The El Dorado was a five-masted schooner, twelve years old, and left Astoria, Oregon, for Antofagasta, Chile, on a Friday, more than seven months before, with a crew of eleven all told:  the captain, two mates, a Japanese cook, and seven men before the mast.  She was a man-killer, as sailors term sailing ships poorly equipped and undermanned.  The crew were of all sorts, the usual waterfront unemployed, wretchedly paid and badly treated.  The niggardliness of owners of ships caused them to pick up their crews at haphazard by paying crimps to herd them from lodging-houses and saloons an hour or two before sailing to save a day’s wages.  Once aboard, they were virtual slaves, subject to the whims and brutality of the officers, and forfeiting liberty and even life if they refused to submit to all conditions imposed by these petty bosses.

Often the crimps brought aboard as sailors men who had never set foot on a vessel.  On the El Dorado few were accustomed mariners, and the first few weeks were passed in adjusting crew and officers to one another, and to the routine of the overloaded schooner.  When they were fifteen days out they spoke a vessel, which reported them, and after that they saw no other.  The mate was a bucko, a slugger, according to Steve, and was hated by all, for most of them during the throes of seasickness had had a taste of his fists.

On the seventy-second day out the El Dorado was twenty-seven hundred miles off the coast of Chile, having run a swelling semicircle to get the benefit of the southeast trades, and being far south of Antofagasta.  That was the way of the wind, which forced a ship from Oregon to Chile to swing far out from the coast, and make a deep southward dip before catching the south-west trades, which would likely stay by her to her port of discharge.

They had sailed on a Friday, and on Wednesday, the eleventh of the third month following, their real troubles began.  Steve’s diary, as interpreted by him, after the foregoing, was substantially as follows, the color being all his: 

“From the day we sailed we were at the pumps for two weeks to bale the old tub out.  Then she swelled, and the seams became tight.  There was bad weather from the time we crossed the Astoria bar.  The old man would carry on because he was in a hurry to make a good run.  The mate used to beat us, and it’s a wonder we didn’t kill him.  We used to lie awake in our watch below and think of what we’d do to him when we got him ashore.  All the men were sore on him.  He cursed us all the time, and the captain said nothing.  You can’t hit back, you know.  He would strike us and kick us for fun.  I felt sure he’d be murdered; but when we got into difficulty and could have tossed him over, we never made a motion.