Rough and craggy, with few trees, sparse vegetation, and a very thin coating of soil, there is no agriculture, and the whole glory of the island is centered in the roaring city on its southeast side.
It is a strange city, lost in the midst of busy up-to-date 163 Canada, with French roofs, narrow tilting streets, and ever the smell of fish. There is a good harbor, and there are wharfs where blackfaced men with blue stockings, caps, and gold earrings chatter the patois and smoke their pipes. In the busy time of year there are ten thousand men in the town and it is a scene of constant revelry and wildness.
The Charming Lass touched the port at the height of its season––early September––and, because of the shallowness of the harbor close in, anchored in the bay amid a crowd of old high-pooped schooners, filled with noisy, happy Frenchmen. There were other nationalities, too, in the cosmopolitan bay––Americans setting a new spar or Nova Scotians in on a good time.
The Charming Lass cast her anchor shortly before six o’clock, having made the run in five and a half hours with a good breeze behind. Code and Ellinwood immediately went over the side in the brown dory of the mate and pulled for the customhouse wharf. The rest of the crew were forbidden off the decks except to sleep under them, for it was intended, as soon as the bait was lightered aboard, to make sail to the Banks again.
The bait industry in St. Pierre is one more or less open to examination. It is the delight of certain French dealers to go inside the English three-mile limit, load their vessels with barrels of herring, and 164 return to St. Pierre. Here they sell them at magnificent profit to Frenchmen, Englishmen, and Americans. And, as the British coat of arms is not stamped on herring at birth, no one can prove that they were not legally procured.
But let a Canadian revenue cutter catch a Frenchman (or American either, for that matter), dipping herring in any out-of-the-way inlet, and the owner not only pays a heavy fine, but he often loses his schooner and his men go to jail for trying to hoist sail and escape at the last minute.
Code had not reached shore before he had been accosted by fully half a dozen of these bait pirates. But he passed them, and tying his dory at the wharf, went on up the street to a legitimate firm.
Immediately the business was finished, Code and Pete Ellinwood started back to the wharf.
The main street was ablaze with lights. Cafés, saloons, music halls, catch-penny places––in fact, every device known to separate sailors from their wages was in operation. The sidewalks were crowded with men, jabbering madly in the different dialects of their home provinces (for many come here from France yearly).
“Queer lot, these frog-eaters,” said Pete, going into the street so as to avoid a thick, pushing crowd.