The foaming fore shore/Chapter 1
CHAPTER I
THE SCHOONER GRAYWING
Now, brothers, for the icebergs of frozen Labrador
Floating spectral in the moonshine, along the low, black shore!
Where in the mist the rock is hiding, and the sharp reef lurks below
And the white squall smites in Summer, and the Autumn tempests blow;
Where through gray and rolling vapor, from evening unto morn,
A thousand boats are hailing, horn answering unto horn
HUGHIE HAY, lookout on the Gloucester schooner Graywing, queen of the American fishing fleet that fished the Labrador waters on the heels of the advantageous Reciprocity Treaty of 1854, paused at the foot of the perpendicular ladder that led from the vessel's deck down into her cramped cabin. In the act of unceremoniously breaking in on the scene below, his captain's uplifted finger held him, and he waited thus, staring across the smoke-blurred forecastle triangle, waiting for the forefinger of the brown sea-fist to fall.
It was a huge fist he watched, and the frame behind, lolling on a bunk, fully matched the fist. A full six feet it sprawled, ponderous in its bulky oilskins, the frame of a Viking surmounted by a Viking head.
Waves of fair hair, luxuriant, silky, topped bronzed features, fiercely tender, and from under golden brows bold sea-blue eyes looked out as Norseman's eyes in the ages gone looked out from their shield-hung bulwarks. They were the eyes of pride, the eyes of a conqueror, the eyes of a man who would never be denied, and yet in the face they illumined was more than colossal daring, more than unalterable determination. In it was that philosophic repose of the seaman who in his thirty-five years of voyaging had communed deeply with the deep sea and gaged its measureless strength as vastly over and above the measure of his own.
In the nearby bunks that lined the oilskin-decorated walls sat the rest of his crew: "Irish" Kerrigan in his attitude of eternal expectoration, shoulders hunched, hands in pockets, his ruddy Erin-bred face glistening under the light of the lantern hung on a beam and his pipe and his brogue on the tip of his tongue; "Boston Jim," slim, straight and strong as a stanchion, with sallow skin and features gentle, almost esthetic, as if he might have been a New England parson drifted out to sea; Patterson, a lopped-off Titan of a man, placid, somnolent-eyed, five feet tall but two hundred and twenty pounds in weight; Brown, a wizened Gloucester shark with a twang that suggested an A-string somewhere down in his bony chest; "Scotty" McCaig, a braw strutting Highlander whose strut had compromised with the sailor's roll in his columnar legs till he two-stepped his way wherever he went about the schooner Graywing; Tom Halifax, a famous sealer with the scars of a dozen trips to the ice floes marring his leathery face; and Bolero, the cook from Cuba, dark-hued, quiet, excellent, like the black cigars of his birth- place with which he hazed his cookery-perfumed galley.
God-fearing men of Gloucester all, native or adopted, up on Newfoundland's French shore for cod, in Baie Verte with their trap, they listened to the prayer of the Reverend Lance, the itinerant missionary of this vast fore shore dropped aboard by night from his Church yacht Star of the Sea.
Up-standing straight in his ministerial black by the long table that ran from the sharp angle of the Graywing's bows to her stout foremast, his spectacles glittering over short-sighted eyes and his purged face haloed by the yellow light of the oil lantern, he was concluding his short service with a benediction, giving them the peace of God and asking His protection for them while they seined the deep under menace of storm and fog and reef and berg.
Quick with an oath in anger, with a fist-blow in a brawl, they were, nevertheless, each according to his breed, inherently religious, and to Lance's benediction they chorused sonorous "Amen." As into the eyes of God they had looked overlong into the depths of the sea, and the Omnipotence of its creation had bound them with stronger bonds than any landsmen's creed or sect.
Swift to devotion, swifter perhaps to action, the captain's finger of warning dropped for his lookout Hughie Hay, and Hughie, himself a fresh-faced, auburn-haired lump of a Gloucester lad with the glowing cheeks of a woman and the wise gray eyes of a child, went on to announce the news he had carried down the ladder.
"Cap'n Taylor, it's thet freighter ez wuz makin' into Chateau; thar's trouble aboard—yellin' an' fightin' goin' on," he informed. "She's yawin' about somethin' turrible an' thar's no tellin' what truck's draggin' overside to walk plumb through aour cod trap. I thaought you aought to knaow!"
"Confound it all, Hughie—you're right I ought to know!" cried his Viking captain.
He sprang from his bunk as he spoke and rushed for the ladder, yelling for his men to follow.
"Tumble up, boys!" he exhorted. "Out of the way, Hughie—I'll go first! Oh, yes—Lance, come on if you want to!"