way, Captain Joyce observed that it was a wistful crowd which was
watching him. It was always a wistful crowd. He nodded amiably to four
or five, but gazed vacantly at the others. All told, there must have
been twenty loafers in the place, and everyone undeniably thirsty, with
a thirst that was immeasurably intensified by the sight of this
successful skipper preparing to take a drink.
Coleman, regarding them again, pulled out an old wallet and from it took
a five-dollar bill. Every pair of expectant eyes in the place saw the V
on the bill. Plainly, too, he was not trying to hide it. A symphony of
short, hacking coughs foretold clogged throats clearing for
action-- Captain Joyce always was free with his money. Following the
bill, but only after a lot of digging about with his fingers, Captain
Joyce extricated a silver coin--a quarter of a dollar, they saw. Coleman
held it up to his eyes that he might the better see it. Nobody, looking
at those eyes of his, would ever suspect that they were weak. He put
back the bill, restrapped the wallet, replaced it in his pocket, laid
the quarter on the bar, and took his drink, first the whiskey, then the
water, and both rapidly, as a man of action should.
Smacking his lips and regarding the change on the bar--a dime and a
nickel--at the same time casting a sly glance at the barkeeper, he
beckoned with his hand over his shoulder, but without looking around.
“Let ye all come up,” he said, and bolted for the door to escape the
rush.
Outside the door of the saloon he was hailed by a shore-going friend,
once a fisherman, but now a grocer, whose chief income arose from
provisioning fishing vessels, and so one who kept up with all the gossip
of the fleet. “Hello, Captain Joyce! What’s this they’re telling me
about you having a new vessel--a new style model, too.”
“It’s the truth.”
“And given up the _Maggie_--that was built for you--that I heard you say
a hundred times was not a bad sailer at all and the ablest vessel of her
tonnage that ever sailed past Boston Light?”
“Yes, or past any other light. She’s that and more. But Lord bless you,
she can’t sail with some of the new ones, and I’m tired to my soul of
havin’ every blessed model of a fisherman that was ever launched comin’
up on my quarter and goin’ by like I was an old sander. This last time
who was it, d’y’ think? You’d never guess. Name every vessel that ever
sailed out of T Dock and she’d be the last you or any other man’d name.
Who but the _Bonita_--yes. The black-whiskered divil, Portugee Joe,
yes--with the rings in his ears. Faith, an’ had I hold of him when he
said it, ’tis in his nose he’d be wearin’ them. ‘Captain Joyce,’ he
hails, and the bloody Dago he can’t talk United States yet--‘Captain
Joyce, what you carry, hah?--breeks or gran-eet or what?’ Gran-eet, mind
ye, with the Western Islands brogue of him! Yes, and goes on by the
same’s if the _Maggie_ was r’ally loaded with granite. ‘By the Lord,’ I
calls out after him, ‘but the next time you and me try tacks I’ll make a
wake for you to steer by or I’ll know why.’ And I’ve got a vessel now,
b’y, a vessel that can sail or I don’t know fast lines when I see them.
And the Portugee he’s just gone down the harbor--he’ll be waitin’ for me
outside the lightship, he says. So I’m off.”
Captain Joyce journeyed on and, standing on the cap-log at the end of
the wharf, he looked down on his new vessel and his eyes shone with joy
in the sheer beauty of her. “Purty, purty, purty,” he murmured; “just
like she was whittled out of a block.” And, turning to a man who was
taking his bag ashore, the last man of the old gang to leave her, he
inquired, “She can sail, they tell me, this one?”
“Oh, she can sail all right.”
“And how does she handle?”
“Handle? She’s that quick in stays that you want to watch her.”
“Watch her, eh? And stiff is she?”
“I don’t know about that. One day we used to think she was a house, but
again she’d roll down in a twelve-knot breeze, and in a way to make your
hair curl.”
“Man alive! But whisper, was that why Jimmie Eliot gave her up?”
“I don’t know about that. He wouldn’t say, the Skipper wouldn’t.”
“And that’s queer, too, come to think.”
“It do look queer, but maybe he thought it wouldn’t be fair to the
owners.”
“’Tis the divil and all of a mystery. And where is he now?”
“Went to Gloucester last night.”
“That’s too bad. When another man’s been in a vessel I gen’rally likes
to get his notions of her myself. You can’t tell a vessel by just
lookin’ at her--you have to be in her a while. Well, whatever she is,
we’ll put out in her now. Let ye hoist the mains’l, b’ys, and we’ll go.
Portugee Joe is waitin’ for us below.”
Captain Joyce and his able crew put out from the dock and a great crowd
lined the cap-log to see her off. Down the harbor she went, creeping
before the light westerly as if she had a propeller hidden somewhere
below.
Captain Joyce and his old friend Jerry Connors looked her up and looked
her down.
“I say, Jerry, but did ever y’ see annything scoot like her--hardly a
breath and she goin’ along like she is. It’s not right, Jerry--hardly a
ripple in her wake.”
“Oh, you’ve been so long in the old _Maggie_, Skipper----”
“The _old Maggie_, is it? She’s not too old--ten year.”
“I know. Ten year is nothing in a good vessel, but they been improving
them so fast. Last fall, the trip you didn’t wait for me, you know, I
went in the _Jennie and Katie_. Y’oughter seen her skipper. Handle? Like
a little naphtha launch to pick up dories. And sail? Man, but she could
sail!”
“That so? And how’d she behave in heavy weather?”
“Well, we didn’t have any heavy weather that trip.”
“No breeze at all?”
“Well, one day it did breeze up. We had her under a balanced reef
mains’l. She did slap around a bit. ’Twas the devil and all to stay in
your bunk, but she did pretty well. But you mustn’t get ’em out of trim.
The first two doryloads of fish that came aboard that trip was pitched
into her after-pens and, man, she reared right up in the air--right
straight up on her hind legs and began to claw out with her fore feet
like she was trying to climb up a wall----”
“You’d think ’twas a horse you were talkin’ about, Jerry. But she could
sail, you say?”
“Sail? Like a plank on edge--and greased.”
“Well, this one can sail, too. Look at her. Not a blessed hop out of
her--just smoochin’ along like a girl slidin’ on ice ashore, isn’t she?”
Off the lightship they found the _Bonita_. “There he is,” announced
Coleman, “with his rings in his ears. Keep her as she is till the pair
of us come together. Trip afore last he sailed a couple of rings around
the _Maggie_ by way of amusin’ himself, but I’ll amuse him now or I’ll
tear the sail off this one.”
In a freshening breeze and both vessels soon swinging all they had, it
was a good chance for a try-out. Four hours of that and the victory went
to the handsome _Celestine_, for off Cape Cod, after a run of fifty
miles, Coleman had the _Bonita_ two miles to leeward.
For an hour after that Coleman could hardly be coaxed down to eat.
Standing on the _Celestine’s_ quarter, he chuckled, and chuckled, and
chuckled. Even after taking his place at the table, he had to climb up
the companionway to have one more look at the beaten _Bonita_. “A good
vessel for rip-fishin’ the Portugee’s got--she drifts well,” he said,
“and maybe ’tis me won’t tell him next time we meet.”
And yet in the middle of the meal he suddenly set down his mug of coffee
and leaned across the table. “Don’t it strike you, Jerry, that for a
vessel of her model this one is the divil for stiffness?”
“We were saying among ourselves a little while ago, Skipper, that we
never before saw a vessel that barely wet her scuppers in a breeze like
this.”
“That’s it-- I don’t know what it is. But she’s a queer divil altogether.
Sometimes when she luffs she fetches up in a way to shake every tooth in
your head. And there was what one of the men that was in her last trip
said of her.”
“And what did he say, Skipper?”
“He said--but come to think, he didn’t say anything, and that’s the
divil of it. One or two little outs in a vessel, if you know what they
are, aren’t always a great harm. But when you don’t know how to take
her!”
The crew agreed with their Skipper that there was something queer about
this new vessel of theirs, but no illuminating discussion came of it
until next morning when, having cleared the north shoal of Georges, it
became necessary to head southward.
Heading to the east’ard in a southerly breeze, she had been on the
starboard tack up to that time. Now her helmsman shot her head across
the wind, her sails shook, shivered, her booms began to swing, and over
on the port tack went the _Celestine_. Everybody looked to see her roll
down some, but in that breeze--they hadn’t even taken their stays’l
in--nobody looked to see her do what she did. Least of all her Skipper,
who, standing carelessly by the starboard rail, would have gone
overboard and been lost probably, but for Jerry Connors.
“Wheel down! wheel down!” roared Jerry, and hauled the Skipper back
aboard.
“Down it is!”
“Cripes!” said the Skipper when he found his breath--“cripes, but she’s
left-handed.”
“Left-handed?”
“Yes, and double left-handed, the cross-eyed whelp! Just barely put her
scuppers under on one tack and down to her hatches on the other. Man
alive, but if we have to put her on the wrong tack makin’ a passage,
what’ll we ever do with her? Put her back, put her back--back on the
other tack with her and keep her there till we get some sail off her.
Man, man, but when we have to put a vessel under her four lowers in a
little breeze like this----”
They kept her so until next morning, when they hove her to--they had to
heave her to--with Georges north shoal bearing twenty-three miles west
by north and a howling gale in prospect. With the glass showing a scant
29 and the sea coming to them in a long swell, they all foresaw a good
lay-off with a chance to catch up on sleep or read up, or overhaul their
gear.
The storm hit in hard that night. 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. Next day
they took sail off her altogether and made ready their hawser and big
anchor. Under both anchors, if it came to that, she certainly would be
safe.
This gale was some time in passing. And now it was coming on evening of
the fourth day--two days of a heavy breeze and two days of the great
seas. All the men, excepting the watch, were below, about half for’ard
and half aft, those for’ard mugging-up or overhauling trawls, those aft
listening to Jerry Connors, a great reader, who was now reeling off a
most interesting story with dramatic emphasis. It was the “Cloister and
the Hearth,” and Gerald was up in the tree with the bear after him--the
_Celestine_ dancing like a lead-ballasted cork figure all the while. In
the middle of it all the watch hailed something from deck. The Skipper,
trying to keep from sliding off the locker and, at the same time, above
the howling of the wind get what Jerry was reading, grew wrathy at the
interruption.
“What’s that ballyhooin’ on deck--whose watch?”
One had risen, and now from the companion steps, his head above the
slide, passed on the word. “It’s John’s.”
“Oh, John is it? Don’t mind John--the least thing worries John. But what
was he sayin’?”
“He says there’s some big seas coming, and getting bigger all the time;
and true enough, they are.”
“Big seas, is it? Cripes, a man don’t need to stand watch on deck or
stick his head out of the hatch, like a turkey in a crate, to find that
out.”
“Big seas coming aboard, he says, and hadn’t we better make ready to put
out the big anchor, she being on her weak tack?”
“Her weak side! That’s so--maybe we had. Tell him yes and call the gang
for’ard. Now go on, Jerry, whilst we’re waitin’. What did that divil of
a bear do then?” The Skipper leaned forward from the locker. “What did
he do? Hurry on, Jerry-boy.”
“And then he--” recommenced Jerry, but got no further. A scurry of boots
was heard on deck, a quick slamming back of the slide, and down the
companionway came John. Feet first he came flying and hauled the slide
after him. “Here’s one big as a church and----”
That was all he got out when the sea struck. Over went the
_Celestine_--over, over--the Skipper was shot from the locker through
the open door of his stateroom across the cabin. Jerry, who had been
sitting by the stove, was shot into that same room ahead of the Skipper.
Another, lying comfortably in his bunk to windward, was thrown clear
across the cabin and into the opposite bunk on the lee side, and his
bedding followed him and covered him up. Another of the crew, doubled up
in the after windward bunk, was sent past the lazarette and in on top of
his neighbor, who had a moment before been comfortably lying in his bunk
to leeward, passing the time of day with a pleasant word and a pipe in
his mouth. The bedding also followed that man. Everything loose went
from the windward bunks to the lee bunks--from the whole windward side
to the lee side.
The vessel poised so for perhaps ten seconds, while men called one to
another. “What’s it?” “Are you hurted, Joe?” “God help us--what in the
divil’s this?” “What in the devil’s name--” “Man, let me up--’tis
smothered I am!” Cries of surprise and cries of consternation, while
through it all the _Celestine_ seemed balanced between going down for
good and never coming up at all. The wall-lamp flared and then started
to blaze. 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.”
A short space of that, and she rolled part way back. “Up she comes,”
said the Skipper--“’tisn’t in nature she won’t come--she’s got to come
up soon or go down entirely.” And it did seem as if she was coming up,
but the next big sea hit her--bigger than the one that had hove her
down. Down inside the _Celestine_ they never quite agreed on what
happened. They knew that for a moment or two they were standing on the
roof of the cabin, that the red-hot cover fell off the stove and hit
that same roof, that the hot coals fell out of the stove and began to
sizzle among the loose bedding. They knew, too, that in the middle of it
all John’s voice was heard exclaiming, “Oh, my poor wife!” and again, “O
God, O God, we’re lost!” and that the Skipper said, “Hush up your
caterwauling--we’re a long way from bein’ lost yet,” even while the
loose bedding began to take fire and blaze up.
Then all at once she righted, and so suddenly that they were thrown one
against the other, across the floor and back again. And Jerry Connors
became entangled in a tub of trawls that somebody had been overhauling.
Six hundred hooks, every hook attached to three feet of ganging, and the
whole hanging to two thousand feet of line--it was an awful mess to get
mixed up with at a time like that. Twenty hooks at least were sticking
in him here and there, and Jerry swore prodigiously.
They smothered the fire with blankets and old clothes and lit the lamp
again. That done, they noted that the print of the red-hot stove cover
had been left on the roof of the cabin, showing that the vessel had been
keel up. “D’y’ s’pose she went clean over and over, or did she go
half-way and back again, Jerry?” was the first inquiry of the Skipper
when the lamp was lit.
“In God’s name, wait till I get some of these hooks out of me--they’re
into me gizzards, some of them.”
Up on deck they met the gang coming out of the forec’s’le, the cook in
the lead.
“How was it for’ard?” asked the Skipper.
‘I was lying in my bunk to looard,” began the cook, “and Jack was in his
bunk to wind’ard just opposite. Jack was playing with the cat. Well,
sir, when she went over I forgot the cat, but through the air came this
great black thing with forty claws and fourteen green and yellow eyes
and got me by the hair, and Jack with his two hundred pound weight on
top of him again. And the cat gets his claws in among me whiskers----”
“Shut up!” roared the Skipper--“you and the cat and your whiskers. Is
anybody gone? Who was on watch with you, John?”
“Mattie.”
“Is he here now?”
“Here, Skipper,” responded Mattie for himself. “When John dove for the
cabin I dove for the forec’s’le. I didn’t lose no time.”
“I’ll bet you didn’t, if you came down red-jacks first the way John
Houlihan did. Well, that’s all right, then. Let’s see what’s left on
deck. Get up a few torches--and have a care some of you aren’t washed
overboard.”
Nothing was left on deck. The spars had been torn out when she went over
and were now lying alongside threatening to punch holes in her side as
they lifted and dropped to every big sea. The Skipper took the big axe
and the cook his hatchet, and others got out their bait knives, and all
began to chop and hack and cut until the wreckage of the spars was clear
of the vessel.
Then they took a further look. Dories were gone, booby hatches were
gone, the rail was gone. Only the stanchions sticking up above the deck
showed where the rail had been. But the wonderful thing was yet to
appear. Going forward, the Skipper noticed a turn of chain around the
vessel’s bow. He looked again--and again. When he had satisfied himself
he thoughtfully combed his beard.
“Forty winters I’ve been comin’ to Georges, and this is the first time
ever I see that. There’ll be people that’ll say it never happened--that
it couldn’t have happened. But there’s the cable around her bows, a
full turn, to prove she went clean over--down one side and up the other.
We’re blessed lucky to be alive, that’s what I say.”
“That’s what we are,” affirmed Jerry, and had another look for himself.
And they all had another look for themselves. “Blessed lucky,” they all
agreed. “And what’ll we do now, Skipper?”
“Do?” He looked around and saw only the stumps of masts projecting above
her deck--no sails, no rigging, nothing. The bowsprit, even, was gone
and their chain parted--and the north shoal of Georges bearing twenty
miles to leeward. “Give her the other anchor, and whilst we’re layin’ to
that we’ll see what we can do.”
That night they hung grimly on to the other anchor. In the morning the
Skipper chewed it over. “We can’t lay here forever--that’s certain. We
must try and get her out. I don’t like that shoal to looard. With this
one there’s no tellin’ what she’ll take it into her head to do--to go
adrift maybe, and then it’s all swallowed up we’ll be in short order.”
So they prepared to work her out. For masts they could do no better than
take the pen-boards out of the hold, split them up and fish them
together. They were of two-inch stock, and when they had used them all
up they made but sorry-looking spars. For sails they shook the bedding
out of their mattresses, took the ticking and their blankets and sewed
them together with pieces of oilskins by way of patchings. There was
some record-breaking sewing aboard the _Celestine_ that morning, for all
were thinking of the shoal under their lee.
They set up the pen-boards by way of masts, laced the bedding and
blankets to them for sails, and then they had it--a medley of colors!
Blue and white striped ticks, green and gold and red blankets--the
masterpieces of fond wives ashore--and two crazy-quilts. One particular
crazy-quilt the Skipper eyed with regret. “I mind the night the wife won
that at the church fair. A hundred and fourteen chances she took--at ten
cents a chance--me payin’ for them. Nine hundred and ninety-nine pieces
in it. ‘There’ll be the fine ornament for your bunk, Colie,’ says she to
me. ‘And warm, too,’ she says, ‘on a winter’s day.’ ’Tis tears she’d be
sheddin’ could she see it this winter’s day, usin’ it by way of a cloth
to a fores’l up where the single reef cringle should be.”
They spread them all at last, brought her head to and warped in the
anchor. “And now, you slippery-elm divil, sail! Sail, you black,
fatherless, left-handed, double left-handed divil, sail!”
She did sail, after a fashion. She did not go along like the saucy
vessel that had put out from T Dock less than a week before, not quite
like a greased plank on edge or a girl sliding on ice, but she made
headway. It was heart-breaking headway that promised to make a long
voyage of the something like two hundred miles to Boston, but the crew
had hopes--if the wind stayed to the east’ard.
But the wind did not stay to the east’ard. After two days it hauled to
the north-west, and they had to tack. They tacked to the north and they
tacked to the south, always with a respectful eye to her weak side; but
it was slow work. More, it was cold, and the seas that came aboard iced
her up. And, having no rails to her, the crew had to be painfully
careful or they would slide overboard.
“And yet no great danger bein’ lost, for even with oilskins a man could
swim as fast as this one’s sailin’. But it’s so blessed cold!” said
Jerry.
They were sighted several times and other vessels bore down, but the
Skipper waved them off. “If they think because we’re short on sails and
spars they’re goin’ to get salvage out of this one, we’ll fool ’em,”
and onward he sailed with a dory, which they had picked up, lashed
amidships.
They ran out of grub and fuel. They had fitted out for market fishing,
with ten days or two weeks as the probable length of the trip. They were
now four weeks out, with Cape Cod not yet weathered. Something had to be
done. Four times they had got all but abreast of the cape--four times
the no’-wester had beaten them back. Under their rig they had to take
whatever came. They could not force her around when around she would not
go.
Nobody murmured. They were enjoying themselves. For one thing they
learned how Gerald made out with the bear, and Jerry read in his round
voice of Gerald’s further adventures; and they would not have minded it
much, though, to be sure, there was not much money in it for their
families--but that was the luck of fishing--only they were cold and
hungry.
It was then that for the first time the Skipper hailed a vessel. She was
one of the big liners, a fourteen-thousand tonner, bound out from Boston
to Liverpool. Beside her huge hulk the little _Celestine_, with her
ridiculous jury-rig, looked like a burlesque toy. But Coleman wasn’t
apologizing for looks.
[Illustration: Stood by and took them as they came down.
--See p. 67.]
“I know ye’ll be carryin’ the mail and in the divil’s own hurry, but
we’re a little short of grub,” he explained when the steamer had come to
a stop. “Our head steward doubts there’ll be oysters and ontrees enough
for our seven o’clock dinner to-night, and if ye’ll stay hove-to for a
half hour I’ll come under your lee and go aboard.”
“All right. But how will you carry the stuff?”
“Carry it, is it? Why, in the dory, to be sure.”
“What? Put a dory over to-day?”
“And why not?”
“She’ll swamp.”
“The divil she will.” They put the dory over. Coleman and Jerry got in
it, rowed alongside, and climbed up the sea-ladder. Half-way up the
Skipper looked back--there was a good bit of water in the dory. “Jerry,
you’ll have to go down again and bail her out.” Which Jerry did, while
the Skipper kept on to the steamer’s deck to negotiate.
“And what can I help you to?”
“Well, we’ll need a little coal.”
“All right. How much?”
“Oh, maybe half or three-quarters of a ton.”
“Three-quarters of a ton? And where’ll you carry It?”
“In the dory.”
“In this sea?”
“I’ve carried twenty-five hundred of fish in a dory in more sea than
this.”
“All right--in it goes. What else?”
“Oh, some wood.”
“Wood all gone, too?”
“We burned the last of our bunk-boards this morning.”
“Gracious! How much wood?”
“Oh, two or three barrels.”
“All right. But won’t it overbalance your dory?”
“L’ave that to me. And have you some vegetables, say a barrel of
potatoes----”
“Sure. And where’ll you put _them_?”
“In the dory. And a barrel of odds and ends--turnips and cabbage
and----”
“And that in the dory, too?”