Willis J. Abbot

“ The skipper of each craft is at his own helm, roaring out orders, and eagerly watchful of the lights of his encroaching neighbors. With the schooner heeled over to leeward, and rushing along through the blackness, the boats are launched, and the men tumble over the side into them, until perhaps the cook, the boy, and the skipper are alone on deck. One big boat, propelled by ten stout oarsmen, carries the seine, and with one dory is towed astern the schooner until the school is overhauled, then casts off and leaps through the water under the vigorous tugs of its oarsmen. ”

“ On all the lakes, but particularly on the smaller ones, an ugly sea is tossed up by the wind in a time so short as to seem miraculous to the practised navigator of the ocean. The shallow water curls into breakers under the force of even a moderate wind, and the vessels are put to such a strain, in their struggles, as perhaps only the craft built especially for the English channel have to undergo. Some of the most fatal disasters the lakes have known resulted from iron vessels, thus racked and tossed, sawing off, as the phrase goes, the rivets that bound their plates together, and foundering. ”

“ That is the peril ever present to the minds of the men in the dory—the danger of losing the schooner. On the Banks the sea is always running moderately high, and the great surges, even on the clearest days, will often shut out the dories from the vision of the lookout. The winds and the currents tend to sweep the little fishing-boats away, and though a schooner with five or six dories out hovers about them like a hen guarding her chickens, sailing a triangular beat planned to include all the smaller boats, yet it too often happens that night falls with one boat missing. ”

“ In the heart of the North American Continent, forming in part the boundary line between the United States and the British possessions to the north, lies that chain of great freshwater lakes bordered by busy and rapidly growing commonwealths, washing the water-fronts of rich and populous cities, and bearing upon their steely blue bosoms a commerce which outdoes that of the Mediterranean in the days of its greatest glory. ”

“ The daily life of those who go down to the sea in ships is one of constant battle, and the whaler caught in the ice-pack is in more direful case than the blockaded cruiser; while the captain of the ocean liner, guiding through a dense fog his colossal craft freighted with two thousand human lives, has on his mind a weightier load of responsibility than the admiral of the fleet. ”

“ The New England shipyards began building them, almost to the exclusion of other types. Before their advance brigs, barks, and even the magnificent full-rigged ship itself gave way, until now a square-rigged ship is an unusual spectacle on the ocean. The vitality of the schooner is such that it bids fair to survive both of the crushing blows dealt to old-fashioned marine architecture—the substitution of metal for wood, and of steam for sails. ”

“ The solid, square houses the whalemen built, stoutly timbered as though themselves ships, faced the ocean, and bore on their ridge-pole a railed platform called the bridge, whence the watchers could look far out to sea, scanning the horizon for the expected ship. Lucky were they if she came into the harbor without half-masted flag or other sign of disaster. The profits of the calling in its best days were great. The best New London record is that of the "Pioneer," made in an eighteen-months' cruise in 1864-5. ”

“ But the trained fisherman, pursing his eyes against the sun's glitter on the waves, points them out one by one, with names, port-of-hail, name of captain, and bits of gossip about the craft. As the mountaineer identifies the most distant peak, or the plainsman picks his way by the trail indistinguishable to the untrained eye, so the fisherman, raised from boyhood among the vessels that make up the fleet, finds in each characteristics so striking, so individual, as to identify the vessel displaying them as far as a keen eye can reach. ”

“ The little schooner runs up to leeward of where the great liner, with her long rows of gleaming portholes, lies rolling heavily in the sea. Sharp up into the wind comes the midget, and almost before she has lost steerage way a yawl is slid over the side, the pilot and two oarsmen tumble into it, and make for the side of the steamship. To climb a rope-ladder up the perpendicular face of a precipice thirty feet high on an icy night is no easy task at best ”

“ The traffic of all these trade highways is by legislation reserved for American ships alone. On the Great Lakes has sprung up a merchant marine rivaling that of some of the foremost maritime peoples, and conducting a traffic that puts to shame the busiest maritime highways of Europe. Long Island Sound bears on its placid bosom steamships that are the marvel of the traveling public the world over. The Hudson, the Ohio, the Mississippi, are all great arteries through which the life current of trade is ceaselessly flowing. ”

“ In all times and ages, the deeds of the men who sail the deep as its policemen or its soldiery have been sung in praise. It is time for chronicle of the high courage, the reckless daring, and oftentimes the noble self-sacrifice of those who use the Seven Seas to extend the markets of the world, to bring nations nearer together, to advance science, and to cement the world into one great interdependent whole. ”

“ It was hard on the men of the navy to steel their hearts to the cries of these castaways as the ship sped by them; but if the great evil was to be broken up it could not be by rescuing here and there a slave, but by capturing and punishing the traders. Many officers of our navy have left on record their abhorrence of the service they were thus engaged in, but at the same time expressed their conviction that it was doing the work of humanity. They were obliged to witness such human suffering as might well move the stoutest human heart. ”

“ At Norfolk the entire crew of a British merchantman deserted to an American sloop-of-war. A lively trade was done in forged papers of American citizenship, and the British naval officer who gave a boat-load of bluejackets shore leave at New York was liable to find them all Americans when their leave was up. Other nations looked covetously upon our great body of able-bodied seamen, born within sound of the swash of the surf, nurtured in the fisheries, able to build, to rig, or to navigate a ship. They were fighting sailors, too, though serving only in the merchant marine. ”

“ What a stretch of imagination is necessary to conceive of the great volume of traffic of the present time, passing Detroit in little schooners not much larger than catboats that skim around the lakes! Imagine such a corporation as the Northern Steamship Company, with its big fleet of steel steamers, attempting to handle its freight business in sailing vessels of a size that the average wharf-rat of the present time would disdain to pilot. ”

“ Though the old salt may sneer at the freshwater sailor who scarcely need know how to box the compass, to whom the art of navigation is in the main the simple practise of steering from port to port guided by headlands and lights, who is seldom long out of sight of land, and never far from aid, yet the perils of the lakes are quite as real as those which confront the ocean seaman, and the skill and courage necessary for withstanding them quite as great as his. The sailor's greatest safeguard in time of tempest is plenty of searoom. ”

“ A wild, turbulent class, ready to fight and to dance, equally enraptured with the rough scraping of a fiddle by one of their number, or the sound of the war-whoop, which promised the only less joyous diversion of a fight, they aroused all the inborn vagrant tendencies of the riverside boys, and to run away with a flatboat became, for the Ohio or Indiana lad, as much of an ambition as to run away to sea was for the boy of New England. ”

“ Taking passage on a whaler, he spent several years among the Esquimaux, living in their crowded and fetid igloos, devouring the blubber and uncooked fish that form their staple articles of diet, wearing their garb of furs, learning to navigate the treacherous kayak in tossing seas, to direct the yelping, quarreling team of dogs over fields of ice as rugged as the edge of some monstrous saw, studying the geography so far as known of the Arctic regions, perfecting himself in all the arts by which man has contested the supremacy of that land with the ice-king. ”

“ And again, there are stories of escapes that were almost miraculous; of men thrown by the shock of collision out of the foretop of the schooner onto the deck of the steamship, and carried abroad in safety, while their partners mourned them as dead; of men, dozing in their bunks, startled suddenly by the grinding crash of steel and timbers, and left gazing wide-eyed at the gray sea lapping the side of their berths, where an instant before the tough oak skin of the schooner had been ”

“ Yet it has dangers of its own—dangers of a sort that, to the sailor, are more menacing than the icebergs or even the swift-rushing ocean liners of the Great Banks. For mackerel fishing is pursued close in shore, in shallow water, where the sand lies a scant two fathoms below the surface, and a north-east wind will, in a few minutes, raise, a roaring sea that will pound the stoutest vessel to bits against the bottom. With plenty of sea-room, and water enough under the keel, the sailor cares little for wind or waves ”

“ Sometimes day comes in a fog, a dense, dripping, gray curtain, more impenetrable than the blackest night, for through it no flare will shine, and even the sound of the braying horn or tolling bell is so curiously distorted, that it is difficult to tell from what quarter it comes. No one who has not seen a fog on the Banks can quite imagine its dense opaqueness. When it settles down on a large fleet of fishermen, with hundreds of dories out, the peril and perplexity of the skippers are extreme. ”

“ No ocean but what is vexed with their fisheries; no climate that is not witness of their toils. Neither the perseverance of Holland, nor the activity of France, nor the dextrous and firm sagacity of English enterprise ever carried this perilous mode of hardy enterprise to the extent to which it has been pushed by this recent people—a people who are still, as it were, in the gristle, and not yet hardened into the bone of manhood. ”

“ It is the chiefest glory of the sailor, whether in the official service, or in the merchant marine, that he has never permitted a stranger ship to go unaided to destruction, if by any heroic endeavor he could save either the ship or her crew. The annals of the sea are full of stories of captains who risked their own vessels, their own lives, and the lives of their people, in order to take castaways from wrecked or foundering vessels in a high sea. ”

“ Most often an explosion is the result of gross carelessness—a sleepy engineer, and a safety-valve "out of kilter," as too many of them often are, have killed their hundreds on the Western rivers. Sometimes, however, the almost criminal rashness, of which captains were guilty, in a mad rush for a little cheap glory, ended in a deafening crash, the annihilation of a good boat, and the death of scores of her people by drowning, or the awful torture of inhaling scalding steam. ”

“ And now the mainsail is up, the jib down, and the captain is throwing bait. It is not yet quite light, but we hear other mainsails going up all round us. A cool drizzle makes the morning unmistakably uncomfortable, and we stand around half asleep, with our sore hands in our pockets, wishing we were at home. The skipper, however, is holding his lines over the rail with an air which clearly intimates that the slightest kind of a nibble will be quite sufficient this morning to seal the doom of a mackerel. ”