“Every man of them a good seaman in calm weather,” Sieur Radisson observed; and he put them through marine drill all that week.  La Chesnaye so far recovered that he sometimes kept me company at the bowsprit, where we watched the clumsy gambols of the porpoise, racing and leaping and turning somersets in mid-air about the ship.  Once, I mind the St. Pierre gave a tremor as if her keel had grated a reef; and a monster silver-stripe heaved up on our lee.  ’Twas a finback whale, M. Radisson explained; and he protested against the impudence of scratching its back on our keel.  As we sailed farther north many a school of rolling finbacks glistened silver in the sun or rose higher than our masthead, when one took the death-leap to escape its leagued foes—­swordfish and thrasher and shark.  And to give you an idea of the fearful tide breaking through the narrow fiords of that rock-bound coast, I may tell you that La Chesnaye and I have often seen those leviathans of the deep swept tail foremost by the driving tide into some land-locked lagoon and there beached high on naked rock.  That was the sea M. Radisson was navigating with cockle-shell boats unstable of pace as a vagrant with rickets.

Even Foret, the marquis, forgot his dainty-fingered dignity and took a hand at the fishing of a shark one day.  The cook had put out a bait at the end of a chain fastened to the capstan, when comes a mighty tug; and the cook shouts out that he has caught a shark.  All hands are hailed to the capstan, and every one of my fine gentlemen grasps an ironwood bar to hoist the monster home.  I wish you had seen their faces when the shark’s great head with six rows of teeth in its gaping upper jaw came abreast the deck!  Half the fellows were for throwing down the bars and running, but the other half would not show white feather before the common sailors; and two or three clanking rounds brought the great shark lashing to deck in a way that sent us scuttling up the ratlines.  But Foret would not be beaten.  He thrust an ironwood bar across the gaping jaws.  The shark tore the wood to splinters.  There was a rip that snapped the cable with the report of a pistol, and the great fish was over deck and away in the sea.

By this, you may know, we had all left our landsmen’s fears far south of Belle Isle and were filled with the spirit of that wild, tempestuous world where the storm never sleeps and the cordage pipes on calmest day and the beam seas break in the long, low, growling wash that warns the coming hurricane.

But if you think we were a Noah’s ark of solemn faces ’mid all that warring desolation, you are much mistaken.  I doubt if lamentations ever did as much to lift mankind to victory as the naughty glee of the shrieking fife.  And of glee, we had a-plenty on all that voyage north.