The American and the Japanese schooners were not always quite good
friends, and there is a queer story of a triangular duel between three
vessels, fought in a fog. Mr. Kipling had the _Rhyme of the Three
Sealers_, he told me, from Captain Lake in Yokohama. I had it from
the mate of one of the three schooners, _The Stella_. She changed
her name to _Adele_, and the mate became master, a little, round,
fox-faced Norseman, Hans Hansen, of Christiania. In 1884 the _Adele_
was captured by an American gunboat and taken to San Francisco. Hansen
said that he and his men were marched through the streets shackled, and
great was the howl about pirates, but when the case came up for trial
the court had no jurisdiction, and the ship was released. From that
event dates the name “Yokohama Pirates,” and Hansen’s nickname as the
Flying Dutchman. Because at the time of capture he had for once been a
perfectly innocent deep sea sealer, he swore everlasting war against
the United States, transferred his ship to the port of Victoria,
British Columbia, and would hoist by turns the British, Japanese,
German, Norwegian or even American flag, as suited his convenience.
Once when I asked him why not the Black Flag, he grinned, remarking
that them old-fashioned pirates had no business sense. Year after
year he raided the forbidden islands to subvert the garrisons, rob
warehouses, or plunder the rookeries, while gunboats of four nations
failed to effect his capture. In port he was a pattern of innocent
virtue, at sea his superb seamanship made him as hard to catch as a
ghost, and his adventures beat the _Arabian Nights_. I was with him
as an ordinary seaman in the voyage of 1889, a winter raid upon the
Pribilof Islands. At the first attempt we clawed off a lee shore in a
hurricane, the second resulted in a mutiny, and the third landing was
not very successful, because the boats were swamped, and the garrison
a little too prevalent ashore. On the voyage of 1890 the _Adele_ took
four hundred skins, but in 1891 was cast away on the North Island
of the Queen Charlotte group, without any loss of life. The Flying
Dutchman took to mining on the outer coast of Vancouver, where he
rescued a shipwrecked crew, but afterward perished in the attempt to
save a drowning Indian.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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