Eastern Passage

by Farley Mowat

  When desperate efforts to restart the stricken engines were unsuccessful, the crew knew they had either to abandon the bomber in flight or attempt an emergency landing. Bailing out was not really an option. The potential consequences when the unmanned plane inevitably crashed were too horrendous to contemplate. An emergency landing had to be attempted – if a suitably equipped airport could be reached.

  While the captain and navigator urgently conferred, the bomber was labouring in the vicinity of the little north-woods settlement of Chibougamau, 250 miles to the northwest of Quebec City. The nearest airport equipped to handle a B-50 with nuclear material aboard was an SAC base at Van Buren, roughly 440 miles to the eastward, on the U.S. side of the border between Maine and New Brunswick. Van Buren it had to be. However, to have risked a landing there with two engines out and a Fat Man nuclear bomb aboard would have invited an explosion that could have obliterated Van Buren as well as the Canadian town of Saint-Léonard, just across the Saint John River. So Fat Man had to go.

  Strategic Air Command standing orders stipulated that if an atomic bomb had to be jettisoned over friendly or neutral territory, the drop should be made into a large expanse of open water where the consequences could be expected to be less disastrous than over land. Only one suitable drop zone existed on the new course of the crippled Superfortress 46-038 – the St. Lawrence River between Tadoussac and Murray Bay, a stretch of water some forty miles long and up to eighteen wide, with depths as great as six hundred feet.

  Shortly before 1600 on November 10, 1950, the B-50’s bomb bay doors swung open and the Fat Man was dropped.

  Next day the Montreal Gazette reported that St-Alexandre-de-Kamouraska on the south shore of the St. Lawrence River had been rocked by a mighty explosion. The Canadian Encyclopedia records that townsfolk saw a thick cloud of yellow smoke spiralling up a thousand metres above the middle of the river. Then came a low rumble that shook houses for forty kilometres around.

  Vera’s mate had described to me a smoke or vapour pillar towering so high it mingled with the cloud deck overhead. He thought the explosion must have taken place ten or fifteen miles to the south of Saint-Siméon where his vessel was lying. A subsequent wave surge from that direction nearly caused his goélette to break out her anchor and go adrift.

  Some time after the event, the U.S. Air Force issued a succinct notice to the effect that one of its four-engined bombers had accidentally dropped some 500-pound practice bombs into the St. Lawrence River while on a training flight.

  There the matter rested until almost fifty years later when the Canadian Minister of National Defence stated for the first time that an American B-50 from Goose Bay carrying a Mark IV nuclear bomb had lost its cargo over the St. Lawrence River.

  Recent releases of previously secret documents from the Pentagon reveal that there were at least two other similar accidents in the United States during 1950. On July 13, a B-50 carrying a Fat Man bomb stalled soon after takeoff and crashed between the Ohio towns of Lebanon and Mason, killing the four officers and twelve airmen aboard and causing an explosion that was heard 25 miles away and blew a crater 200 feet in diameter and 25 feet deep. The U.S. Air Force denies that any nuclear materials contributed to this explosion.

  Then, on August 5, another B-50 Superfortress carrying a Fat Man experienced propeller and landing-gear problems while taking off from Fairfield-Suisun airfield in California. The pilots attempted to make an emergency landing, but the plane crashed, causing a huge explosion that killed 19 aboard the plane and severely injured as many as 173 residents of mobile homes in the vicinity of the crash. The USAF attributes this massive explosion to conventional 500-pound bombs that happened to be aboard.

  A Pentagon report on the St. Lawrence River incident in November of 1950 now claims the plane jettisoned an empty Mark IV (Fat Man) casing and three conventional 500-pound high-explosive bombs, the blast from which “was felt for 25 miles.”

  We will probably never know the bomb’s exact point of impact, but it must have been somewhere between Cap-à-l’Aigle on the north shore and St-Germain de Kamouraska on the south side of the river, in a body of water 12 to 14 miles in diameter with an average depth of about 35 fathoms (210 feet). The high-explosive component would have detonated on impact. Since the “pit” had been removed from the bomb, plutonium would not have been involved but the uranium sphere must have been blown to smithereens and its extremely toxic dust scattered into the air and into the waters of the St. Lawrence.

  One can only guess at what must have happened to life in the river, and on land beneath the prevailing west-east airflow downstream from the point of impact. However on January 12, 1988, New York Times correspondent Philip Shabecoff published an article in that newspaper about a mysterious die-off of beluga whales in the St. Lawrence which since the 1950s had reduced the beluga colony there from an estimated 1,200 to about 450. Pollution was suspected of being the cause, but the identity of the pollutant had not been established. Shabecoff’s piece also noted that the region of the beluga die-off “has Canada’s highest level of human birth defects, although no direct cause-effect relationship has been shown.”

  Over the years, scientists have autopsied more than eighty beluga corpses discovered along the shores of the St. Lawrence, and Dr. Pierre Beland of the St. Lawrence Institute of Ecotoxicology has reported finding “lesions of a kind never before reported in marine mammals, as well [as] tumours in numbers 10 times greater than normally found.” And Dr. Lee Shugart of the Oak Ridge National Laboratory concludes the dead whales had been exposed to a substance “that would produce cancer in laboratory animals.” Their findings were reported in Shabecoff’s article, but apparently nobody has yet undertaken tests to establish what contaminants might have been involved.

  Before the war, blue, fin, sei, and pilot whales were all present in the Gulf and in the St. Lawrence inland as far as the Saguenay River region. For many years after 1950, few were seen. And for some years after 1950, grey seals, harbour seals, and porpoises reportedly were scarce in the estuary, where previously they had been common. Additional anecdotal evidence given to me by fishermen, mariners, and other observers in the estuary and the Gulf indicates that populations of many species of aquatic or marine-dependent animals suffered significant declines following the explosion. These include several species of sea birds, herring, eels, salmon, squid, and sharks.

  Between 1969 and 1977, I spent several summers on the Magdalen Islands in the Gulf of St. Lawrence. In 1970, the Quebec department of fisheries investigating the commercial shrimp fishing potential there found shrimp in abundance; but no commercial fishery was established because, the captain of the Quebec research vessel told me, the shrimp were “dangerously contaminated.” The source and nature of the contaminant was unknown to him and so far as I know has never been publicly identified.

  On the Magdalens, my wife and I noted a high incidence of cancer among the permanent residents, although there had never been any industrial activity on or around these islands to which this might have been attributed. Fishing and sealing were the only significant commercial activities, and provided the major source of protein for most of the madelinots.

  One morning I came on deck to find the Gaspé coast in view, curving away to the southeast. We were “rounding the bend” into the wide waters of the Gulf of St. Lawrence, and the six-hundred-foot-high limestone cliffs behind Cape Gaspé were looming into distant view. Occasional clusters of tiny houses clinging to the shoreline below the massive brow of the Gaspesian mountains made me wonder how les habitants managed to make a living with only fish, trees, and rocks to draw upon.

  Not long after I took the tiller, we sailed into the midst of a covey of dories bobbing a mile offshore while their two-man crews set and hauled handlines for cod. I altered course to hail one of the little boats and asked in my atrocious French if we could buy a fish. “Mais non, mon ami!” the man in the stern yelled. “We geev you wan!” with which he threw a glistening and still quivering te
n-pound cod onto our deck as we sailed past.

  Angus, who had taken the graveyard watch, was still asleep so Murray relieved me at the helm while I gutted the fish and took it below to cook cod chunks simmered in sea water with a few peppercorns and served with boiled potatoes, the whole smothered in melted butter. We did justice to it. Nothing of that noble fish remained for the gulls except the head and tail; I had sneakily cut out the cheeks and tongue to be later fried in diced salt pork for my own delectation.

  Although sometimes disrupted by untoward events, our days afloat were following a steady pattern. Angus and I kept alternate four-hour watches, beginning at 8:00 in the evening and continuing until 8:00 next morning when Murray, who could now steer a compass course, would take the helm and handle the vessel pretty much on his own while we elders slept or did ship’s chores, wrote up the log, saw to ongoing navigation, and repaired or replaced worn gear – a never-ending task on any sailing vessel.

  Navigation thus far had mostly been from buoy to buoy, from light to light, or from landmark to landmark, a fairly easy task, necessitating only correct identification of the “marks” as shown on the charts or as found in the indispensable St. Lawrence River Pilot. We streamed the patent log during every watch. Our lovely brass affair not only told us how far we had gone but how fast. From it we learned we were averaging five knots. Angus claimed this was a fast passage but Murray complained it was as slow as the tractor-drawn wagon he drove on the Finnerty farm.

  Most of the cooking was done on an alcohol-fuelled Primus stove as the weather was too warm for us to endure the heat from Bonnet’s coal-fed Fisherman range. As I had warned him, Murray was the galley drudge and cabin boy, washing up and attempting to keep things tidy below decks – no easy task at any time and nearly impossible in rough weather. Nevertheless, he did his work with such enthusiasm that Angus promoted him from Ordinary Seaman to Able Seaman.

  Here is how my father’s journal described the way things were aboard and around his little ship, always referring to himself as the Old Man, which is what the captains of great windjammers of old were called by their crews, sometimes in fear and fury, sometimes in admiration.

  Farley had the first watch of the night and the Old Man relieved him at twelve o’clock. The breeze was light and the vessel just poking along at two knots. The sky was all ablaze with stars – too many and too bright. The Old Man did not like the look or the feel of the weather but settled down to watching the compass, a square of unsweetened chocolate in his mouth, his pipe close by while the vessel went her way.

  The wind died down then suddenly came back and settled in northeast. The Old Man let her head pay off, away from land, and hardened the sails. In a trice it was blowing up no end of a to-do. The wind did not grow in strength, it arrived en masse, sweeping up an acre or so of spume all around them and sending Bonnet careening away on the offshore tack. The lights of some little Gaspé village flickered for a minute or two then vanished as the night became coal-black. The sea rose quickly and the tiller began kicking hard against his hand. The vessel bucked and pranced and flung up spray that burst in the crimson arc of her port-side running light.

  There was noise enough now for anybody; shouts of wind in the rigging up aloft; the smash of her bows against the seas; and a disgusting clatter from the cabin where the kettle, Murray’s dishpan, and sundry other things came adrift and fought back and forth across the floor.

  Farley never seemed to turn a hair or waken, but Murray did. He scrambled on deck and crawled to join the Old Man in the steering well. He was in his underwear and shivered with the cold when the spray flicked him in his face, which was greenish-pallid in the dim light reflecting from the compass lamp.

  “What’s happening now?” he asked plaintively.

  “Nothing, Murray. Just a hatful of wind.”

  “Do you want me to do anything?”

  “No, thanks.”

  “Okay,” he said gratefully and began to crawl below again. Then he turned and summoned up a grin. “I’ll go back to bed if that’s okay. Wake me when it’s over.”

  And that, the Old Man thought, was pretty casual, and pretty stout, for a lad who had never been tossed about in a gale of wind before.

  The way the sea got up, and the steepness of it, was a great surprise to him, an inland-waters sailor all his life. But the chart said there was 150 fathoms – nine hundred feet – beneath her keel and a fetch of 150 sea miles to the tip of Anticosti Island, the nearest weather shore. That was a great comfort since it meant they had sea-room enough that, if she didn’t lose a mast or spring a desperate bad leak, they ought to come to no great harm before the wind blew itself out.

  It grew very cold. The stars were gone and there was no sky, and the spume and spindrift tore by so close overhead that the mainmast seemed to be thrusting into it like a giant spear. And then Bonnet ducked her head and buried her face so deep in a breaking sea that the decks ran blacker than night and ripped the tarpaulin off the forward hatch so that buckets of salt water came through right onto the Old Man’s bunk below.

  The Old Man himself was now quite soaked beneath his oilskins and he was glad when his watch was over and Farley climbed on deck. Farley must have suspected things were getting rough for he already had his oilskins on, and rubber boots. He braced himself in a corner of the cockpit and looked around to see how things stood; then he began to grumble.

  “You’ve wet your bed again.”

  “Yes, I know. What business is it of yours?”

  “That’s no way to speak to your son on a night like this. You are the damnedest man!… Look … there should be two on deck on a night like this … what’s the course?”

  “There isn’t any. She’s just going full-and-by but I think we’re about twenty miles off the Gaspé shore. Maybe we should go to the inshore tack and see where she’ll fetch up?”

  So it was “Hard a lee!” and, like the excellent sea-boat she was, she never faltered. On the inshore tack now, the Old Man went below to take his rest. As he lay in his soaked sleeping bag staring up at the leaking hatch, he remembered some of the words of a sailor’s song from long ago.

  Fared we upon wide billows,

  Cold lie the skies above.

  Cold lie the seas below …

  Next day the strength of the gale abated and the seas went down as they again approached the land. Then they coasted a mile offshore, almost in the shadow of gigantic, rounded hills where, here and there, a Canadien family clung to an up-tilted little farm and to the hard and meagre independence it gave them for reward.

  Toward evening Bonnet raised the improbable silhouette of Percé Rock, an immense, white limestone hulk with a mighty hole punched through it by the sea. The day was crisp and clear and the wind, from abaft now, drove us along so swiftly we were soon closing with the rock, whose splendour left us almost speechless, as Jacques Cartier is supposed to have been when in the year 1535 he stood on his poop deck gaping at this same spectacle, and could only express his amazement with the phrase “Sacré bleu!”

  We laid course for the narrow channel separating Percé from the rugged, sheer-walled, and towering island of Bonaventure. As we drew close, the whole of the narrow plateau on its top and the innumerable ledges on its nearly vertical sides became a black-and-white blur of tens of thousands of nesting gulls, gannets, and cormorants. The stench of their droppings was palpable and the sound of their cries echoing from the cliff faces was almost deafening.

  Ahead of them [Angus wrote] lay a thirty-mile open-water crossing of the mouth of Chaleur Bay but they had the kind of wind only granted to the devout. What a sail it was! The seas grew high and came clambering after Bonnet, reaching up to swamp her from behind but she reacted to them happily and when one had passed under she would split the next one on her sharp Norwegian stern and never take a drop on deck. The log was giving her eight knots, a thing hardly to be believed, but it had to be because the fine old instrument, made a hundred years ago, was never known to falsify
a fathom in its reckoning.

  Halfway across, the Old Man remembered that the bullgine’s exhaust pipe, which leads outside through a hole in her port buttock, was open. So he roused Farley and announced:

  “We’re going to stuff the exhaust hole with rags to make sure the salt water doesn’t get to the engine head again.”

  Farley looked resigned.

  “We?”

  “Yes. But Murray and I will do the hard part. We’ll hold your feet.”

  They put a line about his waist – just in case – and held him while he stood on his head in the Gulf of St. Lawrence and pushed and pounded one of Murray’s dish cloths into the hole. The hole is at the waterline, and the deck was high above. Farley was rather slow, and the Old Man scolded nervously. After each succeeding sea rolled by, Farley got a little air, then they could hear him swear. When at length they hauled him back aboard he was indignant. Salt water drained from his hair and beard and down his shirt and into his rubber boots.

  “I stuffed it up her,” he grumbled, “but it’s all a waste of time you know.”

  “Why would that be?”

  “Because you can’t start your damn old engine anyhow. The batteries are dead again. Didn’t you know?”

  The Old Man changed the subject.

  When we began crossing Baie des Chaleurs, entailing several hours out of sight of land, we set a course on Bonnet’s binnacle compass. This instrument had been salvaged long ago from a sunken Great Lakes barley schooner and was somewhat unreliable – so when we raised land again we were not greatly surprised to find ourselves ten miles off course and dangerously close to the New Brunswick coast. We clawed off, but it had been a near thing. During the remainder of our voyage we had to put our trust in a boat compass – a little thing one could hold in the hand, Boy Scout style.

  Now the wind dropped, leaving us to drift idly through a perfect forest of lobster-pot marker buoys. Murray suggested we haul a few pots for a change in diet but Angus sternly forbad it.