Captains Courageous (Bantam Classic)

by Rudyard Kipling

  And while Harvey was taking in knowledge of new things at each pore and hard health with every gulp of the good air, the We’re Here went her ways and did her business on the Bank, and the silvery-gray kenches of well-pressed fish mounted higher and higher in the hold. No one day’s work was out of common, but the average days were many and close together.

  Naturally, a man of Disko’s reputation was closely watched—“scrowged upon,” Dan called it—by his neighbours, but he had a very pretty knack of giving them the slip through the curdling, glidy fog-banks. Disko avoided company for two reasons. He wished to make his own experiments, in the first place; and in the second, he objected to the mixed gatherings of a fleet of all nations. The bulk of them were mainly Gloucester boats, with a scattering from Provincetown, Harwich, Chatham, and some of the Maine ports, but the crews drew from goodness knows where. Risk breeds recklessness, and when greed is added there are fine chances for every kind of accident in the crowded fleet, which, like a mob of sheep, is huddled round some unrecognized leader. “Let the two Jeraulds lead ’em,” said Disko. “We’re baound to lay among ’em for a spell on the Eastern Shoals; though ef luck holds, we won’t hev to lay long. Where we are naow, Harve, ain’t considered noways good graound.”

  “Ain’t it?” said Harvey, who was drawing water (he had learned just how to wiggle the bucket), after an unusually long dressing-down. “Shouldn’t mind striking some poor ground for a change, then.”

  “All the graound I want to see—don’t want to strike her—is Eastern Point,” said Dan. “Say, Dad, it looks ’s if we wouldn’t hev to lay more’n two weeks on the Shoals. You’ll meet all the comp’ny you want then, Harve. That’s the time we begin to work. No reg’lar meals fer no one then. ’Mug-up when ye’re hungry, an’ sleep when ye can’t keep awake. Good job you wasn’t picked up a month later than you was, or we’d never ha’ had you dressed in shape fer the Old Virgin.”

  Harvey understood from the Eldridge chart that the Old Virgin and a nest of curiously named shoals were the turning-point of the cruise, and that with good luck they would wet the balance of their salt there. But seeing the size of the Virgin (it was one tiny dot), he wondered how even Disko with the hog-yoke and the lead could find her. He learned later that Disko was entirely equal to that and any other business and could even help others. A big four-by-five blackboard hung in the cabin, and Harvey never understood the need of it till, after some blinding thick days, they heard the unmelodious tooting of a foot-power foghorn—a machine whose note is as that of a consumptive elephant.

  They were making a short berth, towing the anchor under their foot to save trouble. “Square-rigger bellowin’ fer his latitude,” said Long Jack. The dripping red headsails of a bark glided out of the fog, and the We’re Here rang her bell thrice, using sea shorthand.

  The larger boat backed her topsail with shrieks and shoutings.

  “Frenchman,” said Uncle Salters, scornfully. “Miquelon boat from St. Malo.” The farmer had a weatherly sea-eye. “I’m ’most outer ’baccy, too, Disko.”

  “Same here,” said Tom Platt. “Hi! Backez vous—backez vous! Standez awayez, you butt-ended mucho-bono! Where you from—St. Malo, eh?”

  “Ah, ha! Mucho bono! Oui! oui! Clos Poulet—St. Malo! St. Pierre et Miquelon,” cried the other crowd, waving woollen caps and laughing. Then all together, “Bord! Bord!”

  “Bring up the board, Danny. Beats me how them Frenchmen fetch anywheres, exceptin’ America’s fairish broadly. Forty-six forty-nine’s good enough fer them; an’ I guess it’s abaout right, too.”

  Dan chalked the figures on the board, and they hung it in the main-rigging to a chorus of mercis from the bark.

  “Seems kinder unneighbourly to let ’em swedge off like this,” Salters suggested, feeling in his pockets.

  “Hev ye learned French then sence last trip?” said Disko. “I don’t want no more stone-ballast hove at us ’long o’ your callin’ Miquelon boats ‘footy cochins,’ same’s you did off Le Have.”

  “Harmon Rush he said that was the way to rise ’em. Plain United States is good enough fer me. We’re all dretful short on tearakker. Young feller, don’t you speak French?”

  “Oh, yes,” said Harvey valiantly; and he bawled: “Hi! Say! Arrêtez vous! Attendez! Nous sommes venant pour tabac.”

  “Ah, tabac tabac!” they cried, and laughed again.

  “That hit ’em. Let’s heave a dory over, anyway,” said Tom Platt. “I don’t exactly hold no certificates on French, but I know another lingo that goes, I guess. Come on, Harve, an’ interpret.”

  The raffle and confusion when he and Harvey were hauled up the bark’s black side was indescribable. Her cabin was all stuck round with glaring coloured prints of the Virgin—the Virgin of Newfoundland, they called her. Harvey found his French of no recognized Bank brand, and his conversation was limited to nods and grins. But Tom Platt waved his arms and got along swimmingly. The captain gave him a drink of unspeakable gin, and the opera-comique crew, with their hairy throats, red caps, and long knives, greeted him as a brother. Then the trade began. They had tobacco, plenty of it—American, that had never paid duty to France. They wanted chocolate and crackers. Harvey rowed back to arrange with the cook and Disko, who owned the stores, and on his return the cocoa-tins and cracker-bags were counted out by the Frenchman’s wheel. It looked like a piratical division of loot; but Tom Platt came out of it roped with black pigtail and stuffed with cakes of chewing and smoking tobacco. Then those jovial mariners swung off into the mist, and the last Harvey heard was a gay chorus:

  “Par derrière chez ma tante,

  Il y a un bois joli,

  Et le rossignol y chante

  Et le jour et la nuit…

  Que donneriez vous, belle,

  Qui l’amènerait ici?

  Je donnerai Québec,

  Sorel et Saint Denis.”

  “How was it my French didn’t go, and your sign-talk did?” Harvey demanded when the barter had been distributed among the We’re Heres.

  “Sign-talk!” Platt guffawed. “Well, yes, ’twas sign-talk, but a heap older’n your French, Harve. Them French boats are chock-full o’ Freemasons, an’ that’s why.”

  “Are you a Freemason, then?”

  “Looks that way, don’t it?” said the man-o’-war’s man, stuffing his pipe; and Harvey had another mystery of the deep sea to brood upon.

  CHAPTER 6

  THE THING that struck him most was the exceedingly casual way in which some craft loafed about the broad Atlantic. Fishing-boats, as Dan said, were naturally dependent on the courtesy and wisdom of their neighbours; but one expected better things of steamers. That was after another interesting interview, when they had been chased for three miles by a big lumbering old cattle-boat, all boarded over on the upper deck, that smelt like a thousand cattle-pens. A very excited officer yelled at them through a speaking-trumpet, and she lay and lollopped helplessly on the water while Disko ran the We’re Here under her lee and gave the skipper a piece of his mind. “Where might ye be—eh? Ye don’t deserve to be anywheres. You barn-yard tramps go hoggin’ the road on the high seas with no blame consideration fer your neighbours, an’ your eyes in your coffee-cups instid o’ in your silly heads.”

  At this the skipper danced on the bridge and said something about Disko’s own eyes. “We haven’t had an observation for three days. D’you suppose we can run her blind?” he shouted.

  “Wa-al, I can,” Disko retorted. “What’s come to your lead? Et it? Can’t ye smell bottom, or are them cattle too rank?”

  “What d’ ye feed ’em?” said Uncle Salters with intense seriousness, for the smell of the pens woke all the farmer in him. “They say they fall off dretful on a v’yage. Dunno as it’s any o’ my business, but I’ve a kind o’ notion that oil-cake broke small an’ sprinkled——”

  “Thunder!” said a cattle-man in a red jersey as he looked over the side. “What asylum did they let His Whiskers out of?”

 
“Young feller,” Salters began, standing up in the fore-rigging, “let me tell yeou ’fore we go any further that I’ve——”

  The officer on the bridge took off his cap with immense politeness. “Excuse me,” he said, “but I’ve asked for my reckoning. If the agricultural person with the hair will kindly shut his head, the sea-green barnacle with the wall-eye may perhaps condescend to enlighten us.”

  “Naow you’ve made a show o’ me, Salters,” said Disko, angrily. He could not stand up to that particular sort of talk, and snapped out the latitude and longitude without more lectures.

  “Well, that’s a boat-load of lunatics, sure,” said the skipper, as he rang up the engine-room and tossed a bundle of newspapers into the schooner.

  “Of all the blamed fools, next to you, Salters, him an’ his crowd are abaout the likeliest I’ve ever seen,” said Disko as the We’re Here slid away. “I was jest givin’ him my jedgment on lullsikin’ round these waters like a lost child, an’ you must cut in with your fool farmin’. Can’t ye never keep things sep’rate?”

  Harvey, Dan, and the others stood back, winking one to the other and full of joy; but Disko and Salters wrangled seriously till evening, Salters arguing that a cattle-boat was practically a barn on blue water, and Disko insisting that, even if this were the case, decency and fisher-pride demanded that he should have kept “things sep’rate.” Long Jack stood it in silence for a time,—an angry skipper makes an unhappy crew,—and then he spoke across the table after supper:

  “Fwhat’s the good o’ bodderin’ fwhat they’ll say?” said he.

  “They’ll tell that tale agin us fer years—that’s all,” said Disko. “Oil-cake sprinkled!”

  “With salt, o’ course,” said Salters, impenitent, reading the farming reports from a week-old New York paper.

  “It’s plumb mortifyin’ to all my feelin’s,” the skipper went on.

  “Can’t see ut that way,” said Long Jack, the peacemaker. “Look at here, Disko! Is there another packet afloat this day in this weather cud ha’ met a tramp an’, over an’ above givin’ her her reckonin’,—over an’ above that, I say,—cud ha’ discoorsed wid her quite intelligent on the management av steers an’ such at sea? Forgit ut! Av coorse they will not. ’Twas the most compenjus conversation that iver accrued. Double game an’ twice runnin’—all to us.” Dan kicked Harvey under the table, and Harvey choked in his cup.

  “Well,” said Salters, who felt that his honour had been somewhat plastered, “I said I didn’t know as ’twuz any business o’ mine, ’fore I spoke.”

  “An’ right there,” said Tom Platt, experienced in discipline and etiquette—“right there, I take it, Disko, you should ha’ asked him to stop ef the conversation wuz likely, in your jedgment, to be anyways—what it shouldn’t.”

  “’Dunno but that’s so,” said Disko, who saw his way to an honourable retreat from a fit of the dignities.

  “Why, o’ course it was so,” said Salters, “you bein’ skipper here; an’ I’d cheerful hev stopped on a hint—not from any leadin’ or conviction, but fer the sake o’ bearin’ an example to these two blame boys of aours.”

  “Didn’t I tell you, Harve, ’twould come araound to us ’fore we’d done? Always those blame boys. But I wouldn’t have missed the show fer a half-share in a halibutter,” Dan whispered.

  “Still, things should ha’ been kep’ sep’rate,” said Disko, and the light of new argument lit in Salters’s eye as he crumbled cut plug into his pipe.

  “There’s a power av vartue in keepin’ things sep’rate,” said Long Jack, intent on stilling the storm. “That’s fwhat Steyning of Steyning and Hare’s f’und when he sent Counahan fer skipper on the Marilla D. Kuhn, instid o’ Cap. Newton that was took with inflam’try rheumatism an’ couldn’t go. Counahan the Navigator we called him.”

  “Nick Counahan he never went aboard fer a night ’thout a pond o’ rum somewheres in the manifest,” said Tom Platt, playing up to the lead. “He used to bum araound the c’mission houses to Boston lookin’ fer the Lord to make him captain of a tow-boat on his merits. Sam Coy, up to Atlantic Avenoo, give him his board free fer a year or more on account of his stories. Counahan the Navigator! Tck! Tck! Dead these fifteen year, ain’t he?”

  “Seventeen, I guess. He died the year the Caspar McVeagh was built; but he could niver keep things sep’rate. Steyning tuk him fer the reason the thief tuk the hot stove—bekaze there was nothin’ else that season. The men was all to the Banks, and Counahan he whacked up an iverlastin’ hard crowd fer crew. Rum! Ye cud ha’ floated the Marilla, insurance an’ all, in fwhat they stowed aboard her. They lef’ Boston Harbour for the great Grand Bank wid a roarin’ nor’wester behind ’em an’all hands full to the bung. An’ the hivens looked after thim, for divil a watch did they set, an’ divil a rope did they lay hand to, till they’d seen the bottom av a fifteen-gallon cask o’ bug-juice. That was about wan week, so far as Counahan remembered. (If I cud only tell the tale as he told ut!) All that whoile the wind blew like ould glory, an’ the Marilla—’twas summer, and they’d give her a foretopmast—struck her gait and kept ut. Then Counahan tuk the hog-yoke an’ thrembled over it for a whoile, an’ made out, betwix’ that an’ the chart an’ the singin’ in his head, that they was to the south’ard o’ Sable Island, gettin’ along glorious, but speakin’ nothin’. Then they broached another keg, an’ quit speculatin’ about anythin’ fer another spell. The Marilla she lay down whin she dropped Boston Light, and she never lufted her lee-rail up to that time—hustlin’ on one an’the same slant. But they saw no weed, nor gulls, nor schooners; an’ prisintly they obsarved they’d bin out a matter o’ fourteen days and they mistrusted the Bank had suspinded payment. So they sounded, an’ got sixty fathom. ‘That’s me,’ sez Counahan. ‘That’s me iv’ry time! I’ve run her slat on the Bank fer you, an’ when we get thirty fathom we’ll turn in like little men. Counahan is the b’y,’ sez he. ‘Counahan the Navigator!’

  “Nex’ cast they got ninety. Sez Counahan: ‘Either the lead-line’s tuk to stretchin’ or else the Bank’s sunk.’

  “They hauled ut up, bein’ just about in that state when ut seemed right an’reasonable, and sat down on the deck countin’ the knots, an’ gettin’ her snarled up hijjus. The Marilla she’d struck her gait, an’ she hild ut, an’ prisintly along came a tramp, an’ Counahan spoke her.

  “‘Hev ye seen any fishin’-boats now?’ sez he, quite casual.

  “‘There’s lashin’s av them off the Irish coast,’ sez the tramp.

  “‘Aah! go shake yerself,’ sez Counahan. ‘Fwhat have I to do wid the Irish coast?’

  “‘Then fwhat are ye doin’ here?’ sez the tramp.

  “‘Sufferin’ Christianity!’ sez Counahan (he always said that whin his pumps sucked an’ he was not feelin’ good)—‘Sufferin’ Christianity!’ he sez, ‘where am I at?’

  “‘Thirty-five mile west-sou’west o’ Cape Clear,’ sez the tramp, ‘if that’s any consolation to you.’

  “Counahan fetched wan jump, four feet sivin inches, measured by the cook.

  “‘Consolation!’ sez he, bould as brass. ‘D’ye take me fer a dialect? Thirty-five mile from Cape Clear, an’ fourteen days from Boston Light. Sufferin’ Christianity, ’tis a record, an’ by the same token I’ve a mother to Skibbereen!’ Think av ut! The gall av um! But ye see he could niver keep things sep’rate.

  “The crew was mostly Cork an’ Kerry men, barrin’ one Marylander that wanted to go back, but they called him a mutineer, an’ they ran the ould Marilla into Skibbereen, an’ they had an illigant time visitin’ around with frinds on the ould sod fer a week. Thin they wint back, an’ it cost ’em two an’ thirty days to beat to the Banks again. ’Twas gettin’ on towards fall, and grub was low, so Counahan ran her back to Boston, wid no more bones to ut.”

  “And what did the firm say?” Harvey demanded.

  “Fwhat could they? The fish was on the Banks, an’ Counahan was at T-wharf talkin’ av his recor
d trip east! They tuk their satisfaction out av that, an’ ut all came av not keepin’ the crew and the rum sep’rate in the first place; an’ confusin’ Skibbereen wid ’Queereau, in the second. Counahan the Navigator, rest his sowl! He was an imprompju citizen!”

  “Once I was in the Lucy Holmes,” said Manuel, in his gentle voice. “They not want any of her feesh in Gloucester. Eh, wha-at? Give us no price. So we go across the water, and think to sell to some Fayal man. Then it blow fresh, and we cannot see well. Eh, wha-at? Then it blow some more fresh, and we go down below and drive very fast—no one know where. By and by we see a land, and it get some hot. Then come two, three nigger in a brick. Eh, wha-at? We ask where we are, and they say—now, what you all think?”

  “Grand Canary,” said Disko, after a moment. Manuel shook his head, smiling.

  “Blanco,” said Tom Platt.

  “No. Worse than that. We was below Bezagos, and the brick she was from Liberia! So we sell our feesh there! Not bad, so? Eh, wha-at?”

  “Can a schooner like this go right across to Africa?” said Harvey.