Eastern Passage

by Farley Mowat

  We had a conference. Murray suggested we tie Bonnet to some safe wharf and proceed to Halifax by train. I thought we might try to make our way around the top of Cape Breton Island, but without a reliable engine this detour could take days and Angus had no time to spare. So, there being nothing else for it, we decided to attempt the Gut.

  We took our departure soon after first light next day, under sail. However, as we met the sweep of the open gulf the weather closed down, bringing rain and southeasterly wind squalls right on Bonnet’s nose. This gave us no choice but to use the engine. Very tentatively we started it up, and slowly, slowly Bonnet limped eastward. We entered Canso Strait four hours later just as a rising tide began flowing through it against us.

  We had hoped to find a fisherman or some such water-farer here from whom we could get local knowledge and advice, but wind, rain, and fog seemed to have swept the strait clear of human life. Then, with fearsome suddenness, the ragged black mass of the causeway loomed dead ahead. Built like a gigantic battlement from hundreds of thousands of tons of stone blasted from a nearby mountain, it was pierced only by a gap that looked narrower than a two-lane highway, through which the incoming tide was already flowing like a mighty river.

  At the sight of it, Angus reflexively hauled the tiller hard over, making Bonnet pivot like a deer encountering a panther in its path. We were circling, wondering what was to be done when a Norwegian freighter emerged from the mists behind us, running straight for the gap at full speed. As we watched in horror, she plunged into it with no more than a couple of dozen yards’ clearance on either side. Though she must have been making ten knots, the current slowed her to half that. We watched with mounting apprehension as fountains of white water burst over her bows and washed across her fore-deck. Then – miraculously, it seemed – she was through and steaming triumphantly eastward.

  I glanced at Murray. I don’t know about my expression, but his was piteous.

  “We’re not going into that, are we?” he pleaded.

  I glanced at Angus, who drew himself up and became a Canadian Captain Bligh.

  “We’ve missed the turn of the tide. It’s flooding now and it’ll get stronger by the minute. In half an hour, we won’t have the chance of a snowball in hell of getting through! Mate! Give the bullgine everything it’s got. Stand by all hands!”

  The current was now sluicing through the gap like “shit through a goose,” as Murray later put it. But providentially an eddy had formed on our side and somehow we were able to claw up into it, almost scraping the rocks to port until we were within a few hundred feet of the curling lip of the overflow. Against all odds the bullgine continued to haul us ahead, inch by laborious inch, until unbelievably we were through! But not finished. We expected at every instant that the shaft bearing would go adrift, but somehow it held as we crept into the shelter of Port Hawkesbury’s harbour.

  A long, lean fellow standing at the end of Langley’s Shipyard wharf waved imperiously at us. Jut-jawed and rakishly handsome Harry Langley, son of the yard’s owner, took our lines, made us fast, and leapt aboard with a mock salute and a greeting that carried a sting in its tail.

  “You fellows should be ten fathoms under! What the devil possessed you to try pushing your old barge through the causeway against a rising tide? Don’t you give a damn … or don’t you know any better? Ah, well. You’re mainlanders, aren’t you?”

  He had been observing the causeway as we approached it.

  “I figured you must’ve thought you were on a Sunday School picnic. I guess you know different now. Well, you’ve made it somehow, what can we do for you?”

  My father’s pride was so ruffled he stomped down below, leaving me to deal with things. After I explained our difficulties, Harry leaned perilously over Bonnet’s stern, took a long look, then straightened, grinned, and said,

  “Not to worry. We can fix that. And there’s no need to haul your vessel up on our slipway – that’d be expensive. As you maybe noticed, there’s a lovely big tide in the Gut. So just run your tub’s nose onto the land alongside the government wharf over there, and when the tide goes out tonight she’ll be high and dry on the bottom and our shipwrights will have that shaft bearing fixed in a jiffy.”

  Meekly we did as we were told, and Bonnet was soon securely moored at the government wharf, with additional lines strung from the crosstrees to the far side of the wharf to hold her upright after the tide had fallen.

  While we were waiting, a rough-and-ready working schooner about three times Bonnet’s size puttered down the Gut from the eastward and came alongside the wharf ahead of us. The name painted in uncertain script on her bows and stern read Maggie Billard. Her crew consisted of the skipper – a beak-nosed, bouncy little man of about seventy who introduced himself as Dolph (Adolphus) Billard – and his son Josh, who seemed about Murray’s age.

  Skipper Dolph told us they “belonged” to (and had just come from) La Poile, an outport on Newfoundland’s southwest coast, and were bound for the Island for a cargo of potatoes, which they would bring back to the Rock and peddle to the scattered outports.

  “But,” said Skipper Dolph hospitably, “we’s in no hurry, so come aboard, me sons, for a dram and a gam.”

  We scrambled over Maggie’s splintered bulwarks to find ourselves aboard a ship out of another age. Every stick and timber on her was at least twice as heavy as it needed to be, and whatever paint may once have adorned her had long since vanished, revealing naked wood worn to a silvery sheen.

  We followed the skipper down a steep and narrow companion ladder leading from a Spartan wheelhouse into a dungeon of a cabin that he smilingly called the “doghouse.” Low-ceilinged, dark, and dank, it made Murray wrinkle his nose at the potent stench of ancient fish emanating from the gurgling bilges beneath our feet. Crowded into this malodorous little den, we sipped black rum out of chipped porcelain cups and listened, enthralled, as the two Billards yarned about life on their Rock and the seas surrounding it.

  Angus eventually remarked upon the apparent lack of navigating gear and especially the absence of a compass. Skipper Dolph chuckled.

  “’twas like this, Skipper Mowat. We stripped the blades from our screw [propeller] on a trip into the Gulf and never had the dollars for to buy another so I traded me old compass for one.”

  Angus was incredulous.

  “But, good heavens, Captain, how could you find your way without a compass?”

  The skipper looked puzzled, and Josh answered for him.

  “Well, you see, sorr, that old feller, he knows where every place is at. Don’t need no compass, no, nor no chart neither, to find his way about.”

  The talk shifted to boat building, and Skipper Dolph described how he and his sons, with help from relatives and neighbours (the two terms are almost synonymous in a Newfoundland outport), had built the Maggie from timber felled “back in the country” and dragged out to salt water by horses and, when the snow lay really deep, by their black water dogs.

  “Me maids [daughters] and me woman [wife] cut and sewed her canvas. Helped we to cork [caulk] her. And we named her for me eldest maid.

  “Summertime me and some of me boys cruises round the Gulf picking up cargo wherever theys any to be had. Cabbage, coal, potatoes, salt herring, pigs and sheep – any old stuff as needs to go sommers else. One time we did it under sail but that’s gone out. Now we does it with two or three old make-and-break, one-lunger engines rigged so as to keep the vessel going no matter if one of they gives up.

  “Early spring and late fall we takes a full fishing crew and four dories aboard and goes after cod on Burgeo Banks or St-Pierre Banks. That be some cold misery when a winter starm blows up, but we’s good for it and so is Maggie. Times we slips into St-Pierre dark of night so’s the revenue cutter don’t see hide nor hair of we, to buy or trade for rum or alky or black tobacco. Comes nigh to Christmas we might make a voyage to Halifax where goods is cheap and plenty, and bring home flour, butter, sugar, tea, and foolishnesses for the women
and the young ones.

  “After the Christmas jollying, we hauls Maggie up onto the land where the ice can’t chew her up, and goes ashore ourselves. Wintertime we fixes gear, builds a dory or two, goes furrin’ [trapping] into the country, kills a deer [caribou], has ourselves a time now and again – and makes babies. Them as is up to it,” he added with a grin at his son.

  Skipper Dolph reminisced about how, during the years between the two wars, he had shipped aboard big schooners out of Newfoundland and Nova Scotia, sometimes dory fishing on the Grand Banks; sometimes freighting salt cod to the Caribbean islands and returning north with cargoes of salt, rum, and sugar; sometimes carrying “made fish” (dried, salted cod) right across the Western Ocean (the Atlantic) to markets in Spain, Portugal, and Italy.

  I might have been in Maggie Billard’s cabin yet had not Harry Langley come stomping aboard late that afternoon to warn us the tide had turned. We hurried on deck, to find the water had already fallen so much that the spiny sculpins that gathered around an adjacent sewage discharge pipe had left for deeper water. By midnight Bonnet’s keel was firmly fixed in bottom mud, and two shipwrights in long rubber boots were at work on her shaft by lamplight.

  When the tide rose again, she was, as Skipper Dolph put it, hale and hearty. But although ready to go back to sea, she was not yet free to do so. The wind had dropped, and in the dead calm that followed, the world vanished under a blanket of fog so thick the end of the wharf was invisible. Nothing was moving in the Gut, and I was about to go back to sleep when the rumble of powerful engines brought me skittering up on deck to find a great black something looming over us. Whatever it might be, it was large enough to crush Scotch Bonnet. I was about to shout a warning to Angus and Murray when a mighty engine roared in reverse and a steel bow slammed into the wharf not five feet from us.

  The newcomer turned out to be one of the big new draggers, fish killers extraordinaire, that we had been hearing about. On the so-called cutting edge of modernity, they were equipped with the latest electronic marvels, enabling them to get about in any weather with the certainty of seeing-eye dogs and to find and follow schools of fish at almost any depths. Within a few days their enormous trawl would fill their holds with fifty to a hundred tons of cod, haddock, hake, redfish, and several other species.

  This one hailed from Saint John, New Brunswick, and was owned by one of the burgeoning international fishing consortiums. Her skipper was of a different breed from Dolph Billard. When he came out onto the wing of his bridge to watch his ship being secured, I hailed him from the wharf, but he barely acknowledged my existence. There was no invitation to come aboard, and no hint of an apology for the reckless manner in which he had brought his big ship up to a fog-shrouded wharf crowded with vulnerable smaller vessels.

  When I went below again, I found Angus struggling into his clothes.

  “What’s all that foolishness up there?” he asked anxiously.

  “Nothing to bother us. Visitor from some other planet. Noisy. And smelly. Not for real. Maybe when this fog goes he’ll be gone too. Figment of the imagination.…”

  I climbed back into my bunk but could not sleep. For the first time since our voyage began, I felt ill at ease – as if I was an alien in a foreign land. I was being given a glimpse into a future I feared I would not like.

  I was drifting off to sleep when the lugubrious coughing of make-and-break engines near at hand brought me back to consciousness. This time Angus went on deck to see what was happening. He returned ten minutes later, shaking his head.

  “You may not want to believe this, Farley, but the Maggie Billard just pulled out. When I got to the head of the wharf the fog was so thick I could barely see the captain only twenty feet away as he popped out of his wheelhouse to wave goodbye.

  “ ‘Come visit we when you’ve a mind,’ he shouted. ‘You and your woman and your young’uns. We’ll make a proper time of it!’ ”

  Angus paused and whispered, “He must have the second sight to go out in muck like this!”

  He must have had because, almost nine years later when I took him up on his invitation, he was as hale and hearty as ever, and the Maggie Billard was still afloat in her home port of La Poile.

  Later Harry came aboard bearing gifts – a steaming pot roast from his mother and a bottle of Lemon Hart from himself. At my father’s request, he had also brought Bonnet’s bill from the shipyard. Including the cost of three long-distance calls Angus had made from the yard to Halifax and Ontario, the total came to $4.50. He also brought us a proposal. If we would stay for a while, he would pilot us on a voyage through Cape Breton’s interior maze of saltwater lakes that constitute one of the loveliest and most benign cruising grounds in the Western world.

  Murray and I were dead keen to accept (anything to postpone venturing out into the vast unknown of the Atlantic) but my father had his speech to deliver in Halifax, and he was resolutely a man of his word.

  When, later in the day, a westerly breeze blew the suffocating fog clear of Port Hawkesbury, the skipper gave the order to let go the lines and Scotch Bonnet sailed into the Gut and turned her bluff bows east toward the open sea. We had gone only as far as the mouth of Chedebucto Bay before the fog sprang its trap. A black wall of it rose up ahead, forcing us to tie up at a tiny wharf below the Chedebucto Lighthouse. We got our lines ashore just as the fog obliterated everything except the belly-shaking rumble of the defiant diaphones at the lighthouse.

  The light keeper, a former lobster fisherman, came aboard. He was not able to sufficiently conceal his doubts about our seafaring abilities, and Angus was offended. So a few hours later, when the fog seemed to be thinning a bit, he ordered us back to sea. A bit of a breeze was making up, so we crowded on all sail and ran the bullgine at full throttle in hopes of rounding Cape Canso and reaching open ocean before the fog could smother us again. We almost succeeded. But the fog came back and then there was nothing for it but to steer due east, away from the hidden dangers of the land, and trust to the cold embrace of the North Atlantic.

  A long ocean swell, probably coming all the way from Ireland, lifted Bonnet’s keel and made her skittish. Somewhere off to starboard, a whistle buoy gurgled like a hungry sea monster. The charts offered no comfort. They showed the Nova Scotian coast as a wicked maze of reefs, rocks, and shoals.

  The fog grew thicker as night fell. The swells became heavier and even I began to feel wonky. Angus and I stood short watches: two hours on and two off. Being at the helm was a tense business because we could see nothing. Once or twice the heart-stopping bellow of an invisible ship’s foghorn chilled us. We could only pray they were equipped with radar and so could see us since we had not a hope in hell of seeing them until too late.

  Being immured in that fog was like being engulfed in a void of darkness. Only the vessel’s faintly luminescent wake and the flicker of the oil lamp on the binnacle remained visible. I lost all sense of direction.

  Despite the heavy clothing we wore under our oilskins, it grew bitterly cold on deck. Our world, contained by the fog, seemed lifeless but when dawn lightened the murk a little, storm petrels appeared and danced buoyantly under Bonnet’s bow like faerie spirits.

  A little later a breeze began to freshen out of the southwest, and we prayed it would disperse the fog. When it finally did just that, we thankfully reversed course and Bonnet surged westward back toward Nova Scotia, now a considerable but unknown distance from us. Just before noon, Murray spotted a buoy in the waste of water to the westward. Angus and I joined him as Bonnet slowly drew close enough for us to read the name emblazoned on it: COUNTRY HARBOUR.

  The land behind this buoy was hidden from us by shore fog but at least we now knew where we were. We were chagrined to realize we had only “made good” about thirty miles of the direct distance between Cape Canso and Halifax. Dead reckoning suggested that, in our attempt to escape the fog by sailing east, we had been headed for Sable Island – that sinister place a hundred miles offshore which seamen call the Graveya
rd of the Atlantic.

  Sea and wind continued making up as we beat southward parallel to the Nova Scotian coast, “reaching” from one offshore buoy to the next – buoys that were anchored as much as ten miles from land and up to fifteen miles distant from one another.

  Gull-like shearwaters skimmed the surface of the sea, never quite touching the wave crests or the bottoms of the valleys in between. Angus wryly suggested they were as totally in their element as we were out of ours. Murray shook his head dubiously.

  “How do you know they ain’t just as lost as we are? If they’re so smart, why don’t they live someplace inland and give the crows a run for their money?”

  A storm was approaching as evening closed in. Wind and seas continued to build until by midnight the waves were cresting at eight or ten feet, heaving Bonnet’s twelve-ton bulk about like an old sack. Fierce squalls and driving rain made it almost impossible to hold a course. Chilled and exhausted, Angus and I should have been lamenting our fate. He didn’t seem to be, and I certainly was not.

  People at home would call us nuts to be out here in this. Funny, but I don’t feel that way. Scared, yes, a little. Cold and weary, sure. But alive like I haven’t been since the war, even out on the Barren Lands. I’m getting to sense and revel in what people like the Billards know about the real world and about themselves. I can begin to sense what the petrels and shearwaters and their like must feel about the sheer, bloody joy of living close to the edge. The satisfaction of being able to do that. Of being part and parcel of the real world and making the most of it! Crazy? Maybe so.