Pike & Cutlass: Hero Tales of Our Navy

by George Gibbs

WHEN THE SNOW MELTS

Ashore in Gloucester town there are signs a-plenty of the work to come. The sleepy village throws off her white mantle and rises from the lethargy of the winter past. The spring is in the air, and the docks and wharves, white and ice-trussed during the long, bleak winter, are trod by groups of men, rubber-coated and “sou’ westered,” moving briskly from one shed to another.

In the town they gather like the stray birds of spring that flutter under the eaves of the store-houses. By twos and threes they appear. On street corners they meet, pipe-smoking, reminiscent, gloomily hopeful for the future, and grateful that they have helped themselves over “March Hill” without a loan from owner or buyer. And as they lounge from post-office to store, from store to shed, and back again, their talk is of dealings with owners and skippers, of vessels and luck.

For luck is their fortune. It means larger profits by shares, new dresses for the wife and little ones, and perhaps an easy time of it in the winter to follow. It means that there will be no long, hard winter of it at the haddock-fisheries at “George’s,” where trawls are to be set in weather which makes frozen hands and feet, and perhaps a grave in an icy sea, where thousands have gone before.

The skipper of the “Polly,” even before he gets his men, has broken out his gear and reckoned up his necessities for the run up to the Banks. If he ships the same crew he had the year before, they work in well together. The “Polly’s” topmasts are run up with a hearty will and a rush. There is a cheerful clatter of block and tackle, and the joyous “Yeo-ho” echoes from one schooner to another as sail and rigging are fitted and run into place.

The snow yet lingers in little patches on the moors when some of the vessels warp down to an anchorage. Dories are broken from their nests and skim lightly across the harbor, now alive with a fleet in miniature. Jests and greetings fill the air, as old shipmates and dory-mates meet again,—Gloucester men some of them, but more often Swedes, Portuguese, and men from the South.

For to-day the fleet is not owned in the villages, and Gloucester, once the centre of the fishing aristocracy, the capital of the nation of the Banks, is now but a trading- and meeting-place for half the sea-people who come from the North and East.

The skipper of the “Polly J.,” himself perhaps the scion of three generations of fishing captains, may wag his head regretfully, for fishers cannot be choosers; but he knows that his fishing has to be done, and, after all, a “Portygee” is as good a sailor-man and dory-mate as another,—better sometimes,—if he keeps sober.

So long as the ship-owner makes his credit good at the store for the people at home, the fisherman takes life as joyfully as a man may who looks at death with every turn of the glass. If he takes his pleasures seriously, it is because he lives face to face with his Maker. Nature, in the awful moods he knows her, makes trivial the little ills that flesh is heir to.

So when the crews are aboard, and the stores and salt are being hoisted in, there is a hurry to be among the first away. Chains and windlasses creak and clang, nimble feet fly aloft, hoarse voices ring across the rippling water, and many a cheerful song echoes from ship to shore and back again.

Willing hands, strangers for months to hemp and tar, lay on to the tackle, as spar and boom are run into place. The fish-bins below are cleaned and scrubbed to the very quick. Bright-work, if there be any, is polished, and sail-patching and dory-painting and caulking are the order of the day, and most of the night. The black cook, below in the mysterious blackness of the galley, potters with saucepan and kettle, and when the provisions are aboard serves the first meal. There is coffee, steaming hot in the early hours of the morning, and biscuit and meat,—plenty of it. There is not much variety, but, with the work to be done above and below decks, a full-blooded appetite leaves no chance for grumbling.

At last the bag and baggage of the crew are tossed aboard,—packs of tobacco innumerable, new rubber clothes, all yellow and shiny in the morning dampness, boots and woollens to keep out the cold of spring on the Bank Sea,—all bought on credit at the store, to be charged against “settling-day.”