Читать книгу The Sea: Its Stirring Story of Adventure, Peril, & Heroism (Vol. 1-4). The History of Sea Voyages, Discovery, Piracy and Maritime Warfare онлайн

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Any one who has travelled by small canoes on the sea must remember those happy camping-times, when, often wet, and always hungry and tired, the little party cautiously selected some sheltered nook or specially good beach, and then paddled with a will ashore. No lack of drift-wood or small trees on that coast, and no lord of the manor to interfere with one taking it. A glorious fire is soon raised, and the cooking preparations commenced. Sometimes it is only the stereotyped tea—frying-pan bread (something like the Australian “damper,” only baked before the fire), or “slapjacks” (i.e., flour-and-water pancakes), fried bacon, and boiled Chili beans; but ofttimes it can be varied by excellent fish, game, bear-meat, venison, or moose-meat, purchased from some passing Indians, or killed by themselves. It is absurd to suppose that “roughing it” need mean hardship and semi-starvation all the time. Not a bit of it! On the northern coasts now being described, one may often live magnificently, and most travellers learn instinctively to cook, and make the most of things. Nothing is finer in camp than a roast fish—say a salmon—split and gutted, and stuck on a stick before the fire, not over it. A few dozen turns, and you have a dish worthy of a prince. Or a composition stew—say of deer and bear-meat and beaver’s tail, well seasoned, and with such vegetables as you may obtain there; potatoes from some seaside farm—and there are such on that coast, where the settler is as brown as his Indian wife—or compressed vegetables, often taken on exploring expeditions. Or, again, venison dipped in a thick batter and thrown into a pan of boiling-hot fat, making a kind of meat fritter, with not a drop of its juices wasted. Some of these explorers and miners are veritable chefs. They can make good light bread in the woods from plain flour, water, and salt, and ask no oven but a frying-pan. They will make beans, of a kind only given to horses at home, into a delicious dish, by boiling them soft—a long job, generally done at the night camp—and then frying them with bread-crumbs and pieces of bacon in the morning, till they are brown and crisp.