That’s about how it’s done, sir.
Prowse’s head in his big hands. Crew claims you bought the vessel for a dollar.
I tendered the only bid, your Honour.
I bet you did. You had her careened, and then sailed home in her.
That is correct, your Honour.
Prowse fined the captain seventy dollars. He seized the ship and gave it to Lloyd’s. Not for a moment did the captain think he had done something wrong.
The next case was against an entire southcoast community. There had been a true shipwreck the winter before. A salt banker had been trapped in a galloping surf and crushed on a reef. The crew in the frozen sea, hanging to the bowsprit. They wrapped themselves in canvas. They held on to chopped-down masts. And while they drowned and perished of hypothermia, a small gang from the town had rowed out in a chain of dories and stripped the banker of plates and silver and manila rope and tobacco. They had gathered spoons and money and a mantel clock while the salt dissolved around them. They had pushed survivors aside for the booty. This was the charge against fourteen residents of the town. There had been one survivor, and this was his testimony. The man was helped into the stand, for he had lost both his hands and one leg. He said they had been at sea for months. Had sailed from Cadiz and meant to land in St John’s with a load of salt. There was smallpox on board, and beriberi. There was scurvy, he said, typhus, lice, nervous exhaustion, and venereal disease. There was blood poisoning and influenza. There was hypothermia, he said, and frostbite and gangrene. Then this storm. Our rudder, he said, holding up one handless wrist, was sheered off, and a makeshift one cut away. We didnt put up a stitch of canvas. We were pushed north, away from St John’s. We saw the birds of Funk and then the island, but we couldnt hold the island, so Captain told us to better crack on sail. We hove west like that for a day. Captain figured it was an emergency, so we lowered the colours and turned them upside down. That’s what they saw.
Prowse: Did you see them?
We got in close to a rough shop.
Please explain.
We fell victim to a canal effect, your Honour. A change in pressure, it pushes your vessel towards the land. So we got sucked up onto these here rocks. That’s when I saw them coming out in small boats. We was hoping yet to free ourselves. The masts were cut down, both to raise the level of the deck and to offer the crew something if we had to abandon ship. We tossed over the salt too, to lighten her. Hoping she’d come off the rocks. But her jawbones were broke, so we covered her with a sail to see if the water could be stopped from reaching the engines. I climbed into the shrouds and saw it all as they come out in their boats. We thought they come to help us.
The shrouds.
What gives the mast lateral support. The men, your Honour, were clinging to the chopped-down masts. Some were rolling under and losing their grip. All they had to do was throw a line made into a loop. A man in water will reach with his weakest hand and can often not hold on to a rope.
You saw the death of one mate.
Yes, before they were through with him they stripped him of his clothing. They appeared pleased with his death.
They knew the man.
He was from there. One often hates the mate.
You stayed above in the rigging.
I had bread and salt pork in a handkerchief. When I saw what they done to the mate, well, I stayed up there. The ship was doomed.
Youve been after having three operations to amputate hands and one leg.
My genitalia just recently was removed. Your Honour, my hands rotted off during the seventeen weeks I spent here. The man in charge would not agree to ferry me to St John’s. They was hoping I’d perish. I was put into a cold hut downwind from town.
After the people left the ship, what did you do.
I went down aboard her and made a raft of some planks. I put my feet in a box meant for ship’s papers. I found a hen basket with four hens dead in it. I paddled to a fellow shipwreck, who was in a broken boat. We found a barrel of cider. We were to use a hoop off the cider barrel to repair the boat. But neither of us had the strength to turn the boat over. We had to paddle ashore up to the chest in water. He perished then. I kept on. Seventeen weeks, sir, without proper treatment.
A woman came up to testify. She was gaunt and open around the eyes. She looked insane and starved and determined and sorry but vexed with a dilemma. You could tell she knew starvation well, and she was intimidated by the formality of court. I thought she too must be a survivor, but she was one of the fourteen on trial.
Is the charge before you accurate, Judge Prowse asked.
She replied, bitterly: Why did they have to go up on the rocks. And tempt us like that?
The way she said it. There was nothing more to be said.
The judge sought me out and stood me a drink.
I have a confession, he said.
He’d heard all about me. American painter in the hinterland. He joked about the romance of it. I love experts, he said. Regardless of the field. Except experts in poverty.
He shook his head. They are that poor, he said, that they are lured by the misfortunes of others. And imagine being that man, perched in a mast, having climbed as far as he is able. He looks down at the world.
I dont know how you do it.
Sometimes, in my line, there is levity too.
He’d just done a trial in St Anthony. There was a stabbing. On the stand a witness who described the murder. Kept addressing Prowse as me old trout. Bailiff cautioned him, said, Call him your Honour. Then Prowse asked if there was anything else the witness wished to say. There was nothing left on the books. But the witness said, No, your Honour me old trout, except perhaps what I heard the man say after stabbing Vince.
What was that.
After he stabbed Vince, the man he was terrified. He said, What’s I gonna do.
Pause.
That’s it. That’s all the accused said?
Yes, your Honour me old trout.
Okay.
Except for what Vince said back to him. Vince, he said, holding in his guts, he says, What’s you gonna do? What’s I gonna do?
Judge Prowse and I slugged back our drinks.
I told him about my charge in Brigus. He smiled. Oh, I know all about that one, he said. That’s how I heard about you. Got your file right here.
He had been assigned the case.
Back on board that night I heard Mose Harris say: I plan to spend most of this summer drunk. When youre married the best thing you can ask for is a fight.
42
We left Prowse in Cartwright and continued on to Turnavik. On our way we fell into a pack of drift ice. The ice was not stationary. The ice had a destination. Our floater tried to find a path through it. It pushed pans of ice away. But looking at the icefield ahead you felt the pattern was not random. You could feel an intention. The ice was inanimate, yet it had purpose. By nightfall the ice had knitted firmly together and grown thicker. It was not a purpose that was on a human scale of geography or time. The ice had taken us prisoner and was leading the floater to some ice-logical rendezvous.
I thought this was summer.
Mose Harris: It’s awful weather all right.
He said we could be stuck like this for a day or a week. The captain asked if some of us wouldnt mind going overboard and chopping at the ice. I was happy to. We used poles to push away the ice pans. The floater moved ahead half a boat length and we marched up to the next set of pans. We did this for three hours, and when we looked at the shore we saw we hadnt made any progress. The ice had drifted south as we were pushing north.
The ice grew coarse and bunched around the floater. It broke and clawed in giant fingernails. The ice contained greens and browns and blacks. The floater listed to starboard. The ice buckled and crunched around the hull.
Jesus, Mose said. I never seen a
nything like it for the season.
There was a raft of ice on the starboard side. A white wall pressed against the engines. The ship lacked the beams and sheathing for ice work. The captain was calm, just making sure his lifeboats were in order. There seemed to be a shared humour about the fluke of it all. Mose said, about the ice, I have seen a dog’s jaws carry a duck egg for miles and then crush it in a second.
A column of ice from a mile off bore through the ice pans as if looking for something to eat. It was heading directly for us. The engine sounded like a tired heart.
Time to scuttle her.
The crew unloaded tons of food, loose wood, dogs, tents, crates of ammunition, petrol, coal, alcohol, rigging, sails, kitchen supplies. We got to free her out, Mose Harris said. He had been on one boat like this when they chopped the masts down. To make the boat less top-heavy. He said it felt like they were chopping into the skull of the ship.
I could not believe I had spent a day in court listening to this very kind of ordeal. It made me anxious for looters, though we could not see land. I was happy that we could not, but then worried about how we’d get home. We had drifted many miles into ice-clogged sea. Which was worse.
The crew stepped off the ship and winched over the nested dories. A sail was spread across a gunwale. Men on the ice and men on board held the sides of the sail. We lifted one of the dogs and let it slide down. Nine dogs this way. The dogs were delighted.
The ice became bony and indifferent. If you scraped away the top layer of white snow crust, all the ice was black. It was an odd find, like parting an animal’s white coat to see a dark pigment.
The weather grew bad.
We built a wall of snow and sat leeward. Mose Harris gave me some advice. Keep ahold of a gaff stick. If you wake up this night and find yourself on an ice pan, floating away, you’ll have something to burn. Make shavings off your stick. Better yet if you get a seal. Cut strips of fat and drip on the shavings.
As if I’m going to discover a seal.
If one comes handy, hit him with your gaff, hit him with the service end and make sure he dont sink. Watch out for the sun, he’ll scald the eyes out of your head, and dont be fooled by the blue drop. You’ll see houses and ships on it. If it snows you won’t hear a ship’s whistle if youre windward.
I think, Mose, youre enjoying this.
We kept a watch for five days, but never had to sleep on the ice. One night from the deck we watched the horizon flash. Mose called it an ice-blink, beyond the blue drop. On the morning of the fifth day the ice relaxed. It lost its determination and eased back. The space around the floater gently filled with cold sea water. It had squeezed its hands together for five long days making a plan, and now it released us. The captain ordered the stores back on board. Hoist the spanker, he said. That’ll make her smarter.
We were safe but lost. The captain took a shot of the sun with his sextant and brought it down to kiss the sea. Then he pointed us in a direction that he knew would make us hit land. A coper sailed close by. We waved him over.
Where are we? our captain shouted.
You got the Cook map aboard?
Yes.
Well, look at the E in Newfoundland. Youre right under the E.
43
What I like about the name Newfoundland: how many other places are named so repetitively, redundantly. Yes, it is land. Yes, we found it. And yes, it is new. The only place that has new in it that does not refer to an older place. After Ireland it was England’s first colony. When so much land is named after benefactors. No one got the nod for this one. Perhaps no one wanted the responsibility. But Bartlett and Peary named things in worse places than this. Peary named an entire mountain range after Jenny Starling’s father: Crocker Land. And a thing imagined can never be fully unimagined. And Newfoundland, its descriptor telling of time, discovery, and substance.
We put in at Turnavik. The nose of our steamer curled in to the pier. There were many rocks the ship had to manoeuvre around. Sunkers, Mose Harris called them. Lethal to sailors.
Me: I guess the skipper knows where every rock in the harbour is.
Mose Harris: No. But he knows where theyre not.
As we docked there was a hymn in the air. From a distance a brass band. I could not see the band. There were blubber barrels on the stagehead and Inuit women pounding out the hard blubber. Then, on the hill, this unfinished church. Mose Harris said, That’s the Moravian mission. Moravians, I said. Did you know that when Tolstoy was a kid, his older brother told him they would all be ant brothers? He’d misheard the word Moravian, which sounds like ant in Russian.
Mose: Yes boy. Right on.
Then I saw them. Standing in the rafters of this unfinished church. Figures dressed in sealskin, playing big polished brass instruments. They swayed at the hips. A tuba and cymbals. They were Inuit women and men welcoming us to Turnavik.
I think, I said to Mose, I’m being converted.
Children stood in a barrel without ends, tipping it. Dogs running amok, dogs that had leapt from the floater into the sea before it reached the wharf. Dogs sick of being on the water.
The stagehead filled with livyers. Looking for supplies, for family and friends. This is where the Harrises put in.
Mose: We’ve been fishing out of Turnavik since I was eleven years old.
And this is Bartlett’s station?
This is where he parks the Morrissey.
And where he docked the Roosevelt. To pick up fifty pairs of sealskin boots, and whale meat for the dogs, on their way to find Crocker Land. This is where they returned, five years later, and made their claim by wireless for the pole.
They use hook and line, no traps. Mag, she does the cooking. We have a room, just an ordinary fishing room. More of a summer resort, Mose Harris said. We have a dwelling house and salt store that we share with Baxter Hodge. You can stay with us if you like.
I said Rupert Bartlett was taking care of me.
Well yes, you’d want to stay with Rupert.
But I’d love to see you work.
I walked with them to the brother-in-law’s fishing rooms. Baxter Hodge. Their stage was about sixty feet long and sixteen feet wide. A fair-sized stage. It was rundown. Can’t afford to keep her up, Baxter Hodge said. But the salt store was in good repair. The men shook hands.
Baxter Hodge said he came down on the Kyle and in the fall he’ll leave the boat on the stages. Just turn her over and pile some boughs and longers over her. He left Brigus in mid-June. They had their boat in the davits of the Kyle. Last year, Baxter said, we got two hundred and ninety quintals of fish. That almost paid our account. It would have paid, but my fish got mixed in with some cullage aboard the coaster that we was shipping to St John’s on. I wasnt too happy about that. I make good fish and there they were loading it in with cullage. I wanted to have it placed in piles, and so I had a kick with the captain about this.
Captain Bob?
Yessir that cunt.
Mose: Be easy, boy.
Mag: Rupert’s easier. Rupert’s here now.
Baxter: I give Bartlett my fish and it was to be subject to the St John’s prices. I wanted that to appear on my receipt. After they culled my fish I had roughly a quintal left over. A man who broke his arm on one of the steamers asked us for some fish to help him out — it is customary for us to help one another out down there if we can do it. I gave him this extra hundred pounds or so, and a man aboard the Hesperus told me that he sold that same quintal of fish in St John’s for forty cents more than what I got. If I had got the extra forty cents a quintal, I would have been able to pay my account.
44
I stayed with Rupert Bartlett. He oversaw the operation. In his office there were photographs of animals arranged by frozen taxidermy. Polar bears in the moment of swiping the shoulder off his brother, Bob. Peary’s head inside the tusks of a walrus, like he was planni
ng a jailbreak. Peary spearing a char, letting it freeze on the ice, shattering it, then eating the chunks like they were pink strawberries. I wanted to be with the men. I was excited by the work of labourers. Paperwork bored me. So I went with Mose and Baxter and Niner Harris and helped them land twenty-three barrels of fish in a day. Then we split it and washed it before nightfall. One day’s work. Enough fish to last a family a year. We were all cleaned up by seven oclock and then a man came in and told Mose he could have thirteen quintals more. We took it and by nine-thirty it was all stowed away. Then we had a drink of rum.
A good fisherman, Baxter Hodge said, can do a lot in one day.
I’m realizing the very same.
That is, a fisherman who understands his work. Lots of men go fishing just for something to do. They are not real fishermen. Use makes master of any trade.
Judge Prowse had told me that there might be much demand for Labrador fish this year, and that the Bartletts werent taking a big risk outfitting. The demand would come if there was a European war.
Baxter: You met the judge?
Mose: He was right chummy with him all the way down the shore.
We left him, I said, in Cartwright.
Youre a ballsy one.
I asked Baxter Hodge what he thought of Labrador fish this summer.
I am afraid to say anything, he said. It may be all right — in fact, I really do not know enough to say anything just now. It might not be worthwhile touching it. Whether the market is going to be any better during the next six months you cannot say. It cannot be any worse. If there is less fish caught, it should be better still.
The next day was Sunday and I walked up to the new church with Rupert. Inside there were Bibles in the pews, but all the covers had been torn off. I asked about this. Dogs, Rupert said. They came charging down that hill last winter. They were ploughing mad through the snow. Made a beeline to the church and dove straight through a window like it was open. They took over the church, starved out of their minds. There were dogs with Bibles in their mouths, the whites of their crazy eyes, reeling drunken-like over the pews. Dogs madly tearing the covers off with their back teeth. They ate everything leather in the place.
The Big Why Page 18
