Ashore in Gloucester town there are signs a-plenty of the work to come.
The sleepy village throws off her white mantle and rises from the lethargy
of the winter past. The spring is in the air, and the docks and wharves,
white and ice-trussed during the long, bleak winter, are trod by groups
of men, rubber-coated and “sou’ westered,” moving briskly from one shed
to another.
In the town they gather like the stray birds of spring that flutter under
the eaves of the store-houses. By twos and threes they appear. On street
corners they meet, pipe-smoking, reminiscent, gloomily hopeful for the
future, and grateful that they have helped themselves over “March Hill”
without a loan from owner or buyer. And as they lounge from post-office
to store, from store to shed, and back again, their talk is of dealings
with owners and skippers, of vessels and luck.
For luck is their fortune. It means larger profits by shares, new dresses
for the wife and little ones, and perhaps an easy time of it in the winter
to follow. It means that there will be no long, hard winter of it at the
haddock-fisheries at “George’s,” where trawls are to be set in weather
which makes frozen hands and feet, and perhaps a grave in an icy sea,
where thousands have gone before.
The skipper of the “Polly,” even before he gets his men, has broken out
his gear and reckoned up his necessities for the run up to the Banks. If
he ships the same crew he had the year before, they work in well together.
The “Polly’s” topmasts are run up with a hearty will and a rush. There
is a cheerful clatter of block and tackle, and the joyous “Yeo-ho” echoes
from one schooner to another as sail and rigging are fitted and run into
place.
The snow yet lingers in little patches on the moors when some of the
vessels warp down to an anchorage. Dories are broken from their nests
and skim lightly across the harbor, now alive with a fleet in miniature.
Jests and greetings fill the air, as old shipmates and dory-mates meet
again,--Gloucester men some of them, but more often Swedes, Portuguese,
and men from the South.
For to-day the fleet is not owned in the villages, and Gloucester, once
the centre of the fishing aristocracy, the capital of the nation of the
Banks, is now but a trading- and meeting-place for half the sea-people
who come from the North and East.
The skipper of the “Polly J.,” himself perhaps the scion of three
generations of fishing captains, may wag his head regretfully, for
fishers cannot be choosers; but he knows that his fishing has to be done,
and, after all, a “Portygee” is as good a sailor-man and dory-mate as
another,--better sometimes,--if he keeps sober.
So long as the ship-owner makes his credit good at the store for the
people at home, the fisherman takes life as joyfully as a man may who
looks at death with every turn of the glass. If he takes his pleasures
seriously, it is because he lives face to face with his Maker. Nature, in
the awful moods he knows her, makes trivial the little ills that flesh is
heir to.
So when the crews are aboard, and the stores and salt are being hoisted
in, there is a hurry to be among the first away. Chains and windlasses
creak and clang, nimble feet fly aloft, hoarse voices ring across the
rippling water, and many a cheerful song echoes from ship to shore and
back again.
Willing hands, strangers for months to hemp and tar, lay on to the tackle,
as spar and boom are run into place. The fish-bins below are cleaned and
scrubbed to the very quick. Bright-work, if there be any, is polished,
and sail-patching and dory-painting and caulking are the order of the day,
and most of the night. The black cook, below in the mysterious blackness
of the galley, potters with saucepan and kettle, and when the provisions
are aboard serves the first meal. There is coffee, steaming hot in the
early hours of the morning, and biscuit and meat,--plenty of it. There is
not much variety, but, with the work to be done above and below decks, a
full-blooded appetite leaves no chance for grumbling.
At last the bag and baggage of the crew are tossed aboard,--packs of
tobacco innumerable, new rubber clothes, all yellow and shiny in the
morning dampness, boots and woollens to keep out the cold of spring on
the Bank Sea,--all bought on credit at the store, to be charged against
“settling-day.”