Joseph E. Garland - Lone Voyager

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Text originally published in 1963 under the same title.

Pickle Partners Publishing 2015, all rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted by any means, electrical, mechanical or otherwise without the written permission of the copyright holder.

Publishers Note

Although in most cases we have retained the Authors original spelling and grammar to authentically reproduce the work of the Author and the original intent of such material, some additional notes and clarifications have been added for the modern readers benefit.

We have also made every effort to include all maps and illustrations of the original edition the limitations of formatting do not allow of including larger maps, we will upload as many of these maps as possible.

LONE VOYAGER

BY

JOSEPH E. GARLAND

with Illustrations

Contents

For my wife

BECKY

who launched this book

and

steered it around many a shoal

A WILD ATLANTIC NORTHEASTER is driving a scud of rain and spray across this spit of land called Eastern Point. Out there to the southward, a thousand yards beyond the lighthouse, the whistling buoy groans on the back of the ocean swell. The great waves have been making up at sea for two days. They heave by the lands end in relentless procession and explode into plumes of surf against the ledge across the harbor. Sometimes one sideswipes the breakwater at the entrance, lifts its white crest fifteen feet, twenty feet, clear over the top and buries the granite under a concussion of solid spume that boils along the length of it for half a mile.

The house creaks and wrenches from the storm, but it is snug inside, like the bridge of a big ship. Through the salt-sprayed windows I see the whole of Gloucester Harbor stretching out, north to south from the rocks close in front, empty and gray, until it vanishes behind the gale.

Into this same harbor, past the arm of land where my house stands, sailed Champlain on a wandering voyage of discovery three hundred and fifty years ago. And past itout to the sea and the bankshave sailed ten thousand fishermen of Gloucester to their deaths.

Past it sailed Howard Blackburn.

This was his kind of weather, the way it is outside today.

A few ancient mariners who dory-trawled from schooners and drank beer in his saloon remember him, and to them he was the finest kindthe Man of Iron. He remains the special possession of all the fishermen of Gloucesterthe symbol of their hard courage and their stoic love, and hatred, of the sea.

Something in this place of my forebears has pulled me back. A hundred and fourteen years ago my great-grandfather came here to practice medicine, and the people elected him their mayor and christened a schooner after him. My grandfather, for whom another schooner and I were named, was also a doctorand my father, a doctor too, born and raised here. Young Blackburn, back from Newfoundland, was Grandfathers patient, but he reached the end of his lone voyage while I was a child, and I had not met him.

The gale howls on. Two fishing draggers lurch in from the monstrous seas and labor by the house, just visible through the sheets of rain and spray, homeward bound.

What a beating the Atlantic has given them, these men and their boats! And their fathers and grandfathers before them, in schooners and pinkies and dories, in sloops and shallops and sharpshooters.

Howard Blackburn belongs to them all, to the fishermen of all time.

JOSEPH E. GARLAND

Eastern Point

Gloucester, Massachusetts

1. Voyages to California, England and Portugal
2. Burgeo Bank, 1883
3. Gloucester, 1899
4. The Inland Voyage
5. The Last Voyage

SUDDENLY the great sails are there.

Gray as the winter Atlantic, they slide into view from behind the drifted snow on Eastern Points far shore. They are still a long way off.

The black hulls lunge by the lighthouse and swing off the swells to the quiet water of the lee. The rollers surge onward into detonations of destruction against the crags of Normans Woe.

Down the length of their harbor lean the schooners of Gloucester, hard on the wind. Heavy with fish, and silent, they schoon through the tide.

They are coming fast, sheeting in around the ice-strewn rocks of Ten Pound Island.

Now they have made the anchorage and are turning to face the wind, losing way, tall sails luffing aloft.

The anchors splash and sink with a rattle of cable. The flapping spreads of canvas collapse in heaps to the decks.

The fishing fleet is home.

In from the winter sea the wind still sweeps. It shrieks through the shrouds of the sleeping ships and whines across the wharves. It groans up the streets and moans at the doors, and the lamps in the windows shiver.

It sighs up the stairs and breathes cold on the beds of the men that went down to the sea.

Sch. Hattie S. Clark from Georges, on Friday, reports the loss of one of her crew, John Powers, who was washed off the mainboom and drowned. He was a native of Nova Scotia.

Sch. Herbert M. Rogers arrived home from a Newfoundland herring trip Saturday morning, and reports that on the previous Tuesday, James Keefe, one of the crew, was lost overboard while engaged in reefing the mainsail, and was drowned. He was thirty years of age, and leaves a widow and three children in this city.

No news has been received in relation to the sch. Willie H. Joyce, reported overdue on a Newfoundland herring trip, and the conviction is becoming a settled one that she struck upon the reefs at Sable Island and was lost with all on board.

Mr. Michael Brien, one of the crew of sch. Hattie L. Newman of this port, died at St. Jacques, Newfoundland, January 16, from the effects of exposure. He had been on a visit to the sch. Henri M. Woods, and while returning to his own vessel in a dory became chilled, was driven ashore and perished on the beach.

Sch. Gatherer arrived home from a halibuting trip on Sunday and reports speaking on Grank Bank sch. Mary F. Chisholm of this port with loss of two of her crew, Angus McIsaac and Martin Flaherty, while visiting their trawls.

An improbable story and one calculated to arouse false hopes and occasion unnecessary anguish, was circulated in this community on Tuesday evening, when it was reported that Charles Ray and John Whitman, two of the men lost from sch. James A. Garfield January 10, had arrived at St. Pierre, having rowed ashore.

Sch. Grace L. Fears came in Wednesday afternoon with flag at half-mast to the memory of Thomas Welch, one of her crew, who was frozen to death in a dory January 26.

Seventeen vessels and two hundred and nine lives have been lost in the Gloucester fisheries during the year. Forty of the men are known to have left widows, and the number of fatherless children of which there is a record is sixty-eight. Seventy-one men capsized or gone astray in dories have reached the shore or been rescued from a watery grave, many of them after exposure and sufferings that defy description.