Out of the Fog: A Story of the Sea

by Charles K. Ober

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 Massachusetts 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 pass in the night" make interesting reading; but if they pass 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 passing 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 shore 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 molasses 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 grass and trees of the old North Shore, I said to myself, "This is God'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 Shore of Massachusetts 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 shells 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 glass; miniature pagodas; 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 assortment 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.