Books: Out of the Fog
C >>
C. K. Ober >> Out of the Fog
Produced by Juliet Sutherland, Tonya Allen, Charles Franks
and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team
OUT OF THE FOG
A Story of the Sea
C. K. OBER
Introduction By Dr. Wilfred T. Grenfell
FOREWORD
Since I am permitted to consider myself in some way responsible for this
narrative's being put on record, it is with the very heartiest good will
that I accept the publishers' kind invitation to write a brief foreword
to it.
I have, during twenty years, been working against a problem that I
recognized called for all--yes, and more, than--I had to give it. For I
have been endeavoring, through my own imperfect attainments, to
translate into undeniable language on the Labrador Coast, the message of
God's personal fatherhood over and love for the humblest of His
creatures. During these years, often of overwork, I have considered it
worth while to lay aside time and energy and strength to improve the
charting and pilot directions of our devious and sometimes dangerous
waterways.
How much more gladly shall I naturally avail myself of any chance by
which to contribute to the knowledge of that seemingly ever evasive
pathway leading to that which to me is the supreme motive power of human
life--faith in the divine Redeemer and Master. The best helps to reach
the haven we are in search of, over the unblazed trails of Labrador, are
ever the tracks of those who have found the way before us. Just such to
me is this simple and delightful story of Mr. Ober's. It has my most
hearty prayers for its unprecedented circulation.
WILFRED T. GRENFELL.
[Illustration]
OLD SALTS
The lure of the sea prevailed, and at nineteen I shipped for a
four-months' fishing trip on the Newfoundland Banks. These banks are not
the kind that slope toward some gentle stream where the weary fisherman
can rest between bites, protected from the sun by the shade of an
overhanging tree; they are thirty to forty fathoms beneath the surface
of the Atlantic Ocean, a thousand miles out from the Massachusetts
coast.
The life that had long appealed to my imagination now came in with a
shock and a realism that was in part a disillusionment and in part an
intense satisfaction of some of my primal instincts and cravings. Old
salts are more picturesque and companionable spinning yarns about the
stove in a shoemaker's shop than they are when one is obliged to live,
eat and sleep with them for four months in the crowded forecastle of a
fishing schooner. An ocean storm is a sublime spectacle, witnessed from
a position of safety on the land; but a storm on the ocean, experienced
in its very vortex from the deck of a tiny fishing boat, is thrilling
beyond description. "Ships that pass in the night" make interesting
reading; but if they pass near you, in a foggy night, on the Banks, they
are better than the muezzin of the Moslem in reminding a man that it is
time to pray. I recall with vividness the scene on such a night, and
still feel the compelling power of the panic in the voice of the
mild-mannered old sea dog on anchor watch, as he yelled down the
companionway, "All hands on deck." In six seconds we were all there; and
there was the great hulk of a two-thousand-ton ship looming up out of
the night. She had evidently sighted our little craft just in time to
change her course, and was passing us with not more than a hundred and
fifty feet to spare. I can see them tonight, as they vanished into the
fog--three men and a big Newfoundland dog, looking over the rail and
down on us who, a moment before, were about to die.
Storm, fog, icebergs, cold, exposure, the alert and strenuous life, with
his own life the forfeit of failure, are a part of the normal experience
of a deep sea fisherman. Two members of our crew were father and son,
Uncle Ike Patch and his son, Frank. The old man had been a fisherman in
his youth, but had been on shore for thirty years. When we were making
up our crew, Frank caught the fishing fever and wanted to go, and his
father decided to go along with him. They were out in their dory, one
foggy day, and when the boats came back to the vessel from hauling their
trawls, Uncle Ike and Frank were missing. We rang the bell, fired our
small cannon, shouted and sent boats out after them. As night came on,
we were huddled together in the forecastle, wondering about their fate,
while the old fishermen told stories of the fog and its fearful toll of
human life. It seemed a terrible thing for the old man and his boy to be
out there, drifting no one knew where; and though we were accustomed to
danger, there was a gloomy crew and little sleep on our schooner that
night. In the morning the weather cleared and soon our missing boat came
alongside; we received them as men alive from the dead. They had found
shelter on another fishing vessel that happened to be lying at anchor
not more than two or three miles away.
There was reason for our solicitude, for we knew very well that a large
proportion of the men who get adrift in the fog are never found alive.
Shortly before this experience we had spoken a Gloucester vessel and
learned that her crew had picked up, a short time before, one of the
boats of a Provincetown schooner that had been adrift four days. One of
the two men was dead and the other insane. Each day brought its own
dangers, which the fishermen met as part of the day's work, thinking
little of them when they were past, and ready for whatever another day
might bring.
But four months is a long time to be out of sight of land, on a fresh
fish and "salt hoss" diet, with molasses instead of sugar in your tea,
and fresh water too much needed for drinking purposes to waste in
personal ablutions. We all swore that we would never go to sea again;
and when, after gliding into harbor in the night, we looked, one clear
September morning, on the seemingly unnatural green of the grass and
trees of the old North Shore, I said to myself, "This is God's country,
if there ever was one, and I, for one, will never get out of sight of it
again."
But I had tasted fog and brine, and the "landlubber's" lot was too
monotonously tame for me. The next spring saw me on the deck of the same
schooner headed for the Newfoundland Banks, the home of the codfish and
the fog.
A seafaring ancestry and a boyhood spent within sound of the surf
doubtless had much to do with my love of the salt water. My grandfather
was one of six brothers who were sea captains, and our family had clung
to the North Shore of Massachusetts Bay almost since the first white
settler had moored his bark in that vicinity, more than two hundred
years before.
My boyhood home was originally a fishing town, since changed to
manufacturing, and was fragrant with traditions of the sea. Many of the
neighborhood homes in which I visited as a boy had souvenirs of the
ocean displayed on the mantelpiece or on the everlasting solitude of the
parlor table. There were great conch shells that a boy could put to his
ear and hear the surf roaring on the beaches from which they had been
taken; articles made of sandalwood; curiously wrought things under
glass; miniature pagodas; silk scarfs; bow-legged idols; and a wonderful
model of the good ship Dolphin, or of some other equally staunch craft,
in which the breadwinner, father or son, had sailed on some eventful
voyage. These had all been "brought from over sea," I was told, and this
gave me the impression that "over sea" must be a very rich and
interesting place.
But the souvenirs of the sea were not as interesting to me as its
survivors. We had in our town, and especially in our end of it, which
was called "the Cove," a choice assortment of old sea dogs who had
sailed every sea, in every clime--had seen the world, in fact, and were
not averse, under the stimulus of good listeners, to telling all they
knew about it and sometimes a little more.
Scattered through the Cove were many little shoemakers' shops, into
which, especially in the long winter evenings, these old salts would
drift. There around the little cylinder stove, with its leather-chip
fire, leaking a fragrance the memory of which makes me homesick as I
write about it, they would swap their stories of the sea, many of which
had originally been based on fact.
These old derelicts--and some of the younger seafaring men--were better
than dime novels to us boys, for we could always question them and draw
out another story. Some of them were unconscious heroes who had often
risked their lives for their comrades and the vessel owners; and for the
support and comfort of their families no dangers or hardships had seemed
too great to be undertaken or endured. We boys held these old salts in
high esteem, and never forgot to give to each his appropriate title of
"Captain" or "Skipper," as the case might be. We also occasionally had
some fun with them.
We never thought of any of them as bad men, though some of them, by
their own testimony, had lived wild and reckless lives. One or two,
according to persistent rumor, had carried out cargoes of New England
rum and brought back shiploads of "black ivory" from the West coast of
Africa. Not a few of them were picturesquely profane. Old Skipper Tom
Bowman had a very original oath, "tender-eyed Satan!" which he must have
had copyrighted, as he was the only one that I ever heard use it. We
boys would sometimes bait him, provoking him to exasperation, that we
might hear it in all its original force and fervor.
[Illustration: Old Salts Are More Picturesque and Companionable Spinning
Yarns about the Stove in a Shoemaker's Shop than when One Is Obliged to
Live, Eat and Sleep with Them]
We knew his habits well. He eked out a scanty sustenance by fishing off
the shore and would frequently come in on the ebb tide and leave his
boat half way up the beach, going home to dinner and returning when the
flood tide had about reached his boat, to bring it up to its moorings.
So one day we dug a "honey pot" by the side of his boat, at the very
spot where we knew he would approach it, covered it over with dry
seaweed and about the time he was due we were lying out of sight, but
within earshot, behind the rocks. He drifted down, at peace with all the
world, went in over the tops of his rubber boots, and then, for one
blissful moment, we had our reward.
Some of these old salts were so thoroughly salted, being drenched with
the brine of many stormy voyages, that they kept in good condition well
beyond their allotted time of three score years and ten. Some were of
uncertain age, but were evidently well beyond the century mark, as
proved by the aggregate time consumed on their many voyages, the stories
of which they had reiterated with such convincing detail.
One of these, Captain Sam Morris, was patiently stalked by the boys
through a long season of yarn spinning, careful tally being kept. When
the tale was complete, the boys closed in on him.
"How old are you, Captain Sam?"
"Oh, I dunno, I ain't kep' count."
"Are you seventy?"
"I swan! I dunno."
"Well, you were on the Old Dove with Skipper Jimmie Stone, weren't you?"
"Sartin."
"You were on the Constitution, when she fought the Guerriere, weren't
you?"
How could he deny it?
"Well, weren't you with Captain Lovett on four of his three-year trading
voyages to Australia and China?"
"Course I was."
"How about those trips 'round the Horn, on the clipper ship 'Mary Jane'
from '49 to '55?"
"I was thar." They kept relentlessly on down the list, and then showed
him the tally. Allowing for infancy, an abbreviated boyhood on land, and
the time they had known him since he had quit the sea, he was one
hundred and thirty-five years old. The showing did not disconcert him,
however. He was interested, but he had told those stories so often and
had come to believe each of them so implicitly that he could not doubt
them in the aggregate. He simply exclaimed: "Well, I'll be darned! I
feel like a young chap o' sixty."
But while some of these old sailors liked to "spin yarns" and some had
their frailties, they were, as a rule, strong characters, rugged,
honest, courageous, unselfish--real men, in fact, whose sterling
qualities stood out in strong contrast against the unreality of many
timid and non-effective lives about them. It was not their romancing,
but their reality, and the achieving power of their lives that appealed
to me as a boy, and I was drawn to the kind of life that had helped to
produce such men.
Then, too, the ocean itself, with its immensity, its mystery, its moods,
the danger in it, and the man's work in mastering it, was almost
irresistibly attractive to me.
On graduating from high school I declined my father's offer to send me
to college, thinking that the life I had in view did not require a
college education. Then he made me a very attractive business
proposition, but it looked to me like slavery, and what I wanted most
was freedom. My father and mother were both Christians, but I had become
skeptical, profane and reckless of public opinion. I had left home for a
boarding house in the same town at eighteen, and at nineteen I had
slipped the moorings and was heading out to sea.
ADRIFT
My second trip to the Banks was made in response to the same kind of
impulse as that which drives the nomad out of his winter quarters in the
springtime or brings the wild geese back to their summer feeding
grounds. To one who really loves the ocean, the return to it after a
period of exile on the land, is an indescribable satisfaction. There was
at least one of our crew who experienced this emotion as our staunch
little craft turned her nose to the blue water, and with all sail set
and lee rail almost under water, leaped away from the petty restrictions
of the shore into the practically limitless expanse of the Atlantic. In
a week we were on the fishing ground and sentiment gave way to business.
Our schooner was a trawler, equipped with six dories and a crew of
fifteen, including the skipper, the cook, the boy and two men for each
boat. Each trawl had a thousand hooks, a strong ground line six thousand
feet long, with a smaller line two and a half feet in length, with hook
attached, at every fathom. These hooks were baited and the trawl was set
each night. The six trawls stretched away from the vessel like the
spokes from the hub of a wheel, the buoy marking the outer anchor of
each trawl being over a mile away. I was captain of a dory this year,
passing as a seasoned fisherman with my experience of the year before.
My helper or "bow-man" was John Hogan, a young Irishman about my own
age, red-headed, but green at the fishing business. John's mother kept a
little oasis for thirsty neighbors, in a city adjacent to my home town,
and his father was a man of unsteady habits. But John was a good fellow,
active and willing, and, though he had not inherited a rugged
constitution, he could pull a good steady stroke.
Soon after we reached the Banks, a storm swept our decks and nearly
carried away our boats. As a result, the dories, particularly my own,
were severely strained and leaked badly. For two weeks, however, we had
no fog, but on the morning of the second of June, just as we went over
the schooner's side and shaped our course for our outer buoy, a bank of
fog with an edge as perpendicular as the side of a house moved down on
us like a great glacier, though much more rapidly, shutting us in and
everything else out from sight. It was ugly and thick, as if all the fog
factories from Grand Manan to Labrador had been working overtime for the
two weeks before and had sent their whole output in one consignment. We
had just passed our inner buoy when the fog struck us, but we kept on
for the outer buoy, as was customary in foggy weather, since it was
safer to get that and pull in toward the vessel, rather than take the
inner buoy, pull out, and find ourselves with a boatload of fish and
ugly weather over a mile from the vessel. We had our bearings, I had
often found the buoy in the fog and believed that we could do it again.
We kept on rowing and knew when we had rowed far enough, though we had
not counted the strokes; but we found nothing.
"Guess we have drifted too far to leeward; pull up to windward a little.
That's strange, we must have passed it, this blamed fog is so thick.
What's that over there?" We zigzagged back and forth for some time and
then realized that we had missed it and must go back to the vessel and
get our inner buoy. This seemed easy, but we found that it is as
important to have a point of departure as it is to have a destination,
and not knowing just where we were we could not head our boat to where
the vessel was. We shouted, and listened, rowed this way and that way
but not a sound came to us through the fog, although we knew that the
boy must be at his post ringing the bell, so that the boats could hark
their way back to the vessel. I learned afterward that the tide that
morning was exceptionally strong. I had noted its direction and made
allowance for it, before leaving the schooner, but we were where the
Gulf Stream and the Arctic Current are not very far apart and the
resulting tides are strong and changeable. We were in the grip of two
great elemental and relentless forces, the impenetrable fog, cutting off
all our communications, and the strong ocean current sweeping us away
into the uninhabited waste of waters. From my experience of the year
before, I knew what it meant to be lost in the fog on the Banks,
practically in mid-ocean; I understood that if the fog lasted for a week
or ten days as it sometimes did, especially at that season of the year,
it was a fight for our lives. I soon realized that we were lost and that
the fight was on.
We were certainly stripped for it, without impedimenta, no anchor,
compass, provisions, water, no means of catching fish or fowl, and with
rather light clothing, as we were dressed for work and not for
protection against cold. But youth is optimistic and claims what is
coming to it, with a margin for luck, and we started on our new voyage
of discovery with good courage and a cheerful disregard of the
hardships, dangers and possible death in the fog, with which and into
which we were drifting.
It would not be strictly accurate to say that we saw nothing during all
the time we were adrift, but the things we saw were of the same stuff
that the fog was made of. Early in the first day I saw a sail dimly
outlined in the misty air. I called John's attention to it with a shout,
and he saw it too, but, as we rowed toward it, the sail retreated and
then disappeared. We thought that this was strange, for the wind was not
strong enough to take a vessel away from us faster than we could row,
and we were near enough to make ourselves heard. Soon, the sail appeared
again, and again we shouted and rowed toward it, and again it glided
away from us and disappeared, and again, and again, through the
seemingly endless procession of the slow-moving hours of that first day,
we chased the phantom ship.
When night came on, there came with it a deepening sense of loneliness
and isolation. The night was also very cold, the chill penetrated our
thin clothing, and we were compelled to row the boat to keep ourselves,
not warm, but a little less cold. The icebergs coming down on the Arctic
Current hold the season back, and early June on the Banks is much like
April on the Massachusetts coast. We tried to sleep lying down in the
bottom of the boat with our heads in a trawl tub, but we were stiff with
cold, the boat leaked badly, and it was necessary to get up frequently
and bail out the water. The thought also that we might drift within
sight or sound of a vessel, or within sight of a trawl buoy, made us
afraid to sleep.
The night finally wore away, the second day and night were like the
first, the third like the first and second and the fourth day like
another "cycle of Cathay." These four days and nights were like solitary
confinement to the prisoner, the grim monotony and lack of incident
contributing to the cumulative effect and accentuating the sense of
helplessness and isolation. There was nothing to relieve the situation.
We were like an army lying in trenches in the face of the enemy, waiting
for the enemy's move.
The fourth night we were startled by the sound of the fog horn of a
sailing vessel. The wind was blowing almost a gale. We listened to get
the direction, then sprang to the oars and rowed hard to intercept her,
shouting, listening, rowing with all our strength, and willing, if need
be, to be run down, in the chance of being seen and rescued. The horn
finally sounded so near that it seemed that we could almost see the
vessel, and we felt sure that they could hear our call. But our hearts
sank as the sounds grew fainter and soon we were alone again with the
wind and fog. The fifth day we heard the whistle of an ocean steamship.
"We can surely head this one off," we thought, but she quickly passed
us, too far away to see or hear. It was a bitter disappointment as this
floating hotel, full of warmth, food, water, shelter and companionship,
for the lack of each and all of which we were perishing, rushed by, so
near, yet unconscious and unheeding, in too great a hurry to stop and
listen to our cry for help. I have thought of this since, as I have
hurried along with the crowd in the street of a great city and wondered,
if we stopped to listen, what cry might come to us out of the deep.
The fifth night the sea was running high. We were drifting with a trawl
tub fastened to the "painter" as a drag to keep the boat headed to the
wind, when it began to rain. I spread my oil jacket to catch the water,
and we waited until we could collect enough for a drink, watching the
drops eagerly, as we had tasted neither food nor water since leaving the
vessel five days before. Just as we were about to drink, however, our
boat shipped a sea, filling the oil jacket with salt water, and there
was no more rain.
Every day we passed great flocks of sea fowl floating on the water,
coming frequently almost within an oar's length, but always just out of
reach. We were in worse condition than the Ancient Mariner, with food as
well as water everywhere about us, and not a morsel or a drop to eat or
drink. Thirst is harder to endure than hunger, and yet hunger finally
wakes up the wolf; and the time comes when even the thought of
cannibalism can be entertained without horror. About this time John
asked me, "Well, what do you think?"
"Oh," I said, "I think that one of us will come out of it all right."
He started, as if he thought that I had premature designs on him.
"You need not be afraid," I said, "I'll not take advantage of you."
He knew that I was the stronger and perhaps thought that if I felt as he
did, his chances were very small.
The sixth day, John seemed like a man overwhelmed with the horror of a
situation that had gotten beyond his control. He cowered at the opposite
end of the boat and had said nothing for a long time. Finally he opened
a conversation with a person of whose presence I had not been conscious.
"Jim," he said, "come, give me a piece."
"Jim who?" I asked. "Piece of what? Where is he?"
"Jim Woodbury," he answered, "don't you see him? There he is, hiding
under that oil jacket. He's been there over half an hour, eating pie,
and he won't give me any."
I tried to laugh him out of his delusion, but the thing was real to him.
Soon he jumped up and said: "I'm going on board; I'm tired of staying
out here."
"How will you get there?" I asked.
"Walk," he answered, "the water ain't deep," and he started to get
overboard.
I caught him and pulled him back into the boat, not any too soon, for if
he had gone overboard, the sharks would probably have gotten him, for
they were not very far away. Every now and then I had seen their fins
cutting the surface of the water, as they patrolled back and forth,
waiting their time, or ours, as if they knew that it was only a question
of time. Soon John started again to get overboard. This time I punished
him so severely that he did not try it again. After that, I had to keep
my eye on him constantly. His ravings about food were not particularly
soothing to my feelings, for I was as hungry as he, only not so
demonstrative about it.
The seventh day drifted slowly by and the fog still held us captive. For
a week we had had no food, no water, and scarcely any sleep; having our
boots on continuously stopped the circulation in our feet with the same
effect as if they had been frozen; we were chilled to the bone; my boat
mate was insane. Since the whistle of the steamship had died away in the
distance, two days before, no sound had come to us out of the fog but
the voices of the wind and the swash of the waves. I knew the chart of
the Banks and had a general idea as to where we were. There is a great
barren tract on the Banks where few fish are found and fishermen seldom
go, and we had drifted into this man-forsaken place. I had almost said
"God-forsaken" too, but something began to shape itself in my mind about
that time, that makes it difficult for me now to say this. Rather, as I
look back on our experience, I feel more like claiming fellowship with
the "wanderer" who called the place of his hardship "Bethel" because it
was there, at the end of self and of favoring conditions, that he found
God.