Читать книгу The Deep Sea's Toll - James B. Connolly - Страница 6

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SAILING out of Boston is a fleet of fishing schooners that for beauty of model, and speed, and stanchness in heavy weather are not to be surpassed—their near admirers say equalled—by any class of vessels that sail the seas; and, saying that, they do not bar the famous fleet of Gloucester.

This Boston fleet is manned by a cosmopolitan lot, who are all very proud of their vessels, particularly of their sailing qualities. Good seamen all—some beyond compare—Irishmen still with the beguiling brogue of the south and west counties, Yankees from Maine and Massachusetts, Portuguese from the Azores, with a strong infusion of Nova Scotians and Newfoundlanders, and scattering French, English and Scandinavians.

No class of men afloat worry less about heavy weather than do these men; nowhere will you find men more deeply versed in the ways of vessels or quicker to meet an emergency; none will carry sail longer, or, if out in a dory, will hang on to their trawls longer if it comes to blow, or the fog settles, or the sea kicks up. In the matter of courage, endurance and skill, they are the limit.

The standard for this superb little navy was first raised by a lot of men of Irish blood, from Galway and Waterford originally, who chose this most hazardous way to make a living—and in other days, with the old-class vessels, it was terribly hazardous—who chose his life, tenderhearted men and men of family though most of them were, in preference to taking orders from uncongenial peoples ashore.

They are still there, an unassuming lot of adventurers taking the most desperate chances in the calmest way—great shipmates all, tenderness embodied and greatness of soul beyond estimation. And it was one of the best known of them, a dauntless little Irish-born, who, squaring his shoulders and swinging his arms, spat right and left and moved up the dock to a hail of salutations this beautiful winter morning. “Good-morning, Captain,” and “How are you, Coleman?” and “Are you to take the new one this trip, Skipper?” All this, and more, as Captain Coleman Joyce, not above five feet in height nor a hundred and thirty pounds in weight, but of a port to subdue Patagonians seven feet high, as with a beard that curled and shoulders that heaved he rolled gloriously up the dock.

An abstemious man was Captain Joyce; but there were times and circumstances, say now, for instance, when before casting off for a haddocking trip to Georges Banks it became necessary to consummate one of the rites without which no man could conceive a fishing trip to be lucky. These rites, incidentally, were two: One consisted of taking a good drink before going out; the other was to take a good drink after getting in. Simple, but not to be overlooked.

And now, when, after a beat up Atlantic Avenue to the saloon that is nearest the south side of the wharf, Coleman found himself leaning against the bar and looking at the barkeeper, that suave party, without further orders, set before him a small glass of water and a small glass empty and the same old bottle with the horse and rider on the outside.

Raising his filled glass, and absent-mindedly looking about him by the way, Captain Joyce observed that it was a wistful crowd which was watching him. It was always a wistful crowd. He nodded amiably to four or five, but gazed vacantly at the others. All told, there must have been twenty loafers in the place, and everyone undeniably thirsty, with a thirst that was immeasurably intensified by the sight of this successful skipper preparing to take a drink.

Coleman, regarding them again, pulled out an old wallet and from it took a five-dollar bill. Every pair of expectant eyes in the place saw the V on the bill. Plainly, too, he was not trying to hide it. A symphony of short, hacking coughs foretold clogged throats clearing for action—Captain Joyce always was free with his money. Following the bill, but only after a lot of digging about with his fingers, Captain Joyce extricated a silver coin—a quarter of a dollar, they saw. Coleman held it up to his eyes that he might the better see it. Nobody, looking at those eyes of his, would ever suspect that they were weak. He put back the bill, restrapped the wallet, replaced it in his pocket, laid the quarter on the bar, and took his drink, first the whiskey, then the water, and both rapidly, as a man of action should.

Smacking his lips and regarding the change on the bar—a dime and a nickel—at the same time casting a sly glance at the barkeeper, he beckoned with his hand over his shoulder, but without looking around. “Let ye all come up,” he said, and bolted for the door to escape the rush.

Outside the door of the saloon he was hailed by a shore-going friend, once a fisherman, but now a grocer, whose chief income arose from provisioning fishing vessels, and so one who kept up with all the gossip of the fleet. “Hello, Captain Joyce! What’s this they’re telling me about you having a new vessel—a new style model, too.”

“It’s the truth.”

“And given up the Maggie—that was built for you—that I heard you say a hundred times was not a bad sailer at all and the ablest vessel of her tonnage that ever sailed past Boston Light?”

“Yes, or past any other light. She’s that and more. But Lord bless you, she can’t sail with some of the new ones, and I’m tired to my soul of havin’ every blessed model of a fisherman that was ever launched comin’ up on my quarter and goin’ by like I was an old sander. This last time who was it, d’y’ think? You’d never guess. Name every vessel that ever sailed out of T Dock and she’d be the last you or any other man’d name. Who but the Bonita—yes. The black-whiskered divil, Portugee Joe, yes—with the rings in his ears. Faith, an’ had I hold of him when he said it, ’tis in his nose he’d be wearin’ them. ‘Captain Joyce,’ he hails, and the bloody Dago he can’t talk United States yet—‘Captain Joyce, what you carry, hah?—breeks or gran-eet or what?’ Gran-eet, mind ye, with the Western Islands brogue of him! Yes, and goes on by the same’s if the Maggie was r’ally loaded with granite. ‘By the Lord,’ I calls out after him, ‘but the next time you and me try tacks I’ll make a wake for you to steer by or I’ll know why.’ And I’ve got a vessel now, b’y, a vessel that can sail or I don’t know fast lines when I see them. And the Portugee he’s just gone down the harbor—he’ll be waitin’ for me outside the lightship, he says. So I’m off.”

Captain Joyce journeyed on and, standing on the cap-log at the end of the wharf, he looked down on his new vessel and his eyes shone with joy in the sheer beauty of her. “Purty, purty, purty,” he murmured; “just like she was whittled out of a block.” And, turning to a man who was taking his bag ashore, the last man of the old gang to leave her, he inquired, “She can sail, they tell me, this one?”

“Oh, she can sail all right.”

“And how does she handle?”

“Handle? She’s that quick in stays that you want to watch her.”

“Watch her, eh? And stiff is she?”

“I don’t know about that. One day we used to think she was a house, but again she’d roll down in a twelve-knot breeze, and in a way to make your hair curl.”

“Man alive! But whisper, was that why Jimmie Eliot gave her up?”

“I don’t know about that. He wouldn’t say, the Skipper wouldn’t.”

“And that’s queer, too, come to think.”

“It do look queer, but maybe he thought it wouldn’t be fair to the owners.”

“’Tis the divil and all of a mystery. And where is he now?”

“Went to Gloucester last night.”

“That’s too bad. When another man’s been in a vessel I gen’rally likes to get his notions of her myself. You can’t tell a vessel by just lookin’ at her—you have to be in her a while. Well, whatever she is, we’ll put out in her now. Let ye hoist the mains’l, b’ys, and we’ll go. Portugee Joe is waitin’ for us below.”

Captain Joyce and his able crew put out from the dock and a great crowd lined the cap-log to see her off. Down the harbor she went, creeping before the light westerly as if she had a propeller hidden somewhere below.

Captain Joyce and his old friend Jerry Connors looked her up and looked her down.

“I say, Jerry, but did ever y’ see annything scoot like her—hardly a breath and she goin’ along like she is. It’s not right, Jerry—hardly a ripple in her wake.”

“Oh, you’ve been so long in the old Maggie, Skipper——”

“The old Maggie, is it? She’s not too old—ten year.”

“I know. Ten year is nothing in a good vessel, but they been improving them so fast. Last fall, the trip you didn’t wait for me, you know, I went in the Jennie and Katie. Y’oughter seen her skipper. Handle? Like a little naphtha launch to pick up dories. And sail? Man, but she could sail!”

“That so? And how’d she behave in heavy weather?”

“Well, we didn’t have any heavy weather that trip.”

“No breeze at all?”

“Well, one day it did breeze up. We had her under a balanced reef mains’l. She did slap around a bit. ’Twas the devil and all to stay in your bunk, but she did pretty well. But you mustn’t get ’em out of trim. The first two doryloads of fish that came aboard that trip was pitched into her after-pens and, man, she reared right up in the air—right straight up on her hind legs and began to claw out with her fore feet like she was trying to climb up a wall——”

“You’d think ’twas a horse you were talkin’ about, Jerry. But she could sail, you say?”

“Sail? Like a plank on edge—and greased.”

“Well, this one can sail, too. Look at her. Not a blessed hop out of her—just smoochin’ along like a girl slidin’ on ice ashore, isn’t she?”

Off the lightship they found the Bonita. “There he is,” announced Coleman, “with his rings in his ears. Keep her as she is till the pair of us come together. Trip afore last he sailed a couple of rings around the Maggie by way of amusin’ himself, but I’ll amuse him now or I’ll tear the sail off this one.”

In a freshening breeze and both vessels soon swinging all they had, it was a good chance for a try-out. Four hours of that and the victory went to the handsome Celestine, for off Cape Cod, after a run of fifty miles, Coleman had the Bonita two miles to leeward.

For an hour after that Coleman could hardly be coaxed down to eat. Standing on the Celestine’s quarter, he chuckled, and chuckled, and chuckled. Even after taking his place at the table, he had to climb up the companionway to have one more look at the beaten Bonita. “A good vessel for rip-fishin’ the Portugee’s got—she drifts well,” he said, “and maybe ’tis me won’t tell him next time we meet.”

And yet in the middle of the meal he suddenly set down his mug of coffee and leaned across the table. “Don’t it strike you, Jerry, that for a vessel of her model this one is the divil for stiffness?”

“We were saying among ourselves a little while ago, Skipper, that we never before saw a vessel that barely wet her scuppers in a breeze like this.”

“That’s it—I don’t know what it is. But she’s a queer divil altogether. Sometimes when she luffs she fetches up in a way to shake every tooth in your head. And there was what one of the men that was in her last trip said of her.”

“And what did he say, Skipper?”

“He said—but come to think, he didn’t say anything, and that’s the divil of it. One or two little outs in a vessel, if you know what they are, aren’t always a great harm. But when you don’t know how to take her!”

The crew agreed with their Skipper that there was something queer about this new vessel of theirs, but no illuminating discussion came of it until next morning when, having cleared the north shoal of Georges, it became necessary to head southward.

Heading to the east’ard in a southerly breeze, she had been on the starboard tack up to that time. Now her helmsman shot her head across the wind, her sails shook, shivered, her booms began to swing, and over on the port tack went the Celestine. Everybody looked to see her roll down some, but in that breeze—they hadn’t even taken their stays’l in—nobody looked to see her do what she did. Least of all her Skipper, who, standing carelessly by the starboard rail, would have gone overboard and been lost probably, but for Jerry Connors.

“Wheel down! wheel down!” roared Jerry, and hauled the Skipper back aboard.

“Down it is!”

“Cripes!” said the Skipper when he found his breath—“cripes, but she’s left-handed.”

“Left-handed?”

“Yes, and double left-handed, the cross-eyed whelp! Just barely put her scuppers under on one tack and down to her hatches on the other. Man alive, but if we have to put her on the wrong tack makin’ a passage, what’ll we ever do with her? Put her back, put her back—back on the other tack with her and keep her there till we get some sail off her. Man, man, but when we have to put a vessel under her four lowers in a little breeze like this——”

They kept her so until next morning, when they hove her to—they had to heave her to—with Georges north shoal bearing twenty-three miles west by north and a howling gale in prospect. With the glass showing a scant 29 and the sea coming to them in a long swell, they all foresaw a good lay-off with a chance to catch up on sleep or read up, or overhaul their gear.

The storm hit in hard that night. A northeaster it was, with a thick snow in its wake and a whistle that made a bunk feel most comfortable. The snow passed, and after two days the worst of the breeze also; but after it came the tremendous seas that make such a terrible place of the northerly edge of Georges shoals in the wrong kind of winter weather.

Nobody aboard the Celestine worried particularly. They had been having that sort of thing all their lives. After a while it would pass. Only when it lasted for too long a time it did make slow fishing. They put her under jumbo and riding sail and let go their chain anchor. Next day they took sail off her altogether and made ready their hawser and big anchor. Under both anchors, if it came to that, she certainly would be safe.

This gale was some time in passing. And now it was coming on evening of the fourth day—two days of a heavy breeze and two days of the great seas. All the men, excepting the watch, were below, about half for’ard and half aft, those for’ard mugging-up or overhauling trawls, those aft listening to Jerry Connors, a great reader, who was now reeling off a most interesting story with dramatic emphasis. It was the “Cloister and the Hearth,” and Gerald was up in the tree with the bear after him—the Celestine dancing like a lead-ballasted cork figure all the while. In the middle of it all the watch hailed something from deck. The Skipper, trying to keep from sliding off the locker and, at the same time, above the howling of the wind get what Jerry was reading, grew wrathy at the interruption.

“What’s that ballyhooin’ on deck—whose watch?”

One had risen, and now from the companion steps, his head above the slide, passed on the word. “It’s John’s.”

“Oh, John is it? Don’t mind John—the least thing worries John. But what was he sayin’?”

“He says there’s some big seas coming, and getting bigger all the time; and true enough, they are.”

“Big seas, is it? Cripes, a man don’t need to stand watch on deck or stick his head out of the hatch, like a turkey in a crate, to find that out.”

“Big seas coming aboard, he says, and hadn’t we better make ready to put out the big anchor, she being on her weak tack?”

“Her weak side! That’s so—maybe we had. Tell him yes and call the gang for’ard. Now go on, Jerry, whilst we’re waitin’. What did that divil of a bear do then?” The Skipper leaned forward from the locker. “What did he do? Hurry on, Jerry-boy.”

“And then he—” recommenced Jerry, but got no further. A scurry of boots was heard on deck, a quick slamming back of the slide, and down the companionway came John. Feet first he came flying and hauled the slide after him. “Here’s one big as a church and——”

That was all he got out when the sea struck. Over went the Celestine—over, over—the Skipper was shot from the locker through the open door of his stateroom across the cabin. Jerry, who had been sitting by the stove, was shot into that same room ahead of the Skipper. Another, lying comfortably in his bunk to windward, was thrown clear across the cabin and into the opposite bunk on the lee side, and his bedding followed him and covered him up. Another of the crew, doubled up in the after windward bunk, was sent past the lazarette and in on top of his neighbor, who had a moment before been comfortably lying in his bunk to leeward, passing the time of day with a pleasant word and a pipe in his mouth. The bedding also followed that man. Everything loose went from the windward bunks to the lee bunks—from the whole windward side to the lee side.

The vessel poised so for perhaps ten seconds, while men called one to another. “What’s it?” “Are you hurted, Joe?” “God help us—what in the divil’s this?” “What in the devil’s name—” “Man, let me up—’tis smothered I am!” Cries of surprise and cries of consternation, while through it all the Celestine seemed balanced between going down for good and never coming up at all. The wall-lamp flared and then started to blaze. It looked like a possible fire to add to the rest of it, but the Skipper, like a flash, threw a smothering wet oil-jacket over it. The binnacle lamp then started, but only for a moment—suddenly went out, and then for the first time they heard the rush of the sea coming on them in the dark.

“Did you think to draw the slide tight, John?” bellowed the Skipper.

“Tight? ’Tis tighter than the lid of hell.”

“Then somebody must’ve left the binnacle slide open—there’s men without sense to be found wherever you go—you can’t dodge them.”

A short space of that, and she rolled part way back. “Up she comes,” said the Skipper—“’tisn’t in nature she won’t come—she’s got to come up soon or go down entirely.” And it did seem as if she was coming up, but the next big sea hit her—bigger than the one that had hove her down. Down inside the Celestine they never quite agreed on what happened. They knew that for a moment or two they were standing on the roof of the cabin, that the red-hot cover fell off the stove and hit that same roof, that the hot coals fell out of the stove and began to sizzle among the loose bedding. They knew, too, that in the middle of it all John’s voice was heard exclaiming, “Oh, my poor wife!” and again, “O God, O God, we’re lost!” and that the Skipper said, “Hush up your caterwauling—we’re a long way from bein’ lost yet,” even while the loose bedding began to take fire and blaze up.

Then all at once she righted, and so suddenly that they were thrown one against the other, across the floor and back again. And Jerry Connors became entangled in a tub of trawls that somebody had been overhauling. Six hundred hooks, every hook attached to three feet of ganging, and the whole hanging to two thousand feet of line—it was an awful mess to get mixed up with at a time like that. Twenty hooks at least were sticking in him here and there, and Jerry swore prodigiously.

They smothered the fire with blankets and old clothes and lit the lamp again. That done, they noted that the print of the red-hot stove cover had been left on the roof of the cabin, showing that the vessel had been keel up. “D’y’ s’pose she went clean over and over, or did she go half-way and back again, Jerry?” was the first inquiry of the Skipper when the lamp was lit.

“In God’s name, wait till I get some of these hooks out of me—they’re into me gizzards, some of them.”

Up on deck they met the gang coming out of the forec’s’le, the cook in the lead.

“How was it for’ard?” asked the Skipper.

‘I was lying in my bunk to looard,” began the cook, “and Jack was in his bunk to wind’ard just opposite. Jack was playing with the cat. Well, sir, when she went over I forgot the cat, but through the air came this great black thing with forty claws and fourteen green and yellow eyes and got me by the hair, and Jack with his two hundred pound weight on top of him again. And the cat gets his claws in among me whiskers——”

“Shut up!” roared the Skipper—“you and the cat and your whiskers. Is anybody gone? Who was on watch with you, John?”

“Mattie.”

“Is he here now?”

“Here, Skipper,” responded Mattie for himself. “When John dove for the cabin I dove for the forec’s’le. I didn’t lose no time.”

“I’ll bet you didn’t, if you came down red-jacks first the way John Houlihan did. Well, that’s all right, then. Let’s see what’s left on deck. Get up a few torches—and have a care some of you aren’t washed overboard.”

Nothing was left on deck. The spars had been torn out when she went over and were now lying alongside threatening to punch holes in her side as they lifted and dropped to every big sea. The Skipper took the big axe and the cook his hatchet, and others got out their bait knives, and all began to chop and hack and cut until the wreckage of the spars was clear of the vessel.

Then they took a further look. Dories were gone, booby hatches were gone, the rail was gone. Only the stanchions sticking up above the deck showed where the rail had been. But the wonderful thing was yet to appear. Going forward, the Skipper noticed a turn of chain around the vessel’s bow. He looked again—and again. When he had satisfied himself he thoughtfully combed his beard.

“Forty winters I’ve been comin’ to Georges, and this is the first time ever I see that. There’ll be people that’ll say it never happened—that it couldn’t have happened. But there’s the cable around her bows, a full turn, to prove she went clean over—down one side and up the other. We’re blessed lucky to be alive, that’s what I say.”

“That’s what we are,” affirmed Jerry, and had another look for himself. And they all had another look for themselves. “Blessed lucky,” they all agreed. “And what’ll we do now, Skipper?”

“Do?” He looked around and saw only the stumps of masts projecting above her deck—no sails, no rigging, nothing. The bowsprit, even, was gone and their chain parted—and the north shoal of Georges bearing twenty miles to leeward. “Give her the other anchor, and whilst we’re layin’ to that we’ll see what we can do.”

That night they hung grimly on to the other anchor. In the morning the Skipper chewed it over. “We can’t lay here forever—that’s certain. We must try and get her out. I don’t like that shoal to looard. With this one there’s no tellin’ what she’ll take it into her head to do—to go adrift maybe, and then it’s all swallowed up we’ll be in short order.”

So they prepared to work her out. For masts they could do no better than take the pen-boards out of the hold, split them up and fish them together. They were of two-inch stock, and when they had used them all up they made but sorry-looking spars. For sails they shook the bedding out of their mattresses, took the ticking and their blankets and sewed them together with pieces of oilskins by way of patchings. There was some record-breaking sewing aboard the Celestine that morning, for all were thinking of the shoal under their lee.

They set up the pen-boards by way of masts, laced the bedding and blankets to them for sails, and then they had it—a medley of colors! Blue and white striped ticks, green and gold and red blankets—the masterpieces of fond wives ashore—and two crazy-quilts. One particular crazy-quilt the Skipper eyed with regret. “I mind the night the wife won that at the church fair. A hundred and fourteen chances she took—at ten cents a chance—me payin’ for them. Nine hundred and ninety-nine pieces in it. ‘There’ll be the fine ornament for your bunk, Colie,’ says she to me. ‘And warm, too,’ she says, ‘on a winter’s day.’ ’Tis tears she’d be sheddin’ could she see it this winter’s day, usin’ it by way of a cloth to a fores’l up where the single reef cringle should be.”

They spread them all at last, brought her head to and warped in the anchor. “And now, you slippery-elm divil, sail! Sail, you black, fatherless, left-handed, double left-handed divil, sail!”

She did sail, after a fashion. She did not go along like the saucy vessel that had put out from T Dock less than a week before, not quite like a greased plank on edge or a girl sliding on ice, but she made headway. It was heart-breaking headway that promised to make a long voyage of the something like two hundred miles to Boston, but the crew had hopes—if the wind stayed to the east’ard.

But the wind did not stay to the east’ard. After two days it hauled to the north-west, and they had to tack. They tacked to the north and they tacked to the south, always with a respectful eye to her weak side; but it was slow work. More, it was cold, and the seas that came aboard iced her up. And, having no rails to her, the crew had to be painfully careful or they would slide overboard.

“And yet no great danger bein’ lost, for even with oilskins a man could swim as fast as this one’s sailin’. But it’s so blessed cold!” said Jerry.

They were sighted several times and other vessels bore down, but the Skipper waved them off. “If they think because we’re short on sails and spars they’re goin’ to get salvage out of this one, we’ll fool ’em,” and onward he sailed with a dory, which they had picked up, lashed amidships.

They ran out of grub and fuel. They had fitted out for market fishing, with ten days or two weeks as the probable length of the trip. They were now four weeks out, with Cape Cod not yet weathered. Something had to be done. Four times they had got all but abreast of the cape—four times the no’-wester had beaten them back. Under their rig they had to take whatever came. They could not force her around when around she would not go.

Nobody murmured. They were enjoying themselves. For one thing they learned how Gerald made out with the bear, and Jerry read in his round voice of Gerald’s further adventures; and they would not have minded it much, though, to be sure, there was not much money in it for their families—but that was the luck of fishing—only they were cold and hungry.

It was then that for the first time the Skipper hailed a vessel. She was one of the big liners, a fourteen-thousand tonner, bound out from Boston to Liverpool. Beside her huge hulk the little Celestine, with her ridiculous jury-rig, looked like a burlesque toy. But Coleman wasn’t apologizing for looks.