It was getting well along toward sunset then, with everybody worried, the skipper still aloft, and one boat making ready to set about a mile inside of us. “They’ll dive,” said our skipper, and they did. “There’s Pitt Ripley’s school now,” and he pointed to where a raft of mackerel were rising and rippling the water black, and heading for the north. “There’s another gone down, too––they’ll dive that fellow. Who is it––Al McNeill?––yes. But they’ll come up again, and when it does, it’s ours.” And they did come up, and when they did the skipper made a jump and roared, “Into the boat!” There was a scramble. “Stay up here, you Billie, and watch the school,” he said to Hurd, and “Go down, you,” to me. I slid down by the jib halyards. The skipper and Clancy came down by the back-stay and beat me to the deck. They must have tumbled down, they were down so quick.
“Hurry––the Aurora’s going after it, too.” The Aurora was one of Withrow’s fleet and we were bound to beat her. I had hardly time to 74 leap into the dory after Clancy, and we were off, with nobody left aboard but Hurd to the mast-head and the cook, who was to stay on deck and sail the vessel.
In the seine-boat it was double-banked oars, nine long blades and a monstrous big one steering––good as another oar that––and all driving for dear life, with Long Steve and a cork-passer standing by the seine and the skipper on top of it, with his eyes fixed on the school ahead––his only motions to open his mouth and to wave with his hands to the steersman behind him. “Drive her––drive her,” he called to the crew. “More yet––more yet,” to the steering oar. “There’s the porgy steamer’s boat, too, after the same school. Drive her now, fellows!”
The mackerel were wild as could be, great rafts of them, and travelling faster than the old seiners in the gang said they had ever seen them travel before, and what was worse, not staying up long. There were boats out from three or four vessels before we pushed off with ours. I remember the porgy steamer had cut in ahead and given their boat a long start for a school. However, that school did not stay up long enough and they had their row for nothing. But then their steamer picked them up again and dropped them on the way to the same school that we were trying for. 75 How some of our gang did swear at them! And all because they were steam power.
It promised to be a pretty little race, but that school, too, went down before either of us could head it, and so it was another row for nothing. We lay on our oars then, both boats ready for another row, with the skipper and seine-heaver in each standing on top of the seine and watching for the fish to show again. Of course both gangs were sizing each other up, too. I think myself that the Duncan’s crowd were a huskier lot of men than the steamer’s. Our fellows looked more like fishermen, as was to be expected, because in Gloucester good fishermen are so common that naturally, a man hailing from there gets so that he wants to be a good fisherman, too, and of course the men coming there are all pretty good to begin with, leaving out the fellows who are born and brought up around Gloucester and who have it in their blood. A man doesn’t leave Newfoundland or Cape Breton or even Nova Scotia or Maine and the islands along the coast, or give up any safe, steady work he may have, to come to Gloucester to fish unless he feels that he can come pretty near to holding his end up. That’s not saying that a whole lot of fine fishermen do not stay at home, with never any desire to fish out of Gloucester, in spite of the good money that a fisherman 76 with a good skipper can make from there, but just the same they’re a pretty smart and able lot that do come. And so, while our gang was half made up of men that were born far away from Gloucester, yet they had the Gloucester spirit, which is everything in deep-sea fishing, when nerve and strength and skill count for so much. And this other crowd––the porgy steamer’s––did not have that look.
“Look at what we’re coming to,” somebody called. “All steam boys soon, and on wages––wages!” he repeated, “and going around the deck, with a blue guernsey with letters on the chest of it––A.D.Q.––or some other damn company.”
“Well, that would not be bad either, with your grub bill sure and your money counted out at the end of every month,” answered somebody else.
I was sizing up the two gangs myself, I being in the dory with Clancy, and I guess that nearly everyone of us was doing the same thing and keeping an eye out for fish at the same time, when all at once a school popped up the other side of the porgyman’s boat. Perhaps, half a mile it was and, for a wonder, not going like a streak.
We saw it first and got to going first, but the Aurora’s boat and the steamer’s boat were nearer, and so when we were all under good headway there were two lengths or so that we had to make 77 up on each. Well, that was all right. Two lengths weren’t so many, and we drove her. It was something to see the fellows lay out to it then––doubled-banked, two men to each wide seat and each man with a long oar, which he had picked out and trimmed to suit himself, and every man in his own particular place as if in a racing crew.
And now every man was bending to it. A big fellow, named Rory McKinnon, was setting the stroke. There was a kick and a heave to every stroke, and the men encouraging each other. “Now––now––give it to her,” was all that I could hear coming out of him. All this time we in the dory were coming on behind, Clancy and I having to beat their dory just as our boat had to beat their boat. And we were driving, too, you may be sure. Clancy was making his oars bend like whips. “Blast ’em! There’s no stiffness to ’em,” he was complaining. And then, “Sock it to her,” he would call out to our fellows in the seine-boat. “We’ve got the porgy crew licked––that’s the stuff,” came from the skipper. From on top of the seine he was watching the fish, watching the gang, watching the other boats, watching us in the dory––watching everything. Whoever made a slip then would hear from it afterwards, we knew. And clip, clip, clip it was, with the swash 78 just curling nicely under the bow of the other boat, and I suppose our own, too, if we could have seen.