The Bosun Chair

by Jennifer Bowering Delisle

  TO: The Captain, Mates, Engineers and other members of the crew of S.S. Hercules

  We the undersigned do hereby wish to express our thanks and gratitude to you for your kindness and hospitality shown to us in our distress. I am sure words fail to express how we feel toward you when we think of how you have rescued us from the sinking schooner.

  The kind actions you have done for us; the kind words you have spoken to us as strangers during our stay with you shall not soon be erased from our memory. And wherever it may be our lot to go and whenever we may look upon a Norwegian Captain or sailor we shall always look upon him as a friend and in our hearts shall be found a warm place for him.

  As we have nothing financially to compensate you, we trust that our superiors and those who represent us and our country shall not fail to amply reward you and I know the great God of the universe, who has not failed to see your actions, shall much more reward you.

  I trust it will not be your lot to pass through such an ordeal as we have passed but, if it may, I trust you may find in an Englishman or some other nationality such a friend as we have found in you. May I say in conclusion, I trust that you will arrive safely home in due time and that you may be prospered on whatever voyage you may go.

  Signed

  Captain and Crew of Swallow

  Nov. 30th, 1915

  BAY ROBERTS GUARDIAN, FRIDAY, NOV 26, 1915

  SCHR. SWALLOW STILL UNREPORTED

  The schr Swallow, John Bowering, master, and owned by Fradsham & Co., bound from Domino to Bay Roberts with freighters and a load of fish, is still unreported. The vessel left Seldom Come By with other schooners on Monday and was caught in the terrific storm of Tuesday, Nov, 16th.

  The friends of those on board have been very anxious regarding the fate of their loved ones, and early in the week sent messages to the Marine and Fisheries Dept. requesting that a steamer be sent to search for the vessel.

  They learned that on Friday the steamers Ingraham and Cabot were sent out, but they cruised chiefly in a southerly direction. The Cabot took the rescued crew of the little schr. Annie from another steamer which rescued them and brought them into Fermeuse.

  Both steamers returned to St John’s on Wednesday, having seen nothing of the other missing vessels. Steps should in our opinion and in the opinion of others, have been taken earlier in the week to have a search made and the largest and fastest steamers available should have been sent out. Three or four days passed away before a search was commenced.

  The Cabot left again Thursday night to continue the search for the Swallow. It is very probable that the Swallow drifted south in the way of shipping and that those on board have been rescued before this.

  She wants to believe, when his sister bursts breathless into the kitchen, a fluttering gull above the stage, that what she says is true: that the fortune teller she saw knows that he is safe. She wants to believe that he will return on Christmas Day, as foretold in the lines of leaves or palms, that this is not pagan nonsense, but a small new Christmas miracle. She wants to believe, even as she tells her, his sister, that she is dull to believe in such things, even as she feels her small bones crush beneath the words on her teeth.

  Rumours that the ship has been spotted on Locker Flat Island in Bonavista Bay, a three-mile-long island with shores of shelving rock beneath the water. The Minister of Marine and Fisheries has sent a motor boat to search for the ship among the islands of Locker Reach.

  She heats a beach rock in the stove, wraps it in a towel and brings it to bed. It weighs down the mattress, just a little, on his side, where his elbow would nestle into her chest. How many quintals? Are you eating enough? How is Clara King’s cooking? Let me tend your hands, I’ll dress the salt water boils on your knuckles with a cool bread poultice, while I tell you about the new baby that Mrs. Russell had, the snow that fell this afternoon. Nellie said a new word today. Her voice comes some soft and small from her tiny mouth, and sometimes I want to swallow her, safe back into my body. Soup, she said. I made pea soup today with you in my mind, thick with fatty pork so that the spoon would barely sink. Let me heat you some, that’ll warm you, it must be cold on the water tonight. ’Tis a cold night. Before she is asleep the rock is cool.

  Eight days at sea, getting used to the new sound of the ship’s steel belly. Drawing nearer to a war that had been as far from Labrador as the bottom of the ocean from the light. They hadn’t known that soldiers spent the summer locked in French mud, that the Germans had captured Warsaw in August, that the Newfoundland Regiment was in the Dardanelles. Drawing into the trenches of the Atlantic’s waves, where submarines sharked unseen.

  They were stopped by a British cruiser that checked their papers and escorted them to Stornoway, a small Gaelic port town on the Isle of Lewis. They were citizens of the British Empire, but Norway was neutral, and in letters spies had written the location of British ships in invisible ink. The Custom House officer told him he wasn’t supposed to send them home.

  I said “That thing seemed awful strange,

  And hard to understand;

  Norwegian sailors were so good,

  As to bring us in to land.

  And here among our British friends,

  There’s nothing can be done;

  And is it possible you say

  We cannot be sent home.”

  His speech did not rhyme. Between these lines, quiet as ink on paper, is a hidden rhythm, the timbre of a man two thousand miles from home, who negotiates with waves, not men. Was he the sort of man who made demands or made friends? Had the storm’s surges hewn him like a beach stone, or like a knife? Did he gently remove the backbone of his words? Did he plead, did he slam a fist on the table?

  The officer sent a message to Liverpool stating their case to the Board of Trade, and the next day made arrangements for them to go to Liverpool in two days time. They left at 4 a.m. on a steamer to Kyle, where they would leave the sea and continue their journey by train. It was the beginning of December.

  When daylight came, and we could see

  Along the Scottish shore;

  The hills were covered in with snow,

  Almost like Labrador.

  These lamplight stanzas roll,

  seabirds riding the windshear,

  groundfish on deep currents.

  Does he imagine me, eating these hard-fought verses pulled from the deep pressure of the ocean its pinching fickleness?

  Will he set them before his children carefully removing the tiniest of bones?

  The iamb mouths at the story and the rhyme hangs on the line, like drops of cold water.

  Someone is running. From the Bay Roberts cable building, down Water Street, across the Klondyke Bridge. The old folks here remember dumping the rock and gravel into the open water gashed in the ice, to build the causeway. Their fathers and mothers had carried the rock in hand-barrels and the children had piled stones in their arms, for the goldrush wage of a dollar a week. Now ice again fills the coish, and ice shines the boy’s steps into Coley’s Point, along the road to the Bowering house. In the pocket of his coat crinkles the paper of a telegram, a message that came across the ocean in dots like scattered stones.

  London, Dec 1st

  To Governor:

  Following for Minister of Marine and Fisheries from master of Swallow:

  Crew and passengers saved and landed, all well, at Stornoway, on Norwegian steamer Herkules. Please circulate information.

  (Sgd,) John Bowering

  We are alive.

  We are coming home.

  From Kyle, a train for Inverness, then another for Perth, then another for Wigham, then another for Liverpool, finally stumbling from the train at 6 a.m., feeling its rumble still in their bones the way they always felt the sea floating their feet after stepping on dry land.

  In Bay Roberts, the first electric lights had been turned on last spring, lighting the railway station, two streetlights and the telegraph house. Liverpool was dawn before the morning, streetlights spot
lighting the grey snow, a city throbbing with motor cars and tram cars flushed with immigrants.

  They had to get a passport to prove they were British citizens before they would be allowed on a ship, dogged by questions from the Board of Trade. Then a week waiting for the Pretorian to sail for Canada.

  On December tenth, they were at sea again. At night, all the lights were out on deck for fear of German submarines. The seas were rolling high, familiar as the stink of their own bodies after a day at the fish. They stayed below, sick in their beds, waiting for the rogue wave across the deck, or the final white shock of a torpedo. Eleven days and nights in darkness and heavy seas until they finally docked in Saint John, New Brunswick.

  It took several hours for all hands to pass the emigration officer, and they could not arrange to leave Saint John until that night. Two more days by train and ship to get to Port aux Basques on the west coast of Newfoundland. But the train was four hours late; they missed their connection and had to wait for the night train at Brigus Junction. They finally arrived in Bay Roberts on Christmas Day, two months after they had started for home, six months since they had last seen their families.

  BAY ROBERTS GUARDIAN, FRIDAY, DEC 31, 1915

  THE SWALLOW’S SURVIVORS RETURN HOME

  Details of Their Hard Experience

  The crew and passengers of the ill-fated schr. Swallow reached their various homes on Saturday (Christmas) night, Dec. 25th. At Clarke’s Beach and Bay Roberts stations hundreds of people gathered to extend to them a glad welcome, and this was proof of the deep interest which was manifested in their rescue and their return to home and loved ones.

  With the limited time at our disposal this week we have managed to glean the following particulars regarding the trip of the Swallow and the awful time experienced by those on board during the storm which commenced on Tuesday, Nov. 26th, up to the time of their rescue and of their arrival home.

  …The mast was rocking to and fro and the deck was opening fast. After sometime a brace was placed against the spar. Three days passed and still the storm continued. The main rigging then burst and the deck was torn open. The vessel began to leak and things looked very gloomy for those on board.

  One pump alone was kept going the second one being useless, while a good watch was kept for any passing ship. A quantity of fish was thrown overboard to lighten the vessel. The girls on board kept up a good heart and encouraged the men…

  BAY ROBERTS GUARDIAN, JAN 14, 1916.

  THE TRIP OF THE “SWALLOW”

  (Editor the Guardian).

  Dear Sir, -- As there has been a lot of strange statements rumored, and also a note or two which appeared in last week’s issue concerning our hard experience seemed so ridiculous, I feel prompted to give you my statement so near to the thing as I can go.

  On the 15th day of November, about 7 p.m., we left Seldom-Come-Bye bound for Bay Roberts. The wind was blowing a fresh breeze from the north-west, and all hoped that within the next 24 hours we would reach our destination.

  The poem says nothing of his wife’s worry through his absence, nothing of how the families made it through winter with no fish to bring home and a debt to the merchant that could not be paid. He cannot write how once he returned, he never went to sea again, but became a carpenter, made barrels for potatoes and fish. Had seven more children, four of whom died before the age of eighteen.

  …All this happened at about the one time—the foresail jibed, the casks broke loose, the wheel was knocked out of its place and the boat was smashed up. This made things look quite gloomy…

  We sawed off the jaws of a main boom we had lashed on deck and put it down around the foot of the mast and let the end go against the side of the vessel. We also tried to secure the rigging by putting tackles on the ends of the shrouds and strops around the bulwarks; but with such a heavy sway it was impossible to secure it good.

  He supported his family building houses in Grand Falls and St. John’s, and still found himself far away from his family for months at a time.

  …On the evening of the 10th we left Liverpool by the S.S. Pretorian of the Allan Line for St. John, N.B., arriving at the latter place on Dec. 21st, where the Shipping Master gave us a railway pass to Bay Roberts via North Sydney and Port au Basques, arriving at Bay Roberts on the 25th (Christmas Day) a long round indeed from Domino.

  With all sympathy for the girls in passing through such an ordeal I must say that note in the last issue has put the few brave fellows who stood by me and worked so faithfully in the face of such dangers down in a very low place, to say they had to be encouraged by a few girls. Yours, etc.

  JOHN BOWERING

  The next time I returned, the house was completely gone. Grass had grown over the stumps of walls, thistle cluttered the rooms. Embedded in the ground was half a teacup stained with soil. Surely she had lifted it to her mouth, waiting for her husband to return, to stomp the snow from his boots and lay them by the stove. The fragments interrupted the weeds, like stories buried in the earth: She puts her knitting down, pulls him in, kisses him with tea-warm lips.

  BALLYCATER

  HAVE YOU EVER HEARD OF BALLYCATER? Ballycater, there must be a more scientific name for it but as far as I know it’s B-A-L-L-Y-C-A-T-E-R, it’s ballycater. You might find another word in a dictionary or some book, but it was big pans of ice. And sometimes they would fill up the harbour. And we would go down, and hop from one pan to the next, and as you stepped on the pans they had a tendency to go under. And then of course there were several coming behind you, everybody’s stepping on the pans, and you had to try to get from one pan to the next without getting your feet wet. And also hoping that the next pan wouldn’t be too far away so you could hop to it.

  They called it copying, this game. They copied their fathers heading out on the ice for the seals, just as they had copied their mothers, feeding dolls with spoons of grass. My grandmother is copying on the ballycater, the pans tipping dangerously as she lands near the edge. Leaning forward, pantsuit and nylon stockings, grey hair dyed pale blonde, icy water flooding pink slippers.

  My father used to leave to go to the Labrador in May and he wouldn’t return home until September? October? And I can remember stormy nights saying to Mom, “My gosh, I wonder how’s Dad.” And that’s when it would come in my mind, mostly when we had storms. And then she used to say “Oh, don’t worry, because this is only here where we are. They’re not having any storms where he is, that’s too far away.”

  Pop was a winter father. She did not know him in shirt sleeves on the beach, or in the garden. He came like Father Christmas with the cold, his sweater smelling of fish and wool wet with the first snow.

  And maybe that was true, but of course they’re having storms down there when we don’t know about it. But because there was no way we could contact them we didn’t know where they were, or how they were, or anything until they got home. She was pretty optimistic and accepted that as a way of life, really. They were worried, you know they were worried but that was a part of life, that’s the way of life in Newfoundland.

  We used to go to a place called Shepherd’s Pond, which is known for its abundance of trout, fishing through the ice, you know. And on a nice day like today now, when the sun was shining and a good sleigh path, my father always used to say to Mom “Now today would be a nice day to go into Shepherd’s Pond, see if we can get a trout.”

  On the tape, the crackle of tin foil as my mother makes dinner. Atlantic salmon farmed on the west coast, bought from an Edmonton Costco. I strain to catch the words—rewind, stop, play again. Dog sleigh full of trout and the day dimming to the light off the snow. Streaks of black where they know the woods are, black where they know the sky is. Then black where the ice is, where the ice should be on the path ahead, where the water has shed its icy skin.

  My mother told me this story, they were in Shepherd’s Pond trouting and it was getting dark.

  Stories too slippery to steady on. The oven door opens, the television news. And th
e dogs are heading for the water, and the dogs are going too fast to stop them. And Pop is pushing Nan off the sleigh, and jumping after her, and the dogs go on, into the water.

  In that black cleft are the questions I did not ask: if she was in school or if this was before she was born, if they saved the dogs, how they got home without the sleigh. Stop, rewind.

  I can hear my father say to my mother now, “This’ll be a nice day to go to Shepherd’s Pond.”

  Pop called his schooner the Ivy Frances for his youngest, and so took his girls with him like a photograph in his pocket. In Little Heart’s Ease he was the privileged one, the Skipper, the one who owned the store and the post office, whose wealth was measured by his debt.

  Credit from the merchant in St. John’s for the ropes and the nets, for the oilskins and boots for the twelve men on the schooner, for the food that stocked the ship and the food that stocked the store to feed the families of the men for the summer. Credit to the men for their oilskins and boots, for the flour that sustained their children while their fathers were away. There had to be fish. There had to be enough for the men to pay him their debts, so that he could pay his own in St. John’s, when the winter came and the last of the fall’s carrots were gnarled in the bottom of the bin like beckoning fingers. There had to be fish.

  She fished from the wharf, where she and her sister would line up the connors and play at grief, pretending they had a cemetery. Where they screamed and dropped their rods when they pulled a sculpin grunting from the water, the monsters with their jurassic teeth and spines. Where the water was deep enough for the schooners to unload, and the logs were iced with seaweed, and the children didn’t know how to swim. And we went for help, calling out to someone to come—Donny, his name was Donny, I’ll never forget his name was Donny,“Donny’s in the water! Donny’s in the water!” And the memory of the men plucking Donny from the water, barely breathing but alive, makes her think not of her own small feet balanced on the edge of the wharf greased with fish, but of her mother, watching from a window or the road, watching the bodies of her daughters small and slippery at the water’s edge.