PERILS OF THE NEWFOUNDLAND BANKS.
BY W. J. HENDERSON.
It was blowing half a gale from the southward and eastward, and the Captain said it would be worse before it was better. The Mohawk was plunging head first over the ragged seas, with a great roaring of thunderous foam under her hawseholes as she fell into the wide hollows, and a sickening upward swirl of her lean stem as she rose again to meet the reeling cliffs of water that swept down upon her out of the windward gloom. The streamer of brown smoke that rushed from her tall black funnel went wreathing and shuddering away to leeward, where it seemed to add a blacker tinge to the gray wall of the hard clouds. The sea was not yet torn to spoon-drift by the wind; but there was a huge under-running sweep of swell that made one think that bad weather lay behind the windward horizon.
Ever and anon the propeller would leap out of the water, and as it revolved in the air, set the ship full of rumbling quivers. Most of the passengers—and they were not many, for it was not one of the big "liners"—lay below decks in the unspeakable agony of early seasickness, for the ship was not long out, and had just reached the edge of the Newfoundland banks. A few of the ocean travellers, however, mostly men who had seen salt spray before, sat huddled in their rugs under the lee of the deck-house, conversing upon such cheering topics as collisions, and icebergs, and leaks. One who had not crossed the sea before, but who was free from sickness, said,
"I am told that we are now on the banks of Newfoundland, where foolish men go in small sailing-vessels to fish."
"Foolish you may well call them," said an old voyager, "for they lie there in thick weather and thin without making a sign of their presence. I remember once, steaming slowly through a dense fog on a great Cunarder, we heard the fog-horn of a single sailing craft, and presently that ceased. A minute later the fog lifted, and there were thirty sail of them within the circumference of a mile. I tell you, those fellows are—"
"Sail ho!" cried the lookout forward, and several passengers sprang to their feet. They knew that it was out of the common order of things on a merchant steamer to make a noise about a passing sail, such fussiness being left to men-of-war that have nothing more to do. They crowded to the rail of the ship, and far ahead they saw what seemed to be a small sloop staggering over the big seas under very scant canvas. The lookout and the officer on the bridge exchanged some words, from which the passengers learned that the sailor made the vessel out to be in distress.
"Call away the whale-boat!" cried the officer, and in a moment the boatswain's pipe was screeching, and three or four seamen trotted aft in their oilskins.
"A rescue!" exclaimed the new voyager. "I had no hope that I should ever be so fortunate as to see such a thing."