A schooner—let her be called the Good Fortune—running through dense fog, with a fair, high wind and all sail set, struck a “twin” iceberg bow on. She was wrecked in a flash: her jib-boom was rammed into her forecastle; her bows were stove in; her topmast snapped and came crashing to the deck. Then she fell away from the ice; whereupon the wind caught her, turned her about, and drove her, stern foremost, into a narrow passage which lay between the two towering sections of the “twin.” She scraped along, striking the ice on either side; and with every blow, down came fragments from above.
“It rained chunks,” said the old skipper who told me the story. “You couldn’t tell, look! what minute you’d get knocked on the head.”
The falling ice made great havoc with the deck-works; the boats were crushed; the “house” was stove in; the deck was littered with ice. But the Good Fortune drove safely through, was rigged with makeshift sails, made harbour, was refitted by all hands—the Labradormen can build a ship with an axe—and continued her voyage.
I have said that the Newfoundlanders occasionally navigate by means of old rhymes; and this brings me to the case of Zachariah, the skipper of the Heavenly Rest. He was a Newf’un’lander. Neither wind, fog nor a loppy sea could turn his blood to water. He was a Newf’un’lander of the hardshell breed. So he sailed the Heavenly Rest without a chart. To be sure, he favoured the day for getting along, but he ran through the night when he was crowding south, and blithely took his chance with islands of ice and rock alike. He had some faith in a “telltale,” had Zachariah, but he scorned charts. It was his boast that if he could not carry the harbours and headlands and shallows of five hundred miles of hungry coast in his head he should give up the Heavenly Rest and sail a paddle-punt for a living. It was well that he could—well for the ship and the crew and the folk at home. For, at the time of which I write, the Rest, too light in ballast to withstand a gusty breeze, was groping through the fog for harbour from a gale which threatened a swift descent. It was “thick as bags,” with a rising wind running in from the sea, and the surf breaking and hissing within hearing to leeward.
“We be handy t’ Hollow Harbour,” said Zachariah.
“Is you sure, skipper?” asked the cook.
“Sure,” said Zachariah.
The Heavenly Rest was in desperate case. She was running in—pursuing an unfaltering course for an unfamiliar, rocky shore. The warning of the surf sounded in every man’s ears. It was imperative that her true position should soon be determined. The skipper was perched far forward, peering through the fog for a sight of the coast.
“Sure, an’ I hopes,” said the man at the wheel, “that she woan’t break her nose on a rock afore the ol’ man sees un.”