Life on the Grand Banks 
An Account of the Sailor-Fishermen Who Harvest the Shoal 
Waters of North America’s Eastern Coasts 
By FREDERICK WILLIAM WALLACE 
With Illustrations from Photographs by the Author 
I T HAD been blowing a hard Decem¬ 
ber gale for two days and the big 
liner was rolling and pitching enough 
to interfere with the comfort and equa-, 
nimity of the thousand or more passen¬ 
gers aboard her. The few hardy ones who 
appeared at table bragged of their per¬ 
formance in lounge and smoking-room 
and opined it was quite a storm; the vast 
number of the prostrate vowed it was a 
hurricane. 
In the lift of a squall of snow some 
one, peering through the great windows 
of the lounge, declared he saw a ship, a 
small schooner, close alongside. A rush 
was made for hats and wraps and the 
small party of those whom seasickness 
did not claim ventured out on the wind- 
and-spray-swept promenade deck to view 
the tiny craft which had the temerity to 
brave such winter weather so many miles 
offshore. 
The writer happened to be coming 
home from Havre, and one glance at the 
schooner to windward served to recognize 
an old friend. She was a Banks fisher¬ 
man, from Gloucester or Lunenburg pos¬ 
sibly, and she was bound west for home, 
under heavy-weather canvas. 
A GLIMPSE IN THE GALE 
Passing within a cable’s length of our 
rolling and wallowing leviathan, the little 
loo-ton schooner was storming along 
with a broil of white water shearing 
away from her sharp, round stem, and 
her reefed sails were as stiff and as white 
as marble, in the weight of the gale. 
She would top a mighty Western Ocean 
gray-back with the graceful spring of a 
steeple-chaser, bowsprit pointing to the 
gray skies and red-painted underbody 
showing clean to the heel of the foremast; 
then with an easy plunge, like a porpoise 
diving, she leaped over the cresting surge 
and drove down into the trough with but 
the masts and upper parts of the sails 
showing above the bluey-green of the 
combers. 
“They’re sailors aboard that craft,” ob¬ 
served a business man to the grizzled 
chief officer, who had been cajoled from 
his watch below by the sight. 
“Aye,” he returned slowly, “they’re 
sailors all right. She’s an American 
fisherman homeward bound.” And he 
stared at her for a minute or two, until 
she vanished in a flurry of snow. 
WHAT THE SEAMAN MEANS BY 
“sailor” 
In this age of steel hulls and steam 
and motor propulsion, the term “sailor” 
is often misapplied. All who are em¬ 
ployed at sea on board a ship are called 
“sailors” by landsmen, but seamen narrow 
the embrace of the term down to those 
who can steer, equip, repair, and handle 
the canvas of a sailing craft under sea 
conditions. All others are deck-hands 
and seamen. 
Sailors of the orthodox class even go 
a step further and designate all the per¬ 
sonnel of a steamer as “steamboat-men.” 
They consider the terms “seamen” and 
“sailor” to be sacred to ships driven by 
wind and canvas. 
It has been my privilege to sail and 
steam the oceans in many kinds of craft, 
ranging from the romantic full-rigged 
clipper ship to the oil-burning greyhounds 
of twenty-knots speed, and from the 
graceful, sea-kindly Grand Banks fishing 
schooner to the sturdy steam-trawler of 
North Sea type; but in all my voyaging I 
am inclined to the belief that the only real 
“sailors” we have today, in this mechan¬ 
ical age, are to be found in the Banks 
fishermen of North America’s Atlantic 
coasts. 
