Eastern Passage

by Farley Mowat

  “That would be theft, if not piracy!” he announced, making no mention of his conviction that lobsters are carrion eaters, quite unfit for human consumption.

  We drifted amongst the pots most of the day until, as dusk drew down, we decided to find a harbour for the night. We had no luck. All the little ports within our reach appeared to be barred by shoals that would not admit a vessel of our draft. Consequently we were forced to spend another night in limbo, somewhere in the approaches to the Northumberland Strait, which separates the province of Prince Edward Island from New Brunswick and Nova Scotia.

  With barely enough breeze to give us steerage, Angus and I spent a wakeful night avoiding lobster buoys and the occasional darkened motorboat that probably belonged to fishermen bent on poaching some other fellow’s catch. When dawn broke we were fuming and fretting as we tried to identify something – anything – in a world now veiled by heavy mist. Finally, worn down by fifty-five continuous hours “at sea” we elected to steer directly for where we thought Prince Edward Island ought to be.

  We were a bleary-eyed pair as the sky began to brighten. A light air sprang up to give us a push, chase away the mist, and dimly reveal off to port a shoreline that had to be some portion of Prince Edward Island’s sickle-shaped, hundred-mile southern coast. I was at the helm so I pushed the tiller over and Bonnet obediently swung shoreward. The mist continued to thin and Angus, who was staring ahead through my old army binoculars, suddenly shouted that he could see the shore – and a small steamer lying alongside a wharf there. If there was water enough for a steamer, there would be plenty for us, so we started the sheets and Bonnet fairly bounded toward the land.

  Smiling happily, Angus passed me the binoculars. I strained to see what he had seen – and the steamer became a row of fishermen’s shacks and a ramshackle dock occupied by some lobster boats – which, I knew, drew only half as much water as we did.

  We were sailing full tilt into shoal water.

  I shrieked at Angus to take the helm and bring Bonnet about while I rushed to haul in the headsail sheets. As I did so, I glanced over the side and was horrified to see a cloud of bottom mud stirred up by Bonnet’s forefoot. Leaping to the bow, I heaved our hundred-pound anchor overboard. Fortunately it caught at once, and as I snubbed the chain to the winch-head, Scotch Bonnet stopped abruptly only scant feet from driving hard aground.

  An audience of five or six fishermen on the wharf had been watching this manoeuvre with great interest. Now one of them called out, politely wanting to know why we hadn’t used the channel.

  “Because goddamn it to hell it isn’t buoyed!” I shouted furiously.

  They forgave me. Two of them pushed off in a dory and, having helped haul up our anchor, towed us to where the unseen channel began and accompanied us to the rickety old wharf with the solicitude of a mother hen bringing home a vagrant chick.

  Once we had been safely moored, they told us there was no real harbour at West Point, which was where we now were, and if the wind got up from any direction except north we would have to get out pretty smartly or likely be blown ashore. Their boats were all right here, they explained (a big smugly, I thought), because they could haul them up onto the land at the first sign of trouble.

  They also told us we were the first sailing vessel to visit West Point in ages, and one of the few “strangers” ever to put in there. Their hospitality was overwhelming. All ten households adopted us but we became the special charge of Wendell Scott, who had been a lobster fisherman since he was eight years old. He had fished his own boat under sail for thirty years before deigning to install a primitive gasoline engine. Burly and indomitable, Wendell and his perky wife, Daisy, made us welcome in their home, a four-room frame cottage close to the shore. They lived there comfortably on Wendell’s First War army pension, supplemented by his earnings as the community’s unofficial taxi man (he owned the only car for miles around).

  The Old Man slept the night straight through never knowing that men stood watch on the dock, turn by turn, to awaken us in time should the wind get up from the wrong direction. It never did, but in the morning, Murray remembered something.

  “Where’s the boat?” he demanded.

  “What boat?”

  “The steamboat you said you saw.”

  “Oh,” the Old Man said gravely, “she isn’t here just now. She was second-sight, you know. She led us in.”

  Murray snorted. “I don’t think there never was no steamer … sir.”

  Whereupon Farley roared, “Quiet, you farmer! You’ll grow up to be nothing but another bloody sceptic if you don’t watch out!”

  Both Wendell and Daisy were blessed with inquiring minds. They read as many books and magazines as were available, and every summer they filled Wendell’s old car with camping gear to explore the world as far afield as New York, Cape Breton, and Quebec City. They had not yet gone to the far north but planned to do so as soon as Wendell finished building a boat capable of taking them there.

  Meanwhile, they and their car were at our service. The day after our arrival, Wendell drove Murray and me to the village of O’Leary, five miles away, where the owner of the one-pump garage put our ancient batteries on charge, but could not sell us any new ones because he had none.

  “Guess you got to go to Albert [Alberton],” he told us regretfully. “But while you’re there, bring back the parcel of parts that’s waiting for me and” – with a long wink at Wendell – “maybe something to wash ’em down with.”

  Wendell used the trip to Albert – only twenty-five miles, but an hour’s drive because of the rambling nature and fearful quality of the red-dirt roads – as an excuse to give us a tour of the western portion of the island. Scenic it was not, being generally scrub-covered “barrens” with occasional rundown-looking strip farms mostly given over to weeds and potatoes.

  “We get along pretty much on just three things,” Wendell told us. “Lobsters, potatoes, and moonshine. The last two kind of go together, if you get what I mean, and lobsters keeps us from starving.”

  These fishermen-farmer-distillers built their own boats, round-bellied launches thirty or so feet long, open to the weather except for a small wheelhouse and cuddy up forward. They drew only two feet of water, an imperative in this region of sandbars and shallow harbours. Their engines were mostly old car motors locally adapted for marine use.

  Usually two men, often a father and one of his sons, fished together.

  We learned that a fisherman’s work began in winter, building the half-cylinder traps that are about three feet long and made of laths and netting. The finished trap was thoroughly tarred to keep the teredo worm from eating the woodwork.

  The men began fishing for the season’s herring bait early each spring, hard labour, hauling and setting nets often in brutal weather. Vast numbers of herring were salted down in hogsheads (large barrels) and stored in fish shacks by the shore. When the season officially opened, the skipper and his helper loaded their boat and headed for their grounds, which might be from a hundred yards to several miles out. The best grounds were rocky shallows bordered by abrupt deeps, though lobsters inhabited almost all parts of the strait. Each boat set from three hundred to a thousand traps in “bunches” of up to twenty, each bunch carefully buoyed (“booeed”) with a float that would remain visible regardless of the state of the tide. The vast expanses of water where the traps were set became jungles of buoys through which even a small boat threaded its way with difficulty.

  With at least fifteen hundred dollars’ worth of gear on the bottom (a single trap was worth at least five dollars), the men and their women watched the weather uneasily since a heavy northwester could destroy most of a winter’s laboriously constructed gear.

  Wendell took Murray and me to visit a little cannery at Alberton run by a very old gentleman with a rum-blossom nose and alcoholic breath. He showed us through his ancient plant with pride. Murray much admired the dexterity with which the packers – women and girls – tickled every morsel of m
eat out of the shells. Beaming with pride, the owner accompanied us step by step and was so pleased by our interest that he gave us six steaming-hot lobsters, which we ate while sitting on the running board of Wendell’s car.

  As we stuffed ourselves, Wendell recalled having once caught a giant lobster weighing twenty-three pounds that, unable to enter the trap through the entrance provided, had torn a way in with its claws. One claw, emptied of its meat, held a gallon and a half of water. He also told us of a man who once caught six hundred dollars’ worth of lobster in a single day at the beginning of a singularly good season when “lobsters were as thick as lice on an old dog.” Now, he told us grimly, there was “a fisherman for every lobster.”

  While in Alberton we met two young women from O’Leary who needed a ride home. They had just lost their few remaining, caries-ridden teeth to a travelling dentist who would eventually supply them with dentures. Their faces were as swollen as if pushed into a beehive and they were pretty glum, but they cheered up when Wendell not only offered them a ride but also promised to “find a little something to ease the pain.” And soon after leaving town, he pulled up before a ramshackle farmhouse. He went inside and soon returned carrying a milk bottle full of a murky brown liquid. Some of this he poured into each of the toothless ladies, bringing grimaces and smiles to their sore faces. Wendell then offered Murray and me a swig. After one suspicious sniff, Murray refused, but I swallowed a mouthful of what was so nearly straight alcohol it would probably have burned in our Primus stove.

  Wendell was a mine of information about the moonshine trade. He took us on a ten-mile detour over dusty red roads to show us a panel truck that, ten days earlier laden with moonshine, had been seized by the constabulary. It was now back in its owner’s hands and back in business.

  “They’ll never nail that feller down!” Wendell said with satisfaction. “They dasn’t dare: he supplies the most of the hooch the politicians use to buy votes come election time!”

  Angus had not gone with us on our exploration, claiming he had chores to do.

  The Old Man was working at a borrowed tin washtub on the grassy plot in front of the Scott cottage, looking out to a sweep of reddish sand where children played, oh so quietly. They were not slow exactly, and certainly not subdued or listless. They had a poise that matched that of their elders, but they could fling themselves into the shallows with abandon and when they did the spray was bright in the sunlight and glowed for an instant with a red reflection from the underwater sands.

  Out at the end of the pier Scotch Bonnet lay at rest, and Ronnie was at his self-appointed tasks. Ronnie had made himself ships-keeper. He was a lean, grave boy of twelve, silent, thoughtful, and strong as a good rope. The Old Man watched in some awe as Ronnie, on his hands and knees, scrubbed down the decks and white-work.

  Then Daisy Scott came out of her kitchen with two more steaming pails. She looked at the water in the tub and said, “You’d better change it now.”

  The Old Man did as he was told, and they fell into quiet talk. The kind that requires no effort to maintain; an easy and random exchange between neighbours. It drifted into talk of books, which came naturally because reading played a large part in people’s lives at West Point, especially in winter time. This was a thing not in the least surprising. The Old Man had known for years that someone who lives with books will find talk about them everywhere, often far from pavement.

  When the water in the tub grew cold the Old Man emptied it, removed the tub to the woodshed, refilled it, and gave himself a thorough lathering with yellow soap.

  Then Wendell and the Old Man’s crew came back after exploring as much of Prince Edward Island as could be done in a day. Murray looked like a boy who has fallen in love – a rapt expression on his face, and he was mumbling to himself.

  “Twenty-pound lobsters!” he kept saying. “Six hundred dollars a day! Boy, I’m staying right here! No more farming in them burnt-out Albion Hills for me! Lobster fishing, that’s the life!”

  Wendell shook his head. “You’d starve to death once all that puppy fat was used up.”

  “But you said yourself …”

  “I know I did. I said one man brought in six hundred dollars’ worth … once. And that was a long time ago, before every spud farmer that could turn the switch of a gas engine got into the game. No, boy, you’d best stick to your little farm up in the hills wherever.”

  Yes, but there is another side to it. Later on the Old Man read Farley’s journal for this day and it said:

  “The houses are small and simple, set in red fields. It was clear the land was poor, but perhaps because of that the people had not yet lost the need and the desire to work closely with one another on even terms. The people we met in stores, garages, and on the dusty streets of the little villages seemed to accept each other and us strangers as easily as if we were all relatives from the same family. They were not effusive, but they were sincerely interested in us and our problems and anxious to help solve them for us. I think maybe this whole damn island is one big neighbourhood.”

  I suspect we all felt we would be glad to spend a year or so at West Point, but it could not be. Not only was our mooring exposed to every onshore wind but the tides in the strait rise and fall in ways no one can predict. We were told low tides sometimes stayed low for as long as twenty hours and could go low enough to dry out the wharf completely. Having no wish to see Bonnet stranded high and dry, we were becoming increasingly uneasy. Our unease increased as we heard horrendous new accounts of the causeway being built in the Canso Gut, now only about 150 miles away.

  The Old Man was quite convinced by now that if Scotch Bonnet entered the remaining gap she would most likely stick there in the middle and then be spewed back out again like a thrown-up fish some cormorant has brought back to feed its young. So he decided they had better get along while the getting was good.

  Scotch Bonnet sailed at dawn and the Old Man never touched land on the red Island again. And will always regret that this was so.

  We laid course for Cap-Egmont, in Northumberland Strait, while almost the entire population of West Point stood on the dock waving farewell.

  There was no wind, and after an hour the bullgine quit, leaving us to drift amongst schools of medusae (jellyfish) hanging just below the surface in wavering patterns like something in a science fiction fantasy. Murray watched them, fascinated, while Angus and I slaved over the engine, but without success. For the rest of that day and most of the night, we idled in a virtual calm until at 2:00 a.m. we got the engine working again – just as a fresh breeze came up.

  Sailing again, we passed through a covey of small boats netting the mackerel that were pursuing schools of small herring, some of which, in their attempts to escape, went soaring into the air like flying fish. While I was on watch, several fishermen playfully motored across our bows, in effect challenging us for the right of way, but I was too tired to play games so I held my course until they gave way, grinning broadly at me as they passed. Later we were overtaken and passed by a little coasting steamer, a very old ship, very dignified and Victorian in appearance. Her duty, we later learned, took her to most of the little ports of P.E.I., then out to the Magdalen Islands and on to Cape Breton. I could think of no happier prospect than ambling around in her on one of her runs.

  By early afternoon we were well down the strait, closing on Pictou Island, and the wind was rising. It was a dead muzzler so we spent four hours beating back and forth against wind and tide, making almost no headway until the tide changed, bringing with it a swelling sea that soon had Bonnet pitching about like a shuttlecock. A pomarine jaeger – an arctic gull that acts like a hawk and is very rare in these parts – came by for a look as we set course to round Cape George. Wind and sea rose inexorably and, as darkness thickened, so did the massive bulk of the cape, the northern extremity of mainland Nova Scotia. By then Angus and I were standing watch an hour on and an hour off, too tired to take longer tricks at the wheel. At 1:00 a.m. we finally rounded
the cape and raised the feeble light of Ballantynes Cove, so packed with fish boats that there was no room for us and we had to moor along the face of the breakwater. The fishermen must have been surprised to see our big black hull when they came down to their boats at dawn, but they were kindly souls and kept their motors barely turning over until well clear of the harbour so as not to waken us.

  We rose late, in this lovely little cove nestled under the forbidding mass of Cape George. A few farms clung to steeply sloping shores, and grey, weather-beaten fish shacks encrusted the foreshore. On the beach a few hundred feet from us was the rusted boiler of a tug driven ashore by a gale and, not far from it, the bones of a small freighter that had tried and failed to find shelter here from a hurricane. Despite these dark omens, we were delighted with the place. Angus sauntered off the dock, to return bearing gifts – three fresh mackerel for me to cook for breakfast. He was accompanied by a bevy of local men, one of whom, the manager of the co-op store, put his car to work ferrying cans of gasoline out to us and then refused payment for the use of the vehicle or the gas.

  Later in the day I chatted with a pair of fishermen who had just returned to the Cove after spending six hours hand-lining for hake and cod off Cape George. They repeated the lament we would hear many times from inshore fishermen of the difficulty of selling their catches for enough money to provide a decent living because of the enormous quantities of fish caught offshore that were being dumped on the market by an ever-growing fleet of big draggers.

  Our pleasant interlude at Ballantynes Cove came to an abrupt end when a fisherman peering over the edge of the breakwater quietly drew Angus’s attention to our propeller shaft and its underwater housing. The stern bearing had come adrift, allowing the shaft to bounce back and forth in a way that would eventually bend the shaft and damage the engine or open a leak that could sink the vessel.

  Repairs were urgently needed, but only a shipyard equipped with a marine railway could haul Bonnet out to be repaired. There was such a yard at Port Hawkesbury, halfway through the Strait of Canso and only fifteen miles from us, but the dreaded Canso Causeway lay between us and the yard – its opening now reduced to a couple of hundred feet, through which the unfettered power of the North Atlantic poured in a thundering tidal race. No vessel could buck such a torrent, but the Cove fishermen thought that, if we were very lucky and very careful, we might make it through at the turn of a tide.