Captain Cameron of the Rowe stood aft on his vessel and shouted to Whalen, who was standing forward on the Belden: "Careful, Maurice! You know the committee said there was only room for one of us to turn here."
"The committee hell!" answered Maurice. "I'll prove 'em wrong right now!"
Between buoy and ledge went the two vessels together.
It was a roaring, high sea, and the gale was blowing harder than when they started. A steamer with an excursion crowd aboard had followed the racers from Gloucester, and, being a stout craft and having a seagoing master in her, she calculated to follow the racers all the way round. But essaying to make the turn at Davis's Ledge she rolled her top rail under. Whereupon: "No more turns for her — we keep straight on to Boston," said her captain; and so she did, and no excursionist said he hadn't got his money's worth when he was landed in Boston.
A Boston newspaper reporter was sent out by his paper to cover the race. He came back to his office early. The city editor spied him.
"I thought you went down to cover that fishermen's race?" said the editor.
"I did. But there's no race. All I saw was a lot of foolish fishermen trying to drown themselves."
A steamer, one of those harbor excursion things with ginger-bread top-sides, put out from Gloucester with a gang of fishermen to follow the race. She left the harbor with the vessels. Within an hour she was back to the dock in Gloucester, and those piling ashore from her were met with: "I thought you paid three dollars to go out and see the race?"
"We did," answered one. "But we wasn't out to Eastern Point afore her deck planks began to loosen up. Before she'd gone half a mile on the course her deck planks was that loose that we could spit down into her hold. We're satisfied to lose our three dollars and read about that race in tomorrow mornin's papers."
From Davis's Ledge it was a beat back to Gloucester. The great Tommy Bohlen was there with his Nannie Bohlen, When Gloucester fishermen start to name the half dozen Gloucester vessels of all time, they never forget the Nannie Bohlen, It was the dream of Bohlen's life to prove his vessel the greatest heavy-weather fisherman that ever sailed past Eastern Point; but unfortunately he had gambled on moderate weather for the race and had taken out some of the Nannie’ s ballast, and now she was a little light for the breeze blowing. But he went after the Belden, driving his lightened vessel desperately when he saw her take the lead from the Rowe. He rolled the Nannie down to her swifters, which were five feet or so above her main rail, and her main rail was five feet or so above the water line. He had two men lashed to her wheel. On all of them that day they had two men lashed to the wheel. There were also life lines around all their decks, and all masthead men were lashed so they wouldn't be snapped overboard.
One of Tommy Bohlen's helmsmen slipped his life line from over his shoulder and passed it to Tommy, saying: "It's suicide. Captain Bohlen, to be trying to sail a vessel this way any longer."
"It's so F'll sail her — go for'ard, you!" said Bohlen, and took the life line and took the wheel, and held her to it too.
On the Belden they were keeping her to it. Her crew were mostly hanging on to the ring bolts under her windward rail, and the water as they hung so came rolling up to their boot heels. Both men at the Belden's wheel — one was Whalen himself — were standing to their waists in solid water. Sometimes it went to their chests. There was a passenger, a friend of the owners, lashed to the deck bitt to windward of the wheel box. He was a man with yachting experience and had courage enough, but things were looking wicked to him.
"She rolled pretty low that time, captain," he said to Whalen once.
"Yes," answered Whalen, "she rolled pretty low that time, and she'll roll lower yet before the sail comes oiT her. This is the day some of them said they were going to make the Belden take in sail, and I want to see them make her."
The Belden took to plunging forward. Time and again she buried both bows and all her forward deck under it. Once she sent her deck under to her break. The man on the weather bitt cried out again: "She dove pretty deep that time, captain. If she makes another dive like that, will she come up, do you think?"
"Have no fear, boy," was Whalen's calm answer. "If any vessel out o' Gloucester will come up, this one will."
The Belden won.
I have written many stories of Gloucester fishermen, and made use of much dialogue in their writing. In that dialogue I never made use of two successive lines of speech that I ever actually heard. I have heard some great talk among them, but talk can rarely be lifted bodily from its birthplace. The only two successive lines of dialogue I ever used in a Gloucester story were two lines spoken this day of the race.
A Gloucester fisherman was standing on Billy Thomas's vessel watching the racers, particularly the Belden. As the Belden came driving up to the finish line and crossed it a winner, this young fisherman let go his grip of the weather rigging, leaped into the air and shouted so he could be heard a cable length away almost: "The Harry Belden wins! The able Harry Belden, sailin' across the line on her side, an' her crew sittin' out on her keel!"
Always after that race, until the day she was lost, wherever you saw the Belden you would see a broom to her masthead. And no one but admitted she had a right to carry it there. And this sketch is to explain what the old-timers mean when they say there was never but one fishermen's race.
RILEY
Hall and Nordhoff
(from "Faery Lands of the South Seas" Harper & Bros. 1921)
WE sighted Mauke at dawn. The cabin lamp was still burning when the boy brought my coffee; I drank it, lit a cigarette, and went on deck in a pareu. The skipper himself was at the wheel; half a dozen men were in the shrouds; the native passengers were sitting forward, cross-legged in little groups, munching ship's biscuit and gazing ahead for the expected land.
The day broke wild and gray, with clouds scudding low over the sea, and squalls of rain. Since we had left Mangaia, the day before, it had blown heavily from the southeast; a big sea was running, but in spite of sixty tons of copra the schooner was reeling off the knots in racing style, running almost free, with the wind well aft of the beam, rising interminably on the back of each passing sea, and taking the following slope with a swoop and a rush. We had no log; it was difficult to guess our position within a dozen miles; the low driving clouds, surrounding us like a curtain, made it impossible to see more than a few hundred yards. Until an observation could be obtained, the landfall was a matter of luck and guesswork. Our course had been laid almost due north-northeast — to pass a little to the west of Mauke — which gave us the chance of raising Mitiaro or Atiu if we missed the first island; but ocean currents are uncertain things, and with a horizon limited to less than half a mile, nothing would be easier than to slip past the trio of low islands and into the stretch of lonely ocean beyond. Every trading skipper is accustomed to face such situations; one can only maintain a sharp lookout and hold on one's course until there is an opportunity to use the sextant, or until it becomes obvious that the land has been passed.
A squall of rain drove down on us; for five minutes, while we shivered and the scuppers ran fresh water, our narrow circle of vision was blotted out. Then suddenly, with the effect of a curtain drawn aside, the clouds broke to the east, flooding the sea with light. A shout went up. Close ahead and to starboard, so near that we could see the white of breakers on the reef, was Mauke — densely wooded to the water's edge, a palm top rising here and there above the thick bush of iron-woods. Next moment the curtain descended; gray clouds and rearing seas surrounded us; it was as though we had seen a vision of the land, unreal as the blue lakes seen at midday on the desert. But the skipper was shouting orders in harsh Mangaian; the schooner was swinging up into the wind; the blocks were clicking and purring as half a dozen boys swayed on the mainsheet.