“I’m glad we didn’t run durin’ the night,” said Buck, “she wouldn’t ’a’ done it an’ gone clear—just look at that fellow!”
As he spoke a giant sea rose on the weather beam, a great mass of blue water capped with a white comber. The little vessel’s head dropped down the foam-streaked hollow until we were almost becalmed under the sea that followed. A dirty, dangerous sea to run in.
“I thought you might have run when we saw how bad it was—an’ trust to luck to go clear. But fight on, says I, even when you know you’re losing. If you’d started to run you’d never been able to swing her up again if we’d had to—an’ now we’ll go clear. She’ll stand it.”
Buck was an American and John a Swede. The latter had hinted at running off before the storm when we found ourselves close in. Buck cursed him in my presence in true American fashion.
“Never give up a fight because you’re beat at the start,” says I. “It’s them that fights when they have to, an’ because it’s right, that always win. We did seem dead beat last night, an’ when that light flashed out bright I was almost willing to say Amen. But I knew it ware wrong, an’ we must fight it out. A man that fights to win is no sailor. It’s him that fights when he knows he will lose—an’ then maybe he won’t lose after all.”
The sun showed a little through a break in the flying scud, and the water looked a beautiful blue, streaked with great patches of white. Buck was gazing hard to the southward and could make nothing out except the Hatteras Light. He was tired, and refused to move from a wash of foam along the deck where he sat.
“You see,” he said, wiping the spray from his face, “a man can’t tell nothin’ in this world. There’s no use tryin’ to at sea—an’ the more you risk sometimes the more you win. It isn’t always judgment. There ware old man Richards. He knew the coast, but he trusted his judgment too much—an’ I’m the bum ye see now. I don’t mean nothin’ agin your boat, Cap’n.
“You remember Richards? Had the ole Pocosin. Used to run her from Nassau to Hunter’s P’int. ’Taint much of a run, even for that kind o’ hooker, but in the winter this Cape is hell, an’ that’s a fact. You kin almost jump from wrack to wrack from the Core Bank to Bodie’s Island. I’ve seen forty vessels, big an’ small, on the beach here in one season—an’ we aint out o’ the business yet, either.”
We were drifting down fast on the outer shoal, and I could see, or fancy I could see, the Ocracoke Lighthouse. The wind had increased a little with sunrise as usual in a northeaster, but it seemed to be working a bit more to the northward and getting colder.
“It was just such a day as this. We hove the Pocosin up when she was almost in sight of the Capes and not ten hours’ run from Norfolk. But she ware ramming her nose into it harder and harder, an’ there we was. We couldn’t get no farther.