. There is here the portrait of a man painted on the background of a tale of romantic achievement. The man is Stanley Washburn, war correspondent, writer of cable news for a syndicate of the chief American dailies. The achievement was the operation of the Chicago Daily News dispatch boat Fawan through the months of March, April, May and June of 1904 during the Russo-Japanese war. Victor F. Lawson, proprietor and editor of the Daily News, stood behind the expedition with his papers, his money and his influence. Every statement of fact here is literally true, as it was made to the author during the summer of 1905, in a bean mill at General Nogi's headquarters on the borders of Mongolia. The chart in the back of the volume is reproduced from that used in the pilot house of The Fawan.

R. B.

Fakumen^ North China^

September 10, 1905.

Contents

In which, after being the object of all the sharks, touts and hea\chcombers on the China coast, succumbing to as few of them as my inexperience warrants, I set out on a cruise around Robin Hood's barn, accompanied by the Korean Prime Minister.

/ pass the worst day of my life — the two worst days in fact — and meet the fate which puts me ■first behind a wheel.

III. SERVING TIME 43

Chapter I

In which, after being the object of all the touts, sharks and beach-combers on the China coast, and succumbing to as few of them as my youth and inexperience warrants, I set out on a cruise around Robin Hood's Barn, accompanied by the Korean Prime Minister Elect.

The Victoria was not the boat we chartered. She was a wreck suitable for what she finally became — a blockade runner. She was twenty-seven years old, had been brought up in ballast with coal from Australia, her ribs were of iron, she had no bulkheads, and her engines were old-fashioned compounds. When she finally was bought by the Russians, it cost them ten thousand dollars to put her to sea and then she could only drag her miserable way over to the Port Arthur Channel, where she sat and rotted until the end of the war. She sold for 30,000 mex, and yet the special brand of shark that wanted to take me in on her, tried to stick me for repairs and ten thousand mex a month.

It was but one of the devious ways to rope me into silly extravagance, when word went down the coast that a young American, on his milk, was out for a dispatch boat, and that he wanted her quickly. The Victoria lay, an old forsaken tub, up the Shanghai creek when I was piloted to her. I passed her up without winking an eye.

Then they brought me in succession all the halt, lame and blind among the seacraft of the region. Word went gaily forth that I was the proper mark for every weather-beaten tub in the Yellow Sea. There was the Pronto, that got seventeen wounds in her as she slipped out of Port Arthur one bright morning; the Samsui, the Victoria 11. , and a Russian whaler named George; a peach she was, and I thought long of taking her on. It was only a week after I looked at the George, that her first mate was murdered in his cabin. There was the steam pilot boat Shanghai together with a host of others, and I examined them all with that energy and foresight that is expected of a man who contemplates spending $50,000 of someone else's money, and who is going out thereby to risk his life that the world may have instantaneous record of the sea battles of great powers.

One of the neatest deals to pull my leg was put up in that hotbed of intrigue and scandal called Shanghai. I offered 7,000 mex a month for the boat^ — she was a ripper, with double engines and a long funnel — and that was a thousand more than she was worth. The gang that held her said (sotto voce) : "We'll hold out for $10,000, but will finally let her go, if need be, for $7,000. At that we're to the good a clear thousand a month. Then, when he comes in, we'll put in a bill for $10,000 extra, due to inefficient handling. We can say that the hull is strained, the boilers primed or the engines unduly taxed." One of my pals from down the coast, however, put me on to this deal, and when they refused my first offer I sat tight. They came back asking when I would make another offer, and I told them that there was not going to be any other offer.

Then the Fawan hove in sight and I became glad. Fawan ! That's Chinese for "Good Luck" ! She was a salvage boat for work under the Taku forts, lightering heavy vessels over the bar, and for wrecking in the Gulf of Pechili ; as neat a shell as floats the Yellow Sea ! When I think of her my heart goes out as to an old and tried friend. The days and nights that I have lain on her, the dangers that she has seen me through, the seas that we have survived together, the sights that she has led me among, the forces that she has alHed me with; these and more bring my memory back to her with the joy of intimacy and the pride of gallant association.

The dauntless old Fawan! How I have slipped over the bar to meet her at two in the morning, fingering a wire ordering me straight to the Port Arthur guns, and how she has risen, like a bulldog in leash, to the feat! How I have paced those decks month after month on calm days, and again on tempestuous days off the Korean coast, while she pounded and strained her tough little sides till I thought bar and stave could stand no more ! And even now as I wake up in the morning I fancy I can hear the donkey engine just over my head going ^'clumpety, clump, clump, clump" as the anchor comes up rasping and dripping just outside my port hole. You would hardly guess how intimate one could become with a boat like that, just as one might with a human being. I became so accustomed to her every whim and motion that if the revolutions slowed down ten a minute, I would sit up with a start, knowing well that the drill of habit was afoul.

The Fawan belonged to the Taku Tug and Lighter Company, an English concern, and business being dull just then, they gave me a three months' charter with a three months' option for 3,500 taels a month. That was cheap ! She was registered at about 300 tons, and in a seaway rolled like a canal boat, but she could go — as well as any tug boat goes. She was built for towing, was all engines, and when you put that into speed and not weight she boomed like an Eastern liner. Her funnel was forty feet above the grates, and I believe she could have burned bricks — an awful draught ! Then she was rigged with water ballast tanks, fore and aft, drew seven feet six on an even keel, so that she could easily make nine feet aft and six forward, or vice versa. And this was hot stuff when we got over in the Korean swells, and down among the shallows of the Liaotung. She was quite new, built in '97, had towing blades, and when she went ahead full speed she shook like a leaf. If the screw turned at the top revolution you felt convinced that you were getting the worth of your money. It made you feel sick and quittish, but there was wind and steam behind it, and that was what we wanted for a dispatch boat, for the Fawan beat the game many a time, and there were four months in the year 1904 when she ranked as queen in the world of news.

As for the rest of her, the Fawan was 125 feet long, 22 feet in the beam and she carried a searchlight of 2,500 candle power for wrecking. She had steam steering gear and was electric lighted. She carried a crew of twenty-five, and when she was put on full speed across the Gulf of Pechili, carrying a world beat, she made her steady ten knots, which is good speed for a tug in those waters. Some men grow strangely fond of a horse that can carry them up hill and down for many days and never tire and never go bad. Well, I loved the Fawan!

But there was a crew to get, and most of all I needed a skipper. My rooms at the Astor House, in Shanghai, soon became filled with the refuse of the coast, and my days were worn with despair lest I be taken in by some gentry, liquor-logged and ship-soaked. But there came among them a prince — McDonnel ! If ever in North China, you will not miss word of Mc-

Donnel. He is known up and down the coast as the most daring pilot that ever took the Taku Bar at ebb. If you need a dauntless spirit for war or peace, seek Mac. Incidentally, if you require the proper ingredients for a Canton cocktail, ask Mac, who swore by all that's holy that he would be mine till death, and I promptly signed him as skipper at 500 mex a month.

There was, however, the necessary confirmation still lacking from the office. I had cabled the beginning of the venture and was still waiting for funds. Meanwhile Mac hung around. Three days passed. The fourth he came asking for confirmation, which I could not give. He told me he had an offer and would hold it off until the next afternoon at five o'clock. He would not tell me what it was, and the next day at five I was obliged to say that no money was yet in sight. The American fleet, it then developed, had offered him fifteen hundred taels to take them out for target practice in Nimrod sound. It was a ten days' job, for which he would get as much as three months would have netted him in my service. I thought it mighty white to hold off for forty-eight hours on a deal like that, and with sadness and despair saw him go to lead the Monadnock and Admiral Cooper's ships into peaceful waters. Mac almost sobbed as he left me, and I well know the wrench it cost him to forego a peek at real war. In all the career of the Fawan, the loss of McDonnel as skipper was its sorest blow.

However, money will buy anything in China, even to a pilot and a crew. The crew I easily found, but wandered about for two days longer in search of a master, my money having arrived meanwhile, and finally was obliged to put out for Chefoo to look for the proper skipper there.

Before I went, I had stores to lay in, and all the preparations for three months at sea to make. Drake fell on my neck about this time. He was one of those Americanized Shanghighlanders who have failed in every quarter of the globe, finally being deposited in that far fringe of civilization. He swore that he knew and revered my father, and had conceived a sudden and most ardent friendship for myself, hinting meanwhile that, as he was the proprietor of a mushroom grocery store, it would be but patriotic for me to put in supplies there. I assented, and passed one jolly morning spending money in his place. To all my questions as to the price of things he answered: "Should friends talk about money ? I assure you I think so well of you that you shall get the very lowest I can charge, consistent with my own sense of justice to myself. I always do well by my customers, but I shall do extra well by you."

I have often wondered what his customers get, for my bill called for $700. It knocked me flat. Some of the items I knew were wrong. Dried apricots, for instance, he put down at forty cents a pound, while I remembered buying them in the States for fourteen. I went to a Chinaman, had the bill duplicated, item for item, and found it to foot up $400. I returned Drake's bill with a note which I cannot recall now, but which seemed to me at the moment to be a masterpiece of sarcasm. In it I remarked that while ordinarily in favor of trading with Americans, I did not see why I should pay double for the privilege.

In all, the monthly expenses footed up to ten thousand mex. This included provisions, coal, crew and lease, but made no count of insurance, and when I learned the bill for that, I was prepared to throw up the sponge. The best I could get was five per cent, a month of the ship's value. In other words, for a year I should have had to pay in insurance, sixty per cent, of the full value. It was bad business, the underwriters said, among mines, sliding in the dark through battleships, and looking every night for a hole below the waterline. In the momentary despair thus occasioned, I suddenly bethought me to go bond for the whole show, and accordingly cabled the office for such authority, which promptly came. I therefore gave bond for $40,000, and went off to war with my own life in my hands, while over my head hung the small fortune reposing in the chubby sides of the doughty Fawan.

Arrived at Chefoo I first ran into the full complications of Oriental red tape. I survived forty-eight hours of official espionage, for which the later investigations of Japanese men-of-war held no parallel. Every member of the crew had to be sworn before the British consul, for the Fawan sailed under the Union Jack. I had wired to have the state department from Washington authorize the transfer of the ship's charter to the American register, but the trick could not be turned, and I found I must sail for aye under the British flag. Then the tonnage dues and the ship's papers had to be overhauled, and at last everything submitted for the clearances. At length, ready to start, I still lacked a pilot, when the brother of a Kobe friend hove in sight, embraced me in the hotel, and promptly volunteered his services.

"But you need a master's certificate,'' said I.

"For ten years I've held one," said he.

"You're just the man then. How much do you want?"

"Nothing," he replied, leaned over and whispered in my ear. I smiled, frowned, hesitated, blushed, then nodded assent. He dragged me off to the bar, and an hour later there began to be hoisted to the decks of the Fawan the half ton of contraband, passage for which was to pay the volunteer pilot's way.

Calling on the various dignitaries, I soon learned that the Korean Prime Minister, just elected to his high office, was in town and eager for a return home. He had left his opera bouffe country a mere plenipotentiary, but a wire had recalled him to the portfolio of state, and now he was stranded, for declaration of war had cut off all direct communication with Chemulpo, the harbor of Seoul, the Korean capital, and the only way of return then in sight for him was the long, expensive and not certain way back to Shanghai, thence to Nagasaki, and thence by small boat to Fusan. Cables in hand told me I was bound for Chemulpo, via Port Arthur, and I volunteered the Fawan.

Gratefully the Korean Minister accepted, in the name of his Emperor, in the name of himself, in the name of his wife, and in the name of his numerous suite. I told him to be on board the next afternoon before three o'clock, and then I spent the intervening time in fitting up his cabin. I looked for a Korean flag for decoration, but found that no one in Chefoo had ever heard of the Korean flag, nor could I get any one of the sailor jacks in harbour to tell its complexion or contour. At last, in the back of the great dictionary at the American consulate, on a plate bearing the flags of all nations, I found a likeness, and hurried off to a Chink. The next noon I decorated the Minister's cabin with a counterfeit presentment of his soverign's banner.

As the Korean minister came on board, with his billy-goat whiskers, his diminutive wife and his sheepish suite, I was puzzling over the six

Under Way. 2y

cables received within the past twenty-four hours. They came from various parts of the world, and informed me : ( i ) That the Japanese fleet was closing in permanently on Port Arthur; (2) that the Russian fleet was momentarily expected out to give battle; (3) that the first Japanese army was landed and the invasion of Manchuria begun; (4) that I was not to be allowed north of Forth Arthur ; (5) that I was expected to return a news alignment of the situation within forty-eight hours, and (6) that I was to proceed to Chemulpo via Port Arthur. As I read the last cable to the minister he looked aghast and pointed to the map. There he placed his finger on Port Arthur. It lay due north. He then pointed to Chemulpo. It lay due east. He shrugged his shoulders and his mouth drooped. It was as if a man making time from Chicago to New York should start first for Denver.

A SCAB SKIPPER.

Chapter II

I pass the worst day of my life — the two worst days, in fact — and meet the fate which makes me a scab skipper.

Dawn must be the universal omen for the unknown, for it is the moment of executions and, of the saiHng of ships. We weighed anchor out of Chef 00 harbor one March dawn and a devilish bad dawn it was — sickly, wind-slopped and tight rammed with gale. And it was into the blank unknown we went — the smart little Fawan with my ill-assorted crew, my sneakthief of a skipper, my prime minister, his billy-goat suite, and yours truly, than whom a more forlorn and tide-pushed wily wight ever went off to the sea in a boat.

I had long since determined to evade the Port Arthur instructions because (i) there were mines, warships and orders to sink on sight in that direction, (2) I was already leary of the skipper, and (3) I was under orders, being up to that moment, the mere agent for a Bigger Man, whom I was for dashing on to Chemulpo to pick up that I might turn the responsibility of the whole weighty business over to him, filled with risk and sight-seeing though it might be. So it was for Chemulpo that we headed that weary, sad, over-due dawn.

As I have remarked before, the Fawan, in a sea of even decent size, rolled like a canal boat, and we were no sooner clear of the light, than she pitched into an angry belt of souse and scuttle that showed me, straight off the bat, the antics of which she was capable, and the dancing tantrums that lay always snug under her keel.

I soon went topside, and there, in a corner of the bridge,! found my miserable skipper, wound in a Madras shawl and shivering in the depths of a wicker chair. There was a woe-begone Chinese bos'n on the lookout, but the skipper held down the anachronistic chair with that peagreen aspect that spells only internal disorder. I uttered several remarks utterly irrelevant to the thoughts uppermost in my mind, to which he replied in similar quality, though he finally said, incidentally:

'Well, I hope you're satisfied now, with a tug boat lost on the high seas." To this melancholy observation I replied nothing before he added: "Don't you think we had better run into Wei-Hei-Wei until this blows over ?"

"Yes. That's a pious idea," I answered, and went below. From that time on, mere thought of the skipper was enough to rasp my nerves.

As we pulled into the broad, gay British harbour and all the gaunt, grim old men-of-war dipped flags to us, the drooping tail between my legs resumed life, whipped cur though I was, and I soon regained my animal spirits. Once on my feet after that I was all right, and never since, though I have stood by the wheel through the toil of a typhoon, have I been sea-sick.

Late in the afternoon we weighed anchor and headed on due east. At that time we figured the chart, and found it 145 miles to Northwest Rock, which marked the difficult entrance to the harbor of Chemulpo. At the rate we were going that would have brought us there at 5 A. M., so we ordered the engines slowed down to ninety revolutions, which would bring us in at early forenoon instead. The skipper said he would take the bridge early and, as he needed a shut-eye, asked me to hold it down until 11 P. M., after which he would stay by the wheel to find harbor bearings. To this I readily assented, being too green at that moment to understand that no skipper worthy the name would surrender the bridge to a novice (he knowing well my experience, as I had frankly told him) at so critical a moment.

He went below and I stood there on the bridge that was to see me through the four banner months of my life, through storm and battle, through rain and shine and through many a nerve-breaking race for a beat on the world's cable. It was a trim little bridge, and I remember it with every fondness that any old weather-beaten mariner has for his trusted home. The wheel house was partitioned and glassed in, while from the starboard side of the bridge, led a neat brass-railed companion-way to the deck below. All the lookout was shut in with heavy tarpaulin, except for a round hole that led from a man's waist up well above his head, and from which every sea complexion could be scanned. In the rear was the board that held the telegraph and behind that the funnel. Just around the corner of the funnel ran a shute to the hold. Down the shute I could look to the stokers' way and see them shoveling in the coal that cost fifteen cents a shovelful.

As I looked thus at the rise in the month's expense account, the money sHpping into smoke, I was tempted, as MacDonnell would say, to sob like a child, for the limit of my weekly auditing up to that moment had been a dollar fifteen for carfare and downtown lunches. You see I was the city reporter, loose for the first time on a world detail.

In that dreary night wait I inadvertently came across the incompetence of my cringing skipper. Incompetence it was of the worst, and stupidity, and ignorance and recklessness all rolled into one. Racking my brains in suspicion and distrust, for I felt sole sponsor for the forty thousand dollars under my feet, I soon found that the wheel and bridge compasses did not gibe. The latter sheered a full four points shy of the other, for there were water bubbles under the alcohol, and no man could tell which was right and which was wrong. It was the skipper's duty to verify this before he left port. This I later learned, but then I dimly, impotently, felt the confusion, the possible disaster — and I grew faint.

The skipper relieved me at 11 :oo, but I was back on the bridge at 3:30, to find the same old Chink wobbling in front of the lookout and his worshipful self asleep in the wicker chair. What could I say?

But dawn came — dawn the second, and no longer wind and wave. We were in the lee now of Chopeki point and fair under the shores of the Land of the Morning Calm. They are vermin, these Koreans, but I must admit that under the wide expanse of heaven there lies nowhere to the knowledge of one who has sailed well each of the seven seas, a land more wondrous in color, more uplifting in the joy of verdure than this garden spot that some of those lazy old beggars in the long ago dubbed the Morning Calm. There she stretched before us — dyed in seas of saffron, mauve, lilac, vermilion, sapphire, esthetic in the baths of all new glory, rejuvenescent with the birth of worlds and men, land sired in calm, and girthed in eternal morn, peerless Korea !

As she hove over the port quarter, born queen-like out of the mists, there came upon my vision another sight, newer, grander, far more inspiring — my first glance at war. A side glance it was, a mere peep, but I looked, and knew and grew wise. They were sweeping lazily away from us, into the north, and I counted them; one, two, three, four, Japanese transports bound for the Yalu, funnels splitting the blue with puffs of black. I could see the new sheds tightening the decks for the horses, myriad tiny slant-eyed faces smothering the taffrail and lazily flaunting over all the zig-zag army flag. I watched them sweep grandly on — two thousand war-like souls in each, bearers of ache and anguish to how many Russian hearts, of slow-nodding pain and ghastly concealing smile to how many Japanese mat-rooms beyond the shogi I knew not.

I was pulled from my joy with a stab. For my incompetent skipper revealed to me that he had left port minus that first essential of the well prepared mariner — a book of sailing directions. The approaches to Chemulpo are littered with the islands of the Prince Imperial archipelago which numbers some odd thousands of spots in the sea, varying from lonely and verdureless granite rocks to fifty-acre plots on which fishermen can pitch drying racks and nets. It is one of the most dangerous entrances in the world and through it pass two channels, the main one to the south, and that known as the "Flying Fish" to the north. Finding either is quite as difficult a trick as any sea-dog wants, but it is made infinitely light if one had a book of sailing directions which tells every reef, shoal, tide-rip and shallow of every important rock among the thousands. When I asked the skipper where this book was, he lightly and casually mentioned that he had forgotten to bring it, and I wondered what I should say to a hunter if he went after bear without a gun.

We had long since slowed down to half speed, and were now, past mid-forenoon, drifting with the tide. About eleven o'clock the islands began coming out of the mists in every direction and I soon found we were entirely surrounded by them, that the last transport was visible by only a thin smudge on the northern horizon, hiking at twice our speed for the Yalu, that elsewhere there was not a sail in sight and that we were in momentary danger of impalement. Back and forth we argued the question of the northwest rock, the guide by which we were to pilot our course through the Prince Imperial. We could not agree, and so I finally insisted that, for the sake of the argument, we come together on the proposition and sail for some rock, which was surely better than drifting on any. We picked our "pidgin" as the quartermaster said, and ran for it half-speed. The skipper had remembered at least one detail of moment. The depth about the northwest is twelve fathoms and he knew it, but as we slipped under the lee of our compromise northwest the lead called back five fathoms. We were strictly up against it.

At this critical moment my prize skipper became utterly demoralized, sank into his wicker chair, ordered the engines "stand by" and then "full stop" and, before I realised it, they were throwing off the starboard anchor.

"If you can't go forward at eleven o'clock in the morning?" I cried, hurrying to the bridge, "how about dark ?" I was almost in the throes of MacDonnell's only alternative — "to sob like a child," for there was the open sea behind, the reefs ahead, the rocks all about, while the wind had changed and the mist was again closing in. The distant rocks were becoming lost to view and I feared that we would presently not be able to see twenty fathoms ahead.

"The fact is," said the skipper, looking at me with sincerity and frankness, for which he evidently expected to receive a suitable reward, *'the fact is, Fm lost."

"What do you suggest?" I cried, not at all unangered by his child-like simplicity of heart.

"I can suggest nothing," he said.

At this interesting moment the Korean Minister sent one of his billy-goat suite to enquire what hour we would anchor at Chemulpo. I realized that the moment was one in which a slack back and a watery voice similar to, that exhibited by my beloved skipper would, as Napoleon well said, lose the day, so I replied without hesitation :