Fortune Is a Woman - Elizabeth Adler [100]
“The typhoon blew past us as night fell and we were once again on calm waters. The crew appeared from their hiding places and the hold was opened to let the coolies out from their prison and they were told to clean up their own vomit. The captain looked at me and I looked at him—he was roaring drunk by now. He took a silver dollar from his pocket and handed it to me. ‘You’ve just earned yourself your first American dollar,’ he said. ‘And that’s more than I can say for the other cowardly scum on board.’ He strode the decks hurling curses and blows at whoever crossed his path and the crewmen glared murderously at me out of the corners of their eyes, muttering bad things.
“After that I kept as close to the captain as possible because they blamed me for his anger and I knew it would be easy enough to kill me and claim I had fallen overboard. Between the captain and the crew I scarcely slept; every menial job on the ship was mine. Dysentery broke out among the coolies and the ship stank and it was I who had to sluice down the hold and the decks, and help cast overboard the bodies of those who had died. The boilers were giving trouble and we limped from port to port, some of the crew absconded and new men had to be found, and still the coolies gambled. It took three weary months to reach California and as we sailed up the coast, the captain fell silent.
“We were hugging the cliffs off the coast north of San Francisco, heading for Seattle. It was a stormy, blustery night, nothing like the rage of the typhoon but enough to toss the rickety little ship around. The rain was lashing the decks, yet I saw we were sailing closer and closer to the shore, so close I could hear the boom of the surf on the rocks and the tolling of a buoy. Suddenly the captain roared an order for the hatches to be opened and I watched, bewildered, as the coolies were herded onto the decks. They huddled together, shivering in the rain, staring wonderingly at the captain pointing a rifle at them. Four of the crewmen stood by his side, also armed, and the coolies just stared dumbly back at them.
“‘This is America,’ the captain roared suddenly in Chinese. ‘The Gold Mountain. This is where you get off.’ He waved the rifle menacingly at them, but they just stood there, too stupefied with fright even to move. ‘You have your choice,’ he roared again. ‘Jump and take your chances in the sea, it’s only a couple of hundred yards to the shore. Or be shot and thrown into the sea already dead.’ The crewmen let forth with a volley of shots, a couple of men fell dead and they kicked them contemptuously over the side.
“I stared at the captain, numb as the coolies. These poor men had scrimped and saved and borrowed money so they could go to America to make their fortune and return to take care of their poverty-stricken relatives in their old age. The captain had taken all their money. He had been their savior and now he was casting them overboard into the wild dark sea, uncaring whether they could even swim, for those who could not would be shot. He was a pirate and a murderer and I hated him as passionately as I hated the flesh-peddler.
“I watched, horrified as one by one they forced the terrified coolies to jump, laughing as they struggled in the icy waves. I took the captain’s silver dollar from my pocket and spat on it and flung it contemptuously over the side. If this was America I wanted nothing to do with it, it was as evil as the place I had left behind.
“The captain saw my