Almost any little local magistrate down that way can soak an American
skipper or owner for almost any amount and get away with it. And how's
that? Well, we pay two or three dollars a barrel to Newfoundland
fishermen for herring. Before we went down here the St. John's merchants
used to pay them about fifty cents a barrel, and it's the St. John's
merchants who have all the money and came pretty near running
Newfoundland.
Well, when my little local magistrate fines me twenty-five hundred
dollars I said I wouldn't pay it, that I'd stir things up at Washington,
and so on, but they only laughed at me, and put her up for sale.
Now I'd 've bid her in myself if I'd had the money, but I only had a
couple of hundred dollars in cash for running expenses with me. All my
Newfoundland friends down that way were poor people--fishermen. If
'twas home we could 'a' raised plenty of money on her, but I was in
Newfoundland, not Gloucester, and they rushed the thing through.
Well, the _Aurora_ was bid in for just the amount of the fine, and that
was a shame, the vessel she was, and she was bid in by a man nobody
seemed to know. I went to the man who bid her in and told him the whole
story, of what the vessel meant to me, of how I came to bring the rum
over, and asked him would he give me the chance to communicate with some
business men in Gloucester and buy her back, but he only laughs at me,
and laughs in a way to make me think I was a child.
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