Memoirs of Lloyd Moss: 1927
One amusing incident I remember was in connection with the taking on of the meat supplies. The cold storage rooms were four decks down below the engineers' living quarters. It was so arranged that the loading hatches were located exactly over each other so that they could all be opened up and stores could be lowered from the top deck straight down to the bilge deck. To speed the operation they simply put a heavy help mattress fender on the bottom and simply dropped frozen meat all the way down and men down below grabbed it and hung it in the cold rooms. Well, when hams began dropping past the engineers' berth deck one big water tender named Johnson grabbed a baseball bat and swung it at them as they went by. When he hit one it sometimes was diverted far enough over to land on our deck and somebody grabbed it up and rushed it down to the engine room and hit it away. Which meant that on late night watches for some time to come you could smell ham cooking on a little hot plate down under the main condensers somewhere.
It was quite a trip across the Pacific at a nearly constant speed of 25 knots. We broke the existing record for traveling between Honolulu and Shanghai. As before, the landing force was kept busy practicing with machine guns on the fantail deck and there was almost constant loading drills on the turret guns. The noise and vibration on light cruisers at that speed made it far from comfortable but we were so excited that we never noticed that. The first thing we saw as we neared the China coast was a tall pillar of rock called "Lot's Wife" sticking up out of the ocean with nothing else visible anywhere. Some hours later the ocean's color had changed to a muddy hue and we had the instinctive feeling that we were in shallow water. The ship was slowed down considerably and after awhile they first grey coastline of China formed itself on the horizon.
The next thing we knew we were entering the mouth of the Yangtze river with only one bank visible and then were passing what someone said was Woosung Forts and we started up the winding Whangpoo river which is joined to the Yangtze Kiang at this point. The Whangpoo is not a large river but it is navigable to all types of vessels for the approximate 20 miles into the city of Shanghai. It is hard to put into words the impressions we had on that short trip from Woosung to Shanghai. It was like going through Alice's rabbit hole and coming up in ancient Cathay. In the river itself were junks and sampans exactly like the old museum prints and populated with people to match. On shore we saw old men tending their dip nets suspended on poles like the old-fashioned well sweeps. The land was level as far away in the distance as we could see and all cut up into little fields with raised paths between. Almost all the farming was done by hand with only an occasional water buffalo pulling a rough plow. Everywhere were coolies with poles across their shoulders and a five gallon oil can suspended from each end carrying nightsoil to the growing plants. Here and there along the big path that ran along the high river were little groups of Chinese soldiers in blue cottonsuits with wrap-around leggings. And once we saw a high-wheeled wheelbarrow being pushed along it and riding on it were six girls apparently headed for a small factory building a little further along the river.
The absence of any kind of trees gave a strange look to the landscape and the houses stood in little clusters and were the same color as the earth and seemed to be made of woven bamboo, reeds, straw and mud. Finally we rounded a bend of the river and saw the beginning of the city. On the left was the wire-enclosed Standard Oil Compound, composed of oil drum storage buildings, a glass factory for making lamp chimnies and the docks and warehouses, called GoDowns in China, and hordes of coolies all dressed alike in blue cotton and wide straw hats. The women in blue cotton pants and loose overjackets. The coolie men were much the same except that they stripped down to next to nothing depending on how hard they were working and how warm the day was. The shop-keepers and overseer type men were in black or blue gowns and wore felt slippers on their feet.