Haunted Harbours

by Steve Vernon

  To guide the pony through the darkness usually involved a series of spoken commands, but Ethan and Pete worked out a different system. Ethan would sing, and Pete would follow him through the long, winding tunnels. All of the miners got used to the sound of young Ethan walking through the darkness, singing “Barbara Allen”: “T’was in the merry month of May, when all the buds were swelling, sweet William on his death bed lay, for love of Barbara Allen.”

  For three long and dark years, Pete and Ethan worked in a comfortable harmony. Then, one cold September morning as Pete was hauling his load of an even dozen coal cars, the pony stopped short dead in his tracks.

  “What’s wrong, boy?” Ethan asked.

  There seemed to be nothing physically wrong with Pete. The little pony just stood there in the darkness of the mine, shivering softly. Ethan tried to coax him forward.

  “Come on Pete. You can do this. I’ll give you a carrot.”

  Not even the promise of a carrot would make the pony move. At a loss for what to do, Ethan tried singing to the pony.

  “T’was in the merry month of May, when all the buds were swelling, sweet William on his death bed lay, for love of Barbara Allen.”

  It was no good —Pete would not budge. The inevitable traffic jam resulted as another load of coal cars rolled up behind Pete and Ethan. The pony and the boy were in the way of the others; the coal needed to get through. The miners had to meet their quota or else go a day without pay.

  “Get in front and get ready to lead,” said one of the miners. “I’ll make him move.”

  Ethan didn’t argue. He was thirteen, and boys of thirteen learned to take orders back then.

  The miner uncoiled a bit of rope, looping it double.

  “Pony,” the miner said. “We’ll make quota today, and you’ve got to MOVE!”

  He swung the rope hard against the pony’s side, and little Pete jumped forward. He hadn’t gone three more paces when the mine shook and a great load of timber and rock came crashing down on Ethan and Pete, killing them both. Those who witnessed the rock fall swore that the pony had sensed the deadly disaster before a single stone had slid.

  The miners took the rest of the day off. It was always bad luck to keep working when someone had died in the mine. Sunday was the Sabbath, and there was no work then, but by Monday the mess was cleaned up, and they were ready to go back to work. They shouldered their pickaxes and clambered back down into the mine, talking softly for fear of rousing the dead.

  When they reached the site of the accident, they saw a peat-black pony, dragging twelve heavily laden coal cars behind it. The wheels ground against the iron rails and the pony’s hooves clopped like a hammer banging nails into a coffin. In the cloying darkness of the tunnel they heard a soft voice singing, “T’was in the merry month of May, when all the buds were swelling…”

  As the pony reached them, the ghostly vision faded away, wagon and all. But this was not an isolated incident. Over the next year, whenever a miner crossed this spot, he would hear the horse’s hooves clattering against the soft rock, and the soft eerie keening of the boy’s last song.

  The miners eventually got used to the ghost of the boy and his pony clattering by them in the darkness. Money and need are hard masters, and the fear of hunger can override even the fear of ghosts.

  Eventually that tunnel was mined out and sealed off, yet the miners swore in the years to come that they could hear the sound of the horse’s hooves clattering somewhere behind the darkness of the rock. Besides the hoof beats, there were those who swore they heard the haunting sound of young Ethan singing softly through every tunnel they passed through, “T’was in the merry month of May, when all the buds were swelling, sweet William on his death bed lay, for love of Barbara Allen.”

  17

  BLOOD IN THE

  WATER, BLOOD

  ON THE SAND

  SABLE ISLAND

  This is a tale that has been told many times and in many ways by such writers and storytellers as Thomas Haliburton, Helen Creighton, and Edith Mosher, among others. The dates attributed to the shipwreck in question have shifted as often as the sands of Sable Island.

  So file this tale under “Traditional.” It’s a tale that has been told so many times that I reckon it’s grown straight true.

  Sable Island isn’t much to look at on the map — just a little strip of sand laid out in the ocean like a curl of bacon in the frying pan. There are some ponies that you’ve no doubt seen pictures of and a few houses, blown through by the tireless Atlantic winds. No one lives on the island now except for some members of the Coast Guard, a handful of meteorologists, and perhaps a ghost or two.

  The island lies there like a fishhook in the water, just waiting for an unwary nibble. Its name, Sable, means sand in French, for a very good reason. Quite simply Sable Island is the world’s largest water-bound sand dune, composed entirely of a peculiarly iron-stained quartz and raw red garnet, barely twenty miles long and a mile across. Sailors call it a trap and a snare because of the underwater sandbars that stretch out, like the arms of an octopus, sixteen to twenty miles in either direction of the island’s extremities. Between these sandbars lies an unchartable obstacle course of deeps and shoals. The island itself is made entirely of sand, and changes shape as the years go by. The maps must be drawn and redrawn. Two lighthouses, one at each end of the island and built by the Canadian government, have been moved and moved again due to the shifting sands.

  The island itself is a kind of shape-shifting ghost; fishermen fear it and sailors avoid it, because the waters about Sable Island seethe with ghosts. Nearly 150 ships have grounded upon the shoals, broken upon the rocks, and sank beneath the churning Atlantic waters surrounding this little stretch of sand.

  In the late eighteenth century, the waters of Sable Island claimed a two-masted brigantine by the name of Frances. Yet the waters and the rocks were not the only ones that were to blame for the shipwreck. No sir, they had help.

  In those days, men known as wreckers made a living salvaging whatever washed ashore. When the pickings were slim and the weather too calm to wreck many ships, there were always a few unscrupulous men who would lay false signal fires, remove warning buoys, and stuff shoal-bells with cotton, thus luring unwary ships to their doom.

  It was the wreckers who brought about the end of the Frances, luring her to her doom with the aid of several lanterns. Aboard her were a Doctor Copeland, the medical surgeon of the seventh Prince’s Regiment, his wife and their two children, fourteen other passengers, and a crew of nineteen men.

  Mrs. Copeland was a young woman, younger than her husband by a good six years, and was to all accounts a most beautiful woman with long flowing hair the colour of sunburned straw. She was wearing her wedding ring, a family heirloom of solid silver surmounted by a large red ruby. Those who saw the ring close up described it as an eerie thing, the colour of welling blood.

  Frances went down with all hands, and the wreckers found easy pickings, scavenging the supplies and furniture that washed ashore. Amongst the jetsam on the beach, the lead wrecker found the body of Mrs. Copeland. Her face was as pale as candle wax, her skin bloated by long hours in the salt water. Her hair was loosened and snarled by the tide’s angry fingers, and her clothes had been nearly torn from her, but the ring was still there. Its beauty caught the wrecker’s eye.

  He knelt in the surf, heedless of the waves. He caught at the ring and tried to work it from her hand. The ring wouldn’t budge; her fingers were swollen from the cold and the long immersion. Stealing a glance to his left and right, making certain no one watched, the old wrecker snapped open his case knife and severed Mrs. Copeland’s ring finger.

  The instant he cut the finger off, her eyes flew wide open like rudely-snapped window blinds. She opened her mouth to scream, and in panic he held her under the water. She struggled, splashing his face with the blood from her mutilated hand. The wrecker grimly held her under, cutting her throat with the edge of his case knife. In a few shor
t moments, she was dead.

  The wrecker stood up, still holding his case knife and the dead woman’s finger. He worked the ring off and cast the finger into the tide. He pushed her body out a little ways into the water, saying a prayer to Father Neptune in hopes that the current would catch her and hide his dirty work.

  In fear he fled to Halifax, where he sold the ring to a watch-maker of dubious ethics. He used the money to purchase a room and a bottle, and that night he opened his throat with the very case knife he’d used to cut Mrs. Copeland’s fair white neck.

  Some say it was guilt, and some say that it happened in a fight over the spoils of his crime, while others claim the wrecker was visited that night by the ghost of Mrs. Copeland, who stood over his bedside pointing an accusatory finger stub.

  I cannot say for sure, but I do know this. On lonely summer nights when the mist hugs the shores of Sable Island closer than a widow’s veil, sailors say that a gray lady may be seen walking through the mists, pointing with the stub of her missing finger. And to this day as the sun slowly sinks, the waters and the sand of Sable Island are still stained a deep and lingering red.

  18

  THE PHANTOM

  OARSMAN OF

  SABLE ISLAND

  SABLE ISLAND

  As sure as the sunshine follows the rain, one thing will always follow another. In my last tale I told you about Mrs. Copeland’s ruby ring and the unfortunate state of her ghostly finger. That tale leads surely to this second Sable Island tale.

  Following the wreck of Mrs. Copeland’s ship, the Frances, the government decided that it would be wise to place a couple of lighthouses upon the hook ends of Sable Island. These lighthouses have been moved, four times since, due to the island’s constantly shifting shoreline.

  Along with the lighthouses, the government stationed a lifesaving crew of an even dozen men. Twelve souls, and one stout dory.

  Some said that twelve men were all who were needed to haul a good-sized dory. It really wasn’t that complicated a trick. One man would stand in the bow with a heavy brass sea lantern; he was the boat’s set of headlights. A second man would squat in the back, leaning on the rudder; he was the steering wheel. Ten strong lads would haul on the oars, playing the role of the world’s very first ten-cylinder search and rescue vehicle.

  These twelve men kept watch night and day for any sign of ships in trouble. In stormy weather, and it was stormy more days than not around Sable Island, they’d sit astride their stocky little Sable Island ponies, wrapped in oilskins and gum rubbers, peering into the darkness for any sign of trouble.

  They’d keep shifts, some men resting while the others kept watch, so that the dangerous shoals around the ill-fated island were watched over every minute of the day, a necessity in the days before radios and radar. A ship would happen along when it happened along, and the lifesaving crew always needed to be ready for action.

  Every four months a second crew would arrive from the mainland, and the first crew would return home: four months on and four months off, that was their shift.

  This is the tale of one such crew, during one such four-month-long shift.

  The story began on a moonless November evening when the waves were tossing and kicking about Sable Island like a herd of angry horses. The watchman clenched his knees, hanging tightly to his little pony, squinting out to sea, but he couldn’t see anything. His ears strained, listening for the grinding of a hull running aground, for the crack of timber breaking free.

  I could tell you where he was standing on the shoreline, but what difference would that make? The shores of Sable Island changed with every year. That is why you so rarely see a reliable map of the island; it simply refuses to sit still long enough to be mapped.

  And then the watchman saw it. A ship, foundering upon the rocks, caught in the current and the wind, sure to be sunk. He rode full out for the main lodge, and the lifesaving crew ran for the dory.

  It’s hard work putting a dory out into storm-tossed waters. The currents of the Atlantic tie a knot around the island that unravels any plan.

  The crew pushed and hauled hard and the waves kicked them back shorewards as fast as they hauled oar. Sometimes they’d get launched, and sometimes not. Many a time the crew sat shore-bound, the conditions too heavy to launch the dory.

  They had to wait until the blow had its temper and was done with, listening for the wails of the drowning carried in on the Atlantic wind. Even when the wind was blowing too hard to hear the screams of the dying, the rescue crew could hear them deep in the pits of their communal conscience.

  They hauled the dory out into the waves, standing hip deep in the water with the waves and the wind slashing at them like long wet knives. Finally they were afloat. They rowed out towards the shoal-bound ship, one man in front holding the big brass sea lantern, one fellow in back leaning on the rudder, and ten stout men hauling on the oars. As they approached the shoal, a great wave hooked up and out and dragged the lead oarsman straight into the storm-tossed waves. Down he went in his oilskin jacket and gum rubber boots, three sweaters, and a suit of union long johns. He sank like a dropped anchor and drowned. When you fall into water that cold and deep, there is nothing that can be done; each man knew that. They rowed on, without looking back. They’d lost a friend and a good man, but they had a ship to save.

  They rowed out as fast as they could, moving slower now with one less man at the oars. They lost some time correcting their course, as the odd number of rowers kept veering the dory side-ways. By the time they’d arrived at the wreck, nearly half of the crew had drowned or perished from the cold.

  They shot a line out to the wreckage with a breeches buoy attached: a life preserver with a pair of hip waders sewed in tight. They rowed the survivors to the shore, and saw them safe into the shelters built upon the island for just this purpose. Now, it was time to fetch in the dead.

  They’d haul in as many of the dead as they could; later they would comb the beach for the ones who’d washed ashore, sometimes days afterwards. They would sew the dead in a tattered sail-cloth shroud, and leave them on the shoreline to be picked up later, by the supply steamer. The sand was too unstable for graves, so the steamer tipped the remains into the open sea. Until the vessel arrived it was the duty of the lifesaving crew to stand watch over the bodies, shooing away hungry gulls and eager crabs.

  A couple of weeks after the wreck, there came another ship in trouble. The dory crew rowed out, still short-handed. The survivors of the last wreck had already been picked up by the steamer and taken to the mainland. They rowed out in somewhat calmer water, and as they came to that patch of wild shoals, the lantern man saw a white shape moving in the water.

  “It’s ice,” the lantern man yelled out. “Watch out!”

  Only it wasn’t ice; it was a body, swimming towards them, the body of their drowned comrade. He swam up to the dory and climbed on board, sat in his usual seat, and began to row. He was a Nova Scotian, and there was no way on God’s green earth that he was about to give up on a job half done.

  He wasn’t pretty to look at. His flesh was soft and bleached from the time spent in the water. There was a little crab clawing through his beard and long sea worms crawling about his body. You could see clear through to his bones in a few spots, but by god, he could row.

  The dory crew were astounded by this sight, but being practical fellows they decided there was nothing to do but to keep on rowing. Besides, they weren’t about to let a dead fellow outdo them in seamanship.

  They made the sinking ship in easy time and rescued all on board. A few of the survivors of the wrecked ship started at the sight of the grisly rower, but the majority of them knew enough of the ways of the sea not to question her work. They looked the other way, or pretended they did not notice. They were mostly just grateful for being pulled from their sinking ship. To them the phantom oarsman was just another sailor in dirty yellow oilskins and a pair of fat black rubber boots.

  As the dory crossed over the wild p
atch of water, the phantom oarsman stood up, tipped his cap like he was saying goodbye and stepped out into the wind-tossed waves and sank beneath the Atlantic.

  “His work is done,” one oarsman said. “He’s gone back to his briny bedroom.” But these were hasty words spoken too quickly.

  There were two more ships in trouble over that four-month stretch. Both times the phantom oarsman reported for duty, swimming up and clambering into the dory, pulling like mad on the oars, and then finally tipping his hat in a sign of respect right before sinking like a wishing well stone.

  Yet time is a river that must always flow forward, and there came a day when the four months of the shift was finished, and the steamer came, bringing along a fresh new crew.

  The old crew debated for half of the night before the steamer arrived on whether or not they should tell anyone what they had seen. Word had doubtlessly already escaped from the survivors who had noticed the phantom oarsman. In the end, they decided it best not to tell anyone. If word got out that they’d been seeing a dead man at their dory oars, they might be locked away as luna-tics.

  “Better not to stir that pot,” they decided. “Let her lay and settle.”

  For a few weeks all was calm with the new crew. They kept their watches, and ran dry-run practices on the shore. Yet things are never quiet on Sable Island for very long. After those few weeks had passed, there came a storm and another ship was in trouble.

  The new crew rowed their dory on out across the waves, and as they came to that wild stretch of water, up came the phantom oarsman. He swam straight up to the dory. The men didn’t know what to make of him. He looked up into that boat, and saw some-body strange sitting right where he’d always sat.

  I cannot tell you if he felt sad or relieved. He just tipped his hat like he was saying goodbye and sank like a stone.