So it is with most Newfoundlanders: they love their land with an intolerant prejudice; and most are content with the life they lead. “The Newfoundlander comes back,” is a significant proverb of the outports; and, “White Bay’s good enough for me,” said a fishwife to me once, when I asked her why she still remained in a place so bleak and barren, “for I’ve heered tell ’tis wonderful smoky an’ n’isy ’t Saint Johns.” The life they live, and strangely love, is exceeding toilsome. Toil began for a gray-haired, bony-handed old woman whom I know when she was so young that she had to stand on a tub to reach the splitting-table; when, too, to keep her awake and busy, late o’ nights, her father would make believe to throw a bloody cod’s head at her. It began for that woman’s son when, at five or six years old, he was just able to spread the fish to dry on the flake, and continued in earnest, a year or two later, when first he was strong enough to keep the head of his father’s punt up to the wind. But they seem not to know that fishing is a hard or dangerous employment: for instance, a mild-eyed, crooked old fellow—he was a cheerful Methodist, too, and subject to “glory-fits”—who had fished from one harbour for sixty years, computed for me that he had put out to sea in his punt at least twenty thousand times, that he had been frozen to the seat of his punt many times, that he had been swept to sea with the ice-packs, six times, that he had weathered six hundred gales, great and small, and that he had been wrecked more times than he could “just mind” at the moment; yet he was the only old man ever I met who seemed honestly to wish that he might live his life over again!
The hook-and-line man has a lonely time of it. From earliest dawn, while the night yet lies thick on the sea, until in storm or calm or favouring breeze he makes harbour in the dusk, he lies off shore, fishing—tossing in the lop of the grounds, with the waves to balk and the wind to watch warily, while he tends his lines. There is no jolly companionship of the forecastle and turf hut for him—no new scene, no hilarious adventure; nor has he the expectation of a proud return to lighten his toil. In the little punt he has made with his own hands he is forever riding an infinite expanse, which, in “fish weather,” is melancholy, or threatening, or deeply solemn, as it may chance—all the while and all alone confronting the mystery and terrible immensity of the sea. It may be that he gives himself over to aimless musing, or, even less happily, to pondering certain dark mysteries of the soul; and so it comes about that the “mad-house ’t Saint Johns” is inadequate to accommodate the poor fellows whom lonely toil has bereft of their senses—melancholiacs, idiots and maniacs “along o’ religion.”
Notwithstanding all, optimism persists everywhere on the coast. One old fisherman counted himself favoured above most men because he had for years been able to afford the luxury of cream of tartar; and another, a brawny giant, confessed to having a disposition so pertinaciously happy that he had come to regard a merry heart as his besetting sin. Sometimes an off-shore gale puts an end to all the fishing; sometimes it is a sudden gust, sometimes a big wave, sometimes a confusing mist, more often long exposure to spray and shipped water and soggy winds. It was a sleety off-shore gale, coming at the end of a sunny, windless day, that froze or drowned thirty men off Trinity Bay in a single night; and it was a mere puff on a “civil” evening—but a swift, wicked little puff, sweeping round Breakheart Head—that made a widow of Elizabeth Rideout o’ Duck Cove and took her young son away. Often, however, the hook-and-line man fishes his eighty years of life, and dies in his bed as cheerfully as he has lived and as poor as he was born.
[X—SOME OUTPORT FOLK]
It had been a race against the peril of fog and the discomfort of a wet night all the way from Hooping Harbour. We escaped the scowl of the northeast, the gray, bitter wind and the sea it was fast fretting to a fury, when the boat rounded Canada Head and ran into the shelter of the bluffs at Englee—into the damp shadows sombrely gathered there. When the punt was moored to the stage-head, the fog had thickened the dusk into deep night, and the rain had soaked us to the skin. There was a light, a warm, yellow light, shining from a window, up along shore and to the west. We stumbled over an erratic footpath, which the folk of the place call “the roaad”—feeling for direction, chancing the steps, splashing through pools of water, tripping over sharp rocks. The whitewashed cottages of the village, set on the hills, were like the ghosts of houses. They started into sight, hung suspended in the night, vanished as we trudged on. The folk were all abed—all save Elisha Duckworthy, that pious giant, who had been late beating in from the fishing grounds off the Head. It was Elisha who opened the door to our knock, and sent a growling, bristling dog back to his place with a gentle word.
“THE WHITEWASHED COTTAGES ON THE HILLS”
“Will you not——”
“Sure, sir,” said Elisha, a smile spreading from his eyes to the very tip of his great beard, “’twould be a hard man an’ a bad Christian that would turn strangers away. Come in, sir! ’Tis a full belly you’ll have when you leaves the table, an’ ’tis a warm bed you’ll sleep in, this night.”
After family prayers, in which we, the strangers he had taken in, were commended to the care and mercy of God in such simple, feeling phrases as proved the fine quality of this man’s hospitality and touched our hearts in their innermost parts, Elisha invited us to sit by the kitchen fire with him “for a spell.” While the dogs snored in chorus with a young kid and a pig by the roaring stove, and the chickens rustled and clucked in their coop under the bare spruce sofa which Elisha had made, and the wind flung the rain against the window-panes, we three talked of weather and fish and toil and peril and death. It may be that a cruel coast and a sea quick to wrath engender a certain dread curiosity concerning the “taking off” in a man who fights day by day to survive the enmity of both. Elisha talked for a long time of death and heaven and hell. Then, solemnly, his voice fallen to a whisper, he told of his father, Skipper George, a man of weakling faith, who had been reduced to idiocy by wondering what came after death—by wondering, wondering, wondering, in sunlight and mist and night, off shore in the punt, labouring at the splitting-table, at work on the flake, everywhere, wondering all the time where souls took their flight.