"Oh, yes," says he, with interest. "An uncharted rock. It took two of
the three blades of the propeller. But, really, you'd be surprised to
know how well the ship got along with one!"
* * * * *
To know the submerged rocks of one harbour and the neighbouring coast,
however evil the place, is small accomplishment. The Newfoundland lad
of seven years would count himself his father's shame if he failed in
so little. High tide and low tide, quiet sea and heavy swell, he will
know where he can take the punt--the depth of water, to an inch, which
overlies the danger spots. But here are a hundred harbours--a thousand
miles of coast--with reefs and islands scattered like dust the length
of it. The man who sails the Labrador must know it all like his own
back yard--not in sunny weather alone, but in the night, when the
headlands are like black clouds ahead, and in the mist, when the noise
of breakers tells him all that he may know of his whereabouts. A flash
of white in the gray distance, a thud and swish from a hidden place:
the one is his beacon, the other his fog-horn. It is thus, often, that
the doctor gets along.
* * * * *
You may chart rocks, and beware of them; but--it is a proverb on the
coast--"there's no chart for icebergs." The Labrador current is
charged with them--hard, dead-white glacier ice from the Arctic:
massive bergs, innumerable, all the while shifting with tide and
current and wind. What with floes and bergs--vast fields of
drift-ice--the way north in the spring is most perilous. The same
bergs--widely scattered, diminished in number, dwarfed by the milder
climate--give the transatlantic passenger evil dreams: somewhere in
the night, somewhere in the mist, thinks he, they may lie; and he
shudders. The skipper of the Labrador craft _knows_ that they lie
thick around him: there is no surmise; when the night fell, when the
fog closed in, there were a hundred to be counted from the masthead.
* * * * *
Violent winds are always to be feared--swift, overwhelming hurricanes:
winds that catch the unwary. They are not frequent; but they _do_
blow--will again blow, no man can tell when. In such a gale, forty
vessels were driven on a lee shore; in another, eighty were wrecked
overnight--two thousand fishermen cast away, the coast littered with
splinters of ships--and, once (it is but an incident), a schooner was
torn from her anchors and flung on the rocks forty feet above the
high-water mark. These are exceptional storms; the common Labrador
gale is not so violent, but evil enough in its own way. It is a
northeaster, of which the barometer more often than not gives fair
warning; day after day it blows, cold, wet, foggy, dispiriting,
increasing in violence, subsiding, returning again, until courage and
strength are both worn out.
* * * * *
Reefs, drift-ice, wind and sea--and over all the fog: thick,
wide-spread, persistent, swift in coming, mysterious in movement; it
compounds the dangers. It blinds men--they curse it, while they grope
along: a desperate business, indeed, thus to run by guess where
positive knowledge of the way merely mitigates the peril. There are
days when the fog lies like a thick blanket on the face of the sea,
hiding the head-sails from the man at the wheel; it is night on deck,
and broad day--with the sun in a blue sky--at the masthead; the
schooners are sometimes steered by a man aloft. The _Always Loaded_,
sixty tons and bound home with a cargo that did honour to her name,
struck one of the outlying islands so suddenly, so violently, that the
lookout in the bow, who had been peering into the mist, was pitched
headlong into the surf. The _Daughter_, running blind with a fair,
light wind--she had been lost for a day--ran full tilt into a cliff;
the men ran forward from the soggy gloom of the after-deck
into--bright sunshine at the bow! It is the fog that wrecks ships.
"Oh, I runned her ashore," says the castaway skipper. "Thick? Why,
_sure_, 'twas thick!"
So the men who sail that coast hate fog, fear it, avoid it when they
can, which is seldom; they are not afraid of wind and sea, but there
are times when they shake in their sea-boots, if the black fog catches
them out of harbour.
[Footnote 1: A "tickle" is a narrow passage to a harbour or between
two islands.]