in sight, and still another may be lost to sight down some stony river-gorge, the ascending smoke alone telling the tale. But, apart from the dye-pots and their sisters, there is yet another class of pot found near the coast regions, pots that play an equally important part in the upbuilding of Canadian life. These are the tar-pots, the lead-pots, the seal-oil pots, etc., necessary to the fishing industry of our extensive Gulf of St. Lawrence and Atlantic coast. These pots differ, too, from the first class, in that these are presided over by men and boys. From Percé to Digby, the shore-road throughout its many hundreds of miles via Cape North and Halifax is “the way of the out-of-door pot” no less than “the road of fish”.
When the magnitude and the significance of this is realized, it is easily seen that these out-of-doors pots hold in their iron sides considerable power over national industries and national life.
The sea-side pot is a sort of freelance. It is a man’s affair, often wearing a sort of devil-may-care expression, no doubt produced by environment. When the Nor’easter freshens to a gale it may strike the old pot abeam, just as at sea it strikes his master’s schooner. But the pot never capsizes any more than the schooner’s seams, which the tar-pot tarred, open. So the old pot squints an eye to windward and laughs in the face of the dun cloud and the freezing spume, knowing the dory will come again to him for tar.
What fisherman can go after King Cod or any other fish without “a sinker,” and a heavy one, for his deep-water lines?
So the beach-pot is also a lead-pot. Any bit of lead, sheet-lead that lines tea-boxes, any old scrap however small, the old-timer saves and consigns to the magic pot.
The king of the sea-board pots, in point of size is the dye-pot, in use for cooking the concoction of spruce-bark employed to dye the seines the pretty art-brown, which coast-fishermen consider the perfection of camouflage against the piercing “submarine eye” of the silver herring—so necessary as bait.
A pot of net a-soak, or men and boys spreading the wet net from the pot on the beach-stones to dry, is a common sight on any fishing-beach of the Maritime Provinces.
These pots presided over by the men are never kept as neat as the inland out-of-door pot presided over by the women and children of the family, but their usefulness is by no means inferior.
Up in the Bay of Fundy, nature in the great tides of that region aids the work of the tar-pot. When the tide goes out, leaving the bottoms of the plaster-carriers bound New Yorkward hard-and-dry, then the tar-pot, aiding the indispensable oakum of the caulker, closes once for all and to a certainty, the seams that open, insuring the delivery of the cargo, aiding in its humble way the success of Canadian trade, no less than the tar-pot of the Atlantic coast and its brother-worker the lead-pot aid Canadian production.
The seal-oil pot of Les Iles des Madeleines approaches nearest to our idea of the witches’ cauldron. Standing on a narrow sandpit by the road to Havre Aubert, the black-smoke and the dancing figure of the man stirring the oil, the odour, and the gray sea, a stone’s throw away on either hand, make a dramatic picture such as, I am sure, would be encountered on no other highway in the world.