James B. Connolly

“ Ye’ll never fish again, Martin Carr; ye’ll never haul trawl or row dory again, nor stand to a wheel, nor reef a sail. The best part of your life’s gone. Ye’re such a creature, Martin Carr, as men throw pennies to in the street. ”

“ And when we raise Eastern Point! and goin’ into the harbor of Gloucester! Lad, lad, but my eyes run water ’most to think of the people I’m soon to see—to talk and shake hands with, maybe sit up a night or two with before I go out again. Lord, boy, if there warn’t a man or woman in the whole wide world to hail good-mornin’ to you—if it was no more than to look at happy people’s faces when you’re ashore—or out to sea again, if it’s no more than to look at the sky and the fine tumblin’ ocean! ”

“ Crump in his wrath shook his fist at Sam, and followed that by furious orders to the Buccaneer’s crew. But that fit over, he shook his head. “I misdoubt that bark’ll live the night out. Blast her, blast her, I wish we’d never set eyes on her! What’s millions, let alone a few thousand dollars, to men’s lives—and men that’s sailed with you, and summer breeze or winter blow was always there when you wanted ’em? Damn you, Sam Leary, for an obstinate mule, but if ever I see you aboard this vessel of mine again you won’t leave it in a hurry again to go aboard any old sinkin’ hulk for prize money!” ”

“ A mile and a half of trawl to be hauled, and don’t I know that as your dory-mate I ought to haul half of it? And will I? Could I, even if you’d allow me, Martin? Oh, yes—about as well as I could winch in the vessel’s anchor alone. Don’t I know what it means—a man that can’t do his share out here? It means that one of the crew is eating his share of grub and by and by will get his share of the stock, and yet who is no more use in a dory than the painter when the dory’s aboard, and no more use aboard the vessel itself than the spare anchor with the vessel in harbor. ”

“ All that night the prize crew labored. The sails needed but small attention. Hauling in or paying out occasionally sufficed for them, she being on the one tack all night; but the hull of the bark setting so low made the trouble. The seas broke almost continuously over her, and added to that were the icy decks, with footing so uncertain that at any moment a man was likely to be picked up and hurled into the roaring black void. When two or three men had been hove into the lee scuppers, and from there miraculously rescued, Sam saw to it that thereafter every man worked with a life-line about him. ”

“ He waited just that instant too long—it took nerve—and then he had to hurry, and the uprise of the dory was not there to throw him into the air and on to the Delia’s rail. Clothes soaked in brine and heavy boots, a man is not a buoyant thing in the water, and this was a heavy sea. So Orcutt, falling between dory and vessel, went down—deep down—and when he came up it was where the tide swept down under the vessel’s quarter.
Patsie Oddie, standing almost above him, caught the appeal of Orcutt’s eyes, and then saw him go under again. ”

“ The Pantheon cut into the other’s topside planking, her bowsprit bore through the other’s rigging and foresail—cr-s-sh!—cr-s-sh!—the smash of breaking timbers, the tearing of stiff canvas, and above all the howl of the wild gale.
Men hailed out questions, oaths, and words that no man could understand. They held so, the bow of one into the waist of the other, long enough for men from the Pantheon to leap aboard the other and then to leap back. “Man, she’s worse than we are!” ”

“ Calling such of the crew as were chopping ice off her deck and rail, he put them to work setting such extra sail as he had below.
A tedious and difficult job that; and dangerous, with big seas threatening to overpower the logey craft. But it had to be done; and it was done after a long and wracking night.
Sail on her again, the Skipper tried to beat her around the cape. But as a square-rigger won’t lay hove-to as snugly as a fore-and-after, neither will she hold up to the wind like a fore-and-after. A fore-and-after always for coasting work ”

“ No sail—nor smoke. He took note of the dory. Iced to a depth of six inches it was, and with every fresh slap of the sea more ice was adding. “A mile away now and we’d look like a lump of ice to any passing vessel,” he thought aloud.
The no’wester whistled over the ridged seas. A no’west wind and white-tipped seas that broke over them—could man invent anything more freezing? And all night long it had been so.
“Eddie,” called Martin, “Eddie-boy!” Again, “Oh, Eddie-lad— Eddie-boy, shake yourself now, dear.” But no answer coming from the boy, Martin more closely regarded the figure in the stern. ”

“ If one can imagine an impudent, unshaven, hollow-eyed man in iced-up boots, beard, and oilskins, then it is possible to picture Sam Leary as he leaned against the mizzen-rigging of the wallowing derelict and smiled sweetly at his skipper. ”

“ By that time the whole crew was tumbling up on deck. ‘God in heaven, what is it?’ they called out one to another. Another leap of her, and it was clear white astern and on either side. ‘A wall of rock ahead!’ said Henry Carsick, and came tumbling aft—‘a ledge of solid rock, Skipper!’
“‘Yes,’ said the Skipper, in a kind of studyin’ tone—‘and it was hell or Gloucester, warn’t it’—he turned to me. ‘I said it’d be, didn’t I?’
“‘That’s what you did,’ said I, ‘and it ain’t Gloucester. You ought to be proud of yourself—nineteen men, maybe, lost for you—nineteen men. ”

“ When Peter came out of the Anchorage again, the atmosphere had cleared. The blush of the sky was a marvellous thing for March. Peter could not remember when he had ever seen so rosy a morning for that time of year. And it was a fair wind, too—so fair that Peter could not but remark it. “If we was comin’ home in the Colleen Bawn, or the Nannie O, in this breeze, our wake’d be fair boilin’. ”

“ Another private glance at the telegram revealed nothing new. “We’re altogether too near the shoals for Wiley,” muttered the captain of the Fuller, “and even if we weren’t, I guess he’s having all he wants to look after himself in this gale. I wonder is she drifting fast? The lead there, fellows—give her the lead, and see what’s under us.”
One man had life enough to take a sounding. “Forty-five fathom,” he called.
“Forty-five! God, but we’re going into it! Cut that drag adrift and let’s get out of here. Get together, men, and make sail of some kind till we’re by this place.” ”

“ The soul that the Lord gave you—that soul is going from a drunken body straight to the God that’s going to judge you. And how’ll you be judged, d’y’ think, for this night’s work, George Hoodley? Could you listen to what was said on deck to-night and not die of fright at what you’ve done? Did you hear Sam Catiss? “I’m not afraid to go, if go I must,” says Sam, “but, Lord, there’s one or two things I wish I hadn’t done,” says Sam. You heard him—we all
He was having another mug-up for himself. ”

“ He did come back in your vessel, the man I want—but it wasn’t Orcutt.”
“Not Orcutt? Not Orcutt?”
“No, not Orcutt. Oh, Patsie, but it is hard on a woman! Oh, if you only knew what a hard man you are to make understand! I suppose I have to do it—you’re that backward yourself. It’s hard on me, Patsie, but you’ll go no more to sea in a gale, and me here shaking with fear for you. You did bring back the man I want, Patsie. Over Sable Island bar he drove the Delia, but it wasn’t Orcutt.” ”

“ They could not see the sky at all, it was that black, but all around they could see the combers breaking white—so white that they made a kind of light of their own. And then it was, with the Lord knows how much wind behind them and seas mast-head high and the little vessel taking it fair abeam, that the crew of the Delia and the crew of the Eldorado guessed what was running in Patsie Oddie’s mind. ”

“ What had you to offer a handsome young woman that liked a good time? What had you, even supposing she was the kind you could trust—anything that women love? Not a blessed thing. You’ve spent your life with about one idea in your head, and that idea had nothing to do with being pleasant or kind to others, or good to anybody but yourself. Miles away from the kind of thing that women love were you all the time. ”

“ Lord in heaven, what a man he was! And to go at his age!”
“’Twas hard. But he couldn’t’ve been such a young fellow, Martin?”
“Let me see. Nineteen year ago that was. Nineteen from forty-eight—twenty-nine year he’d be that time. We were the one age.”
“Lord, Martin, ’tisn’t possible you’re forty-eight year old?”
“That’s what—forty-eight.”
“Well, you don’t look it. Do you feel it?”
“Feel what—forty-eight? Man alive, what’s forty-eight to a man that’s never seen a sick day in his life?”
“But you’ve taken great care o’ yourself, Martin.” ”

“ It was a winter’s morning he said it. Cold? Oh, but it was cold. Wind from the north-west and blowing hard—a sort of dry blizzard. Every vessel coming in had stories to tell of what a time they had to get home and how long it took them.
“It’s been tack, tack, tack from St. Peter’s Bank, till we fair chafed the jaws off the boom of her,” said Crump Taylor.
“Four days and four nights from Le Have,” said Tom O’Donnell. “Four days and four nights for the able Colleen Bawn to come three hundred miles. ”

“ A dory is the safest small boat that the craft of man has yet devised for living in troubled waters. Handled properly, it will live where ships will founder. And yet, though Patsie Oddie and Malachi Jennings were the two men to the oars, it was too much even for the dory in that sea;{301} and over she went before they were half-way to the Eldorado. The crew of the Delia, seeing them bob up, and for the time safely clinging to the plug-strap, whisked another dory to the rail and ready, but their Skipper waved them back. ”

“ How Oddie ever expected to save the Delia nobody ever knew, beyond trying to lift her across with the sheer weight of the wind to her sails. And that would be sheer luck, such luck as had never befallen a vessel in their plight before. Other men of courage with stout vessels must have tried that, they knew, and none of them had ever got over, nor come back to tell how close they came to it. ”

“ But if he do have to go, I’d lie easy in my grave—wherever my grave may be, Martin—if he was to have a dory-mate like you.’ And to think now we’re dory-mates— Jack Teevens’s boy and Jack Teevens’s old dory-mate. And he had to be lost, your father. Some things are hard to take, believe in a Divine Providence much as we like. ”

“ Overboard went Oddie with all his own weight of clothes, oilskins, woolens, and big boots, while quick-witted men hove the bight of the main-sheet after him; and Oddie, grappling with the smothering and frightened Orcutt, smashed him full in the face. ”

“ A northeaster it was, with a thick snow in its wake and a whistle that made a bunk feel most comfortable. The snow passed, and after two days the worst of the breeze also; but after it came the tremendous seas that make such a terrible place of the northerly edge of Georges shoals in the wrong kind of winter weather.
Nobody aboard the Celestine worried particularly. They had been having that sort of thing all their lives. After a while it would pass. Only when it lasted for too long a time it did make slow fishing. They put her under jumbo and riding sail and let go their chain anchor. ”

“ It looked like a possible fire to add to the rest of it, but the Skipper, like a flash, threw a smothering wet oil-jacket over it. The binnacle lamp then started, but only for a moment—suddenly went out, and then for the first time they heard the rush of the sea coming on them in the dark.
“Did you think to draw the slide tight, John?” bellowed the Skipper.
“Tight? ’Tis tighter than the lid of hell.”
“Then somebody must’ve left the binnacle slide open—there’s men without sense to be found wherever you go—you can’t dodge them.” ”

“ I want somebody nobody gives a damn about—like myself!” and took a young fellow—there is{300} always one such in every crew of fishermen—that swore he had not mother, father, brother, sister, nor a blessed soul on earth that cared whether he ever came home or was lost. And doubtless he was telling the truth, for he certainly acted up to it. A hard case he was, but a good fisherman. And courage? He had courage. He laughed—no affected cackle, but a good round laugh—when he leaped over the side and into the dory with Patsie Oddie. ”

“ Every coming storm does not mean that the one terrible storm of years is at hand; and when it is so difficult to get back to just the right spot after a storm has scattered the fleet, why let go for what is only probability, not a certainty, of disaster?—especially when one is on a good spot. It is only one storm in a dozen years when good seamanship, fishermen’s instinct, sound gear, and an able craft do not avail. ”

“ Now, if George Hoodley had not been like other men during all the years he was fishing, if he hadn’t joined in the talk of his mates on what was worth having in life—you know how fishermen gen’rally talk when they get going on some things—even if George Hoodley pretended to think that he thought they were a lot of blessed fools, yet it is more than likely that the opinions of the men he went to sea with had their influence with him just the same. ”

“ Do you sit on the for’ard thwart, but take it easy—’tis a long drag, boy—a hundred and fifty mile to Newf’undland.”
And so they set out. ’Twas a long, easy, regular stroke that Martin dropped into; just such a stroke as a man might adopt who looked for a moderately long drag to his vessel—ten or fifteen miles, say.
But this was a hundred and fifty miles. Yes, and more, with allowances to be made for the set of wind and tide and the natural perversity of the dory itself. Whoever has rowed a dory knows that nothing will swerve more easily off its course—that is, if you don’t know how. ”

“ Bad as he was, he could do no less than that—stand by his vessel to the last. When he came alongside the Delia, he rose from the bottom{302} of the dory, his companion having safely boarded the Delia, and lunged for the rail. Never a quick man on his feet, nor quick to think and act, and now trembling with anxiety, Orcutt made a mess of boarding. He had to stop long enough, too, to look up at Oddie and think what a fool of a man Oddie was altogether—a mind like a child! ”