off. Instead of cutting through the island with its tangled growth, which could trip a man carrying a tray of seedlings, we went straight down the beach, the sailors bearing the plants grouped in a body and the forty-odd shipmates behind and to each side, as though convoying them. Signalman Third Alice Bixby walked alongside me toting the portable signal light with which we could keep contact with the ship and they with us for any emergency or peril that might arise on sea or land. (As for the latter there had been murmurings among the crew, not entirely frivolous ones, that there might be eyes watching us from within the island’s deep growth. I could only reassure them that if so, there was nothing we could do about it but hope that they were more curious than hostile, since I was not about to mount a land campaign to sweep the island of imaginary unfriendlies. We were too in a hurry to have time for that.) Southerly we moved until we came to a path opening from the beach, cleared by a crew a couple of days back, in accordance with Delaney’s unstinting foresight, of the brush that blockaded the approach to the ridge. We went into it single file. Soon we were cutting around the clear-running stream where we could see the pebbles glistening on the bottom. We started up the hill and between the trees in the sweet early morning light, which nonetheless spoke of a cruder sun to come, and finally came out on the meadowlike plateau with its long silky lime-green grass, stirring ever so slightly now in a wisp of breeze coming over the duny cliff from the sea just beyond. There we could see our destroyer standing out, gray and motionless, the solitary mark on the endless ocean blue. Under a grove of green trees on ground which Delaney’s men, on the preparatory mission two days back, had cleared and leveled for the purpose, the gunner’s mate directed the men to place the trays gently down and soon they rested there, clusters in the shade of the trees. Their sailor-bearers sighed as if glad at last to be relieved of a fearsome responsibility. The seedlings stood safe and waiting alongside the soil which we hoped earnestly would accept them.
With the exactitude we might render to any naval operation, Delaney had planned this one. He took charge now, radiating a knowledge of farming as conclusively as he might, in another context, of naval gunnery, of nuclear missiles. The sailors, as sailors always are, seemed glad to follow a man who knew what he was doing. His instructions came with a crisp precision; under his superintendence the men turned to with a will.
First he made up four plowing teams, each astutely constituted. A pair of the biggest and strongest men in ship’s company, previously chosen, were hitched to a grapnel plow fashioned to Delaney’s specifications, navigated behind in each instance by a farm boy the gunner’s mate had found among the crew. The heart of the rig was a pair of strong boards, essentially two-by-fours, cut by Noisy Travis, one laid across the backs, at waist level, of the pulling men, the other attached to the grappling iron itself; connecting the two, Boatswain’s Mate Second Class Singer, who was a master of marlinspike seamanship, of moorings and hitches of all kind, secured and lashed lines around the pulling team’s hips and shoulders thence to the plow. The big sailors in the hitches stood patiently for Singer’s rigging, somber and curious as to their new employment. One of them was Boatswain’s Mate First Class Preston, imposing as a Santa Gertrudis bull. Machinist’s Mate First Class Andrew Brewster, an engine-room man as opposed to Preston’s weather-deck domain, stood by him as his plowmate. Both were thirty-year Navy men. I felt quite certain neither had ever seen a farm, certainly not seen one worked.
“I’ll be watching close to see that you pull your weight, Boats,” Brewster said to his partner in the hitch. “Below decks, Preston, we know what to do with a man that
With the exactitude we might render to any naval operation, Delaney had planned this one. He took charge now, radiating a knowledge of farming as conclusively as he might, in another context, of naval gunnery, of nuclear missiles. The sailors, as sailors always are, seemed glad to follow a man who knew what he was doing. His instructions came with a crisp precision; under his superintendence the men turned to with a will.
First he made up four plowing teams, each astutely constituted. A pair of the biggest and strongest men in ship’s company, previously chosen, were hitched to a grapnel plow fashioned to Delaney’s specifications, navigated behind in each instance by a farm boy the gunner’s mate had found among the crew. The heart of the rig was a pair of strong boards, essentially two-by-fours, cut by Noisy Travis, one laid across the backs, at waist level, of the pulling men, the other attached to the grappling iron itself; connecting the two, Boatswain’s Mate Second Class Singer, who was a master of marlinspike seamanship, of moorings and hitches of all kind, secured and lashed lines around the pulling team’s hips and shoulders thence to the plow. The big sailors in the hitches stood patiently for Singer’s rigging, somber and curious as to their new employment. One of them was Boatswain’s Mate First Class Preston, imposing as a Santa Gertrudis bull. Machinist’s Mate First Class Andrew Brewster, an engine-room man as opposed to Preston’s weather-deck domain, stood by him as his plowmate. Both were thirty-year Navy men. I felt quite certain neither had ever seen a farm, certainly not seen one worked.
“I’ll be watching close to see that you pull your weight, Boats,” Brewster said to his partner in the hitch. “Below decks, Preston, we know what to do with a man that
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