The Man Behind the Angler 



and fastened it, then made his way down, to be 

 received with the loudest cheer that ever broke the 

 echoes of the key. The act was one of such signal 

 bravery that the government recognized it in a lib- 

 eral way to Charles Rogers, boatman. 



The idea of fear never entered his sturdy breast. 

 One day when we were shark fishing a large shark 

 jerked him overboard in the lagoon in water shoulder 

 deep. The average man would have dropped the 

 line, but not Rogers. He held on and went down 

 out of sight, coming up a few feet distant, and was 

 towed away so rapidly on the surface that I could 

 only catch him by sculling and intercepting the fish 

 in one of its zig-zag rushes. It may be said that 

 there was no particular danger in this, but there was 

 a school of sharks, ten or twelve feet in length, and 

 they were darting here and there, all about him, and 

 while the danger was not apparent to us, the situation 

 would have deterred many a man. 



It is a long reach either on the wind or before it 

 from Loggerhead Key to Boon Island light, off the 

 Maine coast, but a boatman I often had in these 

 waters when hunting for the tuna or horse mackerel, 

 or other game well offshore, was a type of the sturdy 

 fishermen who have given a distinctive character to 

 New England along shore. This boatman, whose 

 only claim was that he was a cod fisherman, went out 

 every day from six to ten miles offshore, fishing; on 

 land he was a school trustee, a selectman and a citi- 



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