The Harbor Master

by Theodore Goodridge Roberts

"Aye, father dear, from the last wrack."

"Without blood on it, my son?"

"Widout so much as a drop o' blood on it, so help me Saint Peter!"

"And the other lads, Denny? Are ye the only one in the harbor able to pay me something for the building of a church?"

There was the one question on the good priest's tongue and another in his clear eyes.

"I bes skipper, father dear, an' takes skipper's shares and pays skipper's shares," replied Nolan. "But for me there'd not bin one bottle o' wine come to us from the wrack an' the poor folks aboard her would never have got ashore in their boats for want of a light on the land-wash. As I kin spare ye fifty pounds for the holy work, yer reverence, there bes nineteen men o' this harbor kin each be sparin' ye ten."

Father McQueen nodded his gray head.

"Then we'll have the little church, Denny," he said. "Aye, lad, we'll have the little church shining out to sea from the cliffs above Chance Along."

Father McQueen was a good man and a good priest, and would as readily have given his last breath as his last crust of bread in the service of his Master; but for the past thirty years he had lived and worked in a land of rocks, fogs and want, among people who snatched a livelihood from the sea with benumbed fingers and wrists pitted deep with scars of salt-water boils. He had seen them risk their lives for food on the black rocks, the grinding ice and the treacherous tide; and now his heart felt with their hearts, his eyes saw with their eyes. Their bitter birthright was the harvest of the coastwise seas; and he now realized their real and ethical right to all that they might gather from the tide, be it cod, caplin, herrings or the timbers and freights of wrecked ships. He saw that a wreck, like a good run of fish, was a thing to profit by thankfully and give praise to the saints for; but he held that no gift of God was to be gathered in violence. In the early years of his work he had heard rumors and seen indications of things that had fired him with a righteous fury and pity—rumors and hints of mariners struggling landward only to be killed like so many seals as they reached the hands to which they had looked for succor. The poor savages who had committed such crimes as this had at first failed to understand his fury and disgust; but with his tongue and his strong arms he had driven into their hearts the fear of Holy Church and of the Reverend Patrick McQueen. Even the wildest and dullest members of his far-scattered flock learned in time that life was sacred—even the life of a half-dead stranger awash in the surf. They even learned to refrain from stripping and breaking up a wrecked or grounded vessel that was still manned by a protesting crew; and with the fear of the good priest in their hearts (even though he was a hundred miles away), they would do their best to bring the unfortunate mariners safely ashore and then share the vessel with the hungry sea.

That even a deserted or unpeopled wreck should be common property may not seem right to some people; but it seemed right to Father McQueen—and surely he should know what was right and what was wrong! It was sometime about the date of this story that a missionary of another and perhaps less broad and human creed than Father McQueen's wrote to his bishop in the spring, "Thanks to God and two wrecks we got through the winter without starving."