THE HARBOR MASTER

CHAPTER I

BLACK DENNIS NOLAN

At the back of a deep cleft in the formidable cliffs, somewhere between Cape Race to the southward and St. John’s to the northward, hides the little hamlet of Chance Along.  As to its geographical position, this is sufficient.  In the green sea in front of the cleft, and almost closing the mouth of it, lie a number of great boulders, as if the breech in the solid cliff had been made by some giant force that had broken and dragged forth the primeval rock, only to leave the refuse of its toil to lie forever in the edge of the tide, to fret the gnawing currents.  At low tide a narrow strip of black shingle shows between the nearer of these titanic fragments and the face of the cliff.  The force has been at work at other points of the coast as well.  A mile or so to the north it has broken down and scattered seaward a great section of the cliff, scarring the water with a hundred jagged menaces to navigation, and leaving behind it a torn sea front and a wide, uneven beach.  About three miles to the south of the little, hidden village it has wrought similar havoc, long forgotten ages ago.

Along this coast, for many miles, treacherous currents race and shift continually, swinging in from the open sea, creeping along from the north, slanting in from the southeast and snarling up (but their snarling is hidden far below the surface) from the tide-vexed, storm-worn prow of old Cape Race.  The pull and drift of many of these currents are felt far out from land, and they cannot be charted because of their shiftings, and their shiftings cannot be calculated with any degree of accuracy, because they seem to be without system or law.  These are dangerous waters even now; and before the safeguard of a strong light on the cape, in the days when ships were helplessly dragged by the sea when there was no wind to drive them—­in the days before a “lee-shore” had ceased to be an actual peril to become a picturesque phrase in nautical parlance—­they constituted one of the most notorious disaster-zones of the North Atlantic.

We are told, as were our fathers before us, that one man’s poison may be another man’s meat, and that it is an ill wind indeed that does not blow an advantage to somebody.  The fundamental truths of these ancient saws were fully realized by the people of Chance Along.  Ships went down in battered fragments to their clashing sea-graves, which was bad, Heaven knows, for the crews and the owners—­but ashore, stalwart and gratified folk who had noted the storms and the tides ate well and drank deep and went warmly clad, who might otherwise have felt the gnawing of hunger and the nip of the wind.