Coast to Coast by Jan Morris Read Free Book Online Page A

all his limbs were double-jointed, and his hat was tilted to the back of his head. “I jest don’t know,” he murmured as I approached him, “I jest don’t know if I can make it. It’s a terrible, fearsome thing to ask a man to do!” It was his first week in the job, and he was finding it inexpressibly tedious. “It’s a terrible imposition! There ain’t no work, and there ain’t no play, and that’s the truth. When I was fishing we used to spend 300 days of the year at sea, and really at sea, that was, in the old sailing days. Now? I take a boat across the harbour there each morning to fetch the papers, and that’s all! That’s the day’s work! And I ask you, what’s in the papers when you get ’em? Nothing but women and gory murders! And they call this living!”
    His views on the Gloucester fishing fleet were mournful, as befits a man who has seen such changes. None of the old-style American skippers were left, he said; most of the fishermen now were Portuguese or Italians, and you could “walk a mile in this town and see nobody but Dagoes”. They were a different breed, said he, from the classic skippers. “My father now, he was a schooner skipper, and he was a well-read man (like me). He brought us up on the encyclopedia, and he read all the magazines, and the reviews and such. These Italians, all they read is the comic strips. And that’s all they’re fit for ! ”
    We went inside to look at some engines. He had never heard of any Merrimac connexion, and he was consumed with disbelief. One of these engines, he happened to know, had been working at the yard for a hundred years or more; but he asked you, how could a thing like that drive a ship? It wasn’t the right way up. I could see that for myself, couldn’t I? He had never heard such poppycock, coming there bothering him on a Saturday afternoon, as if he hadn’t anything better to do than answer tomfool questions.
    But ah! Gloucester in the old days, when the graceful sailing ships would slide in and out behind the breakwater. Often schooners would be lost at sea, and many families would be in mourning (between 1830 and 1950 nearly 5,000 Gloucester fishermen were drowned); but it was a proud place in those days, it had self-respect, you see. It was a real port, then. Now it was all artists and tourists and such. He remembered very well when Josh Slocum’s boat (the one he sailed round the world) was tied up at that very quay. And Dr. Cook’s boat was there for a long time, being repaired. “Dr. Cook?” I queried. “The one who claimed to have got to the North Pole when he hadn’t done anything of the sort?” “The same,” my crusty friend replied: “and I know he was an imposter, andI know they put him in jail for forging cheques, and I know all about him, so you needn’t say. I’ll tell you this, and you can believe me if you want to: he was a real gentleman to talk to.”
    A good man, the old-fashioned Yankee, who keeps his sturdy independence in good repair (Dagoes, diesels and such-like notwithstanding).

5.
On Violence
    V iolence is an ever-present element in American life, even in these Eastern States. We were once travelling through New York State, not far from the Shaker colony, when warning arrived of an impending hurricane, Edna or Fiona, Georgina or Harriet, I forget what they christened it. It had battled its way up from the South Atlantic and raged along the beaches of the Carolinas, before swinging inland towards the Great Lakes. The newspapers and the radio kept us informed of its detailed movements, and I resolved to experience its fury not snug in a warm bed, nor safe in a shuttered tavern, but on the banks of the Niagara Falls. I drove there accordingly, and stood in the dark beside the cataract while the storm passed by.
    The night was very black and the rain teemed down in a wall of wet. I stood in a little park overlooking the American Falls, huddled in a raincoat, desperately holding a flapping umbrella. I was