ge-soaked rascal had imbibed more
gin than was safe for the weathering of rocky coasts.

Call him gamester, liar, cheat--what you will! He had his faults,
which dogged him down to poverty and ruin; but deeds are proof of the
inner man. And look you that judge Pierre Radisson whether your own
deeds ring as mettle and true.

The ironwood capstan bars clanked to that seaman's music of running
sailors. A clattering of the pawls--the anchor came away. The St.
Pierre shook out her bellying sails and the white sheets drew to a full
beam wind. Long foam lines crisped away from the prow. Green shores
slipped to haze of distance. With her larboard lipping low and that
long break of swishing waters against her ports which is as a croon to
the seaman's ear, the St. Pierre dipped and rose and sank again to the
swell of the billowing sea. Behind, crowding every stitch of canvas
and staggering not a little as she got under weigh, ploughed the Ste.
Anne. And all about, heaving and falling like the deep breathings of a
slumbering monster, were the wide wastes of the sea.

And how I wish that I could take you back with me and show you the two
miserable old gallipots which M. de Radisson rode into the roaring
forties! 'Twas as if those gods of chance that had held riotous sway
over all that watery desolation now first discovered one greater than
themselves--a rebel 'mid their warring elements whose will they might
harry but could not crush--Man, the king undaunted, coming to his own!
Children oft get closer to the essences of truth than older folk grown
foolish with too much learning. As a child I used to think what a
wonderful moment that was when Man, the master, first appeared on face
of earth. How did the beasts and the seas and the winds feel about it,
I asked. Did they laugh at this fellow, the most helpless of all
things, setting out to conquer all things? Did the beasts pursue him
till he made bow and arrow and the seas defy him till he rafted their
waters and the winds blow his house down till he dovetailed his
timbers? That was the child's way of asking a very old question--Was
Man the sport of the elements, the plaything of all the cruel, blind
gods of chance?

Now, the position was reversed.

Now, I learned how the Man must have felt when he set about conquering
the elements, subduing land and sea and savagery. And in that lies the
Homeric greatness of this vast, fresh, New World of ours. Your Old
World