"Captains Courageous": A Story of the Grand Banks

d deal about the real Hattie at Gloucester; saw a lock of her hair - which Dan, finding fair words of no avail, had "hooked" as she sat in front of him at schoo

Once, of course, as the boys came to know each other, there was a fight, which raged from bow to stern till Penn came up and separated them, but promised not to tell Disko, who thought fighting on watch r

into the flesh. The salt water stung them unpleasantly, but when they were ripe Dan treated them with Disko's razor, and as

new life, and how brilliantly he was acquitting himself in it. Otherwise he preferred not to wonder too much how she was bearing the shock of his supposed death. But one day, as he stood on the foc'

f, who drove a miniature four-pony drag in Toledo, Ohio, and ordered five suits of clothes at a time and led things called "germans" at parties where the oldest girl was not quite fifteen, but all the presents were solid silver. Salters protested that this kind of yarn was desperately wicked, if not indeed positively blasphemous, but he listened as greedily as the others; and their criticisms at the end gave Harvey entirely new notions on "germans," clothes, cigarettes with gold-leaf tips, rings, watches, scen

jump down into the cabin and scratch the reckoning and date with a nail on the rust of the stove-pipe. Now, the chief engineer of the liner could have done no more, and no engineer of thirty years' service could have assumed one half

except the deep-sea lead that was his spare eye. Harvey nearly slew Penn with it when Tom Platt taught him first how to "fly the blue pigeon"; and, though his

whatever it might be, to Disko, who fingered and smelt it and gave judgment As has been said, when Disko thought of cod he thought as a cod; and by some long-te

a waste of wallowing sea, cloaked with dank fog, vexed with gales, harried with drifting ice,

strayed away into nothing, and the air above that melted on the sea below ten feet from his straining eyes. A few days later he was out with Manuel on what should have been forty-fathom bottom, but the whole length of the roding ran out, and still the anchor found nothing, and Harvey grew mortally afraid, for that his last touch with earth was lost. "Whale-hole," said Manuel, hauling in. "That is good joke on Disko. Come!" and he rowed to the schooner to find Tom Platt and the others jeering at the skipper because, for once, he had led them to the edge of the barren Whale-deep, the blank hole of the Grand Bank. They made another berth th

e ran before a fall. They were sailing on the wind with the staysail - an old one, luckily - set, and Harvey jammed her right into it to show Dan how completely he had mastered the art. The foresail went over with a bang, and the foregaff stabbed and ripped through the staysail, which was, of cours

at the wheel, Long Jack's swinging overhand when the lines were hauled, Manuel's round-shou

y the windlass one thick noon. "I'll lay my wage an' share 'tis more'n half play-actin' t

one it on the old Ohio, I know. Stood my first watch - harbor-watch - feelin' finer'n Farragut. Dan's full o' the same kind o' notions. See 'em now, actin' to be genewine moss-backs - very

when he come aboard; but I'll say he's s

cunnin' little rig an' four ponies up an' down Toledo, Ohio, I think 'twas, an' givin' suppers to

e was busy with the logbook. "Stands to reason that sort is all made up. It don

er Hitty an' Lorin' Jerauld, an' the boys put up that joke on him daown to Georges?" dr

a Cape Cod man, and had not known that tale more than t

taown,' he said, 'an' t'other ha'af blame fool; an' they told me she's married a 'i

replied. "You'd better leave a Cape man to tell t

e moral o' things. That's jest abaout what aour Harve be! Ha'af on the taown,

alterses?" said Long Jack. "Ha'af in the furrer an' other ha'af in t

went round at S

hat he kept in a hatchet-faced, square hand; this was

and few fish. Made berth to

omes in with thick f

breeze from N.E. and fine weather. Made

ith fog and light winds. So ends this d

ohns-town next," Salters explained, "an' what would happen then?" so they compromised on his reading aloud from a book called "Josephus." It was an old leather-bound volume, smelling of a hundred voyages, very solid and very like the Bible, but enlivened with accounts of battles and sieges; and they read it nearly from cover to cover. Otherwise Penn was a silent little body.

t," Salters would shout

e," he would repeat over and over. Sometimes it was Uncle Salters who forgot, and tol

and trembling, on a still day, managed to shin up to the main-truck (Dan was behind him ready to help), he esteemed it his duty to hang Salters's big sea-boots up there - a sight of shame and derision to the nearest schooner. With Disko, Harvey took no liberties; not even when th

tsoever; led him, pencil in hand, from berth to berth over the whole string of banks - Le Have, Western, Banquereau, St

ave begun when he was ten. Dan could bait up trawl or lay his hand on any rope in the dark; and at a pinch, when Uncle Salters had a gurry-score on his palm, could dress down by sense of touch. He could steer in anything short of half a gale from the fe

ifties; of great she-whales slain beside their young; of death agonies on the black tossing seas, and blood that spurted forty feet in the air; of boats smashed to splinters; of patent rockets that went off wrong-end-first and bombarded the trembling crews; of cutting-in and boi

operly buried; of hidden treasure on Fire Island guarded by the spirits of Kidd's men; of ships that sailed in the fog straight over Truro township; of that harbor in Maine where no one but a stranger will lie at anchor

took their horses there in the summer and entertained in country-houses with hardwood floors and Vantine portires. He l

m Buck hove water over them and shouted to the fort to try again. And he told tales of blockade - long weeks of swaying at anchor, varied only by the departure and return of steamers that had used up their coal (there was no chance for the sailing-ships); of gales and cold that kept two hundred men, night and day, pounding and chopping at the ice on cable, blocks, and rigg

inly agricultural; for, though he read "Josephus" and expounded it, his mission in life was to prove the value of green manures, and specially of clover, against every form of phosphate whatsoever. He grew libellous about phosphates; he dragged greasy "Orange Jud

old them of mail-carrying in the winter up Cape Breton way, of the dog-train that goes to Coudray, and of the ram-steamer Arctic, that breaks the ice between the mainland and Prince Edward Island. Then he told them stories that his mother had told him, of life far to the southward, where water never froze; and he said that when he died his soul would go to lie down on a warm white beach of sand with

he We're Here went her ways and did her business on the Bank, and the silvery-gray kenches of well-pressed fish mounte

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

st how to wiggle the bucket), after an unusually long dressing-do

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,

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

re-rigger bellowin' fer his latitude," said Long Jack. The dripping red head-sails of a b

ed her topsail with

uelon boat from St. Malo." The farmer had a weath

- backez vous! Standez awayez, you butt-ende

t. Pierre et Miquelon," cried the other crowd, waving wo

nywheres, exceptin' America's fairish broadly. Forty-six forty-

and they hung it in the main-rigging

'em swedge off like this," Salters

on't want no more stone-ballast hove at us 'long o' your calli

United States is good enough fer me. We're all dretful

he bawled: "Hi! Say! Arretez vous! Att

c!" they cried,

. "I don't exactly hold no certificates on French, but I know a

long 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,

ez ma tante, il'

ssignol

r et la n

eriez vo

rnenera

nerai

t Saint

gn-talk did?" Harvey demanded when the barte

alk, but a heap older'n your French, Harve. Them Fren

a Freemas

ar's man, stuffing his pipe; and Harvey had a