To feel all that and the rest of it––to walk to the tops of your shoes in pine chips in the spar yards, to measure the lengths of booms and gaffs for yourself if you weren’t sure who were going to spread the big mainsails, to go up in the sail-lofts and see the sailmakers, bench after bench of them, making their needles and the long waxed threads fly through the canvas that it seemed a pity wasn’t to stay so white forever––to see them spread the canvas out along the chalk lines on the varnished floor, fixing leach and luff ropes to them and putting the leather-bound cringles in, and putting them in too so they’d stay, for by and by men’s lives would depend on the way they hung on––all that, railways, sail-lofts, vessels, boats, docks alive with men jumping to their work––skippers, crews, carpenters, riggers, lumpers, all thinking, talking, and, I suppose, dreaming of the season’s work ahead––m-m––there was life for a man! Who’d want to work in a store after that?
I stopped at Duncan’s wharf and looked at Wesley Marrs’s vessel, the Lucy Foster, and then the Colleen Bawn.
And O’Donnell drove the Colleen like a ghost through all that gale,
And around ’twas roaring mountains and above ’twas blinding hail,
and so on. And the Nannie O, another vessel that fishermen sang songs about.
Oh, the lovely Nannie O,
The able Nannie O,
The Nannie O a-drivin’ through the gale.