Brrrr, me neither! Just looking at my
schooner with her thin coating of ice is enough to reaffirm my
admiration for the “iron men” who used to sail her wooden
forebears far out into the freezing North Atlantic from New England
and Canadian ports every winter in pursuit of the elusive codfish.
As I comfort myself with the knowledge
that my boat is, after all, securely moored in a sheltered harbor and
that in a couple of days, 60-degree temperatures will melt all the
ice, I think of the men who would routinely climb the rigging with
axes in gale-force blizzards to chop away the ice before it had time
to amass enough weight to capsize the vessel. Just all part of a
day's work!
If you are skeptical when someone says,
“They don't make men like that anymore,” did you ever hear tell
of Howard Blackburn? In January of 1883, this Nova Scotia-born
Gloucester fisherman was dory fishing for halibut from the schooner
Grace L. Fears off the coast
of Newfoundland. In a sudden snowstorm, the 24-year-old Blackburn
and his dory mate Tom Welch lost sight of the schooner. Welch gave
up hope and died after the first night of bailing the dory and
busting the ice off its rails but Blackburn continued on for
five days at sea without food, water or sleep, rowing the dory (with
Welch's corpse) 60 miles with his mittenless hands frozen around his
oars until he reached the coast where he buried Welch before losing
all of his fingers and one toe to frostbite. Returning to Gloucester
in the spring, he opened a successful tavern where he amazed
customers with his ability to palm coins off the bar with his
fingerless hands.
But Blackburn never lost his love of
adventure. In 1897 he joined a Klondike gold-prospecting schooner
cruise around Cape Horn which ended in failure. Two years later he
sailed the 30-foot sloop Great Western
from Gloucester to England (alone and fingerless, no less)! And in
1901, he topped that by sailing the 25-foot sloop Great
Republic from Gloucester to
Portugal.
Of the Gloucester
schoonermen Blackburn was among the more fortunate. He did, after
all, live to the ripe old age of 72. As the Gloucester fishing fleet
sailed out each winter, it was just a sad fact of life that some
would not return. 1879 was probably their worst year with 29
schooners and a total of 240 men lost at sea. Of that number 13
schooners and 143 men perished in a single February gale.
And
for what? Well, it all depended on luck. That and, of course, skill
and backbreaking hard work. But if you didn't drown (and, as you can
see, that was a pretty big IF)
and if you managed to luck into a good catch of fish (another IF),
you had a good chance of making a very decent living – two to three
times the average family income. The fishermen were all paid in
shares so they were likely to do better economically than their
wage-earning brethren ashore if they could just manage to stay alive.
In my
early schooner sailing days back in the 1980s, I was reading one of
my favorite books on the Gloucester schooners, Fast &
Able: Life Stories of Great Gloucester Fishing Vessels
by Gordon W. Thomas,(1952). The book is full of detailed accounts
and photographs of 76 schooners.
I read
about the schooner Mary F. Curtis, one
of two fishing schooners chartered by Hollywood film studios for the
1937 movie Captains Courageous
with Spencer Tracy. She carried cameras, film and equipment valued
at $30,000 which was believed at the time to be the most valuable
cargo any Gloucester schooner had ever had on board. The
summer that I read that, I was sailing sunset cruises out of Hilton
Head Island, S.C. And it occurred to me that it was a slow night
indeed when my passengers on any given trip were not wearing more
than that amount in clothes and jewelry!
I didn't
contemplate turning pirate for more than a half hour before realizing
that the number just seemed low because of a half century of
inflation.
I have
to admit that in this sort of weather, I'd a hell of a lot rather
read a good book about sailing than go sailing myself. So if any of
this has sparked your interest, in addition to Gordon Thomas's
above-mentioned book, you might want to check out works of the late
Joseph E. Garland. Like Down to the Sea: The Fishing
Schooners of Gloucester, (Boston:
David R. Godine, 1983) or Lone Voyager: The Extraordinary
Adventures of Howard Blackburn Hero Fisherman of Gloucester, (Little,
Brown 1963).
