We came to anchor, handed our topsails, but merely hauled up our courses, so as to be ready for sea at a moment's notice. We were in a little sheltered cove, abreast of a small village of wooden huts, surrounded by fences that were buried deep in the frozen snow.
These huts, like all others in this wild terra nova, were built of fir-poles with the bark on, braced or pegged closely together, and having chimneys of rough stone built without mortar. Bark and sods formed the roofs, and all the crevices were carefully caulked with moss and mud.
There, in a wretched and dreary region, dwelt—and, I presume, still dwell—a little Irish colony of fifty or sixty poor souls, who fished for cod in summer and seals in winter, each family herding together for warmth in the same apartment with their pigs, fowls, and the shaggy dogs which dragged in harness the stunted trees that formed their fuel, and which were cut in the adjacent bush—the desolate place which once formed the summer hunting-grounds of the extinct Red men of the island.
Our anchoring in the cove was a great event—the entire population came forth to gaze and their dogs to bark at us.
Though Newfoundland is larger than England and Wales together, it is indented by broad bays of deep water, which run for forty or fifty miles into the interior, and are but little known. On some of these solitary shores are little stations of Europeans, such as this we visited, so remote from all intercourse, and so secluded, that their reckoning of time has become confused as to days, months, and even years; thus Sunday is frequently held by them in the middle of a week.
To the care of these pioneers, or squatters, we consigned our wounded man. By the intensity of the frost mortification had commenced, so the poor fellow died a few days after being landed.
We had scarcely conveyed him ashore, when a man arrived from the bush with a large tree, which he had cut down, and which his dogs had dragged easily over the snow (after it was denuded of its bark and branches) in the usual manner, by having their traces secured to his hatchet, which was wedged in the broad end of the log. He informed us that a schooner—by his description, our identical Black Schooner—was then at anchor under the lee of the Gull Island, about five miles distant; and added that the poor French people at La Scie complained bitterly of the rifling they had undergone at the hands of her crew, which consisted of forty well-armed desperadoes, of all nations, but principally English and Frenchmen.
Here was startling intelligence!
"Only five miles distant, say you?" reiterated Hartly.
"Yes, sir; and you may see Gull Island from the mouth of our cove here."