THE SEA ROVERS
[Illustration: A GLOUCESTER FISHERMAN]
THE SEA ROVERS
_By_ RUFUS ROCKWELL WILSON
Author of "Rambles in Colonial Byways," etc.
_ILLUSTRATED BY MAY FRATZ_
NEW YORK
B. W. DODGE AND COMPANY
1906
COPYRIGHT, 1906
BY
B. W. DODGE AND COMPANY
New York
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I. GLOUCESTER FISHER FOLK 1
II. AN OCEAN FLYER'S CREW 28
III. THE MAN-OF-WARSMAN 61
IV. SOLDIERS WHO SERVE AFLOAT 94
V. THE POLICE OF THE COAST 121
VI. THE OCEAN PILOT 149
VII. THE DEEP-SEA DIVER 169
VIII. THE LIGHTHOUSE KEEPER 198
IX. LIFE-SAVING ALONG SHORE 231
X. WHALERS OF THE ARCTIC SEA 254
ILLUSTRATIONS.
FACING PAGE
A GLOUCESTER FISHERMAN--_Frontispiece_
THE CAPTAIN OF AN OCEAN LINER 42
A MAN-OF-WARSMAN 76
AN OFFICER IN THE REVENUE CUTTER SERVICE 128
PILOT SIGNALING A VESSEL 156
A DIVER READY TO DESCEND 180
A LIGHTHOUSE KEEPER 214
A LIFE-SAVER ON PATROL 242
THE SEA ROVERS
CHAPTER I
GLOUCESTER FISHER FOLK
A glorious vision is Gloucester harbor, whether seen under the radiant
sun of a clear June morning or through the haze and smoke of a mellow
October afternoon. Gloucester town lies on a range of hills around the
harbor, and fortunate is the man who chances to see it as the background
to a stirring marine picture when on a still summer's morning a fleet of
two or three hundred schooners is putting to sea after a storm,
spreading their white duck against the blue sky and fanning gently
hither and thither, singly or in picturesque groups, before the catspaws
or idly drifting to eastward, stretching in a long line beyond
Thatcher's Island and catching the fresh breeze that darkens the
distant offing. Here the green of their graceful hulls, the gilt
scrollwork on the bows and the canvas on the tall, tapering masts are
reflected as in a mirror on the calm surface; or beyond they are seen
heeling over to the first breath of the incoming sea wind that ruffles
the glinting steel of the sheeny swell, forming as a whole a scene of
inexhaustible variety and beauty.
Such a spectacle gives the stranger fitting introduction to Gloucester,
for from earliest times the men of the gray old town have been followers
of the sea. It was three years after the landing of the Pilgrims at
Plymouth that the first Englishman settled on Cape Ann, at the place now
called Gloucester, which took its name from the old English cathedral
city whence many of its settlers had come. America's Gloucester
doubtless seems young to the mother town, which is of British origin and
was built before the Romans crossed from Gaul; but, despite the great
cathedral in the English town and the importance in the clerical world
of the prelates and church dignitaries who found livings there, the
Yankee town was for many years a place of more consequence in the world
of trade and profit than the English Gloucester has ever been.
Founded as a rendezvous where fishermen could cure their fish and fit
out for their trips, in the old days Gloucester in Massachusetts had
fishing and whaling fleets, and her boats not only went out on the Banks
in search of cod, but to the far limits of the North and South Seas they
sailed to bring back rich cargoes of whale oil. Her fleets ventured into
every sea from which profit could be brought, and boys born in the town
or its neighbors three or four generations agone all looked forward to a
half dozen cruises as a matter of course, just as the modern boy knows
that he must go to school and learn to read and write. It was a rough
school to which the youth of Gloucester and Cape Ann went, but it was a
good one. They learned there to be brave and manly, and seafaring
broadened the minds of men who had they stayed at home would have been
sadly provincial and narrow.
Thus the history of Gloucester centers in the fisheries. The yarns most
often told at her firesides are of hairbreadth escapes at sea; her
legends and romances have a flavor of the salt waves about them; her
rugged granite shore is marked with the scenes of memorable shipwrecks
and storms; her town records are the records of fleets that have gone
down on the Banks, of pinks and schooners that have foundered on the
Georges, of heroes that have toiled for their families and fought the
grim battle of life with the fogs, the lightning and the swooping
billows of the sou'wester, and with the ice, the hail and the short,
savage cross seas and terrible blast of the raging nor'wester, while
their children have cried for their absent fathers and their wives have
lain awake through long, dreary nights, burning the light in the window
and straining their eyes to see through the gloom of the storm the long
expected vessel and the beloved forms that perhaps have already gone
down at sea.
The discovery of petroleum struck the Gloucester whaling industry a blow
from which it has never recovered, but the town's fisheries are still in
thriving condition. Four hundred fishing vessels of sufficient
consequence to be registered hail at the present time from Gloucester.
The number of men employed in these vessels, the majority of which are
as speedy and well built as pleasure yachts, is upward of 5,000. Many of
the fishermen are from the British provinces and make excellent skippers
and sailors, while Sweden, Norway and the Azore Islands contribute a
large number, who are, as a rule, orderly, capable and industrious. They
fare well as compared with the fishermen of other days or with men now
before the mast of the merchant service, and fresh pies, biscuits,
fowls, eggs and like delicacies are frequently seen in the forecastle of
a Gloucester banker.
The mackerel fishermen bound for the Georges Banks usually leave
Gloucester as early as the last of February, but those bound to other
waters with the cod, halibut and haddock fishermen do not start until
later. The cod are caught chiefly on the Grand Banks of Newfoundland,
where the watch lights of the Gloucester men twinkle in the midnight
gloom in company with those of the French fishers of Miquelon and St.
Pierre. Mackerel are also caught in the Bay of St. Lawrence, off Cape
North, Sidney and the Magdalen Islands, where the fishermen often linger
until late in the fall and are sometimes assailed by heavy gales among
those inhospitable shores, without sea room, on a lee shore and no safe
port to run to. The haddock and halibut are oftener caught on Brown's
Bank and within the waters of New England. There are several modes of
fitting out for the fisheries, but the one most often followed is for
the owner of a vessel to charter her to ten or fifteen men on shares, he
finding the stores and the nets and the men paying for the provisions,
hooks and lines and for the salt necessary to cure their proportion of
the fish.
The crew of a banker is usually composed of a dozen to eighteen men,
including the skipper, or captain, who exercises no direct control over
the others, but is recognized by them as the principal personage on
board. The average Gloucester fisherman is a splendid though rough
specimen of an American. You may know him by his free-and-easy manner
and his swinging gait. His costume when at work is a red or blue flannel
shirt of the thickest material, admirably adapted to absorb and exclude
the chilling fogs in which he passes so much of his time, a heavy
tarpaulin or sou'wester, generally his own handiwork, pilot-cloth
trousers and heavy cowhide boots completing his attire. His face
bespeaks a serious but cheerful and contented spirit, the result of a
philosophical, half careless dependence upon luck.
Generous and fearless in his address, he is of simple and economical
habits and, like most men of large stature, almost peculiar in a placid
good humor which seldom leaves him. Always ready for any fortune, the
fisherman tries to look upon the bright side of life and draw whatever
there may be of pleasure from his hazardous calling. But among the
bankers are occasional roystering, devil-may-care fellows, whose never
ending practical jokes and offhand manner serve to enliven the little
vessel and dispel the tedium of the voyage to the Banks.
The Grand Bank extends north and south about six hundred miles and east
and west some two hundred, lying to the southeast of Newfoundland. Its
shape cannot be easily defined, but the form denoted by the soundings
give it somewhat the resemblance of New Holland. To the southward it
narrows to a point, presenting abrupt edges, which in some places drop
into almost fathomless water. This, as well as the adjacent banks of St.
Pierre, Bank Querau and the Flemish Cap, abound with fish of various
kinds, which at stated seasons adopt this as a shoaling place or grand
rendezvous. The most numerous of these are the cod, which thrive here so
amazingly that the unceasing industry of many hundreds of vessels
through two centuries has in no way diminished their numbers. The
fishery is not confined to the Banks, but extends to the shores and
harbors of Newfoundland, Nova Scotia, and Cape Breton. The fish affect
sandy bottom. In winter they retire into deep water, but in March and
April reappear and fatten rapidly from the time of their arrival on the
Banks.
Fishing begins as soon as the smacks reach the Banks. In other years all
cod were caught by means of handlines, and some fish are still taken
that way. The most, however, are now taken by trawls, which were
introduced about 1860 and were first used by the French. A trawl
consists of a line some 3,000 feet in length, to which are attached
short ones about a yard long, on each of which is a hook. The short
lines are placed about six feet apart, so that each trawl has about 500
hooks. Attached to each end of the line by a rope is a buoy, sometimes
only an empty powder keg or a mackerel kit. In the head of the buoy is a
pole three feet long, upon which is a small flag to attract the
attention of the owner when in search of it. To each end of the line is
fastened a small anchor.
The hooks are baited with squid, herring or other small fish, if they
can be secured. To bait a trawl requires from an hour and a half to two
hours. When it is ready it is placed in a tub made of a half barrel. The
long line is coiled up in the center and the bait lies next to the sides
of the tub. One man uses from two to six trawls, which are usually
visited in a dory very early each morning and once or twice during the
day. When one buoy is reached the end of the trawl to which it is
attached is drawn up, the hooks examined and the fish taken off. By
means of trawls a man may catch more in a single night than by a week's
hard work with hand lines.
Each man keeps tally of his fish as he hauls them in to the dory by
cutting out the tongues--the number of tongues giving the account of the
fish taken. As soon as the day's catch has been taken aboard the
schooner the crew divide themselves into throaters, headers, splitters,
salters and packers, and the operation known as splitting and salting
begins. The business of the throater is to cut with a sharp pointed
knife across the throat of the fish to the bone and rip open the bowels.
He then passes it quickly to the header, who with a sudden wrench pulls
off the head and tears out the entrails, passing the fish instantly to
the splitter. At the same time separating the liver, he throws the
entrails overboard. The splitter with one cut lays the fish open from
head to tail and with another cut takes out the backbone. After
separating the sounds, which are placed with the tongues and packed in
barrels as a great delicacy, the backbone follows the entrails
overboard. Such is the amazing quickness of the operations of heading
and splitting that a good workman will often decapitate and take out the
entrails and backbone of six fish in a minute. After the catch has been
washed off with buckets of pure water from the ocean the fish are passed
to the salters and thence to the packers in the hold. The task of the
salters is a most important one, as the value of the voyage depends
upon their care and judgment. They take the fish one by one, spread
them, back uppermost, in layers, distributing a proper quantity of salt
between each. Packing in bulk, or "kench," as the fishermen term it, is
intrusted only to the most experienced hands.
When the day's catch has been cared for in the manner just described the
watch is set and all but two men turn in. These watches are regulated in
such a manner that every man is on deck his part of the night hours.
Breakfast is served at 3 o'clock in the morning, and off the men go
again to their trawls. If it is foggy dinner is announced by the report
of a ten-pound gun from the schooner. It is then about 10 o'clock. After
dinner the fishers are away again and back about 4, when the fish which
have been caught are split and salted as on the previous day. The only
thing that relieves the monotony on board a Gloucester fishing smack is
stormy weather or the coming of Sunday. This day is kept holy.
Leaving the Grand Banks, let us cross over to the Georges Banks, where
in the months of spring and summer we shall find Gloucester hand-liners,
with crews of from eight to ten men fishing for mackerel. Every man is
at the rail, as he fishes from the deck of the vessel. The tide runs so
strong that nine-pound leads are necessary. Attached to each lead is a
horse, a slingding, or spreader, and a pair of large hooks. Sometimes
when fishing in thirty fathoms of water the great strength of the tide
forces the men to pay out from sixty to ninety fathoms of line before
the lead touches bottom. In front of each man, driven into the rail, is
a wooden pin. This is termed the soldier, and it has an important duty.
Every inch of the line is hauled across it. Were it not for these rail
pins the lines would continually be fouled with one another.
When a smack's crew chance upon a fresh school of mackerel their hooks
have only to touch the water to be seized and swallowed. No time is lost
in unhooking, but each fisherman hauls as fast as his hands can move
until the fish appears in sight, when with one motion he is swung
quickly over the rail into a barrel or heap and so dexterously that the
hook disengages itself. When the fish continue plentiful the scene is a
most exciting one. The long, lithe bodies of the fishermen eagerly
bending over their work, the quick, nervous twitching at the line,
followed by the steady strain, the rapid hand-over-hand haul that brings
the prize to the surface, the easy swing with which he describes a
circle in the air as the victor slaps him into his barrel and the
flapping of the captives about deck, mingling with the merry laughter of
the excited crew, make it a sport to which the efforts of the trout
angler or the fowler with his double-barreled shotgun are but puny and
insignificant in comparison.
Time was when the use of the hook and line made mackerel catching the
very poetry of fishing, but in recent years the purse seine has come
into general use. Mackerel seining, however, is an interesting process.
A large seine is two hundred and fifty fathoms in length and about
fifteen or twenty fathoms deep. The school is sighted from the masthead
and the direction in which the fish are swimming is noted. A boat is
manned and sets out to head off the school. Two men in a dory hold one
end of the purse line which runs through rings at the bottom of the
seine. A circle is described by the boat, the seine being thrown out at
the same time. When the boat meets the dory the other end of the line is
taken into the boat. Then the seines are drawn together, forming a large
bag. The fish are inside and it is necessary to gather as much of the
net into the boat as possible. The fish are then in what is termed the
bunt. This is the strongest part of the seine. The vessel sails up close
to the boat, picks up the outside corks and the bailing begins, a dip
net that will hold a barrel being used for this purpose, after which the
fish are cleaned, salted and stowed in the hold. Vessels have been known
to take 300 barrels in one haul, but the average catch nowadays is about
twenty-five barrels.
When the mackerel fleet fished with hand lines the pursuit of this
industry was exciting in the extreme. Often when massed together in
great fleets the vessels carried away their mainbooms, bowsprits,
jibbooms and sails by collision in what was really a hand-to-hand
encounter and when the maneuver of lee-bowing was the order of the day.
A fleet of sixty odd sail descry a schooner whose crew are heaving and
pulling their lines. The glistening scales of the fish sparkle in the
sunlight. The fleet as one vessel turns quickly on its heel and there is
a neck-and-neck race for the school. The first that arrives rounds to
under the lee of the fortunate craft, the crew heaving the toll bait
with lavish hands.
The new arrival now shakes up into the wind close under the lee bow of
the fish-catching vessel. The fish forsake the latter and fly at the
lines of the newcomer. Now comes up the balance of the fleet, and each
vessel on its arrival performs the same maneuver and lee-bows its
predecessor. Those to windward, forsaken by the fish, push their way
through their neighbors, fill away and round to under the bows of those
to leeward. The hoarse bawling of the skippers to their crews, the
imprecations of those who have been run down and left disabled, rend the
air, while the crews, setting and lowering sail and hauling fish, freely
exchange with each other language not to be found in any current
religious work. In these latter days, however, seines, as before stated,
have taken the place of line, and lee-bowing, with its attendant
excitement and danger, has passed to the limbo of forgotten things.
Fishing smacks bound for the Georges, the Western, or Banks of
Newfoundland may be gone three or four weeks, bringing their fish to
market on ice, or they may be absent from four to six months, dressing
and salting their fish on board. But, be the voyage long or short, it is
a joyous and moving spectacle to see a schooner come into Gloucester
from the Banks loaded to the scuppers and packed to the beams with
codfish. The wharf is lined with eager spectators as she glides up to
her dock with a leading wind. The foresail comes in and the mainsail is
lowered and handed by a crew weatherbeaten and clumsily limber in heavy
Cape Cod seaboots, sou'westers and oiljackets. Then the jib downhaul is
manned and a number of boys, longing for the day when they can go to the
Banks, catch the hawsers and make her fast to the pier fore and aft.
Amidst a storm of questions asked and answered on both sides, the crew
range themselves on board and on shore with one-tined pitchforks and
proceed to unload with the rapidity and regularity of machinery. The men
in the hold heave the fish on deck, whence they are tossed to the wharf.
Another turn of the pitchfork lands them under the knife, their heads
and tails come off and they are split open in a second and are then
salted and spread upon flakes to dry. These flakes are frames covered
with triangular slats and are about seven feet wide and raised three
feet above the ground. At Gloucester they may be seen not only upon the
wharves, but also in all vacant places between the houses and even in
the front dooryards, so that at every turn the smell of codfish regales
the passerby.
But there is a sadder, sterner side to the life of the Gloucester
fishermen than which I have been describing. Danger is their constant,
death their familiar, companion, and each season has its sorrowful story
of storm, wreck and disaster. Truth to tell, the perils of the trawler
are even greater than those of the soldier in battle. He is often four
or five miles from his vessel, when suddenly the thick fog closes in
upon him and he is lost, perhaps to row for days in hopeless search,
without food, drink or compass. He may die of exhaustion or perhaps be
picked up at length by a passing vessel and taken to some distant port.
More than thirty lives were lost in this way in the summer of 1894.
Although horns are blown in warning, a whole crew is sometimes sunk in
an instant by some steamer on its way across the ocean. Of all the men
lost on the Banks during the last twenty years more than two-thirds have
been out in dories attending trawls.
Fierce, too, are the storms which sweep the Banks in winter. Then the
wind is bitter cold, deck and mast and sails are clad in ice, and many a
crew are never heard of more. The Georges in fair weather is not
dangerous fishing ground, but in a gale it defies both skill and
strength. The shallow water is churned into rolling mountain waves which
almost sweep the ocean bed. At such times the 125-ton fishing vessels,
which usually anchor close together when fishing, are at the mercy of
the elements. It is impossible for the anchors to get a firm grip and
they are sometimes dragged for miles. This, in fact, is the greatest
danger of the business. Not infrequently in a heavy gale two or three
vessels will drift together, their cables become tangled until they are
unmanageable and in short order vessels and crew will be engulfed. Some
years ago thirty schooners, with 150 sailors aboard, were lost in this
manner in a single gale on the Georges.
Since 1830 nearly 700 fishing vessels sailing from Gloucester have been
lost and upward of 2,700 men have perished. The winter of 1882 was one
long to be remembered in Gloucester, for in less than two months more
than a hundred fishermen were lost on the Banks. One of these was Angus
McCloud, than whom no braver man ever found a grave at the ocean's
bottom. Three years before he had been on the Banks in the same vessel
with his brothers, Malcolm and John McCloud. Among their shipmates were
the McDonalds--William, Donald, John and Neal. Their vessel was in the
gale of 1879 on the Banks--a gale the like of which had rarely before
been experienced by the fleet. Thrown over on its beam ends, the little
bark still held to its anchor and finally rode out the gale with her
crew lashed in the rigging. Nearby was another vessel in the same
position, and others were being tossed about to windward and to leeward.
Two poor fellows, washed from one of the former, were swept between the
two vessels that had been knocked down and were not one hundred feet
from either. The crews of these vessels, clinging to the icy rigging,
looked anxiously from one to another to see if any one was bold enough
to attempt a rescue. Angus McCloud cast off the lashings which bound
him, seized a lanyard, made it fast about his waist and stood for a
moment poised on the shroud lashings. Then he sprang boldly into an
advancing wave and was carried toward one of the struggling men. Soon he
had him by his oilskin coat and soon the crew were hauling them in.
Angus assisted in the rescue of another comrade before the gale was
spent and his vessel righted.
Time and again other members of the Gloucester fishing fleet have proved
themselves worthy comrades of Angus McCloud. Several years ago Captain
Mark Lane, now dead, but then skipper of the schooner Edwin, while
homeward bound from the Banks discovered two shipwrecked men on a
half-submerged rock near the Fox Islands, on the Maine coast. It was
midwinter and a heavy gale was blowing, but Captain Lane put his wheel
hard down, brought his vessel up into the wind, hove to under a
close-reefed foresail and told his men they must rescue the sailors on
the rock. It was a perilous undertaking and, as there appeared to be no
chance of a boat living in the sea then running, the crew protested.
"Then I'll go myself," said the skipper. "Stand by, there, lads, to
lower away a boat from the davits!" But the crew relented when they saw
that their captain was determined and two stout fellows drove a dory
over the huge waves to the rock. The men were saved, and a certificate
of the Humane Society of Massachusetts, still treasured by Captain
Lane's family, attests that a careful examination into his conduct had
proved him worthy the recognition of that admirable body.
The experience of the Gloucester fishermen in the winter of 1882 was by
no means an unusual one. In the last twenty years over a thousand of
them have laid their bones on the drifting sands of the fishing banks.
During a hurricane in 1876 on the Banks almost an entire fleet was
disabled or lost and 200 men were drowned. The wind, which had been
blowing a gale from the southeast, veered suddenly to west-northwest.
Skipper Collins of the schooner Howard, one of the vessels that escaped,
had a remarkable experience. His vessel was "hawsed" up by the current,
which set strongly to the southward and nearly at right angles to the
hurricane. He had just time to tie up the clew of his riding sail--a
sort of storm trysail--and lash the bottom hoops together, thus making a
"bag reef," when the hurricane burst with terrific force upon the little
vessel. A heavy sea boarded the schooner and carried off one of the
sailors. Later on, while standing on the bit head of the fife rail and
grasping the riding-sail halyards ready to let it run if necessary, a
ball of lightning burst between the masts and knocked the captain
insensible to the deck, whence he was dragged below by his crew. The
lightning severely burned his right arm and leg and disappeared through
his boots.
During the same storm the schooner Burnham was struck so suddenly and
with such violence by a sea as to turn her bottom up and throw her
skipper, James Nickerson, and his crew, who were below, upon the
ceiling, where they lay sprawling for a moment until the vessel righted
herself. There was one man on deck when she was struck, Hector McIsaac.
He saw the wave coming and leapt into the shrouds. With his legs locked
in the ratlines he went down into the foaming sea, and when the crew
came on deck there was Hector McIsaac still clinging to the shrouds.
Captain Nickerson was subsequently lost in a dory from the Bellerophon
on the Banks, and Hector McIsaac went down in the Nathaniel Webster in
1881, together with his brother.
Everybody who lives in Gloucester is interested in the fishing industry,
and so it falls out that the city's life is about equally made up of
intervals of joy and sorrow. When summer opens the general tone of
public feeling is bright and hopeful, but at the end of the season, as
the fishers come in, some with flags at half-mast, others bearing
fateful news, the whole town is depressed. All the residents show a
concern in the sailors who are lost and in the welfare of their
families. Even citizens of fortune who suffer no personal bereavement
have been brought closely into touch with the poor fishing families
through repeated tragedies at sea. The scenes in the fishing quarters
during the late fall and winter months when news of death is brought by
almost every returning boat are most pathetic. Sometimes the news comes
with a shock, at others wives and children wait for weeks in anxiety and
never know the details of the fate of their loved ones.
The immediate wants of the families of lost sailors are looked after by
the Gloucester Relief Association. Almost everybody in the town
subscribes to this, rich and poor alike, as well as the sailors living
along the shore and in Nova Scotia, all of whom sail in the Gloucester
vessels. When there is a disaster the nearest relatives of the men lost
receive a sum proportionate to the amount which the subscribers have
paid into the association. In addition, voluntary subscriptions are made
by churches and societies in Gloucester and Boston once a year and
distributed at the time of the annual memorial service in February.
This service held in the city hall of Gloucester is unique in its way.
Everybody in the city takes an interest in it and, with shops closed and
business suspended, the day is one of general mourning. But neither
death nor its solemn reminders can rob the boy born and bred in
Gloucester of hunger for the time when he, too, may hazard life and
fortune on the distant fishing grounds; and gray Mother Ocean, kindly
and cruel by turns, claims him for her own, singing to-day of his
hardihood and to-morrow--chanting his requiem.