Читать книгу Westward with the Prince of Wales - W. Douglas Newton - Страница 8

The Dauntless went out from St. John's on Sunday, August 10, to rendezvous with Renown and Dragon, and the three great modern warships came together on a glorious Western evening.

There was a touch of drama in the meeting. In the marvellous clear air of gold and blue that only the American Continent can show, we picked up Renown at a point when she was entering a long avenue of icebergs. There were eleven of these splendid white fellows in view on the skyline when we turned to lead the great battleship back to the anchorage in Conception Bay, north of St. John's, and as the ships followed us it was as though the Prince had entered a processional way set with great pylons arranged deliberately to mark the last phase of his route to the Continent of the West.

Some of these bergs were as large, as massive and as pinnacled as cathedrals, some were humped mounds that lifted sullenly from the radiant sea, some were treacherous little crags circled by rings of detached floes—the "growlers," those almost wholly submerged masses of ice that the sailor fears most. Most of the bergs in the two irregular lines were distant, and showed as patches of curiously luminant whiteness against the intense blue of the sky. Some were close enough for us to see the wonderful semi-transparent green of the cracks and fissures in their sides and the vivid emerald at the base that the bursting seas seemed to be eternally polishing anew.

When Renown was sighted, a mere smudge on the horizon, we saw the flash of her guns and heard faintly the thud of the explosions. She was getting in some practice with her four-inch guns on the enticing targets of the bergs.

We were too far away to see results, but we were told that as a spectacle the effect of the shell-bursts on the ice crags was remarkable. Under the explosions the immense masses of these translucent fairy islands rocked and changed shape. Faces of ice cliffs crumbled under the hits and sent down avalanches of ice into the furious green seas the shocks of the explosions had raised.

This was one of the few incidents in a journey made under perfect weather conditions in a vessel that is one of the "wonder ships" of the British Navy. The huge Renown had behaved admirably throughout the passage. She had travelled at a slow speed, for her, most of the time, but there had been a spell of about an hour when she had worked up to the prodigious rate of thirty-one knots an hour. Under these test conditions she had travelled like an express with no more structural movement than is felt in a well-sprung Pullman carriage.

The Prince had employed his five day's journey by indulging his fancy for getting to know how things are done. Each day he had spent two hours in a different part of the ship having its function and mechanism explained to him by the officer in charge.

As he proved later in Canada when visiting various industrial and agricultural plants, His Royal Highness has the modern curiosity and interest for the mechanics of things. Indeed, throughout the journey he showed a distinct inclination towards people and the work that ordinary people did, rather than in the contemplation of views however splendid, and the report that he said at one time, "Oh, Lord, let's cut all this scenery and get back to towns and crowds," is certainly true in essence if not in fact.

It was in the beautiful morning of August 11th that the Prince made his first landfall in the West, and saw in the distance the great curtain of high rock that makes the grim coast-line of Newfoundland.

For reasons of the Renown's tonnage he had to go into Conception Bay, one of the many great sacks of inlets that make the island something that resembles nothing so much as a section of a jig-saw puzzle. The harbour of St. John's could float Renown, but its narrow waters would not permit her to turn, and the Prince had to transfer his Staff and baggage to Dragon in order to complete the next stage of the voyage.

Conception Bay is a fjord thrusting its way through the jaws of strong, sharp hills of red sandstone piled up in broken and stratified masses above grey slate rock. On these hills cling forests of spruce and larch in woolly masses that march down the combes to the very water's edge. It is wild scenery, Scandinavian and picturesque.

In the combes—the "outports" they are called—are the small, scattered villages of the fishermen. The wooden frame houses have the look of the packing-case, and though they are bright and toy-like when their green or red or cinnamon paint is fresh, they are woefully drab when the weather of several years has had its way with them.

In front of most of the houses are the "flakes," or drying platforms where the split cod is exposed to the air. These "flakes" are built up among the ledges and crevices of the rock, being supported by numberless legs of thin spruce mast; the effect of these spidery platforms, the painted houses, the sharp stratified red rock and the green massing of the trees is that of a Japanese vignette set down amid inappropriate scenery.

Cod fishing is, of course, the beginning and the end of the life of many of these villages on the bays that indent so deeply the Newfoundland coast. It is not the adventurous fishing of the Grand Banks; there is no need for that. There is all the food and the income man needs in the crowded local waters. Men have only to go out in boats with hook and line to be sure of large catches.

Only a few join the men who live farther to the south, about Cape Race, in their trips to the misty waters of the Grand Banks. Here they put off from their schooners in dories and make their haul with hook and line.

A third branch of these fishers, particularly those to the north of St. John's, push up to the Labrador coast, where in the bays, or "fishing rooms," they catch, split, head, salt and dry the superabundant fish.

By these methods vast quantities of cod and salmon are caught, and, as in the old days when the hardy fishermen of Devon, Brittany, Normandy and Portugal were the only workers in these little known seas, practically all the catch is shipped to England and France. During the war the cod fishers of Newfoundland played a very useful part in mitigating the stringency of the British ration-cards, and there are hopes that this good work may be extended, and that by setting up a big refrigerating plant Newfoundland may enlarge her market in Britain and the world.

With the fishery goes the more dangerous calling of sealing. For this the men of Newfoundland set out in the winter and the spring to the fields of flat "pan" ice to hunt the seal schools.

At times this means a march across the ice deserts for many days and the danger of being cut off by blizzards; when that happens no more news is heard of the adventurous hunters.

Every few years Newfoundland writes down the loss of a ship's company of her too few young men, for Newfoundland, very little helped by immigration, exists on her native born. "A crew every six or eight years, we reckon it that way," you are told. It is part of the hard life the Islanders lead, an expected debit to place against the profits of the rich fur trade.

Solidly blocking the heart of Conception Bay is a big island, the high and irregular outline of which seems to have been cut down sharply with a knife. This is Bell Island, which is not so much an island as a great, if accidental, iron mine.

Years ago, when the island was merely the home of farmers and fishermen, a shipowner in need of easily handled ballast found that the subsoil contained just the thing he wanted. By turning up the thin surface he came upon a stratum of small, square slabs of rock rather like cakes of soap. These were easily lifted and easily carted to his ship.

He initiated the habit of taking rock from Bell Island for ballast, and for years shipmasters loaded it up, to dump it overboard with just as much unconcern when they took their cargo inboard. It was some time before an inquiring mind saw something to attract it in the rock ballast; the rock was analyzed and found to contain iron.

Turned into a profiteer by this astonishing discovery, the owner of the ground where the slabs were found clung tenaciously to his holding until he had forced the price up to the incredible figure of 100 dollars. He sold with the joyous satisfaction of a man making a shrewd deal.

His ground has changed hands several times since, and the prices paid have advanced somewhat on his optimistic figure; for example, the present company bought it for two million dollars.

The ore is not high grade, but is easily obtained, and so can be handled profitably. In the beginning it was only necessary to turn over the turf and take what was needed, the labour costing less than a shilling a ton. Now the mines strike down through the rock of the island beneath the sea, and the cost of handling is naturally greater. It is worth noting that prior to 1914 practically all the output of this essentially British mine went to Germany; the war has changed that and now Canada takes the lion's share.

It was under the cliffs of Bell Island, near the point where the long lattice-steel conveyors bring the ore from the cliff-top to the water-level, that the three warships dropped anchor. As they swung on their cables blasting operations in the iron cliffs sent out the thud of their explosions and big columns of smoke and dust, for all the world as though a Royal salute was being fired in honour of the Prince's arrival.