The South-West (Vol. 1&2) - J. H. Ingraham

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      To their good appetites let our table bear witness. Should it be blessed with a conscience, it is doubly blessed by having it cleared thrice daily by the most rapacious father-confessors that ever shrived penitent; of which "gentlemen of the cloth" it boasts no less than eight.

      The first day we passed through a widely dispersed fleet of those short, stump-masted non-descripts, with swallow-tailed sterns, snubbed bows, and black hulls, sometimes denominated fishing smacks, but oftener and more euphoniously, "Chebacco boats," which, from May to October, are scattered over our northern seas.

      While we dashed by them, one after another, in our lofty vessel, as, close-hauled on the wind, or "wing and wing," they flew over the foaming sea, I could not help smiling at the ludicrous scenes which some of their decks exhibited.

      One of them ran so close to us, that we could have tossed a potato into the "skipper's" dinner-pot, which was boiling on a rude hearth of bricks placed upon the open deck, under the surveillance of, I think, the veriest mop-headed, snub-nosed bit of an urchin that I ever saw.

      "Keep away a little, or you'll run that fellow down," suddenly shouted the captain to the helmsman; and the next moment the little fishing vessel shot swiftly under our stern, just barely clearing the spanker boom, whirling and bouncing about in the wild swirl of the ship's wake like a "Massallah boat" in the surf of Madras.

      There were on board of her four persons, including the steersman—a tall, gaunt old man, whose uncovered gray locks streamed in the wind as he stooped to his little rudder to luff up across our wake. The lower extremities of a loose pair of tar-coated duck trowsers, which he wore, were incased, including the best part of his legs, in a pair of fisherman's boots, made of leather which would flatten a rifle ball. His red flannel shirt left his hairy breast exposed to the icy winds, and a huge pea-jacket, thrown, Spanish fashion, over his shoulders, was fastened at the throat by a single button. His tarpaulin—a little narrow-brimmed hat of the pot-lid tribe, secured by a ropeyarn—had probably been thrown off in the moment of danger, and now hung swinging by a lanyard from the lower button-hole of his jacket.

      As his little vessel struggled like a drowning man in the yawning concave made by the ship, he stood with one hand firmly grasping his low, crooked rudder, and with the other held the main sheet, which alone he tended. A short pipe protruded from his mouth, at which he puffed away incessantly; one eye was tightly closed, and the other was so contracted within a network of wrinkles, that I could just discern the twinkle of a gray pupil, as he cocked it up at our quarter-deck, and took in with it the noble size, bearing, and apparel of our fine ship.

      A duplicate of the old helmsman, though less battered by storms and time, wearing upon his chalky locks a red, woollen, conical cap, was "easing off" the foresheet as the little boat passed; and a third was stretching his neck up the companion ladder, to stare at the "big ship," while the little carroty-headed imp, who was just the old skipper razeed, was performing the culinary operations of his little kitchen under cover of the heavens.

      Our long pale faces tickled the young fellow's fancy extremely.

      "Dad," squalled the youthful reprobate, in the softest, hinge-squeaking soprano—"Dad, I guess as how them ar' chaps up thar, ha'nt lived on salt grub long."—The rascal—we could have minced him with his own fish and potatoes.

      "Hold your yaup, you youngster you," roared the old man in reply.—The rest of the beautiful alliteration was lost in the distance, as his smack bounded from us, carrying the young sans-culotte out of reach of the consequences of his temerity. To mention salt grub to men of our stomachs' capacity, at that moment! He merited impaling upon one of his own cod-hooks. In ten minutes after, we could just discern the glimmer of the little vessel's white sails on the verge of the distant horizon, in whose hazy hue the whole fleet soon disappeared.

      These vessels were on a tardy return from their Newfoundland harvests, which, amid fogs and squalls, are gathered with great toil and privation between the months of May and October. The fishermen constitute a distinct and peculiar class—not of society, but of men. To you I need not describe them. They are to be seen at any time, and in great numbers, about the wharves of New-England sea-ports in the winter season—weather-browned, long-haired, coarsely garbed men, with honesty and good nature stamped upon their furrowed and strongly marked features. They are neither "seamen" nor "countrymen," in the usual signification of these words, but a compound of both; combining the careless, free-and-easy air of the one, with the awkwardness and simplicity of the other. Free from the grosser vices which characterize the foreign-voyaged sailor, they seldom possess, however, that religious tone of feeling which distinguishes the ruder countryman.

      Marblehead and Cape Cod are the parent nurseries of these hardy men. Portland has, however, begun to foster them, thereby adding a new and vigorous sinew to her commercial strength. In conjunction with the whale fisheries, to which the cod are a sort of introductory school, these fisheries are the principal nurseries of American seamen. I have met with many American ships' crews, one-half or two-thirds of which were composed of men who had served their apprenticeship in the "fisheries." The youth and men whom they send forth are the bone and muscle of our navy. They have an instinctive love for salt water. Every one who is a parent, takes his sons, one after another, as they doff their petticoats, if the freedom of their limbs was ever restrained by such unnecessary appendages, and places them on the deck of his fishing smack; teaches them to call the ropes by their names, bait, fling, and patiently watch the deceptive hook, and dart the harpoon, or plunge the grains—just as the Indian is accustomed to lead his warrior-boys forth to the hunting grounds, and teach them to track the light-footed game, or heavier-heeled foe—wing, with unerring aim, the fatal arrow, or launch the deadly spear.

      The three succeeding days we were delayed by calms, or contending with gales and head winds. On the morning of the seventh day "out," there was a general exclamation of surprise from the passengers as they came on deck.

      "How warm!" "What a suffocating air!" "We must have sailed well last night to be so far south!" They might well have been surprised if this change in the temperature had been gained by regular "southing." But, alas, we had barely lessened our latitude twenty miles during the night. We had entered the Gulf Stream! that extraordinary natural phenomenon of the Atlantic Ocean. This immense circle of tepid water which revolves in the Atlantic, enclosing within its periphery, the West India and Western Islands, is supposed by Humboldt to be occasioned "by the current of rotation (trade winds) which strikes against the coasts of Veraguas and Honduras, and ascending toward the Gulf of Mexico, between Cape Caloche and Cape St. Antoine, issues between the Bahamas and Florida." From this point of projection, where it is but a few miles wide, it spreads away to the northeast in the shape of an elongated slightly curved fan, passing at the distance of about eighty miles from the coast of the southern states, with a velocity, opposite Havana, of about four miles an hour, which decreases in proportion to its distance from this point. Opposite Nantucket, where it takes a broad, sweeping curve toward Newfoundland, it moves generally only about two miles an hour. Bending from Newfoundland through the Western Islands, it loses much of its velocity at this distance from its radiating point, and in the eastern Atlantic its motion is scarcely perceptible, except by a slight ripple upon the surface.

      This body of water is easily distinguishable from that of the surrounding blue ocean by its leaden hue—the vast quantity of pale-yellow gulf-weed, immense fields of which it wafts from clime to clime upon its ever-rolling bosom, and by the absence of that phosphorescence, which is peculiar to the waters of the ocean. The water of this singular stream is many degrees warmer than the sea through which it flows. Near Cuba the heat has been ascertained to be as great as 81°, and in its course northward from Cuba, it loses 2° of temperature for every 3° of latitude. Its warmth is easily accounted for as the production of very simple causes. It receives its original impulse in the warm tropical seas, which, pressed toward the South American shore by the wind, meet with resistance and are deflected along the coast northward, as stated above by Humboldt, and injected into the Northern Atlantic Ocean—the vast column of water having parted with very little of its original caloric in its rapid progress.

      We crossed the north-western verge of "The Gulf" near the latitude of Baltimore, where its breadth is about eighty miles.

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