Out of the Fog Part 1

Out of the Fog.

by C. K. Ober.

FOREWORD

Since I am permitted to consider myself in some way responsible for this narrative's being put on record, it is with the very heartiest good will that I accept the publishers' kind invitation to write a brief foreword to it.

I have, during twenty years, been working against a problem that I recognized called for all--yes, and more, than--I had to give it. For I have been endeavoring, through my own imperfect attainments, to translate into undeniable language on the Labrador Coast, the message of G.o.d's personal fatherhood over and love for the humblest of His creatures. During these years, often of overwork, I have considered it worth while to lay aside time and energy and strength to improve the charting and pilot directions of our devious and sometimes dangerous waterways.

How much more gladly shall I naturally avail myself of any chance by which to contribute to the knowledge of that seemingly ever evasive pathway leading to that which to me is the supreme motive power of human life--faith in the divine Redeemer and Master. The best helps to reach the haven we are in search of, over the unblazed trails of Labrador, are ever the tracks of those who have found the way before us. Just such to me is this simple and delightful story of Mr. Ober's. It has my most hearty prayers for its unprecedented circulation.

WILFRED T. GRENFELL.

OLD SALTS

The lure of the sea prevailed, and at nineteen I shipped for a four-months' fishing trip on the Newfoundland Banks. These banks are not the kind that slope toward some gentle stream where the weary fisherman can rest between bites, protected from the sun by the shade of an overhanging tree; they are thirty to forty fathoms beneath the surface of the Atlantic Ocean, a thousand miles out from the Ma.s.sachusetts coast.

The life that had long appealed to my imagination now came in with a shock and a realism that was in part a disillusionment and in part an intense satisfaction of some of my primal instincts and cravings. Old salts are more picturesque and companionable spinning yarns about the stove in a shoemaker's shop than they are when one is obliged to live, eat and sleep with them for four months in the crowded forecastle of a fishing schooner. An ocean storm is a sublime spectacle, witnessed from a position of safety on the land; but a storm on the ocean, experienced in its very vortex from the deck of a tiny fishing boat, is thrilling beyond description. "Ships that pa.s.s in the night" make interesting reading; but if they pa.s.s near you, in a foggy night, on the Banks, they are better than the muezzin of the Moslem in reminding a man that it is time to pray. I recall with vividness the scene on such a night, and still feel the compelling power of the panic in the voice of the mild-mannered old sea dog on anchor watch, as he yelled down the companionway, "All hands on deck." In six seconds we were all there; and there was the great hulk of a two-thousand-ton ship looming up out of the night. She had evidently sighted our little craft just in time to change her course, and was pa.s.sing us with not more than a hundred and fifty feet to spare. I can see them tonight, as they vanished into the fog--three men and a big Newfoundland dog, looking over the rail and down on us who, a moment before, were about to die.

Storm, fog, icebergs, cold, exposure, the alert and strenuous life, with his own life the forfeit of failure, are a part of the normal experience of a deep sea fisherman. Two members of our crew were father and son, Uncle Ike Patch and his son, Frank. The old man had been a fisherman in his youth, but had been on sh.o.r.e for thirty years. When we were making up our crew, Frank caught the fishing fever and wanted to go, and his father decided to go along with him. They were out in their dory, one foggy day, and when the boats came back to the vessel from hauling their trawls, Uncle Ike and Frank were missing. We rang the bell, fired our small cannon, shouted and sent boats out after them. As night came on, we were huddled together in the forecastle, wondering about their fate, while the old fishermen told stories of the fog and its fearful toll of human life. It seemed a terrible thing for the old man and his boy to be out there, drifting no one knew where; and though we were accustomed to danger, there was a gloomy crew and little sleep on our schooner that night. In the morning the weather cleared and soon our missing boat came alongside; we received them as men alive from the dead. They had found shelter on another fishing vessel that happened to be lying at anchor not more than two or three miles away.

There was reason for our solicitude, for we knew very well that a large proportion of the men who get adrift in the fog are never found alive.

Shortly before this experience we had spoken a Gloucester vessel and learned that her crew had picked up, a short time before, one of the boats of a Provincetown schooner that had been adrift four days. One of the two men was dead and the other insane. Each day brought its own dangers, which the fishermen met as part of the day's work, thinking little of them when they were past, and ready for whatever another day might bring.

But four months is a long time to be out of sight of land, on a fresh fish and "salt hoss" diet, with mola.s.ses instead of sugar in your tea, and fresh water too much needed for drinking purposes to waste in personal ablutions. We all swore that we would never go to sea again; and when, after gliding into harbor in the night, we looked, one clear September morning, on the seemingly unnatural green of the gra.s.s and trees of the old North Sh.o.r.e, I said to myself, "This is G.o.d's country, if there ever was one, and I, for one, will never get out of sight of it again."

But I had tasted fog and brine, and the "landlubber's" lot was too monotonously tame for me. The next spring saw me on the deck of the same schooner headed for the Newfoundland Banks, the home of the codfish and the fog.

A seafaring ancestry and a boyhood spent within sound of the surf doubtless had much to do with my love of the salt water. My grandfather was one of six brothers who were sea captains, and our family had clung to the North Sh.o.r.e of Ma.s.sachusetts Bay almost since the first white settler had moored his bark in that vicinity, more than two hundred years before.

My boyhood home was originally a fishing town, since changed to manufacturing, and was fragrant with traditions of the sea. Many of the neighborhood homes in which I visited as a boy had souvenirs of the ocean displayed on the mantelpiece or on the everlasting solitude of the parlor table. There were great conch sh.e.l.ls that a boy could put to his ear and hear the surf roaring on the beaches from which they had been taken; articles made of sandalwood; curiously wrought things under gla.s.s; miniature paG.o.das; silk scarfs; bow-legged idols; and a wonderful model of the good ship Dolphin, or of some other equally staunch craft, in which the breadwinner, father or son, had sailed on some eventful voyage. These had all been "brought from over sea," I was told, and this gave me the impression that "over sea" must be a very rich and interesting place.

But the souvenirs of the sea were not as interesting to me as its survivors. We had in our town, and especially in our end of it, which was called "the Cove," a choice a.s.sortment of old sea dogs who had sailed every sea, in every clime--had seen the world, in fact, and were not averse, under the stimulus of good listeners, to telling all they knew about it and sometimes a little more.

Scattered through the Cove were many little shoemakers' shops, into which, especially in the long winter evenings, these old salts would drift. There around the little cylinder stove, with its leather-chip fire, leaking a fragrance the memory of which makes me homesick as I write about it, they would swap their stories of the sea, many of which had originally been based on fact.

These old derelicts--and some of the younger seafaring men--were better than dime novels to us boys, for we could always question them and draw out another story. Some of them were unconscious heroes who had often risked their lives for their comrades and the vessel owners; and for the support and comfort of their families no dangers or hardships had seemed too great to be undertaken or endured. We boys held these old salts in high esteem, and never forgot to give to each his appropriate t.i.tle of "Captain" or "Skipper," as the case might be. We also occasionally had some fun with them.

We never thought of any of them as bad men, though some of them, by their own testimony, had lived wild and reckless lives. One or two, according to persistent rumor, had carried out cargoes of New England rum and brought back shiploads of "black ivory" from the West coast of Africa. Not a few of them were picturesquely profane. Old Skipper Tom Bowman had a very original oath, "tender-eyed Satan!" which he must have had copyrighted, as he was the only one that I ever heard use it. We boys would sometimes bait him, provoking him to exasperation, that we might hear it in all its original force and fervor.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Old Salts Are More Picturesque and Companionable Spinning Yarns about the Stove in a Shoemaker's Shop than when One Is Obliged to Live, Eat and Sleep with Them]

We knew his habits well. He eked out a scanty sustenance by fishing off the sh.o.r.e and would frequently come in on the ebb tide and leave his boat half way up the beach, going home to dinner and returning when the flood tide had about reached his boat, to bring it up to its moorings.

So one day we dug a "honey pot" by the side of his boat, at the very spot where we knew he would approach it, covered it over with dry seaweed and about the time he was due we were lying out of sight, but within earshot, behind the rocks. He drifted down, at peace with all the world, went in over the tops of his rubber boots, and then, for one blissful moment, we had our reward.

Some of these old salts were so thoroughly salted, being drenched with the brine of many stormy voyages, that they kept in good condition well beyond their allotted time of three score years and ten. Some were of uncertain age, but were evidently well beyond the century mark, as proved by the aggregate time consumed on their many voyages, the stories of which they had reiterated with such convincing detail.

One of these, Captain Sam Morris, was patiently stalked by the boys through a long season of yarn spinning, careful tally being kept. When the tale was complete, the boys closed in on him.

"How old are you, Captain Sam?"

"Oh, I dunno, I ain't kep' count."

"Are you seventy?"

"I swan! I dunno."

"Well, you were on the Old Dove with Skipper Jimmie Stone, weren't you?"

"Sartin."

"You were on the Const.i.tution, when she fought the Guerriere, weren't you?"

How could he deny it?

"Well, weren't you with Captain Lovett on four of his three-year trading voyages to Australia and China?"

"Course I was."

"How about those trips 'round the Horn, on the clipper ship 'Mary Jane'

from '49 to '55?"

"I was thar." They kept relentlessly on down the list, and then showed him the tally. Allowing for infancy, an abbreviated boyhood on land, and the time they had known him since he had quit the sea, he was one hundred and thirty-five years old. The showing did not disconcert him, however. He was interested, but he had told those stories so often and had come to believe each of them so implicitly that he could not doubt them in the aggregate. He simply exclaimed: "Well, I'll be darned! I feel like a young chap o' sixty."

But while some of these old sailors liked to "spin yarns" and some had their frailties, they were, as a rule, strong characters, rugged, honest, courageous, unselfish--real men, in fact, whose sterling qualities stood out in strong contrast against the unreality of many timid and non-effective lives about them. It was not their romancing, but their reality, and the achieving power of their lives that appealed to me as a boy, and I was drawn to the kind of life that had helped to produce such men.

Then, too, the ocean itself, with its immensity, its mystery, its moods, the danger in it, and the man's work in mastering it, was almost irresistibly attractive to me.

On graduating from high school I declined my father's offer to send me to college, thinking that the life I had in view did not require a college education. Then he made me a very attractive business proposition, but it looked to me like slavery, and what I wanted most was freedom. My father and mother were both Christians, but I had become skeptical, profane and reckless of public opinion. I had left home for a boarding house in the same town at eighteen, and at nineteen I had slipped the moorings and was heading out to sea.

ADRIFT

My second trip to the Banks was made in response to the same kind of impulse as that which drives the nomad out of his winter quarters in the springtime or brings the wild geese back to their summer feeding grounds. To one who really loves the ocean, the return to it after a period of exile on the land, is an indescribable satisfaction. There was at least one of our crew who experienced this emotion as our staunch little craft turned her nose to the blue water, and with all sail set and lee rail almost under water, leaped away from the petty restrictions of the sh.o.r.e into the practically limitless expanse of the Atlantic. In a week we were on the fishing ground and sentiment gave way to business.

Our schooner was a trawler, equipped with six dories and a crew of fifteen, including the skipper, the cook, the boy and two men for each boat. Each trawl had a thousand hooks, a strong ground line six thousand feet long, with a smaller line two and a half feet in length, with hook attached, at every fathom. These hooks were baited and the trawl was set each night. The six trawls stretched away from the vessel like the spokes from the hub of a wheel, the buoy marking the outer anchor of each trawl being over a mile away. I was captain of a dory this year, pa.s.sing as a seasoned fisherman with my experience of the year before.

My helper or "bow-man" was John Hogan, a young Irishman about my own age, red-headed, but green at the fishing business. John's mother kept a little oasis for thirsty neighbors, in a city adjacent to my home town, and his father was a man of unsteady habits. But John was a good fellow, active and willing, and, though he had not inherited a rugged const.i.tution, he could pull a good steady stroke.

Soon after we reached the Banks, a storm swept our decks and nearly carried away our boats. As a result, the dories, particularly my own, were severely strained and leaked badly. For two weeks, however, we had no fog, but on the morning of the second of June, just as we went over the schooner's side and shaped our course for our outer buoy, a bank of fog with an edge as perpendicular as the side of a house moved down on us like a great glacier, though much more rapidly, shutting us in and everything else out from sight. It was ugly and thick, as if all the fog factories from Grand Manan to Labrador had been working overtime for the two weeks before and had sent their whole output in one consignment. We had just pa.s.sed our inner buoy when the fog struck us, but we kept on for the outer buoy, as was customary in foggy weather, since it was safer to get that and pull in toward the vessel, rather than take the inner buoy, pull out, and find ourselves with a boatload of fish and ugly weather over a mile from the vessel. We had our bearings, I had often found the buoy in the fog and believed that we could do it again.

We kept on rowing and knew when we had rowed far enough, though we had not counted the strokes; but we found nothing.