Cheaper by the Dozen

from the taverns and fleshpots of many exotic ports. Rena was no scow-like catboat, but a sleek four-master, bound around the Horn with a bone in her teeth in search of rare spices and the priceless treasure of the Indies. He insisted that we address him as Captain, instead of Daddy, and every remark must needs be civil and end with a "sir."
    "It's just like when he was in the Army," Ernestine whispered. "Remember those military haircuts for Frank and Bill, and all that business of snapping to attention and learning to salute, and the kitchen police?"
    "Avast there, you swabs," Dad hollered. "No mutinous whispering on the poop deck!"
    Anne, being the oldest, was proclaimed first mate of the Rena. Ernestine was second mate, Martha third, and Frank fourth. All the younger children were able-bodied seamen who, presumably, ate hardtack and bunked before the mast.
    "Seems to be blowing up, mister," Dad said to Anne. "I'll have a reef in that mains'il."
    "Aye, aye, sir."
    "The Rena's just got one sail, Daddy," Lill said. "Is that the mains'il?"
    "Quiet, you landlubber, or you'll get the merrie rope's end. Of course it's the mains'il."
    The merrie rope's end was no idle threat. Able-bodied seamen or mates who failed to leap when Dad barked an order did in fact receive a flogging with a piece of rope. It hurt, too.
    Dad's mood was contagious, and soon the mates were as dogmatic and as full of invective as he, when dealing with the sneaking pickpockets and rum-palsied derelicts who were their subordinates. And, somehow, Dad passed along to us the illusion that placid old Rena was a taunt ship.
    "I'll have those halliards coiled," he told Anne.
    "Aye, aye, sir. Come on you swabs. Look alive now, or shiver my timbers if I don't keel haul the lot of you." Sometimes, without warning, Dad would start to bellow out tuneless chanties about the fifteen men on a dead man's chest and, especially, one that went, "He said heave her to, she replied make it three."
    If there had been any irons aboard, they would have been occupied by the fumbling landlubber or scurvy swab who forgot his duties and made Dad miss the mooring. Dad felt that to have to make a second try for the mooring was the supreme humiliation, and that fellow yachtsmen and professional sea captains all along the waterfront were splitting their sides laughing at him. He'd drop the tiller, grow red in the face, and advance rope in hand on the offender.
    More than once, the scurvy swab made a panic-stricken dive over the side, preferring to swim ashore, where he would cope ultimately with Dad, instead of meeting the captain on the tatter's own quarterdeck.
    On one occasion, when Dad blamed missing a mooring on general inefficiency and picked up a merrie rope's end to inflict merrie mass punishment, the entire crew leaped simultaneously over the side in an unrehearsed abandon-ship maneuver. Only the captain remained at the helm, from which vantage point he hurled threatening reminders about the danger of sharks and the penalties of mutiny. On that occasion, he brought Rena up to the mooring by himself, without any trouble, thus proving something we had long suspected—-that he didn't really need our help at all, but enjoyed teaching us and having a crew to order around.
    Through the years, old Rena remained phlegmatic, paying no apparent attention to the bedlam which had intruded ; into her twilight years. She was too old a seadog to learn new tricks.
    Only once, just for a second, did she display any sign of temperament. It was after a long sail. A fog had come up, and Rena was as clammy as a shower curtain. We had missed the mooring on the first go-round, and the captain was in an ugly mood. We made the mooring all right on the second try. The captain, as was his custom, was standing in the stern, merrie rope in hand, shouting orders about lowering the sail. Just before the sail came down, a squall hit Rena, and she retaliated by whipping her boom savagely across the hull. The captain saw it coming, but didn't have time to duck. The boom caught him on the side of the head with a terrific clout, a blow hard enough to lift him off his feet and tumble him, stomach first, into the water.
    The captain didn't come up for almost a minute. The crew, while losing little love for their captain, become frightened for their Daddy. We were just about to dive in after him when a pair of feet emerged from the water and the toes wiggled. We knew everything was all right then. The feet