A cluster of islands, lying off the cape, made the shelter of our
harbour. They were but great rocks, gray, ragged, wet with fog and surf,
rising bleak and barren out of a sea that forever fretted a thousand
miles of rocky coast as barren and as sombre and as desolate as they;
but they broke wave and wind unfailingly and with vast unconcern--they
were of old time, mighty, steadfast, remote from the rage of weather and
the changing mood of the sea, surely providing safe shelter for us folk
of the coast--and we loved them, as true men, everywhere, love home.
"'Tis the cleverest harbour on the Labrador!" said we.
When the wind was in the northeast--when it broke, swift and vicious,
from the sullen waste of water beyond, whipping up the grey sea, driving
in the vagrant ice, spreading clammy mist over the reefs and rocky
headlands of the long coast--our harbour lay unruffled in the lee of
God's Warning. Skull Island and a shoulder of God's Warning broke the
winds from the north: the froth of the breakers, to be sure, came
creeping through the north tickle, when the sea was high; but no great
wave from the open ever disturbed the quiet water within. We were fended
from the southerly gales by the massive, beetling front of the Isle of
Good Promise, which, grandly unmoved by their fuming rage, turned them
up into the black sky, where they went screaming northward, high over
the heads of the white houses huddled in the calm below; and the seas
they brought--gigantic, breaking seas--went to waste on Raven Rock and
the Reef of the Thirty Black Devils, ere, their strength spent, they
growled over the jagged rocks at the base of the great cliffs of Good
Promise and came softly swelling through the broad south tickle to the
basin. The west wind came out of the wilderness, fragrant of the far-off
forest, lying unknown and dread in the inland, from which the mountains,
bold and blue and forbidding, lifted high their heads; and the mist was
then driven back into the gloomy seas of the east, and the sun was out,
shining warm and yellow, and the sea, lying in the lee of the land, was
all aripple and aflash.
When the spring gales blew--the sea being yet white with drift-ice--the
schooners of the Newfoundland fleet, bound north to the fishing, often
came scurrying into our harbour for shelter. And when the skippers,
still dripping the spray of the gale from beard and sou'wester, came
ashore for a yarn and an hospitable glass with my father, the trader,
many a tale of wind and wreck and far-away harbours I heard, while we
sat by the roaring stove in my father's little shop: such as those which
began, "Well, 'twas the wonderfullest gale o' wind you ever
seed--snowin' an' blowin', with the sea in mountains, an' it as black as
a wolf's throat--an' we was somewheres off Cape Mugford. She were
drivin' with a nor'east gale, with the shore somewheres handy t'
le'ward. But, look! nar a one of us knowed where she were to, 'less
'twas in the thick o' the Black Heart Reefs...." Stout, hearty fellows
they were who told yarns like these--thick and broad about the chest and
lanky below, long-armed, hammer-fisted, with frowsy beards, bushy brows,
and clear blue eyes, which were fearless and quick to look.
"'Tis a fine harbour you got here, Skipper David Roth," they would say
to my father, when it came time to go aboard, "an' here, zur," raising
the last glass, "is t' the rocks that make it!"
"T' the schooners they shelter!" my father would respond.
When the weather turned civil, I would away to the summit of the
Watchman--a scamper and a mad climb--to watch the doughty little
schooners on their way. And it made my heart swell and flutter to see
them dig their noses into the swelling seas--to watch them heel and leap
and make the white dust fly--to feel the rush of the wet wind that drove
them--to know that the grey path of a thousand miles was every league of
the way beset with peril. Brave craft! Stout hearts to sail them! It
thrilled me to watch them beating up the suddy coast, lying low and
black in the north, and through the leaden, ice-strewn seas, with the
murky night creeping in from the open. I, too, would be the skipper of a
schooner, and sail with the best of them!
"A schooner an' a wet deck for me!" thought I.
And I loved our harbour all the more for that.
* * * * *
Thus, our harbour lay, a still, deep basin, in the shelter of three
islands and a cape of the mainland: and we loved it, drear as it was,
because we were born there and knew no kinder land; and we boasted it,
in all the harbours of the Labrador, because it was a safe place,
whatever the gale that blew.