Eastern Passage

by Farley Mowat

Just beyond Lac Saint-Pierre we began seeing vessels more our own size. They were goélettes, roughly built schooners, family-owned and family-worked. They had a casual and friendly air that drew us to them. Some miles above Quebec we came upon several anchored in a cove and, with engine trouble again upon us, we sought sanctuary amongst them.

  Their people told us they were waiting for the tide to rise before continuing upstream to deliver cargoes of pulpwood to a paper mill. We had not realized that the ocean’s tides penetrated this deeply into the continent, for we were freshwater sailors who knew little about such arcane things. The goélette people explained that when tide and current were both flowing eastward, it was foolish to waste costly gasoline trying to buck them.

  “C’est bon pour vous,” they said. “You go down the river. We go up … but not until after supper, when the tide is change.”

  Several men came aboard to sip our rum and listen to our laments about the bullgine. Then they produced a fuel filter and a roll of copper tubing and installed a new fuel system for us, refusing to accept any payment. They even politely refused to share the dinner I had cooked.

  I had made a sausage ragout served on a bed of steamed rice. But Bonnet had no refrigeration and the sausages had been aboard so long they had turned a purplish-green. Moreover, the carrots were mouldy and the onions soft and slimy. As a final touch, kerosene had somehow managed to permeate the rice. Delicious aromas wafted from the galleys of the goélettes as we three surreptitiously scraped most of our supper overboard. I did keep the pot of rice and next day tried to turn it into a “dessert” by adding dried figs, cocoa, canned milk, and a bit of marmalade. Neither Angus nor the usually insatiable Murray asked for a second helping.

  With the tide speeding the river current eastward, we started the bullgine, and the goélette people waved us on our way. Darkness fell, and Murray and my father went below as my watch began. I took considerable satisfaction in being able to identify each navigation light as it winked into being across dark waters and in steering a straight course toward it. There was less pleasure in steering so confidently when I eventually realized I was following the masthead light of a big ship bound for God alone knew where. Nevertheless, we made a good passage that night, reaching Quebec an hour before dawn.

  I was about to drop into my bunk when we were hailed by an approaching motor launch. The burly fellow who clambered from it was Captain Robert Naish, skipper of the Foundation Josephine, a large, seagoing rescue tug berthed a mile away. Naish told us he had come at the request of my aunt Frances Thomson, secretary to the president of a company called Foundation Maritime, who had asked him to brief us on the difficulties we might encounter on our passage to the sea. Captain Naish did this with great thoroughness, while inflating our egos by punctiliously addressing Angus as Captain Mowat, as if the two shared equal professional stature.

  After refuelling we passed close under the grim walls of the mighty Citadel and came abreast of Foundation Josephine – a sleek and powerful vessel possessing something of the aura of a naval ship. I rather importantly saluted her with three toots from the tin trumpet that served as our foghorn and Josephine gallantly replied with three mighty blasts from her siren that resounded all around the harbour. I glanced involuntarily over my shoulder to see if some royal yacht warranted the commotion. But it was only us. We straightened our bonnets, grinned smugly at one another, and left Quebec astern.

  We passed downriver with the old city sun-hazed behind us, the magnificence of Montmorency Falls to the north, and the gigantic hull of the world’s largest tanker in a shipyard on the south shore. A storm threatened but we did not care for we were in an exuberant mood.

  We thought our troubles were behind us. The bullgine thought otherwise. As we cleared the foot of Orleans Island, it began to sputter and balk, forcing us to spend the rest of the night mostly adrift while we drained its clogged pipes, each time praying there would be enough juice left in the batteries to start it one more time. The channel remained far too narrow for comfort and was crowded with hurrying ships, including a huge passenger liner to whom Bonnet, with her black hull and her tiny oil-lamp navigation lights, must have been almost invisible.

  Nightfall was made worse by the onslaught of a summer storm that cut visibility to nothing, and the traffic grew heavier until it seemed to us that every damn ship in the North Atlantic had chosen this particular night to sashay up or down the river. Skittering back and forth, we would sometimes try to sneak in behind a down-bound vessel then churn along in her wake as long as we could.

  At one point we became aware of a peculiar frothing in our own wake. A great light dawned on Angus, and he leapt below to the pump in the galley sink. He reappeared a moment later with a glass of water that he thrust toward me. I tasted it and sputtered, for it was salt water. Although we were still nearly a thousand miles from the sea, the tide had brought the sea to us.

  Dawn found us off Goose Cape on course for Murray Bay, the nearest harbour where we thought we might be able to find help for our ailing engine. But we found little aid in Murray Bay, home to Manoir Richelieu, a vast hotel with a castle complex catering to rich tourists. Like the inhabitants of most tourist towns, the locals were querulous and grasping. They filled our fuel tank but offered no solutions to our other problems. Frustrated and grumpy we limped back into the river stream, where the bullgine died again. Luckily a breeze sprang up so we hoisted all sail and were soon belting downstream fast enough to nearly match the pace of the big ships.

  Because of an enduring anachronism in the international Law of the Sea (applicable to all navigable waters, fresh or salt), which stated categorically that a vessel under sail had the right of way over one propelled by an engine, we now had an advantage over the big fellows. This was a heady prospect, though not one we were anxious to put to the test.

  I spent much of this day in the “engine room” – a space under the cockpit almost wholly occupied by the engine, leaving just enough room for one man to wriggle about. With the overhead hatch in place, there was no daylight so a flashlight had to serve. After what seemed like endless hours of poking about, I discovered that a minute crack had developed in the exhaust manifold through which water – salt water now – was spurting to short-circuit the coil and sometimes the spark plugs too.

  My cure for this was to construct a sort of baffle out of an empty soup can and fix it to the manifold with a length of wire. Then I crawled out of my dungeon and Angus, who was at the tiller, tentatively pressed the starter. The bullgine coughed, failed, and coughed again. Then all three good cylinders fired, and soon she was running as robustly and steadily as anyone could wish.

  We were in the North Channel not far from the mouth of the Saguenay River when Murray, on lookout in the bow, spotted a large, corpse-white something just beneath the surface directly in our path. At his shout I hauled the tiller hard over and Bonnet swung to port. We avoided a collision but came close enough to recognize the almost-submerged object as a twenty-foot-long beluga whale, one of a population of these normally arctic sea mammals which had colonized the river’s estuary eons earlier.

  This beluga was clearly sick or injured for it made no move to avoid us and even seemed to have difficulty keeping the breathing hole on the top of its barrel-sized head above the surface. An exhalation of its breath stank so strongly of decay that Murray covered his mouth and nose with his hands.

  As Bonnet drew away, a black-backed gull, as much a harbinger of death at sea as the vulture is on land, swooped past to alight upon a small exposed portion of the whale’s back and begin ripping up skin and blubber with its long, hooked beak.

  Murray was much distressed by his first encounter with one of the Great Ones of the Deeps. I assured him we would meet more belugas, probably many more, and told him how, in 1946 when I was returning to Canada aboard a Dutch freighter, I had stood on her bridge as we were passing the mouth of the Saguenay and seen half a dozen pods totalling perhaps fifty or sixty white whales sporting around
our lumbering ship. I also told him of having seen several of the truly great whales – blues and fins – as well as sei and pilot whales in the waters we were now entering.

  “Where the Saguenay empties into the St. Lawrence,” I told him, “we cross the hundred-fathom line, which means we’ll have six hundred feet of very cold water under our keel. That cold water welling up into the warm river water is full of nutrients producing an explosion of plankton that attracts pods of every sort of whale. So many used to gather here to feed that ships’ crews were sometimes scared to sail after dark for fear of hitting whales and sinking their own vessels.

  “Sometime before the year 1500 – before Columbus, anyhow – this whale bonanza was discovered by European fishermen, mostly Basques, who began coming here with dozens of big ships to harpoon whales for oil and for a kind of springy bone called baleen that the plankton-eating whales grow in their mouths as strainers.

  “The Basques named the region Bay of Whales – well named, because it took the whaling fleets of Spain, Portugal, France, England, the U.S.A., and finally Norway nearly four hundred years to do it, but by 1939 they had butchered so many whales here that the whaling business itself was about to go belly-up.

  “Then the war came along and gave the remaining whales a second chance because people were too busy killing each other to hunt them. Though some were still killed by floating mines, by warships and submarines blowing each other up, and by planes using whales for target practice, the whales did get a bit of a breather and their numbers began to climb again.

  “When I came this way in 1946, the place was beginning to reclaim its old name and fame. If you keep your eyes skinned you should see a good few from here on.”

  I was dead wrong about that. The only whale Bonnet encountered during the whole of her long voyage to Halifax, south to New York, and eventually back to Lake Ontario was that one sick beluga we met near the Saguenay.

  As evening fell the breeze freshened, filling Bonnet’s red sails until they were “hard and by,” and sending her bounding along almost fast enough to overtake a rusty old Greek freighter. Neither Angus nor I got much rest that night since it needed two of us to steer and to handle sail because there was a plague of steamers on the estuary. However, since we now had plenty of water under foot, we took to ignoring the buoys and sailing more or less where the wind would take us – and where big ships dared not go.

  We had now travelled so far north that dawn brightened the sky at 2:30 in the morning and a red sun oozed over the horizon an hour later as we bowled along past Father Point pilot station, where several big ships idled in the stream waiting to drop off or take on river pilots.

  At breakfast time, we altered course for Rimouski harbour where, as Captain Naish had told us, another Foundation Company tug was stationed whose skipper would brief us about the waters of the Gulf, now a little less than two hundred miles ahead. After feeling our way past a wreck in the harbour mouth, we spotted a rather elderly looking tug bearing Foundation Company’s white-and-green colours on her funnel. As we headed for her, a tousle-haired fellow, dressed more like a farmer than a deep-sea mariner, stepped out on the wing of the bridge and beckoned us alongside. A deckhand took our lines and made us fast while Captain Ira Powers told us he had received a radio call from Naish asking him to look out for “a little black sailboat with three Scotsmen aboard.”

  Powers, a native Nova Scotian, invited us to join him for an enormous “bluenose” breakfast featuring pickled herring and cold fatback pork then took us into his chart room for a briefing about what lay ahead. He was concerned we might have trouble with a massive causeway being built across the Strait of Canso to link Cape Breton Island with mainland Nova Scotia. He warned us that if we hoped to go through the Gut, as he called it, we had better get a move on because the narrow gap still remaining in the causeway was about to be closed, and it would be months before a lock and canal through it was completed. If we missed this window, circumnavigating Cape Breton would add almost three hundred miles to our trip.

  But, just a week earlier, he told us, Vera had been summoned to the aid of a big freighter that had been flung so violently against the rim rocks, while trying to get through the gap against a rising tide, that she had torn a ten-foot hole in her bow and had to be towed to Halifax for repairs.

  Seventy-year-old Powers, who had been going to sea – mostly in tugboats – for half a century, liked to yarn. During the war he had towed many disabled merchant ships to safety in Nova Scotia, Newfoundland, east-coast United States, and Icelandic ports after they had been savaged by winter storms or, worse still, by the torpedoes, guns, and bombs of German U-boats and long-range planes.

  I also spent several hours with the Vera’s first mate, who had soldiered in First Division in Italy. Over a drink of rum to celebrate our survival there, we recalled the hell of Cassino when twelve hundred of our biggest guns had opened fire on the Hitler Line fortifications blocking our advance, and wave after wave of RAF and U.S. bombers had dropped their lethal loads into the inferno below.

  Surprisingly, the mate considered that the most horrific explosion he had ever experienced had occurred here in the St. Lawrence River. In November of 1950 he had been skippering a goélette out of the north-shore village of Saint-Siméon. His vessel was at anchor waiting for the tide to turn when “Hell blew up on the river south of Saint-Fidèle. Was so goddamn loud I could not hear good for a week. Smoke and water shot up so thick it was like night right across the river to Kamouraska.”

  “What the devil happened?”

  He shrugged. “Nobody knows for sure. Later, the radio say a Yankee plane drop a bomb by mistake. When we sailed for Rimouski couple of hours after, dead fish was floating in the water so thick it look like winter ice going out. Dead seals and white whales floating around too. Lots of them. There was a big stink of rotten fish along the shore all the way to Gaspé for weeks after.”

  “You never found out what blew up?”

  “Never! Some foolish people said it might be a Russian air raid. Some said might be an ammunition ship sunk during the war finally blew up, but nobody can say what ship that could have been.”

  Scotch Bonnet got underway early next day and the mysterious explosion slipped out of mind until many years later when, at a time that I was publicly denouncing the stationing of American nuclear weapons on Canadian soil, I recalled what Vera’s mate had told me – and wondered. I did not pursue the matter then and almost half a century would have to pass before the true nature of the “incident” on the St. Lawrence River in 1950 would become clear to me.

  In the summer of 1950 the U.S. government asked the Canadian government for permission to station a force of armed nuclear intercontinental bombers at the Canadian air force base in Goose Bay, Labrador, as a counter measure to a perceived threat of nuclear attacks on North America by the Soviet Union. Canada was assured that the deployment would be temporary, lasting no more than six weeks, and would be implemented with such secrecy that nobody – certainly not the Canadian public – would ever be the wiser. Early in August, Prime Minister Louis St. Laurent acceded to the request, despite public declarations by his government that Canada would never allow nuclear weapons to be stationed on its soil.

  By August 30, the 43rd Bombardment Wing of the U.S. Strategic Air Command (SAC) had established itself at Goose Bay. The Wing was staffed by 616 officers (mainly air crew) and 3,560 other ranks, and equipped with 36 B-50A*

  intercontinental bombers capable of carrying enough atomic weapons to destroy a number of Soviet cities.

  The operations diary of the 43rd’s security section records: “Upon arrival at destination the bomb carriers were met and cleared by Air Police security [and the bombs] were unloaded from the bomb carriers and taken to a restricted storage area … in a forest approximately 4 miles from the base where they were stored 1500 feet from the nearest road. Each unit was guarded 24 hours a day.”

  Once operational at Goose Bay, 43rd Wing, like the fabled
camel in the Bedouin’s tent, showed no inclination of ever leaving. It was still flying out of Goose Bay when I visited that air base in 1953 and did not leave, in the end, until 1971.

  During this occupation there was a continuous interchange of men and equipment between 43rd Wing and its permanent home at Davis-Monthan Air Force Base near Tucson, Arizona, and nuclear bombs were routinely flown back and forth between Labrador and Arizona for inspection and adjustment. On the morning of November 10, 1950, one was loaded aboard B-50 No. 46-038 of the 43rd’s 64th Bomber Squadron. The aircraft was airborne shortly after noon with its eight-man crew and a monster in its belly.

  This was a Mark IV version of Fat Man, the nuclear fission bomb that in 1945 had all but obliterated the Japanese city of Nagasaki. Its core was a sphere of plutonium (Pu-239) surrounded by a sphere of uranium (U-235) which weighed about 445 pounds. This in turn was embedded in the middle of another sphere, about four feet in diameter, consisting chiefly of 4,895 pounds of the high explosives RDX and TNT. At detonation, the chemical explosives were designed to produce an implosion which, sequentially (and almost instantaneously), would crush the inner spheres, initiating a nuclear reaction to produce an explosion equal in power to that of 21,000 tons of TNT.

  This particular bomb had been made “safe for transit” by the removal of the plutonium sphere through a tube built into its core. (The plutonium was referred to as “the pit” because it was at the centre of “the fruit.”) Temporarily separated from its Fat Man, the pit nevertheless travelled with it. The uranium remained in place within the bomb because it could not be removed without dismantling the entire weapon.

  The pilots and navigator of bomber 46-038 began their flight on a course designed to take them west and south across the Canada-U.S. border somewhere in the vicinity of Sault Ste. Marie. After only a few hours, however, the plane ran into trouble when first one, then a second engine failed, leaving just two to keep the bomber airborne.