“Oh no, zur,” said he, quietly, looking up from his work. “’Tis just—just life!”
They do, indeed, know how “t’ sail.” The Newfoundland government, niggardly and utterly independable when the good of the fisherfolk is concerned, of whatever complexion the government may chance to be, but prodigal to an extraordinary degree when individual self-interests are at stake—this is a delicate way of putting an unpleasant truth,—keeps no light burning beyond the Strait of Belle Isle; the best it does, I believe, is to give wrecked seamen free passage home. Under these difficult circumstances, no seamen save Newfoundlanders, who are the most skillful and courageous of all, could sail that coast: and they only because they are born to follow the sea—there is no escape for them—and are bred to sailing from their earliest years.
“What you going to be when you grow up?” I once asked a lad on the far northeast coast.
He looked at me in vast astonishment.
“What you going to be, what you going to do,” I repeated, “when you grow up?”
Still he did not comprehend. “Eh?” he said.
“What you going to work at,” said I, in desperation, “when you’re a man?”
“Oh, zur,” he answered, understanding at last, “I isn’t clever enough t’ be a parson!”
And so it went without saying that he was to fish for a living! It is no wonder, then, that the skippers of the fleet know “how t’ sail.” The remarkable quality of the sea-captains who come from among them impressively attests the fact—not only their quality as sailors, but as men of spirit and proud courage. There is one—now a captain of a coastal boat on the Newfoundland shore—who takes his steamer into a ticklish harbour of a thick, dark night, when everything is black ahead and roundabout, steering only by the echo of the ship’s whistle! There is another, a confident seaman, a bluff, high-spirited fellow, who was once delayed by bitter winter weather—an inky night, with ice about, the snow flying, the seas heavy with frost, the wind blowing a gale.