The _Helen Mar_ carried no guano, and
charged freightage accordingly for being clean. Drygoods she'd
brought out from New York, linens, cottons, tinware, shoes, and an
outfit of furniture for a Chilian millionaire's house, including a
half-dozen baby carriages, and a consignment of silk stockings and
patent medicines. Now she was going back, expecting to pick up a
cargo of rubber and cocoa and what not, along the West Coast. Captain
Goodwin was master, and it happened he was short of hands, including
his cook. He hired Stevey Todd for cook, and shipped the rest of us
willing enough. It was in October as I recollect it, and sometime in
November when we came to lie in the harbour of the city of Portate.
Portate is about seven hundred miles below the equator, and has a
harbour at the mouth of a river called the Jiron, and even in those
days it was an important place, as being at the end of a pass over
the Cordilleras. There's a railroad up the pass now, and I hear the
city has trolleys and electric lights, but at that time it hadn't
much excitement except internal rumblings and explosions, meaning it
had politics and volcanoes. Most of the ships that came to anchor
there belonged to one company called the "British-American Transport
Company," which took most of the rubber and cocoa bark, that came
over the pass on mules--trains of mules with bells on their collars.
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