“No, no––don’t make any mistake there. The discipline of a yacht, so far as I know it, is baby play to what they have on a good fisherman. The discipline aboard a warship is nothing to that aboard a fisherman, like Captain Blake’s vessel say, when there is anything to be done. Fishermen, it’s true, don’t have to touch their caps and say, ‘Very good, sir,’ to a man who may be no more of a real man than themselves. On your yacht I suppose you’d discharge a man who didn’t do what he was told, and on a warship he would be sent to the brig, I suppose. On a fisherman he’d be put ashore. On a fisherman they not only obey orders, but they carry them out on the jump. And why? Because they’ve always done it. Why, deep-sea fishermen are always getting into places where only the best of seamanship can save them, and they very early get in the way of doing things up quick and right. When a Gloucester skipper orders in the sail, say in a gale of wind, and more than apt to be in the middle of the night––you don’t see 164 men trying to see how long it will take them to get into oilskins––or filling another pipe before they climb on deck. No, sir––the first man out on the bowsprit, if it’s the jib to come in––or out on the foot-ropes, if it’s the mainsail to be tied up––he’s the man that will have a right to hold his head high next day aboard that vessel. And so the crew of a fisherman jump to their work––if they didn’t there’d be a lot more of them lost than there are.”
“Dear me,” said Mr. Keith, “that never occurred to me before. But how is it, Mrs. Miner, that you have it down so fine?”
“My father was a Gloucester skipper, and since I was that high”––she put her hand on a level with her knee––“I’ve been listening to fishermen. And yachting life does tend to spoil a fisherman,” she went on to explain. “After a summer of yachting a fisherman will begin to think that a winter of fishing is going to be a serious thing.” She was warmed up then and went on talking at a great rate. And listening to her I could understand better why men took to her. She had warm blood in her. If it were not for her weakness to be admired by men, she would have been a great woman. “And they get so, that what seems extraordinary work to you is only an every-day matter to them. Do you remember that last schooner-yacht race 165 across the Atlantic?––when two or three reporters went along, and after they got back wrote all kinds of stories of what a desperate trip it was––how rough it was and dangerous! Well, that time there were three or four Gloucestermen making the run to Iceland. Now, they were not as big as the racing yachts and they were loaded down with all the stores for a long salt trip––their holds full of salt, for one thing––and yet they made about as good time to Iceland as that yachtsman made to Queenstown. And they weren’t driving their vessels either––they don’t drive on the way out. It’s only coming home that they try to make passages. Now, they must have got the same weather and yet nobody ever heard them in their letters home report a word of bad weather, or ever afterward, either. And yet––but were you to Iceland that time, Maurice?”
“No,” said the skipper, “but you were, Tommie?”
“Yes,” answered Clancy, “in the Lucy Foster. We made Rik-ie-vik inside of fourteen days, carrying both tops’ls all the way. Wesley––Wesley Marrs––wasn’t hurrying her, of course. As Mrs. Miner says, the vessels going to the east’ard don’t hurry, except now and then when two of them with records get together. And the Lucy was logy, of course, with the three hundred and odd hogsheads 166 of salt and other stuff in her. If we’d been driving her going to Iceland that time we’d have had the stays’l and balloon to her––and she’d have gone right along with them, too.”
Mrs. Miner looked around at her yachting friends to see if they were getting all that.
“There was one day that passage it blew a bit,” exclaimed Clancy. “And that was the day we thought we saw a fellow to the east’ard. We had men by the halyards all that day with splitting knives.”
“Why?” asked Keith.
“Why, to cut before she could capsize.”
“Oh!” said Keith and said it with a little click.