Around the World Submerged: The Voyage of the Triton

7

It was only a few hours later that my hopes for an uneventful voyage were dashed and my warning premonition of trouble fulfilled. Don Fears, face taut, brought the bad news. “I’m afraid we’ll have to shut down the port engine, Captain. We have a bad leak in one of the condenser circulating pumps—”

“How much water are we making, Don?” I asked anxiously, after he had given me the details of the problem. “How long will the engine be out of commission?”

“Can’t tell yet,” said Don. “The leak is on a main condenser circulating water pump, and there are no valves between it and the sea except the main sea valves themselves. To fix it, we have to take sea pressure off. To do that, we have to close the main sea valves, and that shuts down the condenser. That’s why we have to stop the engine.”

I went back with Don to take a look. It was exactly as he had stated. Although the work was started immediately, the leak was in a very difficult place to reach; several failures were experienced, and it was early morning of the next day before we finally got a patch to hold.

In the meantime, I had become acutely aware of the great versatility of Triton’s dual-reactor power plant. With the port engine stopped and locked fast, we were dragging our immobile port propeller through the water like a great bronze parachute. But the starboard engine, unaffected by anything that happened to its mate, was driving away with great ease. Although the leaking pipe caused our port engine to be stopped for over five hours, when the job was done, we had virtually maintained our required speed of advance—losing only a few miles which would be easy to regain.

One of the safety features designed into nuclear ships is a warning siren which sounds piercingly in the engineering spaces when certain important electrical circuits connected with the reactors malfunction. Hardly had the leak been fixed—I seemed to have been asleep less than a minute, though it actually was a couple of hours—when I heard the siren shrieking. Within seconds the engineering messenger had sought me out—as though I needed a special call after that alarm! It could signify only one thing; something was wrong with one of the reactors.

“What could be the matter?” I worried. The tremendous effort in design and training which had gone into our nuclear ships had produced a record of dependability unparalleled in the history of any Navy. It was unthinkable that the very heart of one of our power plants—the reactor—should have suffered a casualty, and at the very outset of our cruise. Yet this was the significance of the alarm.

Our casualty control organization was already in action when I arrived. The procedures laid down in the instruction book were meticulously followed. The entire circuitry of the plant was rigorously checked, and we soon found the source of our trouble: a bad electrical connection in the warning circuit itself. Our precautionary moves had been well taken, but the record of reliability of our machinery plant was so far unblemished.

As we sat down for breakfast, neither Don Fears, nor I, nor any of his engineers wished to go through many nights like the previous one. And yet, with some eighty-one more days to go on our cruise, it was inevitable that this one would not be the last.

According to Triton’s Log, shortly after completion of the general drills on that same day a message from New London informed us that Richard W. Steeley, Engineman Third Class, had become the father of a baby girl. The message, in duplicate, was brought directly to me from the radio room, but instead of sending immediately for Steeley, I sent instead for Jim Smith, Seaman First Class. Almost every ship has a cartoonist or artist of some kind. Smith was ours. By the time Steeley arrived to get the good news, Smith was gone. One dispatch form, labeled “Mother’s Copy,” was duly decorated with cupids and hearts and flowers. The carbon copy, marked “Father’s,” had two ugly pot-bellied old men.

Steeley had evidently been on watch in the engineering spaces when the summons for him arrived, but the self-conscious grin of happy relief on his face more than made up for the smudges and perspiration which were also there. Mother and daughter, the message stated, were fine—baby’s name: Bonnie Lynne.

One of the advantages of our new Kollmorgen celestial navigation periscope was the elimination of the need for a horizon. The periscope computes its own horizon; thus observations of sun, stars, or the moon can be made at any time the celestial bodies can be seen. Just after midnight, on the morning of the nineteenth of February, we had Triton back at periscope depth for a fix and ventilation. This fix, when computed, showed us to be short of our PIM (position of intended movement). In preparation for the voyage, a detailed track chart with our exact routing and the times we were supposed to pass through each point had been left with ComSubLant, so he would always know our exact position. Loss of time getting the feel of our ship, learning the techniques of getting some of the observations expected of us, and the somewhat reduced speed necessary for recent repairs had caused us to fall behind schedule. But for Triton, this was no serious problem. With a slight increase in power, our submarine cruiser began to tear through the water at a speed few ships could match, even on the surface. And but for the roar of steam passing through her turbines, there was no sensation of speed at all.

On this day, also, we released our first hydrographic bottle, a procedure we would carry out twice a day throughout the remainder of the trip. The United States Hydrographic Office has a standard form, available to all US merchant and naval vessels, which requests that at appropriate times the form be filled out, sealed in a bottle, and dropped over the side. The so called “bottle paper,” printed in several languages, simply asks the finder to note the time and place it was found, in the blanks provided, and to forward the paper to the nearest US government authority. We could not, of course, surface to put the bottles into the water, but this turned out to be a very easy problem to solve. A standard medical bottle easily fitted into our submerged signal ejector (we had previously tested one to full submergence pressure with no apparent bad effects), and to release it we had only to shut the inner cap, equalize to sea pressure by opening a valve in an equalizer line, then open the outer cap. The bottle floated out on its own buoyancy and within a short time reached the surface.

Concern over possible premature discovery of one of these bottles, however, had prompted a certain amount of circumspection in Washington. We had been directed not to fill out the bottle papers completely and under no circumstances to put the name, Triton, anywhere on them. They were, as a consequence, filled out in a simple code. To assure authenticity, each was written in duplicate, with the carbon copy preserved for later transmittal to the Hydrographic Office.

Another important event of this portion of our cruise was recorded when the Triton Eagle began publication with a four-page issue of fifteen copies. The stated objectives of this daily newspaper were to publish news (received by the editor on our radio and transcribed directly by typewriter to the master copy), editorials (conceived by the editor and typed then and there on the master copy), jokes (thought up by the editor or possibly handed in by someone else and transcribed directly on the master copy), humorous happenings on board (related to the editor and likewise taken down verbatim), and cartoons (drawn by the originator directly on the master copy). In an attempt to be useful to all hands, the first issue contained the following sample letter home, recommended to everyone as a start:

As in most naval ships, for fairly obvious reasons, the editor of the newspaper was a radioman; in our case, Radioman First Class Harold J. Marley, Jr. His assistant and general factotum was Audley R. Wilson, Radarman First. A third member of the staff occasionally contributed a column and rendered assistance in certain important ways, such as selection of periscope depth periods to coincide with the best news broadcasts, but refused the honor of being listed as a contributor because of his official position as Commanding Officer.

We had only been at sea a few days when a serious deficiency in the ship’s ventilation system came to light. Our SINS had been installed in a compartment which used to be a provisions storeroom, and unfortunately the addition of a considerable amount of high-powered electrical equipment had not been accompanied by enough air-conditioning. As a consequence of the slowly increasing warmth of the sea on our way south, the ex-storeroom had kept creeping up in temperature. George Troffer, who as Electrical Officer had responsibility for the SINS, became increasingly concerned as the temperature increased, rose in rebellion when it reached 105° F. Something had to be done, he said, to protect the precious equipment. Specifically, some auxiliary ventilation had to be provided quickly. It wasn’t the discomfort of the Electrician’s Mates keeping watch on the SINS that bothered us, for our men could stand that with never a complaint. The problem was that the tubes and circuitry of the equipment were not built to withstand continual high temperatures.

Several alternative ideas were discussed, and then Triton’s submarine jury-riggers turned to with a will. After several hours of cutting and bending sheet metal and squeezing a collapsible duct into a confined space alongside one of our radar masts, a cool air supply was channeled into the compartment, reducing the ambient temperature in the vicinity of the SINS to 90° F.

The problem was by no means a new one to submarines, nor was the solution; and I was in the end glad it happened. Nothing is better for the crew of a ship, particularly a new ship, than to have a difficult problem to solve, and to solve it efficiently.

A day or two later, as Triton’s mighty engines drove her deep under the ever-warming sea, trouble of another kind arose. This time it was a jammed outer door on our garbage ejector. During the war, it was customary to bag the garbage in weighted sacks and carry it to the bridge right after surfacing every night (one submarine early in 1942 did not do this, instead kept all of it on board during an entire patrol—and raised an unholy stink in Pearl Harbor when the hatches were opened upon her return). The problem created by the continuous submergence of our new submarines had been solved by a small-diameter torpedo tube, mounted vertically, with a watertight and pressure-proof closure or “door” at each end. All garbage and trash was packed into the ejection tube through the open breech door, while an interlock system made it theoretically impossible to open the outer door until the inner one was properly locked shut, and then the positions of the doors were reversed for flushing.

The garbage ejector is a large potential hazard to submarines because of the frequency with which it must be used and the fact that the men handling trash and garbage are generally the least experienced on board. It is so vitally important that at least one ejector door be kept closed at all times that these mechanisms may only be operated by a fully qualified auxiliaryman. Maloperation could result in uncontrolled flooding of the ship.

Despite our careful handling of the garbage ejection system, a problem arose; after the garbage was flushed out, the outer door could not be closed. Full sea pressure, consequently, was riding against the breech door of the ejector—a door built to close against sea pressure instead of with it. The situation was highly undesirable. No one knew how much pressure the hinge of the inner door could stand.

Fortunately, my worries were short-lived. About an hour’s work by Chief Engineman Edwin Rauch, Machinist’s Mate First Class Bob Carter, and Engineman Third Class John Boreczky restored the door to normal operation. Tom Thamm, whose responsibility this was, looked a little sheepish when I asked him what had caused the trouble. This day happened to be the day the garbage ejector was supposed to be greased; so much grease had been rammed into its operating mechanism, and under such force, that a pressure lock was created and the gears had jammed.

During this portion of our trip, we began our weekly divine services. These were held every Sunday in the crew’s mess hall, the only suitable compartment in the ship (where forty-six persons could be accommodated at a single sitting). The first turnout was disappointing; possibly the fact that there was no ordained minister of any faith on board reduced the appeal of the service, but we resolved, nevertheless, to keep up the practice whenever Triton happened to be at sea on a Sunday. Will Adams and I discussed the matter at some length, and finally decided that we should not attempt in any way to pressure our shipmates to attend. Despite our own feelings, attendance, we decided, should always remain entirely voluntary.

On any map where the contour of the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean is shown, an elongated shallow area passing through the Azores can be seen; it curves approximately in the center of the ocean as it crosses the equator and heads into the South Atlantic, where it finally disappears. This area is known to oceanographers as the Mid-Atlantic Ridge. The Azores are mountain peaks, where the Mid-Atlantic Ridge projects above the surface of the water, as are St. Peter and St. Paul’s Rocks.

The Mid-Atlantic Ridge, a pressure ridge created as the earth’s mass cooled millions of years ago, has never presented a hazard to mariners. Only the Azores themselves, or certain other islands, are surrounded by water shallow enough to be of any concern. Much of the Ridge, therefore is not even well charted. Deep traveling submarines are not at all like other ships, however, for they require much more depth. This was another reason for our voyage, to make a world-girdling recording of the bottom contour. One of the special devices with which Triton had been fitted during the hectic two weeks before she sailed was for this purpose. Outfitted with many miles of expensive, sensitized paper, the device operated from our fathometer, taking many soundings per minute and recording them graphically so as to show a virtual photograph of the shape of the bottom of the ocean over which we had just passed. It was with justice officially called the “Precision Depth Recorder (PDR).”

As is well known, the ocean is full of mountains, just as is the land, but very few of the ocean’s mountains have ever been mapped. As Triton approached the vicinity of St. Peter and St. Paul’s Rocks, we expected to notice a gradual shoaling of water, and the PDR was carefully watched.

Civil Engineer Gordon E. Wilkes was aboard to monitor the equipment. In addition, in order to obtain immediate value from anything the PDR might detect, a special watch was detailed to observe it. During the early morning of the twenty-third of February, more than twenty-four hours before we should reach St. Peter and St. Paul’s Rocks, sudden and very rapid shoaling was recorded on the PDR. This was immediately brought to the attention of the Officer of the Deck by Jerry Saunders, Radarman Second Class, who at the moment was on PDR watch. We were still quite some distance from where we expected to find the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, and soundings recorded but a few moments earlier indicated a depth of roughly two thousand fathoms.

This “seamount” must have been of extremely solid structure, for it towered over the relatively flat sea bottom to a height of nearly nine thousand feet. Its sides were precipitous and its craggy form, profiled on the PDR, resembled the spires of a medieval cathedral. We slowed to creeping speed as we came up on the mount, for we had to be able to avoid it should it extend to our depth level. Slowly, we crept over the area, recording a minimum sounding of nine hundred and thirty fathoms, and then reversed course and ran over the same track. Criss-crossing, we pinpointed the peak’s location and traced an outline of it from all sides.

It must be admitted that coming as it did without warning, the abrupt decrease in soundings startled me. We could not see ahead, of course, except by sonar, and until we actually had passed over it and determined the minimum distance between the top of the seamount and the surface, there was no way to guess how high the peak might actually reach. Had it reached higher, had we been traveling much deeper than we were, and had we not been keeping the careful watch that we were keeping, we might have struck it in the manner of an aircraft striking a mountain. The results would have been equally calamitous.

As I left the control room, with the peak safely astern and its location carefully logged, I noticed that this particular submerged mountain had already received a name.

Conforming to the tradition that the discoverer of prominent geographical features has the right to name them, Jerry Saunders had neatly inscribed “Saunders Peak” opposite its location on our track chart.

Saunders Peak will present no hazard to submarines until they travel much deeper than they are yet able to do. But, nevertheless, it had not been marked on any chart before this. We had made a new discovery.

The twenty-fourth of February was the day we expected to sight St. Peter and St. Paul’s Rocks. According to navigator Will Adams, we should see the islet dead ahead on the horizon at about noon. Prior to this time we had studied every bit of lore we had on board about the Rocks, but there was very little to be learned. Sailing Directions described it as bare and useless, a one-time guano collecting spot, noting that there had once been a small dock, long since washed away, and that the highest rock had an abandoned lighthouse surmounting it.

We had been totally submerged for over a week, and as bad luck would have it, for the last thirty-six hours the sky had been overcast. It was consequently impossible for Will to get any sights through our new-fangled periscope. At 4:00 A.M. there was not a star in the sky, and at 0830 we went to periscope depth again in hopes of shooting the morning sun. At this time, as we rose through a temperature layer in the water, the sound of foreign propeller beats suddenly came in loud and clear. It was a striking example of how a temperature or salinity difference in the water will block the sonar return of a ship at relatively close range.

Carefully, we conned Triton through the evolutions necessary to come safely to periscope depth, and finally got the fragile periscope tube out of water. Our contact was a motor ship of eight thousand or ten thousand tons, with a white hull, buff stack, nice-looking clipper bow, a large deckhouse, many king posts, and apparently considerable deck machinery. She must also have been fitted to carry passengers—an easy deduction from the size of her deckhouse and the number of portholes evident. But we were much too far away to make out her nationality.

In the meantime, we had been looking for the sun in hopes of getting an observation. No luck. If there were an unexpected current or, during the last thirty-six hours, a slight error in our dead-reckoning position, it would be more than easy to skid right by this tiny island a few miles either way and never see it. My good friend Fred Janney, navigating the Whale during the war, once missed Midway Island in exactly this manner, and had to spend half a day, with his grumbling crew, groping about looking for the tiny atoll. (I have never let him forget the episode, and he will not be happy to read about it here.)

At 1156, Adams announced St. Peter and St. Paul’s Rocks should be eleven miles dead ahead. Again we brought Triton to periscope depth, and at 1206 I saw a tiny white spot on the horizon bearing exactly two degrees to the left of dead ahead. For the Rocks to show up so precisely on schedule, from dead-reckoning navigation alone, was an indication of Will’s great ability.

As we approached the islet, it presented varying shapes. The white spot looked at first like the sail of a ship, then like a sun-kissed minaret, finally like a huge birdcage. At last I recognized it as the structure of the abandoned lighthouse. The upper parts of the rocks were pure white from bird droppings, and the lower levels, as we approached, were a sort of brownish-black, ceaselessly washed by the waves. The sea was relatively smooth, yet there was considerable surf breaking in and among the rocks, foaming madly like a miniature waterfall one minute, stopping abruptly the next and reversing itself. As we came closer, we could distinguish a great number of granitelike outcroppings scattered about everywhere, and there were large numbers of sea birds.

The whole scene reminded me of a photograph published after the Battle of Midway, which had shown a Japanese cruiser, the Mikuma, after she had received a tremendous drubbing from our carrier-based aircraft. By squinting a little and using a bit of imagination, St. Peter and St. Paul’s Rocks in profile looked exactly like His Imperial Japanese Majesty’s ship, Mikuma.

We certainly had to agree to one thing: the Sailing Directions description of this place was exactly right. As a matter of fact, its barrenness had been one of the arguments in favor of selecting it for the official terminus of the circumnavigation. German submarines had been in the habit of stopping at the Rocks, during World War II, to exchange mail, supplies, and munitions. For them, as for us, the Rocks were a convenient navigational reference point and also, no doubt, a concealing backdrop should a strange ship unexpectedly appear on the horizon.

We took a lot of photographs and went through a complete photographic reconnaissance drill. For three-and-a-half hours we cruised slowly about at various ranges, conforming to the bottom topography and carefully avoiding shallow spots. Everyone who wanted to do so was permitted to come to the conning tower for a look, and many crew members availed themselves of this opportunity.

Not a single engineer came forward, however, for Don Fears had taken advantage of our time at reduced speed to make some minor repairs and some low-power checks on various machinery. Mindful of our experience with the condenser, and not one to neglect a chance of this sort anyway, he used every available hand.

At a few minutes after 1600, we turned Triton south and headed for Cape Horn. The equator was only fifty miles away.

For the last two or three days, there had been a steady effort by the Shellbacks to exaggerate the various tortures that would be inflicted on the lowly pollywogs when we crossed the equator. Among our pollywogs, who composed most of the crew, were some apparently made of fairly stern stuff. One obnoxious character, calling himself the Little Gray Fox, attempted to foment a rebellion. He posted signs reading “Pollywogs arise” and “shellbacks take heed and surrender while you may.” And King Neptune’s crown, the equipment for the Royal Barbers, and the painstakingly made shillelaghs for the chastisement of the guilty pollywogs mysteriously vanished. A thorough investigation by the Shellbacks uncovered the information that their paraphernalia had disappeared permanently through the garbage ejector.

I remembered vaguely having given permission to flush the garbage disposer while we were cruising about the Rocks, and I suppose I had been an unwitting accomplice to a foul deed.

At a few minutes after eight in the evening, we hit the equator. There was a grinding jolt from somewhere forward (which sounded suspiciously like a torpedo tube full of water being fired, which, of course, I knew it was, having given the required permission to shoot it). A confused report, broken off unfinished, came over the ship’s announcing system, and shortly after, I received a note that King Neptune and his Royal Court had arrived on board and desired my presence in the crew’s mess hall.

Buckling on my sword and putting on my cap for the occasion, since undue informality would, of course, have been unseemly—and possibly would have resulted in even sterner measures being visited upon the unworthy pollywogs, for whom I felt the deepest sympathy indeed—I headed for the appointed place.

Neptune, when I met him, looked suspiciously like Loyd Garlock, who had crossed the line with me in the Trigger eight years before. The Royal Queen, half a head taller than he, with brilliant red lips, long stringy curly hair (which was not surprising since it came from a floor mop), and smoking at all times a long black cigar, might have been Torpedoman Second Class Wilmot A. Jones.

The Queen’s bosom (which some of her friends seemed to think ought to be pronounced “buzzoom”) looked to me like a pair of strategically slung grapefruit, but of course my imagination was probably working overtime and I knew I should resolutely put aside such unworthy thoughts. Someone considerately handed me a piece of paper containing a typed and smudged script, with the assistance of which, and with a little ad-libbing, the following colloquy ensued:

The little play here recounted did not go quite so smoothly as it might have, since no one had thought to provide extra copies of the script. King Neptune and I had to hand the solitary script back and forth so that each could read his lines.

Neptunus and his Queen then seated themselves at a long table. The clean-cut, well-combed, blindfolded accused had to kneel before them and present his plea as to the charges. He was legally assisted in his defense by the Royal Sea Lawyer, who unfortunately never won a case. Occasionally, during the trials, the Queen punctuated the learned discourse by drawing a water pistol from her ample bosom and squirting the accused in the face. This always discomfited the unhappy pollywog and caused him to assume a guilty look. The impartial dispensing of justice was thus made easier.

To the right of the Queen sat the hefty Royal Baby, whose real name was Harry Olsen. Babbling playfully between puffs on a large black cigar which he had bummed from his mother, the baby sat on a stool, with his large round belly completely bare except for a heavy coating of black, sticky grease. All pollywogs received a fair trial, were impartially convicted, and all received the maximum sentence. They were first required, in acknowledgment of their fealty, to kiss the Royal Baby’s greasy belly. Then, in penance for his many crimes, each one got a haircut at the hands of the Royal Barbers, before proceeding through the initiation line. For some reason, more than one seemed reluctant to kiss Olsen’s tummy and had to be assisted by a gentle shove from the Sheriff or sometimes from the Royal Defender and once or twice, it must be admitted, from their skipper.

The Royal Barbers looked an awful lot like Lieutenant Tom Thamm and Chief Engineman Alfred Abel, and the artistic jobs they did were beyond compare (since Thamm, the head Barber, was normally in charge of Triton’s auxiliary division, all pollywogs belonging to his own outfit came away with a large “A” cut in their heads). But aside from certain special cuts of this nature, ingenuity and esthetics were the order of the day, and many artfully sculptured pates ensued. Once in a while, to be sure, a bald pollywog came by, but this presented no particular problem. In such cases, the most effective way to improve a pollywog’s appearance was to add hair instead of removing what little there was. The Barbers found this easy to do, with plenty of extra hair lying about and black grease to paste it on with.

In the next compartment, the Royal Dentist squirted unmentionable substances into the shorn pollywog’s ears and awful-tasting concoctions into his mouth, accompanied all the while by an insane giggling as though the person administering the treatment were actually enjoying it instead of being engrossed in a most serious and important duty. The next stop was up a deck to the officer’s wardroom, where a lusty gang of Shellbacks with brand new shillelaghs speeded the pollywogs’ passage. Then, they painfully shambled aft to the Royal Bathroom, a canvas-enclosed space beneath a deck hatch, where a bucket of cold salt water cascaded down on each man in turn and ceremoniously removed the last vestiges of his erstwhile status as a pollywog.

It took some time to initiate all the new men, since there were so many of them. After a while, leaving Neptune and his Royal Party to dispense justice by themselves, I proceeded aft to see how things were faring.

The ship was a mess, all right. In some dismay, I realized it would take days to repair the mess which the fun-loving Shellbacks and pollywogs had made of our clean decks and immaculate bulkheads. But it was a price worth paying. Chief Electrician’s Mate Herbert Hardman, covered with grease, minus half his hair, dripping water, expressed it. “I’ve waited thirteen years for this,” said he. “Nobody is a real sailor until he’s been across the line!”

By this standard, the luckiest man on board was John Moulton, Fireman Apprentice, only seventeen years old, who became a Shellback three months after graduation from boot camp.

During the entire initiation ceremony, the identity of the Little Gray Fox remained a secret, despite occasional attempts by the Shellbacks to elicit information by judiciously applied torture. None, however, would give him away, but I have always personally believed that it was Lieutenant George Sawyer, Triton’s First Lieutenant and the youngest officer on board. He also happened to be an ex-Yale crew man, who looked capable of taking care of himself in almost any kind of situation.

I missed seeing Sawyer tried, but was later informed by eyewitnesses that when asked whether he pled guilty or not guilty to the charges, he shouted, “Banzai!” at the top of his voice, drew a water pistol of his own, and before anyone could stop him, shot the King, the Queen, and the Royal Prosecutor. He was finally overwhelmed by the Prosecutor, the Attorney for the Defense, and a number of other Shellbacks, who, with a right good will, hurled themselves upon his struggling grease-plastered body.

The shillelagh-swinging Shellbacks prepared for a tough battle when Sawyer appeared, but he scuttled between them so fast that they did more damage to themselves and the surrounding furniture than they managed to do to the thoroughly guilty Sawyer.

Finally, with all pollywogs properly initiated, King Neptune and his Royal Party announced they were cheered by the high caliber of our crew and that they had all been inducted and accepted into the august society of Trusty and Loyal Shellbacks. Promising at all times to be ready to assist his Loyal Shellbacks of the deep against pollywogs of the shallow coastal waters and especially pollywogs found on other ships, Neptune bade Triton farewell and returned to his watery realm.

Nowhere does it appear on the record, but the day before the ceremony, King Neptune had made a personal advance call on me to ask whether haircuts would be permitted. In 1952, when Trigger II crossed the line, I would not allow hair to be cut because within a few days we would be going ashore in Rio de Janeiro on liberty, and I didn’t want any of Trigger’s sailors wandering around town with zany-looking haircuts.

But this case, I now told Garlock, was different. There would be plenty of time for the hair to grow back.

There were, indeed, some dismayed looks, as the new Shellbacks regarded themselves in a mirror after the ceremonies, but all were assured that their hair would regrow by the time we got back to port. And, as a matter of fact, hard though it was to believe at the time, that is what happened.

It was a mighty funny ship’s company that carried Triton down the eastern coast of South America toward Cape Horn. Some men cut all their hair off; to give it all an even start, as one ex-pollywog expressed it. Others tried by one stratagem or another to make their heads look halfway decent, or at least symmetrical, but most simply didn’t bother, letting them stay the way they’d been trimmed by the Royal Barbers.

One noticeable thing was that the two Barbers cut each other’s hair some time during the ceremony, apparently to forestall any possible attempt by pollywogs to seek revenge; and at least one Shellback took to wearing a sou’wester cap, strings tied snugly under his chin, whenever he went to sleep. His theory, he explained, was that while awake he was pretty sure he could defend himself; and before anyone could get the sou’wester off his head, he would be pretty sure of being awake.

Shortly after midnight of this day I turned in; the first leg of our trip was completed and the second one fairly started. We had had our share of ups and downs during these first days, and I wondered what the next leg would bring. Our course was now to the southwest, and in another week we would be at Cape Horn.