"Stop makin' a noise wid your face, man, and cook the spuds; 'tis time
for dinner." Thus Tim to Mike, who had been expounding a theory of his
on the wayward habits of mackerel. Tim occasionally comes out with
quaint phrases worthy a wider audience. "Mr. Speaker, the right hon.
member who has just been making a noise with his face on this
amendment"--how would that sound?
There are three men in the boat, not including the writer--Tim, Mike,
and Dennis--engaged in lobster-fishing. They have lived in her now six
weeks from the time they left Baltimore; "doin' purty well, thank
God," they admit. The fishing and the weather and the price all "purty
fair." They get ten shillings a dozen for the lobsters, small or
large, from the cutters that sail along the coast to collect them and
take them to England, and they consider a couple of dozen lobsters a
very good day's fishing. They don't get as good a price in the middle
of the summer, however. They are going to stop the lobstering just now
for the autumn mackerel-fishing, which they hope will be as good as
the mackerel-fishing of last spring, which was the best for the past
four years. The open boat, which they own in partnership, is a
strongly built one about twenty-two feet long, with a lug and foresail
of brown canvas and great flat stones for ballast. The whole outfit,
including the lobster-pots, cost them twenty-five pounds. The pots
have been set and baited with gurnet; during the two hours' interval
we are anchored. A curious thing about the craft is the galley. On a
spar which stretches from the bow to about four feet up the mast is
stretched a piece of brown canvas just forward of the mast, on a flat
stone some lumps of turf are burning, and under this canvas is spread
the straw on which my friends sleep. Mike is now washing a prodigious
quantity of potatoes in a large iron pot, "a grate crop of praties
this year, but the salt water plays the divil with the keeping av
them, like that," and he holds up one with a red mark on it in his
gigantic paw. I kept wondering if they were really going to eat all
these potatoes at one meal. They did, however, washed down with milk
from a big tin jug which they passed around. They make their own bread
or griddle-cake, but that was to be taken with their tea for breakfast
or supper. Tim is a teetotaler, and his two partners have a limit of
three pints (of porter) when they are ashore. They always go ashore on
Sundays, when two of them go to Mass, while the other minds the boat
and the lobsters. Three great, simple, almost child-like giants they
are, yet not without a certain natural courtesy--a core of genuine
politeness within a rough rind.
It was great to see how they made that heavy boat move with their
long oars, coming out of the harbour this morning; and yet they hardly
ever eat any meat. Potatoes and milk are their chief diet; fish
sometimes--"an' thin we has to sample the lobsters sometimes; it
wouldn't do not to sample what we are daling in." They cooked one in
honour of their visitor, who never tasted a better. Then they lit the
pipe, which they smoked in turn, and soon it was time to pick up the
pots. Three lobsters and a crawfish were the haul. What magnificent
colour in the strong yet delicate armour of their shells! Deep blue
shaded into brown, mottled in yellow spots, with deep red at the
joints. They were put into the big basket, which already contained
over three dozen. What a terrible time the poor brutes must have
there! Two or three weeks in this boat, probably the same time in the
tank of the cutter, and a week or two more in another ashore before
they are eaten. I asked if they ever gave them any food, but found
they never did. "One av them dies off an' on, and thin the others ate
him, an' they are always atin' the small claws off each other." Talk
of the lobster blushing because it saw the salad dressing; but ought
it not to make a member of the S.P.C.A. blush to eat lobster
mayonnaise? We set the brown sails to lay the pots again further along
the coast. It is a glorious day, the wavelets dancing on the surface
of the long Atlantic swell that heaves ponderously; for, as Tim
remarked, "the adjacent parish wesht is Ameriky." A glorious
translucent green under the shadow of the leaning sails, and beyond,
under our lee, the line of breakers on the rocks, tapestried in the
rich brown of autumnal seaweed, and above them, in more broken
billows, fields that make the island called "Emerald."
While waiting after laying the pots again, the wind kept freshening,
and heavier clouds in big battalions kept hurrying up from windward.
The trio seem unanimous that we are in for a bit of a blow. Tim says
'tis going to be a nasty night, and we must go in somewhere, although
night is the best time for their fishing. Only one jack-lobster out of
all the pots this time. It was now blowing hard and beginning to rain,
so, with one reef in, we started again. It was a ripping breeze; I
knew of old how quickly the wind can rise along that coast. The last
time I was in Baltimore--picturesque old place, with its ruined abbey
and the memory of the sacking of it by Moorish pirates, and the
carrying-off of the women from only the eighteenth century back--was
when I sailed round in a half-decked 16-footer, designed by Watson.
She was a great little boat, with a ton of lead on her keel. As I was
nearing the harbour just such a breeze sprang up, and, being
single-handed, I could not take in a reef, so had to carry on; right
outside the harbour my foresail carried away, but I got in all right
under the mainsail, and anchored alongside the Baroness
Burdett-Coutts's yacht that was there at the time. I asked Tim about
the money she had lent to the men there for buying fishing-boats.
"Ah, thin, she's a good woman, God bless her; there's many rich or
well-to-do men in Baltimore to-day through the means of her, an' ivery
penny paid back--divil a penny av a bad debt."
[Illustration: Relief Of Pekin.]
The smaller the boat the greater the delight of sailing; you get
closer to things than in big boats. It is part of yourself, half in
the sea and half in the air, and with the sea and breezes you play or
fight. White sails standing patiently upright, waiting, and adown from
over the hills comes along the breath of the wind, breathing across
the mirror; gently, ripplingly, comes the wind to play, and would try
to pass, but you catch it in your white wings--catch it and hold it,
leaning over to its fleeing passage, and press the trembling
tiller-pulse, now throbbing with life, and luff as the boat darts
forward in joy of possession of the wind, but she passes, gently,
gently up again with the tiller till she leaves the sails with the
lingerage of a caress.
But more fun is the fight and tussle in that wonderful surface
fighting-line between sea and wind, which laugh as they fight, blowing
and buffeting, with you between and the little boat-part of you, now
intensely alive and glad like you to be alive, to sing back to the
wind any old song as she passes her fingers through your hair.
One unique sensation of the almost uncanny mingling of the two
elements I can never forget, when once, at daybreak, I went down into
the Cave of the Winds under Niagara Falls; on along the slippery path,
the spray streaming down the oilskins; within a few feet that
shimmering, glistening wall of falling water, the sense of hearing
gone in intoxication, of most musically thunderous noise. One seemed
breathing water, so finely spray-saturated was the air. One seemed to
have passed the portals into a strange, eerie, watery world.
Every moment the wind came up, piping louder and louder, scudding
across the now darkening water. The entrance to Oyster Haven was only
half a mile on. It was too far to go to Kinsale. The Old Head was
invisible in blue-grey mist.
How things find voice in music! I recollect in the climax of the fight
at Elandslaagte, when the uproar of various sounds was simply
terrific, from the shrill treble of the whimpering bullets to the
trumpet-like whoop of the shells as they arched overhead, to alight
with a drum-boom and burst with a cymbal crash; the whole orchestra of
battle was playing--it seemed that everyone must recognise the
air--"The Ride of the Valkyrie;" and now the driving rain and the salt
spindrift, the flapping of the leech of our brown sail, every note of
accompaniment is being given to that great air that runs through
Beethoven's Waldstein Sonata, which the wind is singing louder and
louder. Tim sits up well to windward, the tiller quivering in his
hand, the rain beating on one side of his face, his beard blowing out
from the other. Tim doesn't think what a good model for a Viking he
makes just now. The real actual Viking must have been very little
different in appearance from Tim.
We were not long in making that last half-mile, and dropped anchor
close inshore. At once on doing so the many advantages of the canvas
cabin were apparent. The boat, riding head to wind, made the bow under
the canvas quite snug. Mike blew the bellows on the smouldering sods
of turf which had never quite gone out; it is true the eddying smoke
resulting therefrom was smarting to the eyes, but the resulting hot
tea was compensation. It was useless for me to try to explain that it
would be a real pleasure for me to sleep outside in my waterproof--that
it would make me dream of being outside Santiago in the trenches, or
on the veldt. It was only a matter of which of the three--who all
wanted to--should give up his berth on the straw. Dennis succeeded
eventually. It was a bad night. It was snug and "comfy" inside on the
straw as the boat cradled on the broken aftermath of swell. The rain
played in sheets of notes on the flapping canvas, and from its edge
wraiths of smoke shuddered off into the darkness; and, dropping off to
sleep, I listened to the Storm moaning the air of the Waldstein to the
ear of Beethoven.