On the chart it was a mere dot--a nameless rock, the outermost of a group most happily called the Devil's Teeth. To the Labrador fishermen, bound north from Newfoundland in the spring, bound south, with their loads of green cod, in the fall, it was the Cocked Hat. This name, too, is aptly descriptive; many a schooner, caught in the breakers, had, as the old proverb hath it, been knocked into that condition, or worse. But to the folk of the immediate coast, and especially of Hulk's Harbour, which lies within sight on the mainland, it was for long known as Feather's Folly.
Old Bill Feather had once been wrecked on the Cocked Hat. The little _Lucky Lass_, bound to Hulk's Harbour from the Hen-and-Chickens, and sunk to the scupper-holes with green fish, had struck in a fog. Four minutes later she had gone down with all hands save Bill. An absentminded breaker had deposited him high and dry on a ledge of the northeast cliff; needless to say, it was much to Bill's surprise. For five days the castaway had shivered and starved on the barren rock. This was within sight of the chimney-smoke of home--of the harbour tickle, of the cottage roofs; even, in clear weather, of the flakes and stage of his own place.
"It won't happen again," vowed Bill, when they took his lean, sore hulk home.
What Bill did--what he planned and accomplished in the face of ridicule and adverse fortune--earned the rock the name of Feather's Folly in that neighbourhood.
"Anyhow," old Bill was in the habit of repeating, to defend himself, "I 'low it won't happen again. An' I'll _see_ that it don't!"
But season followed season, without event; and the Cocked Hat was still known as Feather's Folly.
It was early in the spring of the year--too early by half, the old salts said, for Labrador craft to put out from the Newfoundland ports. Thick, vagrant fogs, drifting with the variable winds, were abroad on all the coast; and the Arctic current was spread with drift ice from the upper shores and with great bergs from the glaciers of the far north. But Skipper Libe Tussel, of the thirty-ton _Fish Killer_, hailing from Ruddy Cove, was a firm believer in the fortunes of the early bird; moreover, he was determined that the skipper of the _Cod Trap_, hailing from Fortune, should not this season preëmpt his trap-berth on the Thigh Bone fishing grounds. So the _Fish Killer_ was underway for the north, early as it was; and she was cheerily game to face the chances of wind and ice, if only she might beat the _Cod Trap_ to the favourable opportunities of the Thigh Bone grounds off Indian Harbour.