"If it hadn't been shore," said the trader, "I wouldn't be here."
FOOTNOTE:
[4] A jigger is a lead fish, about three inches long, which spreads into two large barbed hooks at one end; the other end is attached to about forty fathoms of stout line. Jiggers are used to jerk fish from the water where there is no bait.
CHAPTER VIII
In the Offshore Gale: In Which Billy Topsail Goes Seal Hunting and is Swept to Sea With the Floe
WHAT befell old Tom Topsail and his crew came in the course of the day's work. Fishermen and seal-hunters, such as the folk of Ruddy Cove, may not wait for favourable weather; when the fish are running, they must fish; when the seals are on the drift-ice offshore in the spring, they must hunt.
So on that lowering day, when the seals were sighted by the watch on Lookout Head, it was a mere matter of course that the men of the place should set out to the hunt.
"I s'pose," Tom Topsail drawled, "that we'd best get under way."