Bay of Spirits Read online

  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Maps

  I am deeply grateful to…

  1 Island in the Mist

  2 Ferryland

  3 A Southern Shore Bummer

  4 The Angels Sing

  5 The French Isles

  6 Hard Times

  7 Pushthrough

  8 Head of the Bay

  9 Bay of Spirits

  10 Stormy Passage

  11 Searching for an Anchorage

  12 Stone Valley

  13 Queen of the Coast

  14 Seduction

  15 Dropping the Hook

  16 The Petit Nord

  17 Back to the Bay

  18 Basques and Penguins

  19 Shape Changer

  20 Winter of Their Times

  21 The Whale

  Author’s Note

  About the Author

  Also by Farley Mowat

  Praise for Bay of Spirits

  Copyright

  A love affair with a special woman and a special world.

  I am deeply grateful to the many Newfoundlanders who bore with me, gave me access to their lives, and shared what they had with me and mine.

  And the same to friend and publisher Susan Renouf, who has been and remains an unfailing source of encouragement and as accomplished and diligent an editor as any writer could hope to find.

  Island in the Mist

  In the summer of 1954 my father and I sailed his little ketch, Scotch Bonnet, down the St. Lawrence River to the sea. When a storm sent us scuttling into Rimouski on the lower river in search of shelter, we moored alongside an ocean-going rescue tug.

  It was a safe mooring and a friendly one. The tug’s crew consisted mostly of Newfoundlanders–a breed of seamen I had not previously encountered. They invited us aboard their ship, plied us with rum, fed us bowls of a peculiar dish called fish-and-brewis, and, while the storm howled in the rigging aloft, told us stories of their seagoing life.

  These tales so enthralled me that I was determined to know them better. When I asked the tug’s skipper how best to go about meeting his kind on their home ground (or waters), he advised me to book passage on one of the little freight-and-passenger steamers serving Newfoundland’s outport communities.

  “She’ll give ye the feel of what our old Rock’s like. Aye, and the sound of it, and the smell of it too. And if ’twas me I’d carry a bottle or two aboard to ile the whistles of the folk you meets along the way.”

  Three years passed before I could take his advice. Then, in the late summer of 1957, I flew in to Sydney, Nova Scotia, and took a taxi to North Sydney, a compact little harbour that was home to a busy shipyard where coasting and fishing vessels were built and repaired. On the morning of my arrival a venerable three-masted schooner was cradled on the dry end of the marine railway up which she had been hauled, festooned with weeds, a few days earlier. She was being swarmed by twenty or thirty men armed with caulking irons, long-headed hammers, and great hanks of golden oakum made from teased-out strands of manila rope soaked in Stockholm tar. The caulkers were crawling all over her, busily driving bales of oakum into her gaping seams to keep her afloat for a few more years. The sound they made was like a confabulation of giant woodpeckers. It was a sound that had not changed much since Nelson’s time. It rang down the centuries as I carried my gear up the gangplank of the ferry that would carry me across the Cabot Strait to that great island known to its people as the Rock.

  Newfoundland is of the sea. A mighty granite stopper thrust into the mouth of the Gulf of St. Lawrence, its coasts present more than five thousand miles of rocky headlands, bays, capes, and fiords to the sweep of the Atlantic. Everywhere hidden reefs, which are called, with dreadful explicitness, sunkers, wait to rip open the bellies of unwary vessels.

  Fifty thousand years ago this great Rock was mastered by a tyranny of ice that stripped it of soil and vegetation and carried the detritus eastward to form the Grand Banks. The ice grinding relentlessly across the southern coast slashed a series of particularly deep fiords through the granite sea cliffs. Every few miles there was such an opening–sometimes a narrow knife wound, sometimes wide enough to admit a dozen ships sailing abreast.

  After the departure of the ice, the high plateau of the interior was able to support only the most tenacious life. It was a world notably inhospitable to people of European origin. The first such interlopers to reach southern Newfoundland, perhaps as early as six centuries ago, were, however, men of the sea, not of the land. They were fishers in pursuit of cod for food, of walrus for ivory, of whales for oil, with little or no interest in the interior. They found the brooding granite barrier of the south coast adequate for their needs. It contained countless nooks and crannies well suited to shelter their boats, fishing stages, and houses, so there they planted themselves, always within sailing or rowing distance of the enormously rich coastal fishing grounds.

  When Newfoundland joined Canada in 1949, more than eighty such “outports” dotted the Sou’west Coast, the name bestowed on the wall of cliffs and fiords stretching from Port aux Basques in Newfoundland’s southwestern corner to the bottom end of Fortune Bay, more than two hundred miles to the eastward. Although some had as few as a dozen inhabitants, others held a hundred or more. Each was a little world of its own, living by and on the sea. First used as summer fishing stations by itinerant Basque, Portuguese, French, and English fishermen, they gradually acquired permanent residents by attracting runaways, castaways, and fugitives from the law and from the poverty of their European homelands. The names of these little lodgings of humanity, with their hodgepodge of linguistic origins much corrupted through the centuries, suggest their origins. Some that were still extant when I first visited the Sou’west Coast included Fox Roost (Fosse Rouge), Isle aux Morts, Rose Blanche (Roche Blanc), Harbour le Cou, Gallyboy, Grand Bruit, Ramea, Burgeo, La Hune, Cul de Sac, Rencontre, Dragon, Mosquito, Pushthrough, Goblin, Lobscouse Cove, Mose Ambrose, Belleoram, Femme, and Fortune.

  By 1957 only thirty-eight of the original eighty still existed. The rest had fallen victim to the post-Confederation craze for centralization. Pressure brought to bear by the Newfoundland and federal governments had already resulted in the death of more than half of the island’s outport communities whose inhabitants had been encouraged, bribed, or threatened into abandoning their age-old homes and ways of life in order to move to larger centres, mostly in the interior, where they were supposed to become productive citizens of the modern industrialized world.

  A fleet of small passenger and freighter steamers operated by the maritime branch of Canadian National Railways continued to provide a lifeline for the remaining outporters on the Sou’west Coast, which was without either roads or airports. The coastal steamers numbered half a dozen, including the Baccalieu, which I was to join at Port aux Basques.

  Baccalieu was unquestionably the doyenne of the fleet. Built in Paisley, Scotland, in 1939, she was two hundred feet long and displaced fourteen hundred tons. She came from a long line of little steamers that had been working the coasts of the British Isles for a century and more. She was a lady, with a handsome cruiser stern; elegant, flaring bows; and a funnel raked just enough to give her a dashing look. She had been sailed out to Canada in 1940 and had been working the Newfoundland coasts ever since.

  Every Friday she or one of her sister steamers would depart from Argentia in Placentia Bay, upbound (westbound) for Port aux Basques, where she would meet the ferry sailing across Cabot Strait to Canada. Every Saturday she, or a sister, would depart from Port aux Basques bound “down” the coast to Argentia. The direct distance between the two ports was less than three hundred miles, but the actual course, following the deeply indented coastline and in an
d out of the remaining outports, was at least three times that.

  Tough and enduring little ships, small and nimble, the coast steamers were thoroughbreds. Their upper-deck accommodations were fitted in teak and mahogany instead of chrome and plastic. The dining and passenger saloons displayed stained glass windows and Victorian lamps. Meals were gargantuan, if heavy on such things as fish-and-brewis, fried cod, boiled haddock, salt beef, and cabbage. They were served on real china accompanied by Sheffield ware and sterling silver sugar bowls and cream jugs.

  The steamers had class, but were wonderfully democratic. Passengers could wander almost anywhere they pleased and quickly established a first-name relationship with the crew.

  Not only were these steam-powered (though oil-fired) little ships the chief means of getting to and from the outer world and of keeping the outports supplied with almost all the imported goods required, they also served as bank and post office; brought itinerant dentists and optometrists to the coast; and functioned as local buses, carrying people back and forth between neighbouring outports.

  It was not surprising that they were held in high regard. When the steamer sounded her whistle as she approached an outport, the people of the place would flock to meet her, whether by day or by night, in fair weather or foul. Her arrival was always a celebration. The local wharf (if there was one) would sprout a mushroom growth of men, women, children, and the big black dogs that were symbolic of the coast. Shouts of “Steamer’s in!” would echo through the village. Once more the world had come to the outport’s door.

  The steamer would moor alongside or, if there was no wharf, anchor in the stream surrounded by a flock of skiffs and dories. Her hatches would come off; cargo booms would get to work; and out of her holds would come all the things the outport people were unable to make or raise themselves: crates of hens, barrels of molasses, bundles of milled lumber, stoves, mail-order furniture, and a thousand other things.

  An Anglican minister who used the steamers to visit his outlying parishes described them to me this way.

  “They were like floating cornucopias. Almost anything a person could ever need would come out of their holds. They were also like spaceships from distant planets, bringing visitors from away who could tell us what it was like out there. They took our people out to hospital; and young folk out to school and, later, to see if they could find a place for themselves outside. But the biggest thing they did was keep us together. Sooner or later you’d meet everyone along the coast, either aboard the steamers or on the wharfs waiting for them. I can’t think what we’d have done without them.”

  The steamers not only served the material and emotional needs of the far-flung outports, they also provided a medical lifeline. Almost no steamer ever completed a voyage without having to sprint ahead or double back at least once to pick up an emergency patient and carry him or her to the nearest doctor, or to within reach of a hospital at Cornerbrook or St. John’s.

  There was generally at least one pregnant woman aboard. Liza Parsons, Baccalieu’s matronly stewardess, could not remember the number of times she had been a midwife. She became so expert and so renowned that hospital-bound pregnant women would deliberately take passage at the last possible moment in hopes of being able to give birth aboard under Liza’s practised hands.

  Such was the nature of the creature that lay awaiting me at dockside when I disembarked at Port aux Basques. Already laden to her marks, the SS Baccalieu was noisily blowing off surplus steam, which veiled her black hull and white-painted upperworks.

  She was not going to be crowded on this trip. Instead of her usual complement of a hundred or so passengers, she was carrying only seventy-five. Her blushing young purser, who was new to his job, gave me cabin B on the upper deck. It was a wonder of Victorian elegance gone a little shoddy: creaky wicker chairs, worn Persian carpet, etched glass in the alleyway door, and an enormous English “water closet” almost big enough to serve as a sitz bath.

  Farley and Claire in the bows of the Baccalieu.

  I had barely taken all this in when the ship’s whistle let out a throaty roar and Baccalieu began to throb with the slow revolution of her great propeller shaft. I rushed on deck to find we were underway; but there was little to see. Night had fallen and the weather was chill and “thick-a-fog,” as a passing deckhand unnecessarily noted. Never mind. I retreated to the snug warmth of my cabin for a good night’s sleep.

  It was not to be. At 11:30 p.m. a deckhand knocked hard upon my door to tell me the captain wanted me on the bridge.

  Half expecting we would be taking to the lifeboats, I flung on my clothing, hurried across the bridge deck, and entered the wheelhouse–the holy of holies on any ship. A squat figure took shape in the darkness within and introduced himself.

  “Ernie Riggs, skipper of this one. Heard you’ve been in the salvage boats out of Halifax. Thought you might like to help us take this old she-cunt into Rose Blanche…if we can get in. Nasty little place. Tight as a crab’s arsehole.”

  I did not know if the captain was serious or not. There was certainly nothing I could do to help. The night was black as death and the fog almost too thick to breathe. Pretending I wasn’t there, I backed into a corner and watched and listened as Skipper Riggs and the helmsman took Baccalieu through a maze of reefs into an unseen and unseeable little harbour, then laid her alongside a wooden wharf that I never even saw until the lines went ashore and the fog-diffused glow from a lamp on the shore told me we were there.

  I remained on the bridge most of the rest of that black night so as not to miss the succeeding episodes of Riggs Dares All–a harrowing life-and-death adventure in real time.

  Coming in to La Poille two hours later, Riggs could not have been able to see much farther than the nose on his face. Furthermore, Baccalieu’s searchlight was out of order and her old-fashioned radar useless at close quarters. None of this seemed to concern Riggs as he paced rapidly back and forth, muttering to himself:

  “Oh you she-cunt! Where’s she going? Narrow place this…very narrow place. Fucking narrow place. Can’t turn her here. Oh hell, s’pose I got to try.”

  Then, as the end of a dock miraculously appeared about ten feet off our bows: “Never goin’ to make it. Lard Jesus, not going to make it!”

  When people on the dock began yelling that we were going to make a hole in their island, Riggs stepped out on the bridge wing and shouted back:

  “What’re you silly fuckers worryin’ about? We’re right as houses! Finest kind!”

  With which he pulled the engine telegraph to FULL ASTERN, and Baccalieu kissed the dock.

  An hour later we continued on our way and, with the coming of a pallid dawn, Riggs turned the bridge over to the second mate and took me with him down to the saloon for breakfast.

  “You’ll do, Little Man,” he said over his fourth mug of tea. “Long as you knows enough to keep your mouth shut when you’re ignorant, you’re welcome aboard of this one.”

  Through our subsequent friendship he continued to call me Little Man, and to treat me with the affectionate impatience he might have shown a slightly backward son. I learned a lot about Newfoundland and Newfoundlanders from Skipper Riggs.

  A ruddy-faced, burly lump of a man, Riggs had been born in the small settlement of Burin on the shores of Placentia Bay. He was as much a child of the sea as of the land. At the age of eight he had gone to the Grand Banks aboard a fishing schooner owned by an uncle. By the time he was twelve he had a berth as fo’c’sle hand, and at fifteen was fishing down the Labrador. At twenty he got his mate’s papers and signed on aboard an English tramp freighter to spend the next several years travelling the world and, incidentally, picking up some of the worst of the argot used by British seamen. In 1936 he became the freighter’s Master. In 1943 she was sunk under him by a German U-boat. After the war, so he told me, he decided to “settle down, so I married a maid from Fortune and, I supposes you could say, married the Baccalieu as well.”

  His was hardly a settled life
. He had managed to get home for Christmas only once since 1946. His working schedule consisted of two months aboard his ship, followed by a month ashore. When he got home he was often unable to sleep, only able to doze with one ear cocked for trouble. He seldom slept while on board because the ship ran day and night and he was usually on the bridge, and always on call.

  Although he could, and did, gorgeously curse the world around him, and everything in it including his beloved Baccalieu, he never seemed to have a hard word for any of his crew, though he had no patience with shore-side management.

  “I got to keep the old bitch going come hell or high water, into and out of places a duck would leave alone. Places there ain’t even room to change your mind, and do it any time, day or night, in any kind of weather. They’s got to be accidents, and there is. And when some damn fool thing goes wrong, the skipper gets suspension, whether he be at fault or no. But we don’t do it for they office fuckers in St. John’s. We works for the people on the coast. The thanks we gits comes from them. I believe there’s nothing on God’s earth they wouldn’t do for we. Or we for they.”

  He told me Baccalieu had not been dry-docked for a year and her bottom was so foul with marine growth that “the silly old bitch won’t steer anyways at all. Radar’s no good and the chief keeps the engine going with curses and prayers. Needs a rest, the old she-cunt do, and so do I.”

  I had come on this voyage to see Newfoundland, but was not seeing much of it except for the insides of the Baccalieu. I wrote in my journal:

  The fog is impenetrable. It defies the laws of probability that Riggs can take this vessel in and out of places a seal would have trouble navigating on a sunny day…. We came into Grand Bruit (the name means Big Noise) at 0700 hours and never saw a bloody thing. A dory came out of the murk and took off a woman passenger bound for some place called Otter Point; then we were away again…. Burgeo was next. According to the chart it has about 100 islands and three thousand reefs. The Baccalieu went through the middle of them like shit through a goose and I never saw a thing except some blacker shadows in the darkness. He did it by the horn! He blew the damn thing every few seconds, and said he could tell where we were by the sound echoing off the rocks! So help me God, that’s what he said.