CHAPTER V
That was the
first of many talks with Dan, who told Harvey why he would transfer his dory's
name to the imaginary Burgess-modelled haddocker. Harvey heard a good deal
about the real Hattie at Gloucester; saw a lock of her hair—which Dan, finding
fair words of no avail, had "hooked" as she sat in front of him at
school that winter—and a photograph. Hattie was about fourteen years old, with
an awful contempt for boys, and had been trampling on Dan's heart through the
winter. All this was revealed under oath of solemn secrecy on moonlit decks, in
the dead dark, or in choking fog; the whining wheel behind them, the climbing
deck before, and without, the unresting, clamorous sea. Once, of course, as the
boys came to know each other, there was a fight, which raged from bow to stern
till Penn came up and separated them, but promised not to tell Disko, who
thought fighting on watch rather worse than sleeping. Harvey was no match for
Dan physically, but it says a great deal for his new training that he took his
defeat and did not try to get even with his conqueror by underhand methods.
That was after he
had been cured of a string of boils between his elbows and wrists, where the
wet jersey and oilskins cut into the flesh. The salt water stung them
unpleasantly, but when they were ripe Dan treated them with Disko's razor, and
assured Harvey that now he was a "blooded Banker"; the affliction of
gurry-sores being the mark of the caste that claimed him.
Since he was a
boy and very busy, he did not bother his head with too much thinking. He was
exceedingly sorry for his mother, and often longed to see her and above all to
tell her of this wonderful new life, and how brilliantly he was acquitting
himself in it. Otherwise he preferred not to wonder too much how she was
bearing the shock of his supposed death. But one day, as he stood on the
foc'sle ladder, guying the cook, who had accused him and Dan of hooking fried
pies, it occurred to him that this was a vast improvement on being snubbed by
strangers in the smoking-room of a hired liner.
He was a
recognized part of the scheme of things on the We're Here; had his place at the
table and among the bunks; and could hold his own in the long talks on stormy
days, when the others were always ready to listen to what they called his
"fairy-tales" of his life ashore. It did not take him more than two
days and a quarter to feel that if he spoke of his own life—it seemed very far
away—no one except Dan (and even Dan's belief was sorely tried) credited him.
So he invented a friend, a boy he had heard of, who drove a miniature four-pony
drag in Toledo, Ohio, and ordered five suits of clothes at a time and led
things called "germans" at parties where the oldest girl was not
quite fifteen, but all the presents were solid silver. Salters protested that
this kind of yarn was desperately wicked, if not indeed positively blasphemous,
but he listened as greedily as the others; and their criticisms at the end gave
Harvey entirely new notions on "germans," clothes, cigarettes with
gold-leaf tips, rings, watches, scent, small dinner-parties, champagne,
card-playing, and hotel accommodation. Little by little he changed his tone
when speaking of his "friend," whom Long Jack had christened
"the Crazy Kid," "the Gilt-edged Baby," "the Suckin'
Vanderpoop," and other pet names; and with his sea-booted feet cocked up
on the table would even invent histories about silk pajamas and specially
imported neckwear, to the "friend's" discredit. Harvey was a very
adaptable person, with a keen eye and ear for every face and tone about him.
Before long he
knew where Disko kept the old greencrusted quadrant that they called the
"hog-yoke"—under the bed-bag in his bunk. When he took the sun, and
with the help of "The Old Farmer's" almanac found the latitude, Harvey
would jump down into the cabin and scratch the reckoning and date with a nail
on the rust of the stove-pipe. Now, the chief engineer of the liner could have
done no more, and no engineer of thirty years' service could have assumed one
half of the ancient-mariner air with which Harvey, first careful to spit over
the side, made public the schooner's position for that day, and then and not
till then relieved Disko of the quadrant. There is an etiquette in all these
things.
The said
"hog-yoke," an Eldridge chart, the farming almanac, Blunt's
"Coast Pilot," and Bowditch's "Navigator" were all the
weapons Disko needed to guide him, except the deep-sea lead that was his spare
eye. Harvey nearly slew Penn with it when Tom Platt taught him first how to
"fly the blue pigeon"; and, though his strength was not equal to
continuous sounding in any sort of a sea, for calm weather with a seven-pound
lead on shoal water Disko used him freely. As Dan said:
"'Tain't
soundin's dad wants. It's samples. Grease her up good, Harve." Harvey
would tallow the cup at the end, and carefully bring the sand, shell, sludge,
or whatever it might be, to Disko, who fingered and smelt it and gave judgment
As has been said, when Disko thought of cod he thought as a cod; and by some
long-tested mixture of instinct and experience, moved the We're Here from berth
to berth, always with the fish, as a blindfolded chess-player moves on the
unseen board.
But Disko's board
was the Grand Bank—a triangle two hundred and fifty miles on each side—a waste
of wallowing sea, cloaked with dank fog, vexed with gales, harried with
drifting ice, scored by the tracks of the reckless liners, and dotted with the
sails of the fishing-fleet.
For days they
worked in fog—Harvey at the bell—till, grown familiar with the thick airs, he
went out with Tom Platt, his heart rather in his mouth. But the fog would not
lift, and the fish were biting, and no one can stay helplessly afraid for six
hours at a time. Harvey devoted himself to his lines and the gaff or gob-stick
as Tom Platt called for them; and they rowed back to the schooner guided by the
bell and Tom's instinct; Manuel's conch sounding thin and faint beside them.
But it was an unearthly experience, and, for the first time in a month, Harvey
dreamed of the shifting, smoking floors of water round the dory, the lines that
strayed away into nothing, and the air above that melted on the sea below ten
feet from his straining eyes. A few days later he was out with Manuel on what
should have been forty-fathom bottom, but the whole length of the roding ran
out, and still the anchor found nothing, and Harvey grew mortally afraid, for
that his last touch with earth was lost. "Whale-hole," said Manuel,
hauling in. "That is good joke on Disko. Come!" and he rowed to the
schooner to find Tom Platt and the others jeering at the skipper because, for
once, he had led them to the edge of the barren Whale-deep, the blank hole of
the Grand Bank. They made another berth through the fog, and that time the hair
of Harvey's head stood up when he went out in Manuel's dory. A whiteness moved
in the whiteness of the fog with a breath like the breath of the grave, and
there was a roaring, a plunging, and spouting. It was his first introduction to
the dread summer berg of the Banks, and he cowered in the bottom of the boat
while Manuel laughed. There were days, though, clear and soft and warm, when it
seemed a sin to do anything but loaf over the hand-lines and spank the drifting
"sun-scalds" with an oar; and there were days of light airs, when Harvey
was taught how to steer the schooner from one berth to another.
It thrilled
through him when he first felt the keel answer to his band on the spokes and
slide over the long hollows as the foresail scythed back and forth against the
blue sky. That was magnificent, in spite of Disko saying that it would break a
snake's back to follow his wake. But, as usual, pride ran before a fall. They
were sailing on the wind with the staysail—an old one, luckily—set, and Harvey
jammed her right into it to show Dan how completely he had mastered the art.
The foresail went over with a bang, and the foregaff stabbed and ripped through
the staysail, which was, of course, prevented from going over by the mainstay.
They lowered the wreck in awful silence, and Harvey spent his leisure hours for
the next few days under Tom Platt's lee, learning to use a needle and palm. Dan
hooted with joy, for, as he said, he had made the very same blunder himself in
his early days.
Boylike, Harvey
imitated all the men by turns, till he had combined Disko's peculiar stoop at
the wheel, Long Jack's swinging overhand when the lines were hauled, Manuel's
round-shouldered but effective stroke in a dory, and Tom Platt's generous Ohio
stride along the deck.
"'Tis
beautiful to see how he takes to ut," said Long Jack, when Harvey was
looking out by the windlass one thick noon. "I'll lay my wage an' share
'tis more'n half play-actin' to him, an' he consates himself he's a bowld
mariner. Watch his little bit av a back now!"
"That's the
way we all begin," said Tom Platt. "The boys they make believe all
the time till they've cheated 'emselves into bein' men, an' so till they
die—pretendin' an' pretendin'. I done it on the old Ohio, I know. Stood my
first watch—harbor-watch—feelin' finer'n Farragut. Dan's full o' the same kind
o' notions. See 'em now, actin' to be genewine moss-backs—very hair a rope-yarn
an' blood Stockholm tar." He spoke down the cabin stairs. "Guess
you're mistook in your judgments fer once, Disko. What in Rome made ye tell us
all here the kid was crazy?"
"He
wuz," Disko replied. "Crazy ez a loon when he come aboard; but I'll
say he's sobered up consid'ble sence. I cured him."
"He yarns
good," said Tom Platt. "T'other night he told us abaout a kid of his
own size steerin' a cunnin' little rig an' four ponies up an' down Toledo,
Ohio, I think 'twas, an' givin' suppers to a crowd o' sim'lar kids. Cur'us kind
o' fairy-tale, but blame interestin'. He knows scores of 'em."
"Guess he
strikes 'em outen his own head," Disko called from the cabin, where he was
busy with the logbook. "Stands to reason that sort is all made up. It
don't take in no one but Dan, an' he laughs at it. I've heard him, behind my
back."
"Yever hear
what Sim'on Peter Ca'houn said when they whacked up a match 'twix' his sister
Hitty an' Lorin' Jerauld, an' the boys put up that joke on him daown to
Georges?" drawled Uncle Salters, who was dripping peaceably under the lee
of the starboard dory-nest.
Tom Platt puffed
at his pipe in scornful silence: he was a Cape Cod man, and had not known that
tale more than twenty years. Uncle Salters went on with a rasping chuckie:
"Sim'on
Peter Ca'houn he said, an' he was jest right, abaout Lorin', 'Ha'af on the
taown,' he said, 'an' t'other ha'af blame fool; an' they told me she's married
a 'ich man.' Sim'on Peter Ca'houn he hedn't no roof to his mouth, an' talked
that way."
"He didn't
talk any Pennsylvania Dutch," Tom Platt replied. "You'd better leave
a Cape man to tell that tale. The Ca'houns was gypsies frum 'way back."
"Wal, I don't
profess to be any elocutionist," Salters said. "I'm comin' to the
moral o' things. That's jest abaout what aour Harve be! Ha'af on the taown, an'
t'other ha'af blame fool; an' there's some'll believe he's a rich man.
Yah!"
"Did ye ever
think how sweet 'twould be to sail wid a full crew o' Salterses?" said
Long Jack. "Ha'af in the furrer an' other ha'af in the muck-heap, as
Ca'houn did not say, an' makes out he's a fisherman!"
A little laugh
went round at Salters's expense.
Disko held his
tongue, and wrought over the log-book that he kept in a hatchet-faced, square
hand; this was the kind of thing that ran on, page after soiled page:
"July 17.
This day thick fog and few fish. Made berth to northward. So ends this day.
"July 18.
This day comes in with thick fog. Caught a few fish.
"July 19.
This day comes in with light breeze from N.E. and fine weather. Made a berth to
eastward. Caught plenty fish.
"July 20.
This, the Sabbath, comes in with fog and light winds. So ends this day. Total
fish caught this week, 3,478."
They never worked
on Sundays, but shaved, and washed themselves if it were fine, and Pennsylvania
sang hymns. Once or twice he suggested that, if it was not an impertinence, he
thought he could preach a little. Uncle Salters nearly jumped down his throat
at the mere notion, reminding him that he was not a preacher and mustn't think
of such things. "We'd hev him rememberin' Johns-town next," Salters
explained, "an' what would happen then?" so they compromised on his
reading aloud from a book called "Josephus." It was an old
leather-bound volume, smelling of a hundred voyages, very solid and very like
the Bible, but enlivened with accounts of battles and sieges; and they read it
nearly from cover to cover. Otherwise Penn was a silent little body. He would
not utter a word for three days on end sometimes, though he played checkers,
listened to the songs, and laughed at the stories. When they tried to stir him
up, he would answer: "I don't wish to seem unneighbourly, but it is
because I have nothing to say. My head feels quite empty. I've almost forgotten
my name." He would turn to Uncle Salters with an expectant smile.
"Why,
Pennsylvania Pratt," Salters would shout "You'll fergit me
next!"
"No—never,"
Penn would say, shutting his lips firmly. "Pennsylvania Pratt, of
course," he would repeat over and over. Sometimes it was Uncle Salters who
forgot, and told him he was Haskins or Rich or McVitty; but Penn was equally
content—till next time.
He was always
very tender with Harvey, whom he pitied both as a lost child and as a lunatic;
and when Salters saw that Penn liked the boy, he relaxed, too. Salters was not
an amiable person (He esteemed it his business to keep the boys in order); and
the first time Harvey, in fear and trembling, on a still day, managed to shin
up to the main-truck (Dan was behind him ready to help), he esteemed it his
duty to hang Salters's big sea-boots up there—a sight of shame and derision to
the nearest schooner. With Disko, Harvey took no liberties; not even when the
old man dropped direct orders, and treated him, like the rest of the crew, to
"Don't you want to do so and so?" and "Guess you'd better,"
and so forth. There was something about the clean-shaven lips and the puckered
corners of the eyes that was mightily sobering to young blood.
Disko showed him
the meaning of the thumbed and pricked chart, which, he said, laid over any
government publication whatsoever; led him, pencil in hand, from berth to berth
over the whole string of banks—Le Have, Western, Banquereau, St. Pierre, Green,
and Grand—talking "cod" meantime. Taught him, too, the principle on
which the "hog-yoke" was worked.
In this Harvey
excelled Dan, for he had inherited a head for figures, and the notion of
stealing information from one glimpse of the sullen Bank sun appealed to all
his keen wits. For other sea-matters his age handicapped him. As Disko said, he
should have begun when he was ten. Dan could bait up trawl or lay his hand on
any rope in the dark; and at a pinch, when Uncle Salters had a gurry-score on
his palm, could dress down by sense of touch. He could steer in anything short
of half a gale from the feel of the wind on his face, humouring the We're Here
just when she needed it. These things he did as automatically as he skipped
about the rigging, or made his dory a part of his own will and body. But he
could not communicate his knowledge to Harvey.
Still there was a
good deal of general information flying about the schooner on stormy days, when
they lay up in the foc'sle or sat on the cabin lockers, while spare eye-bolts,
leads, and rings rolled and rattled in the pauses of the talk. Disko spoke of
whaling voyages in the Fifties; of great she-whales slain beside their young;
of death agonies on the black tossing seas, and blood that spurted forty feet
in the air; of boats smashed to splinters; of patent rockets that went off
wrong-end-first and bombarded the trembling crews; of cutting-in and
boiling-down, and that terrible "nip" of '71, when twelve hundred men
were made homeless on the ice in three days—wonderful tales, all true. But more
wonderful still were his stories of the cod, and how they argued and reasoned
on their private businesses deep down below the keel.
Long Jack's
tastes ran more to the supernatural. He held them silent with ghastly stories
of the "Yo-hoes" on Monomoy Beach, that mock and terrify lonely
clam-diggers; of sand-walkers and dune-haunters who were never properly buried;
of hidden treasure on Fire Island guarded by the spirits of Kidd's men; of
ships that sailed in the fog straight over Truro township; of that harbor in
Maine where no one but a stranger will lie at anchor twice in a certain place
because of a dead crew who row alongside at midnight with the anchor in the bow
of their old-fashioned boat, whistling—not calling, but whistling—for the soul
of the man who broke their rest.
Harvey had a
notion that the east coast of his native land, from Mount Desert south, was
populated chiefly by people who took their horses there in the summer and
entertained in country-houses with hardwood floors and Vantine portires. He
laughed at the ghost-tales,—not as much as he would have done a month
before,—but ended by sitting still and shuddering.
Tom Platt dealt
with his interminable trip round the Horn on the old Ohio in flogging days,
with a navy more extinct than the dodo—the navy that passed away in the great
war. He told them how red-hot shot are dropped into a cannon, a wad of wet clay
between them and the cartridge; how they sizzle and reek when they strike wood,
and how the little ship-boys of the Miss Jim Buck hove water over them and
shouted to the fort to try again. And he told tales of blockade—long weeks of
swaying at anchor, varied only by the departure and return of steamers that had
used up their coal (there was no chance for the sailing-ships); of gales and
cold that kept two hundred men, night and day, pounding and chopping at the ice
on cable, blocks, and rigging, when the galley was as red-hot as the fort's
shot, and men drank cocoa by the bucket. Tom Platt had no use for steam. His
service closed when that thing was comparatively new. He admitted that it was a
specious invention in time of peace, but looked hopefully for the day when
sails should come back again on ten-thousand-ton frigates with hundred-and-ninety-foot
booms.
Manuel's talk was
slow and gentle—all about pretty girls in Madeira washing clothes in the dry
beds of streams, by moonlight, under waving bananas; legends of saints, and
tales of queer dances or fights away in the cold Newfoundland baiting-ports.
Salters was mainly agricultural; for, though he read "Josephus" and
expounded it, his mission in life was to prove the value of green manures, and
specially of clover, against every form of phosphate whatsoever. He grew
libellous about phosphates; he dragged greasy "Orange Judd" books
from his bunk and intoned them, wagging his finger at Harvey, to whom it was
all Greek. Little Penn was so genuinely pained when Harvey made fun of
Salters's lectures that the boy gave it up, and suffered in polite silence.
That was very good for Harvey.
The cook
naturally did not join in these conversations. As a rule, he spoke only when it
was absolutely necessary; but at times a queer gift of speech descended on him,
and he held forth, half in Gaelic, half in broken English, an hour at a time.
He was especially communicative with the boys, and he never withdrew his
prophecy that one day Harvey would be Dan's master, and that he would see it.
He told them of mail-carrying in the winter up Cape Breton way, of the dog-train
that goes to Coudray, and of the ram-steamer Arctic, that breaks the ice
between the mainland and Prince Edward Island. Then he told them stories that
his mother had told him, of life far to the southward, where water never froze;
and he said that when he died his soul would go to lie down on a warm white
beach of sand with palm-trees waving above. That seemed to the boys a very odd
idea for a man who had never seen a palm in his life. Then, too, regularly at
each meal, he would ask Harvey, and Harvey alone, whether the cooking was to
his taste; and this always made the "second half" laugh. Yet they had
a great respect for the cook's judgment, and in their hearts considered Harvey
something of a mascot by consequence.
And while Harvey
was taking in knowledge of new things at each pore and hard health with every
gulp of the good air, the We're Here went her ways and did her business on the
Bank, and the silvery-gray kenches of well-pressed fish mounted higher and
higher in the hold. No one day's work was out of common, but the average days
were many and close together.
Naturally, a man
of Disko's reputation was closely watched—"scrowged upon," Dan called
it—by his neighbours, but he had a very pretty knack of giving them the slip
through the curdling, glidy fog-banks. Disko avoided company for two reasons.
He wished to make his own experiments, in the first place; and in the second,
he objected to the mixed gatherings of a fleet of all nations. The bulk of them
were mainly Gloucester boats, with a scattering from Provincetown, Harwich,
Chatham, and some of the Maine ports, but the crews drew from goodness knows
where. Risk breeds recklessness, and when greed is added there are fine chances
for every kind of accident in the crowded fleet, which, like a mob of sheep, is
huddled round some unrecognized leader. "Let the two Jeraulds lead
'em," said Disko. "We're baound to lay among 'em for a spell on the
Eastern Shoals; though ef luck holds, we won't hev to lay long. Where we are
naow, Harve, ain't considered noways good graound."
"Ain't
it?" said Harvey, who was drawing water (he had learned just how to wiggle
the bucket), after an unusually long dressing-down. "Shouldn't mind
striking some poor ground for a change, then."
"All the
graound I want to see—don't want to strike her—is Eastern Point," said
Dan. "Say, Dad, it looks's if we wouldn't hev to lay more'n two weeks on
the Shoals. You'll meet all the comp'ny you want then, Harve. That's the time
we begin to work. No reg'lar meals fer no one then. 'Mug-up when ye're hungry,
an' sleep when ye can't keep awake. Good job you wasn't picked up a month later
than you was, or we'd never ha' had you dressed in shape fer the Old
Virgin."
Harvey understood
from the Eldridge chart that the Old Virgin and a nest of curiously named
shoals were the turning-point of the cruise, and that with good luck they would
wet the balance of their salt there. But seeing the size of the Virgin (it was
one tiny dot), he wondered how even Disko with the hog-yoke and the lead could find
her. He learned later that Disko was entirely equal to that and any other
business and could even help others. A big four-by-five blackboard hung in the
cabin, and Harvey never understood the need of it till, after some blinding
thick days, they heard the unmelodious tooting of a foot-power fog-horn—a
machine whose note is as that of a consumptive elephant.
They were making
a short berth, towing the anchor under their foot to save trouble.
"Square-rigger bellowin' fer his latitude," said Long Jack. The dripping
red head-sails of a bark glided out of the fog, and the We're Here rang her
bell thrice, using sea shorthand.
The larger boat
backed her topsail with shrieks and shoutings.
"Frenchman,"
said Uncle Salters, scornfully. "Miquelon boat from St. Malo." The
farmer had a weatherly sea-eye. "I'm 'most outer 'baccy, too, Disko."
"Same
here," said Tom Platt. "Hi! Backez vous—backez vous! Standez awayez,
you butt-ended mucho-bono! Where you from—St. Malo, eh?"
"Ah, ha! Mucho bono! Oui! oui! Clos
Poulet—St. Malo! St. Pierre et Miquelon," cried the other crowd, waving
woollen caps and laughing. Then all together, "Bord! Bord!"
"Bring up
the board, Danny. Beats me how them Frenchmen fetch anywheres, exceptin'
America's fairish broadly. Forty-six forty-nine's good enough fer them; an' I
guess it's abaout right, too."
Dan chalked the
figures on the board, and they hung it in the main-rigging to a chorus of
mercis from the bark.
"Seems
kinder uneighbourly to let 'em swedge off like this," Salters suggested,
feeling in his pockets.
"Hev ye
learned French then sence last trip?" said Disko. "I don't want no
more stone-ballast hove at us 'long o' your callin' Miquelon boats 'footy
cochins,' same's you did off Le Have."
"Harmon Rush
he said that was the way to rise 'em. Plain United States is good enough fer
me. We're all dretful short on terbakker. Young feller, don't you speak
French?"
"Oh,
yes," said Harvey valiantly; and he bawled: "Hi! Say! Arretez vous!
Attendez! Nous sommes venant pour tabac."
"Ah, tabac,
tabac!" they cried, and laughed again.
"That hit
'em. Let's heave a dory over, anyway," said Tom Platt. "I don't
exactly hold no certificates on French, but I know another lingo that goes, I
guess. Come on, Harve, an' interpret."
The raffle and
confusion when he and Harvey were hauled up the bark's black side was
indescribable. Her cabin was all stuck round with glaring coloured prints of
the Virgin—the Virgin of Newfoundland, they called her. Harvey found his French
of no recognized Bank brand, and his conversation was limited to nods and
grins. But Tom Platt waved his arms and got along swimmingly. The captain gave
him a drink of unspeakable gin, and the opera-comique crew, with their hairy
throats, red caps, and long knives, greeted him as a brother. Then the trade
began. They had tobacco, plenty of it—American, that had never paid duty to
France. They wanted chocolate and crackers. Harvey rowed back to arrange with
the cook and Disko, who owned the stores, and on his return the cocoa-tins and
cracker-bags were counted out by the Frenchman's wheel. It looked like a
piratical division of loot; but Tom Platt came out of it roped with black
pigtail and stuffed with cakes of chewing and smoking tobacco. Then those
jovial mariners swung off into the mist, and the last Harvey heard was a gay
chorus:
"Par derriere chez ma tante,
Il'y a un bois joli,
Et le rossignol y
chante
Et le jour et la
nuit....
Que donneriez vous, belle,
Qui l'amenerait ici?
Je donnerai Quebec,
Sorel et Saint
Denis."
"How was it my French didn't go, and your
sign-talk did?" Harvey demanded when the barter had been distributed among
the We're Heres.
"Sign-talk!"
Platt guffawed. "Well, yes, 'twas sign-talk, but a heap older'n your
French, Harve. Them French boats are chockfull o' Freemasons, an' that's
why."
"Are you a
Freemason, then?"
"Looks that
way, don't it?" said the man-o'-war's man, stuffing his pipe; and Harvey
had another mystery of the deep sea to brood upon.
CHAPTER VI
The thing that
struck him most was the exceedingly casual way in which some craft loafed about
the broad Atlantic. Fishing-boats, as Dan said, were naturally dependent on the
courtesy and wisdom of their neighbours; but one expected better things of
steamers. That was after another interesting interview, when they had been
chased for three miles by a big lumbering old cattle-boat, all boarded over on
the upper deck, that smelt like a thousand cattle-pens. A very excited officer
yelled at them through a speaking-trumpet, and she lay and lollopped helplessly
on the water while Disko ran the We're Here under her lee and gave the skipper
a piece of his mind. "Where might ye be—eh? Ye don't deserve to be
anywheres. You barn-yard tramps go hoggin' the road on the high seas with no
blame consideration fer your neighbours, an' your eyes in your coffee-cups
instid o' in your silly heads."
At this the
skipper danced on the bridge and said something about Disko's own eyes.
"We haven't had an observation for three days. D'you suppose we can run
her blind?" he shouted.
"Wa-al, I
can," Disko retorted. "What's come to your lead? Et it? Can't ye
smell bottom, or are them cattle too rank?"
"What d' ye
feed 'em?" said Uncle Salters with intense seriousness, for the smell of
the pens woke all the farmer in him. "They say they fall off dretful on a
v'yage. Dunno as it's any o' my business, but I've a kind o' notion that
oil-cake broke small an' sprinkled—"
"Thunder!"
said a cattle-man in a red jersey as he looked over the side. "What asylum
did they let His Whiskers out of?"
"Young
feller," Salters began, standing up in the fore-rigging, "let me tell
yeou 'fore we go any further that I've—"
The officer on
the bridge took off his cap with immense politeness. "Excuse me," he
said, "but I've asked for my reckoning. If the agricultural person with
the hair will kindly shut his head, the sea-green barnacle with the wall-eye
may per-haps condescend to enlighten us."
"Naow you've
made a show o' me, Salters," said Disko, angrily. He could not stand up to
that particular sort of talk, and snapped out the latitude and longitude
without more lectures.
"Well,
that's a boat-load of lunatics, sure," said the skipper, as he rang up the
engine-room and tossed a bundle of newspapers into the schooner.
"Of all the
blamed fools, next to you, Salters, him an' his crowd are abaout the likeliest
I've ever seen," said Disko as the We're Here slid away. "I was jest
givin' him my jedgment on lullsikin' round these waters like a lost child, an'
you must cut in with your fool farmin'. Can't ye never keep things
sep'rate?"
Harvey, Dan, and
the others stood back, winking one to the other and full of joy; but Disko and
Salters wrangled seriously till evening, Salters arguing that a cattle-boat was
practically a barn on blue water, and Disko insisting that, even if this were
the case, decency and fisher-pride demanded that he should have kept
"things sep'rate." Long Jack stood it in silence for a time,—an angry
skipper makes an unhappy crew,—and then he spoke across the table after supper:
"Fwhat's the
good o' bodderin' fwhat they'll say?" said he.
"They'll
tell that tale agin us fer years—that's all," said Disko. "Oil-cake
sprinkled!"
"With salt,
o' course," said Salters, impenitent, reading the farming reports from a
week-old New York paper.
"It's plumb
mortifyin' to all my feelin's," the skipper went on.
"Can't see
ut that way," said Long Jack, the peacemaker "Look at here, Disko! Is
there another packet afloat this day in this weather cud ha' met a tramp an'
over an' above givin' her her reckonin',—over an' above that, I say,—cud ha'
discoorsed wid her quite intelligent on the management av steers an' such at
sea? Forgit ut! Av coorse they will not. 'Twas the most compenjus conversation
that iver accrued. Double game an' twice runnin'—all to us." Dan kicked
Harvey under the table, and Harvey choked in his cup.
"Well,"
said Salters, who felt that his honour had been somewhat plastered, "I
said I didn't know as 'twuz any business o' mine, 'fore I spoke."
"An' right
there," said Tom Platt, experienced in discipline and
etiquette—"right there, I take it, Disko, you should ha' asked him to stop
ef the conversation wuz likely, in your jedgment, to be anyways—what it
shouldn't."
"Dunno but
that's so," said Disko, who saw his way to an honourable retreat from a
fit of the dignities.
"Why, o'
course it was so," said Salters, "you bein' skipper here; an' I'd
cheerful hev stopped on a hint—not from any leadin' or conviction, but fer the
sake o' bearin' an example to these two blame boys of aours."
"Didn't I
tell you, Harve, 'twould come araound to us 'fore we'd done? Always those blame
boys. But I wouldn't have missed the show fer a half-share in a
halibutter," Dan whispered.
"Still,
things should ha' been kep' sep'rate," said Disko, and the light of new
argument lit in Salters's eye as he crumbled cut plug into his pipe.
"There's a
power av vartue in keepin' things sep'rate," said Long Jack, intent on
stilling the storm. "That's fwhat Steyning of Steyning and Hare's f'und
when he sent Counahan fer skipper on the Marilla D. Kuhn, instid o' Cap. Newton
that was took with inflam'try rheumatism an' couldn't go. Counahan the
Navigator we called him."
"Nick
Counahan he never went aboard fer a night 'thout a pond o' rum somewheres in
the manifest," said Tom Platt, playing up to the lead. "He used to
bum araound the c'mission houses to Boston lookin' fer the Lord to make him
captain of a tow-boat on his merits. Sam Coy, up to Atlantic Avenoo, give him
his board free fer a year or more on account of his stories.
"Counahan
the Navigator! Tck! Tck! Dead these fifteen year, ain't he?"
"Seventeen,
I guess. He died the year the Caspar McVeagh was built; but he could niver keep
things sep'rate. Steyning tuk him fer the reason the thief tuk the hot
stove—bekaze there was nothin' else that season. The men was all to the Banks,
and Counahan he whacked up an iverlastin' hard crowd fer crew. Rum! Ye cud ha'
floated the Marilla, insurance an' all, in fwhat they stowed aboard her. They
lef' Boston Harbour for the great Grand Bank wid a roarin' nor'wester behind
'em an' all hands full to the bung. An' the hivens looked after thim, for divil
a watch did they set, an' divil a rope did they lay hand to, till they'd seen
the bottom av a fifteen-gallon cask o' bug-juice. That was about wan week, so
far as Counahan remembered. (If I cud only tell the tale as he told ut!) All
that whoile the wind blew like ould glory, an' the Marilla—'twas summer, and
they'd give her a foretopmast—struck her gait and kept ut. Then Counahan tuk the
hog-yoke an' thrembled over it for a whoile, an' made out, betwix' that an' the
chart an' the singin' in his head, that they was to the south'ard o' Sable
Island, gettin' along glorious, but speakin' nothin'. Then they broached
another keg, an' quit speculatin' about anythin' fer another spell. The Marilla
she lay down whin she dropped Boston Light, and she never lufted her lee-rail
up to that time—hustlin' on one an' the same slant. But they saw no weed, nor
gulls, nor schooners; an' prisintly they obsarved they'd bin out a matter o'
fourteen days and they mis-trusted the Bank has suspinded payment. So they
sounded, an' got sixty fathom. 'That's me,' sez Counahan. 'That's me iv'ry
time! I've run her slat on the Bank fer you, an' when we get thirty fathom
we'll turn in like little men. Counahan is the b'y,' sez he. 'Counahan the
Navigator!'
"Nex' cast
they got ninety. Sez Counahan: 'Either the lead-line's tuk to stretchin' or
else the Bank's sunk.'
"They hauled
ut up, bein' just about in that state when ut seemed right an' reasonable, and
sat down on the deck countin' the knots, an' gettin' her snarled up hijjus. The
Marilla she'd struck her gait, an' she hild ut, an' prisintly along came a
tramp, an' Counahan spoke her.
"'Hev ye
seen any fishin'-boats now?' sez he, quite casual.
"'There's
lashin's av them off the Irish coast,' sez the tramp.
"'Aah! go
shake yerself,' sez Counahan. 'Fwhat have I to do wid the Irish coast?'
"'Then fwhat
are ye doin' here?' sez the tramp.
"'Sufferin'
Christianity!' sez Counahan (he always said that whin his pumps sucked an' he
was not feelin' good)—'Sufferin' Christianity!' he sez, 'where am I at?'
"'Thirty-five
mile west-sou'west o' Cape Clear,' sez the tramp, 'if that's any consolation to
you.'
"Counahan
fetched wan jump, four feet sivin inches, measured by the cook.
"'Consolation!'
sez he, bould as brass. 'D'ye take me fer a dialect? Thirty-five mile from Cape
Clear, an' fourteen days from Boston Light. Sufferin' Christianity, 'tis a
record, an' by the same token I've a mother to Skibbereen!' Think av ut! The
gall av um! But ye see he could niver keep things sep'rate.
"The crew
was mostly Cork an' Kerry men, barrin' one Marylander that wanted to go back,
but they called him a mutineer, an' they ran the ould Marilla into Skibbereen,
an' they had an illigant time visitin' around with frinds on the ould sod fer a
week. Thin they wint back, an' it cost 'em two an' thirty days to beat to the
Banks again. 'Twas gettin' on towards fall, and grub was low, so Counahan ran
her back to Boston, wid no more bones to ut."
"And what
did the firm say?" Harvey demanded.
"Fwhat could
they? The fish was on the Banks, an' Counahan was at T-wharf talkin' av his
record trip east! They tuk their satisfaction out av that, an' ut all came av
not keepin' the crew and the rum sep'rate in the first place; an' confusin'
Skibbereen wid 'Queereau, in the second. Counahan the Navigator, rest his sowl!
He was an imprompju citizen!"
"Once I was
in the Lucy Holmes," said Manuel, in his gentle voice. "They not want
any of her feesh in Gloucester. Eh, wha-at? Give us no price. So we go across
the water, and think to sell to some Fayal man. Then it blow fresh, and we
cannot see well. Eh, wha-at? Then it blow some more fresh, and we go down below
and drive very fast—no one know where. By and by we see a land, and it get some
hot. Then come two, three nigger in a brick. Eh, wha-at? We ask where we are,
and they say—now, what you all think?"
"Grand
Canary," said Disko, after a moment. Manuel shook his head, smiling.
"Blanco,"
said Tom Platt.
"No. Worse
than that. We was below Bezagos, and the brick she was from Liberia! So we sell
our feesh there! Not bad, so? Eh, wha-at?"
"Can a
schooner like this go right across to Africa?" said Harvey.
"Go araound
the Horn ef there's anythin' worth goin' fer, and the grub holds aout,"
said Disko. "My father he run his packet, an' she was a kind o' pinkey,
abaout fifty ton, I guess,—the Rupert,—he run her over to Greenland's icy
mountains the year ha'af our fleet was tryin' after cod there. An' what's more,
he took my mother along with him,—to show her haow the money was earned, I
presoom,—an' they was all iced up, an' I was born at Disko. Don't remember nothin'
abaout it, o' course. We come back when the ice eased in the spring, but they
named me fer the place. Kinder mean trick to put up on a baby, but we're all
baound to make mistakes in aour lives."
"Sure!
Sure!" said Salters, wagging his head. "All baound to make mistakes,
an' I tell you two boys here thet after you've made a mistake—ye don't make
fewer'n a hundred a day—the next best thing's to own up to it like men."
Long Jack winked
one tremendous wink that embraced all hands except Disko and Salters, and the
incident was closed.
Then they made
berth after berth to the northward, the dories out almost every day, running
along the east edge of the Grand Bank in thirty- to forty-fathom water, and
fishing steadily.
It was here
Harvey first met the squid, who is one of the best cod-baits, but uncertain in
his moods. They were waked out of their bunks one black night by yells of
"Squid O!" from Salters, and for an hour and a half every soul aboard
hung over his squid-jig—a piece of lead painted red and armed at the lower end
with a circle of pins bent backward like half-opened umbrella ribs. The
squid—for some unknown reason—likes, and wraps himself round, this thing, and
is hauled up ere he can escape from the pins. But as he leaves his home he
squirts first water and next ink into his captor's face; and it was curious to
see the men weaving their heads from side to side to dodge the shot. They were
as black as sweeps when the flurry ended; but a pile of fresh squid lay on the
deck, and the large cod thinks very well of a little shiny piece of squid
tentacle at the tip of a clam-baited hook. Next day they caught many fish, and
met the Carrie Pitman, to whom they shouted their luck, and she wanted to
trade—seven cod for one fair-sized squid; but Disko would not agree at the
price, and the Carrie dropped sullenly to leeward and anchored half a mile
away, in the hope of striking on to some for herself.
Disco said
nothing till after supper, when he sent Dan and Manuel out to buoy the We're
Here's cable and announced his intention of turning in with the broad-axe. Dan
naturally repeated these remarks to the dory from the Carrie, who wanted to
know why they were buoying their cable, since they were not on rocky bottom.
"Dad sez he
wouldn't trust a ferryboat within five mile o' you," Dan howled
cheerfully.
"Why don't
he git out, then? Who's hinderin'?" said the other.
"'Cause
you've jest the same ez lee-bowed him, an' he don't take that from any boat,
not to speak o' sech a driftin' gurry-butt as you be."
"She ain't
driftin' any this trip," said the man angrily, for the Carrie Pitman had
an unsavory reputation for breaking her ground-tackle.
"Then haow
d'you make berths?" said Dan. "It's her best p'int o' sailin'. An' ef
she's quit driftin', what in thunder are you doin' with a new jib-boom?"
That shot went home.
"Hey, you
Portugoosy organ-grinder, take your monkey back to Gloucester. Go back to
school, Dan Troop," was the answer.
"O-ver-alls!
O-ver-alls!" yelled Dan, who knew that one of the Carrie's crew had worked
in an overall factory the winter before.
"Shrimp!
Gloucester shrimp! Git aout, you Novy!"
To call a
Gloucester man a Nova Scotian is not well received. Dan answered in kind.
"Novy
yourself, ye Scrabble-towners! ye Chatham wreckers! Git aout with your brick in
your stockin'!" And the forces separated, but Chatham had the worst of it.
"I knew haow
'twould be," said Disko. "She's drawed the wind raound already. Some
one oughter put a deesist on thet packet. She'll snore till midnight, an' jest
when we're gettin' our sleep she'll strike adrift. Good job we ain't crowded
with craft hereaways. But I ain't goin' to up anchor fer Chatham. She may
hold."
The wind, which
had hauled round, rose at sundown and blew steadily. There was not enough sea,
though, to disturb even a dory's tackle, but the Carrie Pitman was a law unto
herself. At the end of the boys' watch they heard the crack-crack-crack of a
huge muzzle-loading revolver aboard her.
"Glory,
glory, hallelujah!" sung Dan. "Here she comes, Dad; butt-end first,
walkin' in her sleep same's she done on 'Queereau."
Had she been any
other boat Disko would have taken his chances, but now he cut the cable as the
Carrie Pitman, with all the North Atlantic to play in, lurched down directly
upon them. The We're Here, under jib and riding-sail, gave her no more room
than was absolutely necessary,—Disko did not wish to spend a week hunting for
his cable,—but scuttled up into the wind as the Carrie passed within easy hail,
a silent and angry boat, at the mercy of a raking broadside of Bank chaff.
"Good
evenin'," said Disko, raising his head-gear, "an' haow does your
garden grow?"
"Go to Ohio
an' hire a mule," said Uncle Salters. "We don't want no farmers
here."
"Will I lend
YOU my dory-anchor?" cried Long Jack.
"Unship your
rudder an' stick it in the mud," bawled Tom Platt.
"Say!"
Dan's voice rose shrill and high, as he stood on the wheel-box. "Sa-ay! Is
there a strike in the o-ver-all factory; or hev they hired girls, ye
Shackamaxons?"
"Veer out
the tiller-lines," cried Harvey, "and nail 'em to the bottom!"
That was a salt-flavoured jest he had been put up to by Tom Platt. Manuel
leaned over the stern and yelled: "Johanna Morgan play the organ!
Ahaaaa!" He flourished his broad thumb with a gesture of unspeakable
contempt and derision, while little Penn covered himself with glory by piping
up: "Gee a little! Hssh! Come here. Haw!"
They rode on
their chain for the rest of the night, a short, snappy, uneasy motion, as
Harvey found, and wasted half the forenoon recovering the cable. But the boys
agreed the trouble was cheap at the price of triumph and glory, and they
thought with grief over all the beautiful things that they might have said to
the discomfited Carrie.
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