When one man asked: 'Why are we doing this?' the captain replied: 'To enable good people to stay alive,' and the other said: 'If God wanted reindeer to feed Alaskan Eskimos, He'd have put some on our side of the Bering,' and Healy replied without rancor: 'Dr. Jackson might argue that we're doing work that God overlooked.'
But the young men had cause for complaint, because when the Bear returned to those very natives to whom it had so generously given gifts in appreciation of their assistance in rescuing American seamen, and the ones who had promised they would sell reindeer to help Alaskan Eskimos, the herders grew massively protective of their animals and would not part with a single one. The officers watched with growing bitterness as Healy sailed the Bear more than a thousand miles along the coastline of Siberia, pleading in vain for the stubborn Asians to sell him reindeer, and the young men also noted that Jackson was just as ineffective in trying to buy animals. At the conclusion of this wasteful excursion, one of the officers wrote to his father:
This trip has been a shameful waste of government time and money. I begin to suspect that Jackson and Healy are plotting to sell their reindeer, if they ever get any, for private gain. The U.S. Gov't. could well investigate this scandal.
Despite the fevered efforts of the two would-be humanitarians, they were able to purchase no reindeer at Cape Navarin, but farther north at Cape Dezhnev, where the Siberian coastline turned sharply eastward toward America, they came upon a village which allowed them to buy nineteen of their precious herd, but the same officer wrote:
With persuasion so ardent that it was unbecoming in the representatives of a Great Democracy, they finally purchased nineteen animals, but at a cost per beast that was unconscionable. This whole affair smells.
On the choppy trip across the Chukchi Sea three of the reindeer died, but sixteen did survive to become the foundation of a herd in the Aleutians, with more to follow in later years.
THE COURT-MARTIAL IN WHICH CAPTAIN HEALY WOULD soon find himself enmeshed was partly his own fault, because once he had delivered the reindeer, he should have headed back to his home port of San Francisco to allow his sea-weary crew shore leave. But he was so enamored of the Bering Sea that he decided to make one last, quick scout north Jackson would ultimately make thirty-two different trips to the land of the Chukchis and it was on this sortie that he spotted an American whaler, the Adam Foster, engaged in pelagic sealing. Running forward at full sail-and-steam, he drew alongside the offender and ordered his men to board, and when some thirty energetically obeyed, he and Jackson followed suit, leaping adroitly onto the captured ship.
However, the sealers, who stood to make a great deal of money if they could get their illegal catch to either Hawaii or China, put up a surprising defense, during which Healy suffered a wound to his left shoulder and a bleeding slash along his cheek.
Infuriated by this act of what he deemed warfare, he urged his men to subdue the attackers, and when they did he calmed his temper and ordered three reprisals: 'All rum and molasses into the scuppers. AH pelts into the Bering. These six ringleaders and those three who assaulted me, trice them up!"
Jackson did not know what this horrendous word meant, but the young officers did, and as it was uttered, one moved to Jackson's side and whispered: 'Oh, this should not be done! They're Americans.' He made this protest because, erroneously, he believed that in a crisis the clergyman would have to side with him against Captain Healy and his drunken, profane behavior, but in this supposition, as he was about to find out, he was wrong. Jackson was not his man; he was Healy's.
So, much to the officers' horror, the nine sailors were trussed up, that is, their hands were handcuffed behind their backs and ropes were passed through the cuffs and over a yardarm. Crewmen from the Bear then pulled on the loose ends of the ropes, and the miscreants were hauled just far enough aloft so their toes could barely reach the deck, and there in fierce agony they remained dangling for seven minutes, after which they were dropped, some of them senseless, to the deck.
Standing over them, Healy said: 'You'll not take arms against a ship of the United States government,' and one of the officers whispered to Jackson: 'But they didn't take arms,' and the missionary, who believed that crime deserved punishment, defended Healy: 'The punished men were selling rum and killing pregnant seals.'
Back aboard the Bear, two relevant things happened: Mike Healy, agitated by the pain from his wounds and the excitement of boarding a ship in midocean, got drunk, and one of the officers sought out Sheldon Jackson for an impassioned discussion of the afternoon's events: 'No captain has the right to storm aboard another ship and trice up nine of its sailors.'
'Captain Healy serves under orders to do just that. Stop unlawful sealing. Punish men and ships that sell alcohol to natives.'
'But certainly not to trice men up by their wrists behind their backs. Reverend Jackson, that's inhuman!'
'It's the law of the sea. Always has been. An alternative to hanging. You ought to be glad he didn't keelhaul them.'
The officer, appalled that a clergyman should defend such behavior, was goaded into saying something which, had he been a more sensitive young man, he would have regretted later: 'You don't sound much like a Christian, defending a man like Healy.'
Jackson rose from where he was seated on the edge of his bunk, pulled himself to his full height, looked up into the young man's eyes, and said: 'Michael Healy in the Bering Sea reminds me of St. Peter on the Lake of Galilee. I'm sure Sailor Peter was a rough-and-tumble man, but he was Christ's chosen apostle on whom he founded his first church. The church in Alaska depends upon the good works of Captain Healy.'
This comparison was so odious that the officer cried: 'How can you say that about a man who blasphemes and gets drunk all the time?' and when Jackson snapped in reply:
'I dare say Peter used rough language aboard his ship, too,' the young man stormed from the cabin.
Late that night, when Healy was more or less recovered from his bout with the bottle, Jackson went to the captain's quarters, allowed the parrot to rest on his left shoulder, and said: 'Michael, I'm afraid you and I have constructed permanent enemies in your young officers. They can't understand why you don't behave like a storybook sea captain, and they certainly think I ought to be like every minister they knew back home.'
'They're young, Sheldon. Never had to captain a ship. Never chased the Erebus back and forth across the Bering Sea.'
'They think I ought to condemn you because of your blasphemy and your drinking.'
'I think you should, too. But on the other hand, I think you forgot you were a minister of the Lord when you made young Father Dmitri turn Presbyterian in order to keep the church we gave him.' To halt such lugubrious thoughts, Healy snapped his fingers:
'They want us to be gods, but we're only men.'
The two reprobates talked long into the cold night, speculating now and then on what the young officers might be plotting.
THEY SOON FOUND OUT, FOR WHEN THE BEAR DOUBLED back to Kodiak with three prisoners taken at the Pribilofs, the officers dispatched a telegram to the headquarters of the revenue cutter service in San Francisco, lodging serious charges against their commanding officer:
Michael Healy, captain of the revenue cutter Bear, has been consistently drunk on duty to the impairment of his responsibilities, has repeatedly used vulgar and abusive language against his officers and men, and has behaved with extreme cruelty to nine American sailors from the whaler Adam Foster.
As officers under his command, we request that he be court-martialed.
By the time the Bear returned to its duty station off the coast of Siberia, the Adam Foster had docked in San Francisco, giving the local newspaper people a horrendous account of its run-in with the Bear and of Captain Healy's unwarranted tricing up of nine American sailors.
However, in the scandal that developed in the California papers, a force much more powerful than the captain of the Adam Foster entered the guerilla warfare against Mike Healy. Mrs. Danfor
th Weigle, president of the San Francisco Woman's Christian Temperance Union, had been searching for some time to find a foolproof case against some ship's captain who abused his men while under the influence of John Barleycorn, and when she read the lurid accounts of Mike Healy's behavior, she and her entire membership lodged formal complaints against him, demanding that he be summoned home, court-martialed, and dismissed from the service. Now all the envious people who had felt that this Negro mariner was growing bigger than his britches united to call for his trial and dismissal.
Bowing to the public clamor and especially to the pressures brought by the W.C.T.U., Healy's superiors had no alternative but to wire him at Kodiak to return immediately to San Francisco to defend himself in a general court-martial against charges of drunkenness, gross and improper behavior toward subordinates and, in the case of nine American sailors, the use of cruel punishment long outmoded in the navies of civilized nations.
He had left Kodiak long before the telegram arrived and spent the summer in the far reaches of the northern seas. During his sail south at the end of the season he learned of the statements made against him, and discussed them with Reverend Jackson: 'They mean to do me in, Sheldon. The captain of the Adam Foster bringing charges! I should have had him hanged from his own yardarm.'
It was Jackson who foresaw the real danger in the threatened court-martial: 'The women, Michael. They'll prove the most powerful of your enemies. I've always found the women to be the final arbiters.'
'Can I count upon you for support?'
'To the end, but I am worried.'
'You'll come to San Francisco? Testify for me?'
'You're the best captain there's ever been in the Bering Sea, Russian or American.'
'James Cook was up here, you know.'
'I didn't include the English.'
So it was agreed that Healy and Jackson would make a united stand against the considerable forces arrayed against the former, but Jackson's promised testimony did not come to pass, because when the Bear put into Sitka to disembark him, the doughty little clergyman faced a kind of court-martial of his own, for a special investigator with plenipotentiary powers had been dispatched from Washington to check upon the numerous charges of malfeasance lodged against him. Although he was not thrown into jail this time, it was obvious that he would not be able to go to San Francisco to testify in defense of his friend, for he had to save his own neck.
THE COURT-MARTIAL OF MICHAEL HEALY WAS A SOLEMN, miserable affair. Five senior officers from the nation's armed services sat in judgment of a popular hero gone sour, and the very newspapers which had inflated his reputation as the savior of the north now seemed to revel in his debasement as a tyrant, a brute, a foul-mouthed rascal and a drunk, but this was understandable, because in the opening days of the trial the evidence against him was devastating. Clean-looking young sailors from the Adam Foster testified, one after another, that whereas they had done nothing wrong, 'merely tried to protect our ship, as you gentlemen would do, he conies aboard, abuses us, and trices us up.' They explained in harrowing detail what trice up meant, and one man showed the court scars that resulted from the seven-minute ordeal when handcuffs had cut into his wrists. The marks were vivid.
The nails were hammered into Healy's coffin by Mrs. Danforth Weigle, of the W.C.T.U., who had long visualized this trial as the triumph of her organization's fight against alcohol on American ships. A fine-looking woman, with a low, cultured voice and not a crusading harridan at all, she made an impressive witness, for her testimony was brief and to the point: 'American sailors have for too long been victimized by drunken brutes who have tyrannized their men once they sailed from port and left the protection of courts ashore. No case more savage than that of Captain Michael Healy has come to our attention, and we demand that he be sent to jail for his crimes and dropped from the service of the United States.'
She asked that members of her committee who specialized in legal aspects of the problem be allowed to testify, and these ladies completed the devastating case against the black officer. When the prosecution closed, most observers in the stuffy courtroom supposed that Healy's fate was sealed, and stories resembling obituaries appeared in the papers, lamenting this deplorable conclusion to a career which had had its moments of nobility, as when the Bear, on various rescue missions, saved many sailors whose ships were trapped in ice.
But traditions of the sea run deep, and when the prosecution rested, a parade of the ordinary seamen whose lives Mike Healy had saved from shipwreck came forward to testify in his behalf. Junior officers who had served under him were eager to tell of how his indomitable will had saved the Bear when crushing in the ice pack seemed inevitable. A representative of the Russian Empire told the court of how, when he was stationed in Petropavlovsk, his officers looked to Mike Healy and the Bear as their right arm along the Siberian coast, and there was a moment of terrible drama when a survivor of a shipwreck at Point Hope took the stand:
'We lost our ship when the ice come in sudden in October. We was nine men made it ashore. The rest went down.'
'Did you get any ship's supplies ashore with you?'
'Some.'
'How long were you marooned?'
'Till June next year.'
'How did you survive?'
'We built lean-tos against the wind. Driftwood.'
'I mean eat? What did you eat?'
'We shot two caribou. We rationed careful. We ate bacon rind, anything.' Here he paused, looked away from the court, and sought the eyes of his salvation, Mike Healy.
'Then he come with the Bear.'
'Go on. What then?'
In a very low voice, which did not reach to the back of the room, he said: 'He knew from lookin' that in April and May when there were no caribou, no stores, we'd been forced to eat the bodies of them as died.'
The last words were lost in whisper, and the court asked the sailor to repeat, but a man in the front row of the audience said clearly: 'They were cannibals,' and the room fell into confusion. When order was restored, the sailor said: 'Captain Healy knowed what we'd done ... been forced to do, that is ... and he took us under his wing like we was his children. No sermons, no lectures. I remember exactly what he said: "We are all men of the sea. We plow a fearful furrow."'
The room was silent as the sailor stepped down, and at that juncture it was clear that the five-man court was not at all as certain of Healy's guilt as it had been the day before, but he would still have been found guilty of at least certain charges had there not been a commotion at the rear of the court, with the marshal shouting:
'You can't go in there!' and a gruff voice responding: 'We're goin' in!' and into the proceedings came a six-foot-four mariner with a huge head of snowy white hair and beard, followed by two junior officers and an ordinary seaman.
'Who are you, barging in like this?' the president of the court demanded, and the intruder said: 'Cap'n Emil Schransky, Erebus, out of New Bedford,' and he said that since maritime matters were under judgment here, he demanded a right to testify.
'Would your testimony be pertinent?' the presiding officer asked, and he replied:
'It would.'
He was allowed to come forward, and without even looking at his old enemy, he began in a restrained voice: 'If there is any San Francisco newspaperman present, he'll be able to verify that for better'n ten years me and Mike Healy, the man on trial, fought each other up and down the Bering Sea. He was for the Eskimo, I didn't give a damn. He was against pelagic sealin', it was my gold mine. He fought anyone who brought rum or molasses to the Eskimos, I didn't. Year after year I outwitted him because I always had the best ship. Then he got the Bear with its steam engine and defeated me. Almost sunk me. Threatened to shoot me if I ever invaded his sea again. I said to myself: Schransky, you had the best ship and did what you pleased. Now he has the best ship and he'll do what he pleases.'
'But what did you do?'
'I said: "Let him run the Bering as he likes. The Pacific is a big pla
ce."I left.'
'Why did you come here today?'
'Because me and my men read what you were doin' to Mike Healy. What the people from the Adam Foster whined about. The Adam Foster'.
What a pitiful ship. What a ship to bring charges against anybody. My men wouldn't waste time spittin' at the Adam Foster,' and his three associates nodded.
'And these good women ravin' about his drinkin'. What did he do when he finally captured the Erebus! Dumped all our rum and molasses down the scuppers. Ask the Adam Foster what he did when he captured them. I'll bet they'll say first thing he did was dump their rum. Healy was fierce against alcohol for Eskimos.'
He concluded his testimony with a surprising statement: 'I fought Healy for a decade, and always I had the best ship. But he fought me like a tiger, because he represents the best traditions of the sea. Even a master ship like the Bear is no good unless it has a master like Healy. That damned nigger with his parrot drove me from the arctic seas, and no lesser man could've done it. And if we went to sea again, we'd still fight, and the man with the best ship would win.' From the witness stand he saluted his longtime enemy and retired to the back of the room followed by his men.
The judges filed out, returned after the briefest possible consultation, and rendered their verdict: 'The citizens who lodged charges against Captain Michael Healy did not do so frivolously. His actions must have seemed deplorable to them. But the sea is governed by noble traditions accumulated through centuries and from the experience of many nations. Unless they are enforced by captains like Michael Healy, no ship can sail safely. This court finds him Not Guilty on all charges.' The audience, divided sixty percent for conviction, forty for acquittal, groaned and cheered while Emil Schransky rose from his seat, uttered a wild yell, and saluted Healy once more.
When order was restored, the court continued with its verdict: 'But since not even the ablest captain can be allowed free rein for intemperate behavior at sea or for abusive language directed against his subordinates, this court must take into account that on three past occasions Captain Healy has received severe reprimands for drunkenness and misconduct, 1872, 1888, 1890. We recommend that he be deprived of command for a period of two years.'