his eyes--the deeper senses do the work on such nights--and let her pay
off. “But we can’t run this way long--we’d be smothered in the shoal
water.” Again he tacked, again in a shadow of sails. “She’s in the same
fix,” he muttered, and tacked again. No shadow pressed and he drew
breath, but hardly a whole breath, when again voices, from aloft as well
as from across the water. All about him he looked to make out. When he
did make out anything there were two of them--one to each side. There
was nothing to do, then, but try to outrun them both. He eased off his
sheets and away went the old _Pantheon_.
“Running to perdition if I hold this long.” He could hear the roar quite
plainly now, and, hearing it, groaned. “But I’ve got to keep clear. God!
why don’t they hold up?”
And then it came--from straight ahead and so suddenly that no human
power could avert, no quickness of hand or eye or trick of seamanship or
weatherliness of vessel could avail. Head on to the old _Pantheon_ it
was--a phantom of white above and a band of black below showed through
the driving snow. One awful wait that was worse than the actual
collision, and then it came. 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!” shouted one, as back he came. The
sea poured in by way of the great gashes. A moment more and it poured
unchecked over the _Pantheon’s_ rails. Then the spars of the stranger
went over the side and across the _Pantheon’s_ deck. Somebody moaned
that he was hurt, but there was no time to find out who. The stranger’s
dory bobbing up alongside, one man made a wild leap for it, fell short,
and that ended him, though that mattered not much--he had no chance
either way. Others--wraith-like voices--were heard calling from the sea
before they went under smothering. One man called to a mate, “Take hold,
boy,” and both rode grimly to their death, cresting high the great seas,
astraddle the _Pantheon’s_ chain-box.
Dannie clung to the wheel, hoping that the wind and sea would carry the
_Pantheon_ clear, and that, being ready, he might force her off. But not
so. They did come apart, but apart they settled even more rapidly. The
stranger went down stern first; the _Pantheon_ stern hove high, pointed
her bow after the stranger, and began to settle that way, bow first.
The Skipper was alone at the wheel when she made her plunge, and
defiantly clung to her till he was carried far under. He rose to the
surface and caught his breath. And that breath he gave to the _Pantheon_
as he saw her mast-heads plunging. “You were a good vessel to me,” he
murmured, even as the sea tossed him far away. He reached for something
in the swash and found he had the wheel-box. He grasped it, but it was
all smooth-sided--no place for his hands to get a grip, and the
terrible tide rips tore him loose. One sea, and another, now high where
the heavens touched the crests almost, and again in the depths and
roarings he was cast like the flying spume itself.
Enveloped in foam so thick that even when his head was above the surface
he could not breathe fairly, he still tried to justify that last
catastrophe. “And yet you were a good vessel to me.”
There is always a last sea, and that last sea caught him fair and
overbore him. He knew it when it came. The physical agony was by then
and the soul surmounting all. Not till then did he indulge himself so
far as to let his heart dwell on the memory of her as he last saw her,
standing in the doorway when he turned the corner. For the last time he
had turned that corner. Ah, but she was beautiful--and was it to lose
her he came to sea?
The roar of Georges Shoals was in his soul. He began to hear the voices
then, voices of his own men--he knew them--and voices he had never heard
before--voices, no doubt, of men lost in these long years of toil in
waters where the sands below are white with lost men’s bones. Her voice
he heard, too--heard it above all. “Dannie, Dannie,” it whispered, plain
as could be. By that he knew that she needed no newspaper to tell
her--even at that moment she knew--knew, and was suffering. And all her
life she would have to suffer. And so it was “God help you, Katie
Morrison!” that parted his foam-drenched lips at the last.
* * * * *
The _Katie Morrison_ was launched and rigged, but ’twas another young
and hopeful skipper that sailed her out to sea.
Patsie Oddie’s Black Night
“To hell with them that’s saved,” said he--
“Here’s to them that died.”
’Twas Patsie Oddie said that--that is, said it first. Many people have
repeated it since, but with Patsie Oddie it was born. He said a whole
lot more--enough for somebody to make a song of--but the two lines
quoted above serve to sum the matter up.
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.
Four days and four nights to butt her shoulders home--and glad to get
home at that.”
That was the story from all of them when they came in. And they were
sights coming in, too. Ice? You had to look half-way to the mast-head to
see anything _but_ ice. Anchors, bows, dories in the waist, cable on
deck--all was solid as could be--all on deck from rail to rail and clear
aft to the wheel--ice, ice, ice.
The crew of the _Delia Corrigan_ were putting her stores aboard. Her
skipper, Patsie Oddie, was standing on the dock and looking her over. He
hummed a song as he looked. This was just after he had painted her
black. She had come to him black, but in a run of bad luck he had
painted her blue; and having worked off the bad luck, he had painted her
black again. Now she looked beautiful--black and beautiful--and able!
Let no man cast eye on the _Delia_ and not praise her ableness while
Patsie Oddie was by.
All at once he called out to one of his men: “Martin, let’s take a walk
up the street.” And Martin went gladly enough.
First they had a drink, and then Patsie stepped into the shop of what
all fishermen rated the best tailor in Gloucester. “Measure me for a
suit of sails,” was his word of greeting there. “Give me a Crump Taylor
vest, a Wesley Marrs jacket, and a Tom O’Donnell pair of pants, and all
of the best. And mind the mains’l.”
“The overcoat, Captain?”
“The overcoat? What else? Isn’t she the biggest sail of all? Mind when
you come to that--put plenty of duck to it, the best and finest of duck.
And good stout duck, double-ought, like what gen’rally goes into a
fores’l. And the best and finest of selvin’ and trimmin’s along the
leach and the luff and in the belly of it. And let it hang low--the
latest fashion, same’s you made Crump Taylor. Crump steps ashore a while
ago with one down to the rail. He tells me he has to sway it up every
now and then to keep it off the deck. Five weeks to-day I’ll want it.
Mind now, the best.”
“And which way do you go now, Captain?” said the tailor when he had
taken the big skipper’s measure.
“To the east’ard,” said Patsie.
“But not to-day?” said the tailor. “Too blowy, ain’t it?”
“Maybe,” said Patsie, “you’d like to go skipper o’ the _Delia Corrigan_?
S’pose now you go on with that suit, and let me go to the east’ard. And
you tell me what’ll be and I’ll pay you now. How much?”
“Will you go as high as forty-five dollars for the suit and sixty-five
for the coat, a hundred and ten dollars in all, Captain?”
“Yes, and a hundred and forty-five and a hundred and sixty-five and
three hundred and ten in all, if need be. The best of cloth I want,
mind, and double-ought in the big coat--no less. It’s to be a weddin’,
maybe.”
“Best man?” said the tailor.
“I dunno,” said Patsie, “whether ’twill be best man or second-best man,
but that’s the way of it now. Maybe I’ll know more about it afore we put
out. But if I don’t call for it next trip, you c’n wear it yourself.
Here’s your money. Come along, Martin.”
Down the street he stopped at a jeweller’s shop. “A diamond ring I want,
and I don’t know much about them.”
He looked over an envelopeful that the salesman emptied on to the glass
case. “But I don’t want any red or yellow or fancy colors--a good white
one I want. Now here’s one. A hundred dollars? Something better than
that. This one now? A hundred and fifty? And this one? A hundred and
seventy-five, is it? And here’s a two hundred one, you say? But here’s a
better one, isn’t it? It’s a bigger one, anyway. Only a hundred and
eighty? Like men, aren’t they--the biggest not always the best? Like
men, yes--and like women, too--the showiest not always the best. I’ll
take this one, the two hundred and fifty dollar lad. Martin, how do you
like that? Would a young woman be pleased with that, d’y’ think?”
“The woman, skipper, that wouldn’t be pleased with that ought to be hove
over the rail.”
“Well, I hope we won’t have to heave nobody over the rail. But pick out
a little somethin’ for yourself, Martin-boy. There’s somethin’ there’d
go fine in your necktie when you’re ashore. Hush, hush, boy--take it,
and don’t talk. And now”--to the man behind the case--“how much all
told? This little pin for myself, too.”
“Two hundred and fifty, and twenty for your friend’s pin, and the little
thing for yourself, five dollars-- I’ll throw that in Captain--two
hundred and seventy. And if you have a mind to change that diamond any
time, we’ll be willing to give you something else for it.”
Patsie looked down at the floor and then up at the salesman. “I don’t
think I’ll want to change it. I mayn’t have any use for it, but whether
I do or not, you won’t see it back here any more. Let’s be movin’,
Martin.”
He led the way out and away from Main Street and stopped on a corner.
“Martin, do you wait under the lee of this house whilst I jogs on a bit.
’Tisn’t long I’ll be gone. Swing off when you see me headin’ back, and
wait for me at the bottom of the hill.”
Martin waited, but not for long. It seemed to him that he had taken no
more than a dozen drags of his pipe when he saw his skipper coming back.
Down the hill went Martin, and after him came his skipper.
Not a word said Patsie Oddie until they were on Main Street again. Then
it was only, “The stores’ll be aboard by now, don’t you think, Martin?”
“They ought to, Skipper.”
“Then we’ll put out.” He threw a glance at the sky and then a look to
the flag on the Custom House as they turned off Main Street to go down
to the dock. At the head of the dock they met Wesley Marrs.
“Hulloh Patsie,” said Wesley.
“Hulloh Wesley,” said Patsie. “Go on to the vessel, you, Martin, and
tell them to make sail. I’ll follow on.” Then, when Martin had gone on
ahead, “When’d you get in, Wesley?”
“Just shot in.”
“How’s it outside?”
“Plenty of the one kind,” said Wesley. “Anybody that likes it no’west
ought to be pleased. Tack, tack, tack, for every blessed foot of the
way. All but put in to Shelburne once to give the crew a rest. Night and
day, tack, tack, tack-- I cal’late the rudder post’s worn ’most out. Yes,
sir. And never a let-up choppin’ ice--had to, to keep her from sinkin’
under us. Fourteen days from Fortune Bay that I’ve run in fifty-odd
hours in the _Lucy_ with the wind to another quarter. Man, but I was
beginnin’ to think the baby’d be grown a man afore I’d see him again.
Well, I’m off, Patsie.”
“Where to?”
“Where to? Home, of course.”
“Oh, home?”
“Of course--the baby and the wife. Patsie, but you ought to marry.
You’ll never be half a man till you marry.”
“Yes? And who’ll I marry?”
“Oh, some nice, fine girl. Man, but there’s whole schools of girls’d
jump to marry you--whole schools, man. Heave your seine and you’d get a
deck-load of ’em--or a dory-load, anyway.”
“No, nor a dory-load, nor a single one caught by the gills in
mistake--me that has no more learnin’ than a husky out o’ Greenland. Not
me, Wesley, that can’t read my own name unless it’s wrote in plain
print, and that c’n only find my way about by dead reckonin’. I c’n haul
the log, and, knowin’ her course and allowin’ for tides and one thing or
another that’s set down and the other things that aren’t set down, but
which a man knows nat’rally----”
“Yes, Patsie, and knows it better than nineteen out o’ twenty that has
sextants and quadrants, and can run them--what do they call ’em--sumner
lines?”
“Well, maybe as well as some, Wesley. But, Wesley, girls aren’t lookin’
for the likes o’ me. Patsie Oddie’ll do to handle a vessel, maybe, and
he’ll take her where any other man that sails the sea’ll take her, and
he’ll bring her home again. And he’s good enough to get the fish and
bring them to market, to hang out in a blow, to carry sail till all’s
blue, and the like o’ that. But his style don’t go these days, Wesley.
No, there may be schools o’ girls swimmin’ around somewheres, but
they’re divin’ the twine when Patsie Oddie makes a set. Anyway, it
wouldn’t make any difference to me if whole rafts of ’em was to come
swimmin’ alongside and poke their heads up and say, ‘Come and take me.’
I’m one o’ them queer kind, Wesley, that only goes after one girl. And I
set for her--and didn’t get her.”
Wesley said nothing to that for a while. Then it was: “Well, Patsie,
never mind. I didn’t think when I spoke first. I’ll say, though, that I
don’t think much of the girl that wouldn’t stand watch with you if you
asked her. If she wanted a man, Patsie, I’m sure I don’t know where
she’d get a better one--that’s if it’s a _man_ she wanted. If she don’t
want a man, but only a smooth kind of arrangement that plays a banjo or
c’n stand up to a pianner and sing, ‘I loves yer, I loves yer,’ or some
other damn mess--and the same to every girl that looks his way--one of
the kind that’s hell ashore, but can’t take in sail in a gale without
washin’ a couple of men over the lee-rail, one of the kind that gives
this way and that to every tide that ebbs and flows, like a red-painted
whistlin’ buoy--why, then, maybe somebody else’d look prettier swashin’
around for the people to look at and make use of. Maybe,” went on
Wesley, “she’d take a notion to some bucko like Artie Orcutt that just
lost the _Neptune_. Heard of it?”
“’Twas in the papers this mornin’, so they tell me. I’m not much of a
hand to read papers, you know.”
“Well, he lost his vessel and ten of his men, and ought to lose his
papers. With half a man’s courage and a quarter of the seamanship any
master of a vessel oughter have, he’d’ve saved his vessel and all his
men. He c’n thank the _Lucy Foster’s_ ableness and the courage of some
of her crew that a soul of them got home at all. They came home with
us--all but Orcutt--from Fortune Bay. He was goin’ to get a passage over
to St. Pierre and wait a while there.”
“My!” said Patsie, “that’ll be a bad bit o’ news to Delia.”
“What!”
“Yes, Orcutt is the man. I think ’tis him, anyways. I know he used to
hang around there when I was to sea--and a word dropped this mornin’-- It
must be somebody; and who but him?”
Wesley looked at Patsie. “Well, if it is him, may the Lord forgive me
for pickin’ him off. I wish I’d knowed it, though maybe, after all, I
couldn’t ’a’ managed it to leave him and take the others. Oh, well, it’s
all in the year’s fishin’. He’s lucky. Maybe he’ll live to teach this
girl of his what a man oughtn’t be, though I don’t suppose you’ll care
so much about it by the time she’s learned the lesson. Man, but I can’t
believe Delia Corrigan’d throw you for Artie Orcutt. No, Patsie, I
can’t. But here’s the Anchorage fair on our beam. What d’y’ say to a
little touch, hah? A pretty cold morning, Patsie.”
“I don’t mind, Wesley.”
“What’ll it be to, Patsie?” Wesley raised his glass and waited for
Patsie. They were leaning against the rail by that time.
“What to? Oh, to the _Neptune’s_ gang--the whole ten of ’em.”
“Sure enough--the whole ten. Here’s a shoot--but hold up. Which ten,
Patsie--the ten lost or the ten saved?”
“The ten saved? To hell with the ten saved!” said Patsie--“the Lord’s
looked out for them that’s saved.” Patsie raised his glass: “Here’s to
them that died.”
“Them that died? H’m--and yet I don’t know but what you’re right.
They’ve got their share, come to think--you’ve got it right, Patsie.
Here’s to them that was lost.” And Wesley gulped his liquor down.
“And which way, Patsie?” Wesley inquired after the return drink.
“To the east’ard,” said Patsie.
“To the east’ard, is it? Well, I don’t need to say fair wind to you, for
you’ve got it. This wind holds, and you’ll be heavin’ trawls in that
fav’rite spot of yours on Sable Island no’th-east bar in forty hours or
so. I cal’late you’ll keep on fishing there till some fine day you get
caught. Well, good luck and drive her, Patsie, till you’re back again.”
And Wesley swung off for his wife and baby.
“Drive her,” Wesley had said, and certainly Patsie Oddie drove her that
trip to the east’ard. Before a whistling gale and under four whole lower
sails the _Delia_ went away from Eastern Point and across the Bay of
Fundy like a ghost in torment. Two or three new men, not yet in full
sympathy with their skipper, began to inquire what it all meant. They
could see the sense of driving a vessel like that on a passage home, but
going out!
On that passage to the east’ard only the watch stayed on deck where a
man had his choice--the watch and the Skipper--the Skipper walking the
quarter and dodging the seas that came after her between little lines of
some song he was humming to himself. Every man on coming below after a
watch spoke of the Skipper and his singing, but only a word did they
catch now and then to remember afterward.
“Out in the snow and the gale they rowed,
And no man saw them more,”
was what one caught.
“And a fine thing that, to be singing on a cold winter’s night with a
howling gale behind and the seas breaking over her quarter. Yes, a fine
thing, that,” said the crew, in the security of the cabin below.
“And no man saw them more----”
Some men lost in dories the skipper must have been talking about, and
after that:
“And should it be the Lord’s decree
Some day to lay me in the sea,
There’ll be no woman to mourn for me--
For that, O Lord, here’s thanks to Thee!”
under his breath generally, but his voice rising now and then with the
wind.
Martin Carr, who happened to be at the wheel just then, made out that
snatch of his skipper’s song as he walked the tumbling quarter. And he
kept walking the quarter, walking the quarter--and a cold night it was
for a man to be walking the quarter--a word to the watch once in a
while, but saying nothing mostly, except to croon the savage songs to
himself.
Surely nothing peaceful was coming out of that kind of a song, thought
watch after watch, bracing themselves at the wheel to meet each new
blast of the no’-west wind.
In the morning he was still there walking the quarter--less mournful,
perhaps, but in a savage humor. Men who had sailed with him for years
did not know what to make of it. There was the incident of the big bark,
a good part of whose sail had evidently been blown away and the most of
what was left tied up. Under the smallest possible canvas she was
heading close up to the wind and making small way of it.
“Why the divil don’t they heave her to entirely!” snapped Patsie. “Look
at her, will ye, the size of her and the sail she’s carryin’, and then
the size of this little one and the sail _she’s_ carryin’.”
The men chopping ice on the bark’s deck stood transfixed as they saw the
little _Delia_ sweep by. Under her four lowers, and going like the
blizzard itself was she, with a big bearded man, wrapped to his eyes in
a great-coat, waving his arms and swearing across the white-topped seas
at them.
“And did you never see a vessel afore?” barked Patsie. “Well, look your
fill, then, and get our name while you’re about it, and report us, will
you?--the _Delia Corrigan_, Gloucester, and doin’ her fifteen knots
good, will you?”
And then, turning away to his own: “The likes o’ some of ’em oughtn’t be
allowed a cable-length off shore. Their mothers ought to be spoke to
about it. There’s a fellow there ought to be going along about his
business--and look at him, hove to! Waitin’ for it to moderate! Lord,
think of it--as fine a day as this and waitin’ for it to moderate! The
sun shinin’, and as nice a green sea as ever a man’d want to look at!
It’s the like o’ them that loses vessels and men--makes widows and
orphans.”
So much for his crew. Then a dark look ahead and beyond the green and
white seas that were sweeping by the _Delia’s_ bow, while the bearded
lips moved wrathfully. “Ten men lost, blast him! And drinkin’ wine,
maybe, in Saint Peer now, if we c’d only see him! Yes, and he’ll come
back to Gloucester with a divil of a fine story to tell. ’Tis a hero
he’ll make himself out to be. Looked in the face o’ death and escaped,
he’ll say--blast him!”
* * * * *
Sable Island--sometimes, and not too extravagantly, termed the Graveyard
of the Atlantic--is set among shoal waters that afford the best of
feeding-ground for the particular kinds of fish that Gloucestermen most
desire--halibut, cod, haddock, and what not--and so to its shoal waters
do the fishermen come to trawl or hand-line.
Lying about east and west, a flat quarter moon in shape, is Sable
Island. Two long bars, extending north-westerly and north-easterly, make
of it a full deep crescent. Nowhere is the fishing so good (or so
dangerous) as close in on these bars, and the closer in and the shoaler
the water, the better the fishing. There are a few men alive in
Gloucester who have been in close enough to see the surf break on the
bare bar; but that was in soft weather and the bar to windward, and they
invariably got out in a hurry.
Two hundred and odd wrecks of one kind or another, steam and sail, have
settled in the sands of Sable Island. Of this there is clear and
indisputable record. How many good vessels have been driven ashore on
the long bars on dark and stormy nights or in the whirls of snowstorms
and swallowed up in the fine sand before ever mortal eye could make note
of their disappearing hulls, there is no telling.
Gloucester fishermen need no tabulated statement to remind them that the
bones of hundreds of their kind are bleaching on the sands of Sable
Island, and yet of all the men who sail the sea they are the only class
that do not give it wide berth in winter. And of all the skippers who
resorted to the north-east bar in winter, Patsie Oddie was pre-eminent.
Some there were who said he was reckless, but those that knew him best
answered that it would be recklessness indeed if he did not know the
place; if he did not know every knoll and gully of it that man could
know, including gullies and knolls that were not down on charts--and
never would be, because the men that made the charts would never go in
where Patsie Oddie had gone and sounded when the weather allowed.
It was on the Sable Island grounds--the north-east bar--that the
_Delia_, after a slashing passage, let go her anchor on the morning of
the second day. Twenty fathoms of water it was, shoal enough water any
time, but good and shoal for that time of the year, when gales that made
lee shore of the bar were frequent. The _Delia’s_ crew were not
worrying, though; they gloried in their skipper.
Lying there close in, with the wind north-west, the _Delia_ was in the
lee of the north-east bar, and that first day, too, was not at all
rough. And the fish were thick there, and as fine and fat as man would
want to see. Fifteen thousand of halibut and ten thousand of good
cod--certainly that was a great day’s work. Was it not worth fishing
close in to get a haul like that? Turning in that night they were all
thinking what a fine day they had made of it, and wondering if the
fellow they had seen to the eastward--in deeper and safer water--had
done so well. But they all felt sure he had not. “In the morning,” said
Martin Carr, “he’ll get up his courage and come in and give us a
look-over, and finding we did so well, maybe he’ll anchor close in and
make a set, too.”