THE NARROWS OF ST. JOHN.
On recovering, I found myself in the cabin of the _Leda_, with
Captain Hartly hanging over me, and chafing my hands and temples, in
anxiety and solicitude, with hartshorn and vinegar; for being a
kind-hearted fellow, he was seriously alarmed.
In these friendly offices he was ably assisted by Cuffy Snowball, his
black cook, who burned several grey goose-quills under my nose, and
who brought me a rummer full of brandy-punch steaming hot from the
galley. On swallowing this, which they forced me to do at two
draughts, I became considerably revived and invigorated.
"Why did you leave me there, Hartly--it might have been, to die?" I
asked, reproachfully.
"I did not leave you, my dear boy, at least not a moment longer than
we could help," he replied. "It cost us no small trouble to get
clear of that lubberly barque. I wish the _Black Schooner_ had sunk
her, when athwart her hawse! We had to clap on all hands to warping
into the fairway, and once there, we had to keep constantly forging
a-head, as other craft were crowding into the channel astern of us."
"Then I was pretty near being left till the wharf-keeper came next
morning. My heaven! I should have been stiff enough by that time!"
"I sent Paul Reeves and Hans Peterkin to bring off the cask on a
sledge, and you may imagine the fright we were in on finding you
cramped up and lifeless as a pickled herring!"
"Oh, Hartly," said I, "the torture I endured was frightful! I now
repent of my undertaking, and wish myself back again."
"Repent--bah! It has been a stupidly managed job, but it is over
now, and there is an end of it. Take another sip of the hot
brandy-and-water, and come on deck; we are abreast of the Crow's Nest
now, and in ten minutes more will be in blue water; then hurrah for
the ice-fields!"
I followed him on deck, and found that we were, as he said, abreast
of a high sugar-loaf shaped rock, crowned by a little battery named
the Crow's Nest, and that around us a very exciting scene was passing.
The _Leda_ was now in the fairway, or main channel, which was formed
through the ice in the centre of the harbour, and into which there
were cut more than fifty canals, or connecting links, along which the
sealing ships were being warped from the various wharves at which
they had been fitted out. All were gaily decked with their owners'
private colours, and had their courses, or lower sails, cast loose,
and were accompanied by crowds, who were conversing, laughing, and
expressing their hopes of a successful fishery to the crews, whose
voices rang cheerily as they tripped round the capstan or wrenched at
the windlass, till they came abreast of the kedge anchor which was
wedged in the ice; and then it was torn up, and carried off a-head
towards the Narrows. when the cheering, warping, and tripping began
anew.
Thousands of persons, many of them on skates, covered all the glassy
expanse of the frozen harbour, which from some points of view appears
land-locked, so closely do the mountains of rock converge at its
entrance; and hundreds of sledges (Mr. Uriah Skrew's among the
number), with round Russian bells at their horses' collars, or on the
circular iron rod above their ears, with the drivers muffled in furs,
swept to and fro; while bands of music playing the air invariable on
this occasion, "St. Patrick's Day," marched alongside of the
departing fleet.
Flags of every fashion--square, triangular, and swallow-tailed--were
streaming everywhere; on the mastheads of the shipping, on the
black-tarred mercantile stores, and on the dwellings of their
owners--a passion for a display of bunting being one of the
peculiarities of this our most northern colony in America.
The aspect of its capital, which covers the northern slope of the
harbour, is rather pretty, though the country beyond is nearly as
wild and as dreary as when, in the words of Hakluyt--"in the yeere of
our Lord 1497, John Cabot a Venetian, and his son Sebastian, with an
English fleet from Bristol, discovered that land which no man had
before attempted, on 24th June, about five of the clocke, early in
the morning. That island which lieth out before the land, he called
of _St. John_, as I think, because it was discovered upon the day of
John the Baptist."
During the brief summer, this harbour, the entrance of which is so
narrow that two ships can scarcely pass in the dangerously deep
mid-channel, is smooth as a mill-pond, and presents a lively scene,
for there the smart Clyde-built clipper, the dark and battered
Sunderland collier brig, the smart Yankee liner, with her gaudy stars
and stripes, her snowy decks, and gear so taut; the Pomeranian, with
her grass-green hull and fur-capped crew; the Dutch galliot, all
brown varnish, and shaped like a half cheese, or like the old craft
that bore the Crusaders to Palestine; the huge ship of Blackwall,
redolent of guano, all blistered, rusted, and turned yellow by the
sun of the fiery south; the sharp Spanish brig, which had run her
cargo of slaves in South Carolina and escaped here, to go quietly
home, with her brass nines hidden in the hold, and with fish in Lent
for the pious at Cadiz or Oporto--during the brief season of summer,
I say, all these had been here; but now when a snowy mantle covered
the land, and black ice locked the harbour, its basin or bosom
presented a very different scene.
Floundering through sludge and water, a thousand of those men who are
England's real pioneers in the Far West--Irish emigrants--in long
boots, were cutting the thick ice with ponderous saws, and pushing
the blocks under the solid mass on either side, to form a fairway or
clear channel for the shipping; and this channel, though at least
twenty feet broad, would certainly be frozen hard and fast ere
morning dawned.
On this occasion there passed out with us, as I have elsewhere
stated, more than one hundred sail of sealing craft. There were
brigs, brigantines, and schooners, ranging from fifty to two hundred
and fifty tons, all following each other through the fairway, warping
ahead, till beyond the Chain Rock, where they got into open water.
Many of the smaller craft are miserably adapted for the dangers they
have to encounter, and thus are frequently crushed or lost in the ice
by being swept off among the floes and fields to the far north, from
whence they never return. Some, I have observed, had only a box
lined with fire-brick placed on edge, lashed aft the foremast, for a
caboose, and an iron cauldron on three legs placed therein for
boiling the wretched mess of old salt pork and doughballs which form
the daily food of the crew, who, with such apparatus, would be unable
to cook anything in foul weather or a heavy sea.
The wind was southerly for a time, but gradually veered a little to
the west as we neared the harbour mouth. After passing the Chain
Rock, where a cable of Cyclopean aspect, that now lies a mass of rust
thereon, was wont in times of war and alarm to be stretched across to
the Pancake Rock to secure the harbour at night, we found ourselves
in the deep water. With a loud cheer we brought the kedge anchor and
hawser on board. Paul Reeves took the wheel; we sheeted home the
foresail and gib, let fall the fore and main topsails, and brought
the starboard tacks on board when we were clear of the Signal Hill,
and the Dead Man's Bay--a dreary inlet of the sea--lay on our quarter.
This hill is a stern and precipitous mountain of sandstone and
slate-rock, nearly six hundred feet in height, with batteries that
rise over each other in tiers, to the highest, which is named "The
Queen's." Opposite, towers an equally abrupt mountain of similar
height and aspect, having at its base a little promontory defended by
Fort Amherst.
The slender gut between is named the Narrows of St. John.
The breeze came more and more round upon our quarter as we ran past
Signal Hill, ploughing through a somewhat heavy surf; past the Sugar
Loaf, and a little creek where, in the clear summer sea, I have seen
the guns of an ancient and forgotten wreck lying like black dots on
the smooth white sand many fathoms below; for in these regions, when
a brilliant sun shines upon the ocean, its waters become transparent
to a wondrous depth; thus giant corals, dusky weeds, and the
snow-white bones of mighty fish,
"With the rainbow hues of the sea-trees' bloom,"
may be seen distinctly at the depth of a hundred and fifty feet from
the surface.
There, too, I have seen the bright yellow sea anemone, with its long
fibrous leaves, that close and shrink into the rocks from view when
touched.
Cape St. Francis, one of the eastern promontories of Avalon, was soon
upon our beam; Cape Spear light had sunk into the waves astern, and
night was coming down upon the wintry sea, when we hauled up a point
or two to the north and west, and stood right away to the icy regions
of the North; and that night merrily at supper we sang in the cabin--
"'Twas in the year of 'sixty-one,
Of March the seventeenth day,
That our gallant ship her anchor weighed
And to the North seas bore away,
Brave boys," &c.