Elmer stows away to Cranberry

Elmer stows away to Cranberry by turning an ordinary grain bag into a hiding place. The episode makes his passage depend not on speed or force but on patient concealment, an improvised disguise, and the sailors’ mistaken interpretation of what they are handling. Its destination is also a turning point: once ashore, Elmer can continue his journey toward Wild Island.

Circumstances and Improvised Disguise

Elmer spends six days and nights hidden in the ship’s hold. Twice, when the ship stops to take on more cargo, he nearly gets caught. The danger is specific: if the sailors find him, they will send him home. When he hears that the next port is Cranberry, where the wheat will be unloaded, he recognizes a chance to leave the ship without being discovered.

His disguise is made from what he has at hand: a rubber band and an empty grain bag whose label says Cranberry. At the last moment, he climbs inside the bag with his knapsack, folds the top inward, and secures it with the band. The plan is makeshift rather than convincing. Elmer knows that his bag does not look quite like the others, but it is the best concealment he can manage. The small details of the arrangement matter: the label identifies the intended destination, while the folded top and rubber band turn the bag into a container that can be moved with the cargo.

The Cargo Inspection

The sailors lower a large net into the hold and begin moving the wheat bags. One notices that Elmer’s bag is lumpy and calls attention to how odd it looks, even as its label indicates that it belongs in the Cranberry shipment. Elmer responds by trying harder to look like a bag of wheat, a comic reversal in which a person must perform the appearance of cargo while people inspect him as an object.

The inspection brings him close to discovery. Another sailor feels the bag and happens to touch Elmer’s elbow. But instead of identifying a stowaway, the sailor decides that the bag contains dried corn on the cob. He tips Elmer into the net with the wheat. The misunderstanding does not simply spare Elmer; it carries him through the unloading process. His disguise succeeds because the sailor finds an explanation for the bag’s strange shape that fits the shipment well enough to stop asking questions.

The False Count and Escape

The timing of the unloading gives Elmer another advantage. The wheat merchant does not count the bags until the next morning, because the delivery arrives so late in the afternoon. Before leaving, the sailors report the contents to the captain, who writes down that they delivered 160 bags of wheat and one bag of dried corn on the cob. The written tally preserves the mistake after the men who handled the cargo have sailed away.

The merchant spends the following day counting and recounting the wheat and feeling each bag in search of the missing corn. He never finds it: after dark, Elmer climbs out, folds the bag, and puts it back in his knapsack. The episode’s escape depends on a chain of ordinary delays and errors—the late delivery, the next-morning count, the captain’s inaccurate record, and the merchant’s unsuccessful search. None is a dramatic confrontation, but together they give Elmer time to slip away unseen.

Significance in the Journey

The stowaway episode marks the change from hiding aboard a ship to moving freely on land. Elmer has endured six days and nights in the hold, yet arrival does not immediately make him safe; he still has to evade detection during unloading and wait until darkness to leave the bag. The sequence presents resourcefulness as a practical process: he listens for the next port, uses a label and rubber band to adapt the materials available, and takes advantage of the sailors’ and merchant’s assumptions.

The comic mismatch between Elmer and the cargo also gives the episode its particular shape. He is at once an alert traveler and, in the sailors’ handling of the shipment, a supposed bag of wheat or dried corn. The captain’s precise tally makes the absurdity durable: the paper records a delivery that includes an item the merchant cannot locate, while the missing item has already walked away. By the time the merchant searches, the cargo’s supposed anomaly has become a false trail. Elmer’s success here is not that he becomes indistinguishable from the wheat, but that other people settle on an explanation for him before they discover who he is.