Show WAKEMANS wanderings LONDON march 20 20 1893 Pil griming in many lands I 1 have been much among their waterside folk with the fishermen of alg algiers aers i w who ho are a conglomerate race of greeks italians spaniards and arabs giai with the fishermen of sicily gl gloomy omy and voiceless as gipsy dogs w with th and ns fishermen hermen those most ma majestic jestic sluggards slug gards of a all italy with those of barcelona the giants of the south of spain wil with bis cayan breton and cornish fisherman superstitious and sodden above all others with the brave kind men of claddagh Clad dagh at galway and those along the wondrous kerry coast with the stem yet tender fisher folk of Manx land with the lazy fishermen of the dreamy azores who transferred to american coasts prove the most valuable recruits to our east shore fishing fleets with the cap and tasseled pescadores Pesca dores of cuba brigands brigande bri gands all in looks and ways with the squatty eskimos of the labrador coast satisfied with any fruitage of the deep which will barely sustain life with the crofter fisher of the north scottish and shetland coasts and with our own brave gloucester men who risk their lives upon the grand banks and the quoddy fisherman whose chief quarry is the herring all along the grand maine coast to the mist wreathed crags of wild manan in many years of intercourse with these lowly folk I 1 have been continually impressed with the almost indefinable and wholly indescribable sadness that seems to brood over and among all this class of people it is in their cabins and homely social life if is in their voices voices and looks in repose it sets on their faces pitifully roused into some great activity in storm in taking fish or in saving lives they have grand earnest faces these fishermen fishermen but in the quiet hours there is something haunted wearied worried dreading and dreadful to be read in the lines of their faces in the tremulousness of their voices and in the light which shines from their eyes that all their brave and hearty ways cannot hide or disguise it is as if the sea from which the they live had bad whispered in secret to eack each consciousness some savage threat of reprisal al as if over every little comfort home joy or well earned content hung the spectre hand of fate comin coming closer to the inner vision every time the dfisher fisher mans heart grew glad in whatever d degree e r e this is universal it seems to me t to ote be e more marked among the fishermen of england ireland and scotland than I 1 have ever found it elsewhere revea revealed I 1 ed I 1 believe dickens saw an and d felt this at the old fishing port of great yarmouth when he created out of his great and tender heart the pathetic characters of the Pegg ottys si simple tender true majestic in suffering and f forgiveness ene ss and through and over all t the yke e p pathetic aphetic t thread ahre a d of sadness quivering li like an end endless ess plaint in a melodious though mournful song in this experience strange and tender weird and sad pictures of fishing towns and villages sea reaches and coasts innumerable each one a study tor for a masters brush are stored within the memory here are a few of their outlines the mighty southwest of ireland kerry cc coast ast with weird bray head and and majestic tic st michaels mount upon great rock darkening along the eastward landward fan fand fandra dward rd horizon and at sea just to the north of the great ocean liners way the spring mackerel fleet from kerry hamlets from man land and from franci france altogether from to craft frequently so densely massed that ke water cannot be seen from a fish fishing win smacks deck thousands of sea auly gulfs whistling and flapping their white wings above and to the west a sea horizon of rose and orange where the setting sup sun still shows a flaming edge while more than ten thousand lusty men under a third as many flashing crutch lights set amidships of the smacks are silently shooting the great brown seines for the haht night matchless atchless is that picture ever tinted by the near presence of fisher fisher folk and their storm whipped homes you may see from Shet lands most sober seawall sea wall height in mighty likhite aty mournful fitful head it is the white mountain of the norse men on account of the lustre of its slate formation its highest crag rises fully 1000 feet above the sea but the legendary habitation of noma a bold almost detached cliff lifting its sea front into a point as sharp as a church spire is not more than three fourths that elevation it is quite accessible after a rough scramble and its sides are the haunts of myriads of seafowl sea fowl horrible indeed must be the place in times of storm but away down there below the sea is often as calm as a highland loch from the higher headland the whole of shetland can can be seen waste moor hillock valley glen a land without forests forest 3 split and serrated by the ceaseless gna wings of the sea tremendous precipices rise rise everywhere lochs and tarns show without copse or verdure shadowy hellmers hell cut the sea walls where the tide is even at ebb or flow here a fishing station there a dreary hamlet yonder a gravelly beach with fish and their sodden toil beyond a weird gio with a herd of seals turning their chinin shinin shining sides ides to the low red sun over alli all a imy filmy dreamy tender presence for in the abne ays before the darkling dar klong winter sets in n it is the fis hermans 64 summer in the shetland isles stran strange e q quiet ui et god fearing souls are the fi fishermen he rm en of the solway shores whether they live on the scottish side where every stream and brae and vale has a reminder of the immortal poet of the lowly who rests within the sound of Sol ways tide rings or on the en english I 1 ii ls h side in rock girt cumberland i in n tt the e brave old house built from roman walls giant frames have these folk and wondrous height wide fair brows great reat blue or hazel eyes and and leonine beads beads of flaxen hair I 1 always remember them with their apparent ap alertness of attention an unconscious habit and attitude of listening for it is said these folk can hear the oncoming sweeps p s of ohp the great tide born from the irish ish s sea ea which brings the harvest of fish and often terror and death for twenty miles away long before this if you are standing on the cliff edge above ancient bowness you will see the fishers waist deep in in water hurrying on the tightening of their upright nets which for ten miles below seem like tiny fences of rush and away seaward with your glass you can see them scurrying up from the ebb slime and sand towards safety and the shore then to your unpracticed ears come the faint reverberations ot of a hoarse roar and soon like a pillar of flame in the play of the sunlight the great mist r banner of the advancing waters is flung from scotland to england almost from briffel to silloth willoth Sil loth and moves toward you like a lurid cloud above a running battle in a few moments more the brilliancy of the phenomenon is greatest preceding the advancing advancing cloud along the seething front of a wa wall of water five miles wide glitter foams and hisses a bank of spume and spray zoned rimmed and interlaced with tiny rainbows the rhe roaring of the bellowing water hosts becomes deafening for an instant you are enveloped by the cloud that passed while you thrill with the mystery and awful grandeur of the spectacle the great tibe tidehead tide head is abreast of you a true tide bore such as breaks majestically into minas and other estuaries nes of the bay of fundy cylindrical and straight as an arrow across the firth and from six to eight feet in he av height ht which sweeps past with a bellow and shriek like that of a hundred thousand coast fog horns howling in in unison unison while close in its wake is a hillock tempestuous mass of waves brilliantly gorgeous in fitfully swept prismatic colors and the solway tide is in this is the picture that comes to me from Ir elands crag craggy y north the eastern shore of wild fough lough is a succession of ruins dainty villages like Bun crama and fahan and of pilgrim haunted shrines over to the west are wilder shores huts round towers fishers cabins and here and there the patched sails of the berrini herring fishers smacks lie white against the bac background ground of the headlands and hills here the sweetest herring known to man are taken the brawny herring fishers of the north are here in greatest numbers they are sodden hopeless hard but they are brave and strong as iron they have tremendous frames are brown as bronze a nd ind form groupings of startling impressiveness they are simple and peaceable I 1 am told but were pirates wanted were fleets to be fitted out with men for work giving one a shudder to contemplate these sea giants would furnish incomparable human heartless flint but if they are flint their wives are ste steel el about six feet in height broad and st strong rong as their burly mates with legs corded like a mans and bare to the knees with arms long crooked and fleshless as wood with flat hairy breasts often bared from neck to waist and tanned by salt sun and wind to the c olor color of the mottled alder bark with wide jaws half toothless mouths sunken cheeks eyes blue black and flashing from deep yellow sockets and brows bushy and ragged with bristling hairs hair s with narrow creased foreheads and great wide saffron colored ears set straight out from behind like dirty it wing and wing sails and their square heads crowned by one black hair faded into snuff brown like an animals which is matted and knotted upon the shoulders and frequently to the waist and you ou have but the faintest picture of this half alf animal who subsists upon kelp dulse black oatcake oat cake and half raw fish that the buyers who come to the beaches in their carts from londonderry refuse as even unworthy of salt to mendicant and crouching man beast of the town and the children of these they drag out the same horrible lives help make the british navy or turn traitor to the brood of half pirates behind becoming the most remorseless of coastguard coast guard or mountain hunt ing officers and yet how the old blood occasionally blossoms through this limitless de gration A daughter of just such an one as I 1 have pictured was the most perfect type of wild and simple human beauty I 1 ever beheld barelegged bare legged and bare breasted as her mother brown as a hazel nut ignorantly innocent of fear for four copper coins she rowed me across lough to where her fathers work lay mending the seines like an amazonian man of wars man while I 1 sat speechless contemplating contemplate her marvelous beauty and majestic proportions hating myself because I 1 was not altogether an artist and wonderlin won wondering derin F in all reverence why god or gods god s nineteenth century civilization could not wait upon the african missions for a little and reach to and succor such as these standing upon the huge headland above ancient st ives another remarkable picture is yours it is one of the most interesting fishing ports in europe the bay itself faces the north at your feet are purple heather and waving terns ferns parted from the water by glistening sands to the right and east the green hillocks of the eastern shore then the broad yellow beach of porth cocking or the forehand Fore sand dominating this is the great headland of Ped nolva beyond gleaming like a field of gold are the magnificent sands of ter and further still the headland and rocky islet of Go drevy with the lat latter batters white lighthouse setting cameo like be tween the purple of the sea walls and the tremulous blue of the ocean before you the silent shimmering bay with a few white winged fishing craft scarcely ca acely moving it seems the distance is is so great from the height where you kokx stand the ocean beyond chinin shinin shining 19 and blue and still rhythmic reaches of incon ing tide waves miles in length advant ing and retreating and breaking softly V upon the shelving sands in tiny ridges ot of sparkling spume and here tu to 9 the west a great jumbled mass of f gravold st ives crouching in a little po pocket lir C et of the rocks like a mass of mossy r tone ansome in some shadowy glen ale sleeping aw abw ne the centuries unconscious of th t thunderous sea aside from these and half a hundred more picturesque spots that cannot evelti evs be named there are the sleepy harri leis and sand shores of orange orang e iron from pool to whitehaven White haven al along on the irish sea s the mites of villages specking the sid of the winsome sea combs 0 of somerset and devon the quaint scenes amone the thai fleets and homes of the fisherr fishermen nen c penzance Pen zance falmouth plymouth and torquay Tor quay the countless fisher haunts faSL the seething chines of the win winsome I 1 tos of wight the drearier of the engli east shore where the battles with storms and tides are ever fierce ass strong the wild wailing woeful C coas from dermouth Yer mouth to whitby which seemed fated to be the scene of th oceans saddest tragedies the red ro the breezy shores the gl gleaming earning sa sands and the tossing spray of boldingh CoIdin Coldi ehaS and north berwick around to the tra son of the mouth of the forth the sn anus town and har harbor harbora the quaint old bori streets e the lucious fish d dinners anners and the acre ing fishwives fish wives of newhaven the alm almol somber silence ever brooding above th piers of buck haven the rocky wa walla the steely blue of the german ac ocean the awful storms and the great cheerless fishing towns of the enfil coast from aberdeen to thurso cheh brown crags the emerald pings a aal the shadowy fissures of ESS shetland and orkney shores with t theall dutch and norse color in faces a w ways a and the drear gray rocks a pu puffin en haunted crags of the misty hi rid rides where the brave half sta stan crofter fisher battles all his life for m existence the customs folklore folk lore and s stations ions which have been the r catl outgrowth of their vocation have b been practically changeless tor for half a th thou sand years and their portents and omena are countless in skye if a woman crosses the where fishing is in progress and am anao the newhaven men if the name braunger Bro unger that of an old reprobate who was the impersonation bad luck and once lived among the them mentioned fishing will be at once d continued skye and harris bishir fisher tn have been known to beat their dreadfully not from any ill feeling to propitiate and attract the fish all british fishermen note ca can the first person upon whom m their alight in the morning their lud luck the day will depend on whether person is well or ill favored A ader cl man a pig or a cat are the most of all agg 0 objects ejects as fleets are sailing out the harbor the sight of either or CUs discovery covery of the footprint of a flatfooted flat footed sand bodes all of person on in the manner luck and to utter the name of a clergyman rayman or any four footed beast on board a fishing boat would render the offender subject to bodily peril and at least destroy all hopes ol of success on that day all along the wes west t coasts of cornwall scotland e and ireland brelar id they make better vise ase of the dreaded cat they secure fevering winds by burying it alive in the sands of the seashore with its head opposite the desired course of the wind up tip in the Shet lands and Ork fishermen wear a lucky belt containing dried offal of three different herrings and a perfect childs caul which wards off evil influences and brings good fortune banging in the cabin of a fishing bat boat is hanging worth from rom five to eight guineas in in any prosperous fishing villa village among many banc fanc fanciful ife L u 11 supe superstitions and curious weather |