Bay of Spirits

by Farley Mowat

  In the next four months four major strandings took place, the last of which was that of the Bar Haven at Bay L’Argent. At that point the CN compensated Lizbet for her lost baskets.

  Riggs explained that Baccalieu had escaped the curse because he always made a point of treating the old woman well.

  “Like a queen. Always give her everything she wants, I tells my crew. A deluxe cabin if she wants. I tells the cook to feed her up the best he can. Give her the run of the ship. Oh yes, my Little Man, I treats her proper!”

  In return Lizbet had assured him nothing bad would ever happen to the Baccalieu, and nothing ever had.

  Ferryland

  Reluctantly, I left the Baccalieu at Fortune, the largest settlement in Fortune Bay, in order to spend a few days at St. Peters, as Newfoundlanders called the offshore islands of St. Pierre and Miquelon. I needed some firsthand information about the stranding and subsequent salving there of the British freighter Fort Boise–an event that played a role in the book I was currently writing.

  The visit was short but seminal since it drew me back to these French islands, where I would meet a woman who would become central in my life.

  From St. Pierre I made my way to St. John’s, capital city of Newfoundland, where I encountered Harold Horwood, a lean, hawk-nosed, sharply blue-eyed man of my own age. Harold’s family had been fishermen, boat builders, and master mariners in Newfoundland for seven or eight generations, but he had broken with that long tradition to become a political activist, a sometime poet and artist, a vitriolic journalist, and the paramount gadfly of Premier Joey Smallwood, the ruler of the island.

  Acerbic and iconoclastic, Harold had a low opinion of “Canadians.” Almost his first words to me after we met were these: “From Ontario, are you? I suppose you intend to pick my brains then fly away back to Toronto and write a piece about the colourful natives of NewFOUNDland, as you people from away insist on calling us. Well, good luck.”

  That would have been that, except for a benevolent fate that had put me in possession of a bottle of St. Pierre rum on a day when all the liquor stores in St. John’s were closed. By the time the bottle was empty, Harold conceded that I just might be worth knowing. We spent much of the next few days together and, by the time I flew back to Ontario, had become friends. And Harold had invited me to come along with him the following summer in his new Chevrolet on a month-long exploration of Newfoundland.

  This adventure took us from one side of the great island to the other; sometimes by car or, when roads ran out, by rail, but nothing brought me closer to understanding the Rock than a prolonged visit to the village of Ferryland on what is called the Southern (but is really the eastern) Shore, some fifty miles to the south of St. John’s.

  My chief mentors in Ferryland were members of the Morry family, of which Howard Morry was the patriarch. Then in his eighties, Howard could have passed for a man of fifty. Tall and heavy-set, with a rubicund visage, he could almost have been the reincarnation of a west coast of England farmer-fisherman of Drake’s time. A widower, he lived in a large and rambling old wooden house with his laconic son Bill, and his voluble daughter-in-law Pat. Pat “took in” occasional visitors (there were no hotels or motels in Ferryland); her men ran a small salt-fish plant. The couple had two vivacious children: Peter, aged ten, and Paula, aged eight.

  The Morrys adopted me into their household. Pat fed me gargantuan meals whose principal ingredients came directly from the ocean at our door: cod, flounder, halibut, mackerel, salmon, sea trout, mussels, capelin, and lobster being chief among them. She also provided glimpses into the women’s world in an outport.

  Howard and Bill inducted me into the complexities of a fishery that had not changed significantly since its establishment on this coast five centuries earlier. They revealed the arcane arts and secrets of making the salt fish that they exported to Mediterranean and Caribbean countries, and they sent me to sea in the big, open skiffs used to tend the cod traps along the ragged coast.

  Young Peter and Paula did their part by taking me on long rambles into the country over ancient trails originally made by mysterious “Masterless Men” and to a crumbling stone beacon on a high hill called the Gaze from which through the centuries women had watched for the seaborne return of their men, and boys as young as Peter had stood ready to raise the alarm when the sails of pirates, privateers, or French invaders hove into view.

  It was principally Howard who guided me into the heart and soul of Ferryland. He knew its story as far back as oral history went. The well-protected harbour at the foot of low hills fringed by a wide foreshore of grassy meadows had welcomed some of the earliest European visitors to the Americas. Basque whalers and cod fishers probably sheltered in Ferryland’s harbour before the end of the fifteenth century. During the first decades of the sixteenth, Bretons and Normans built summer fishing stations along its pebble beaches. It appears on a seventeenth-century French map as Farillon, a corruption of the earlier Portuguese name Farelhāo.

  The French held Farillon until about 1600, when the English seized it. In 1621 Lord Baltimore chose it as the site of a grand “plantation” he intended to build in the New Founde Lande. However, the lord was hag-ridden by a wife who could not stand Firiland, as it had become, and badgered him into moving south to what would one day become the state of Maryland.

  Other overlords took control of the place through the succeeding centuries and sweated its inhabitants, who were of French, West County English, Jersey, and eventually some Irish stock. They formed a tough, stubborn, and enduring amalgam able to survive the harsh rule of British fishing admirals, predatory merchants, and an interminable series of raids by French, New Englanders, and stateless buccaneers.

  During the eighteenth century the English fishery that dominated eastern Newfoundland was largely worked by men from the western shires of Britain who had been driven to sea by an economic system that treated them little better than slaves. “Planted” in Newfoundland harbours to fish for absent masters, some fled into the desolate interior and became the Masterless Men: a loose-knit outlaw society, somewhat in the romantic tradition of Robin Hood. The interior of the Avalon Peninsula, with its caribou barrens, rugged hills, and sweeping forests, was their domain. Only the best armed and most able British troops dared enter it. The Masterless Men’s chief settlement lay in a valley not five miles as the crow flies from Ferryland, under the loom of a mighty hill called the Butterpot, to whose high crest Howard and Peter took me one summer day.

  The Masterless Men were never subjugated. Gradually they melded with coastal fishermen-settlers, and to this day their blood runs strongly in the veins of the people of the Southern Shore.

  One day Howard and I rowed out to Bois Island, which guards the mouth of Ferryland harbour. As the name indicates, it was once well wooded, though Bois, together with almost all the coast of Newfoundland, now stands denuded of trees.

  Bois Island once boasted a considerable fortress. Howard, who had made himself its guardian, showed me the remains of five heavy-gun batteries with their circumvallations. And lying in shoal water at the foot of a cliff were four great, brass cannon that had been dumped there, Howard said, by a Yankee privateer who had tried but failed to carry them off. Recently a new kind of privateer had attempted to remove them using divers and heavy lifting gear. He had been foiled by Howard and two friends armed with swiling (sealing) guns, who had sent the vandal and his crew packing.

  Howard Morry making salt fish.

  Howard inducted me into the ancient modes of the cod fishery, first teaching me how to jig the fish using a double-hooked lead model of a capelin at the end of a hand line as bait. Then he sent me out to the cod traps. At four o’clock one morning I joined the four-man crew of a trap skiff, a broad-beamed open boat twenty feet long powered by a five-horsepower “jump spark” gasoline engine. We puttered out of the harbour in inky darkness accompanied by the muted reverberations of a dozen other “one-lunger” engines pushing unseen boats toward the open se
a.

  We fished two traps. These were great box-shaped nets as much as fifty feet on a side, with a bottom but no top. A long, vertically suspended head net stretched out from a “door” on one side of the trap to guide passing schools of cod into confinement. The whole complicated affair was moored to the sea floor with enormous wrought-iron anchors salvaged from the wrecks of ancient ships.

  The first trap had been set in nine fathoms (fifty-four feet) of water off Bois Island. Our skipper tested it by jigging inside the trap. On the first try he hooked a fine, fat cod and hauled it, shimmering, over the gunwale.

  “Good enough!” he said. “We’ll haul her, byes!”

  It took the best efforts of all five of us manhandling the great mass of twine and ropes to “bag” the trap and haul it to the surface. It contained about a ton of big cod, seething against the mesh. Pitching them aboard with glorified hay forks while the skiff lifted and fell in the ocean surge was an exciting and dangerous business. One young fellow was very nearly hauled overboard when his arm became entangled in a mooring line. He would not have lasted long had it pulled him down for the Labrador current, in whose chill waters we were, was only a few degrees above freezing.

  It took an hour to clear this trap and reset it. Then we moved on to the second one but a rising wind and sea prevented us from hauling it. We were thankful to regain the shelter of the harbour, where all hands turned to and forked our fish up onto the stage. Here they were gutted, split, and boned preliminary to being “made” into salt fish. Flattened out like triangular shingles, the split fish were carried to the salt shed, sprinkled with coarse salt, and left to cure. Once the salt had thoroughly penetrated the flesh, the split fish were carried on hand barrows by women and children to spindly outdoor structures constructed of spruce “longers” overlaid with spruce boughs. These were the “flakes” upon which the fish were spread to dry in sun and wind, carefully tended against sun burning or against infestations of maggots. Seen from a distance, the flakes looked as if they were covered with snow.

  I spent hours on the stages watching the trap boats come home and yarning with men like Uncle Jim Welch and Uncle John Hawkins–“Uncle” being an honorific title conferred on older outport men.

  Jim was eighty-eight, and John was ninety, but, as they assured me, they were “still good fur it.” They greeted every arriving boat with kindly but critical comments as to the quality and quantity of fish aboard it–comments the crews accepted good-naturedly, for the old fellows enjoyed the unstinting respect of all hands.

  They had surely earned it.

  Uncle John had first gone to sea at the age of eight with his father, jigging fish from a dory. He was a late starter. Uncle Jim had begun his career at seven as cabin boy aboard his grandfather’s small schooner fishing down the Labrador. Salt water was almost their blood. As Howard said of them: “They be as well pickled as the finest Madeira.” He was referring not to Madeira wine but to the best grade of salt cod, called Madeira because that was where most of it was sold.

  The stories men like these and Howard had to tell were legion.

  One I especially liked concerned Albert Billard, from nearby Mobile, who had died only a year previously. Although primarily a fisherman, Billard had also worked a potato patch in which he took much pride. Unfortunately his neighbours’ goats were forever getting into Billard’s potatoes. The feud between goats and man was already old when, late one summer day as Billard was harvesting his potatoes, back bent and eyes fixed on the stony soil, the stout parish priest, a man famous for his appetite, happened by. Seeing Billard at work, the Father leaned upon his stick and hopefully remarked: “Ah, so ye’re diggin’ ’em, Billard.”

  Glancing out from under his bushy eyebrows, Billard failed to see the priest. Instead he found himself looking into the baleful yellow eyes of a nanny goat busily munching one of his spuds.

  “Yiss, ye whore!” Billard shouted furiously. “And if ’tweren’t for the likes of you there’d be more for the rest of we!”

  Another tale illuminated the indomitable nature of Southern Shore women.

  During Howard’s childhood a runaway from an English fishing ship–an “Irish youngster,” as such men were called–had appeared in Ferryland.

  “They was hard times that year and this fellow must have had a fill of it. He had nought but the clothes on his back. Ferryland folk took him in and made him welcome. My old father give him a hand and he worked at the fishing; but he was always, as you might say, looking over his shoulder, afeared he’d be captured.

  “He did look to his front sometimes, ’cause he fell in love with a maid from Acquaforte called Rose and married she, and began fishing on his own. But his fears never left him and one autumn he took his wife and their two babies and rowed his skiff forty mile down the coast to a spit of a cove no ships and few boats would care to enter. He built a cabin there and went about living far away as he could get from the world.

  “It must have been some hard lines for Rose. They had nought but what they made for theyselves. No neighbours to pass the time with, or lend a hand when they was need. Me old mother felt so sorry for that maid she got a crew to make a trip down to the cove they was in to take some clothes to her little boys and herself. Those fellows said it was the roughest place ever they saw. Rose’s family was so little used to seeing strangers they hardly had a word to say.

  “Once or twice a year the man would row into Ferryland to trade his salt fish for fishing gear, powder and shot, a puncheon of molasses, fat pork, maybe a bit of flour. For the most of it, them people lived like they was the only people in the world. They lived from the sea and off the country, eating fish, caribou, ducks, and the few potatoes they could grow on a patch of moss and dirt scrabbled out among the rocks.

  “One February morning the man was struck down. Paralysis, it seemed like. Rose nursed him for two weeks but he got worse. Then she made up her mind to go for help, so she left her boys–they was nine or ten years old by then–to care for their poor father, and set out single-handed to row the skiff forty mile to Ferryland in wicked winter weather with the floe ice not a half a mile offshore.

  “Rose’d made about fifteen miles before a nor’east gale blew up and drove the ice in. It nipped the skiff and broke her into match-wood. Rose made her way ashore on foot–copying, we calls it–over the ice pans. Then she clumb the cliffs, waded five brooks that was full of ice, and walked, knee-deep in snow, to Ferryland.

  “Her toes and fingers was mostly frozen and for a time she’d lost the power to speak. It were three days before we knew what had happened, and two more afore the nor’easter died down and a westerly blew the ice far enough off shore so’s a party of men could make their way to the cove. Rose tried to go along but they made her stop where she was to.”

  The rescuers were met by two silent boys. The men went up to the little house and found it snug, warm, and tidy. They asked the boys where their father was and the oldest–the ten-year-old–silently led them to a shack some distance from the cabin. Inside was the missing man.

  He was strung up to the roof beam by his feet; he had been cleanly bled and gutted.

  “You sees how ’twas,” Howard told me sombrely. “Them lads never seen a dead man before. But they’d seen a good many deer killed, and watched their poor father hang them up and gut them. So, poor lads, they thought that was the way to treat any dead creature, be it man or beast.

  “They done the best as they knowed how….”

  A Southern Shore Bummer

  My Cook’s tour with Harold Horwood had given me a kaleidoscopic overview of Newfoundland, and my visits to Ferryland had provided glimpses into the lives of its people. Wanting to dig deeper, I pondered a lesson that time spent with the Inuit had taught me: in order to gain any real insight into the lives of a tribal people it is necessary to at least try to be one. Although it was patently too late for me to assume the oilskins, sou’wester, and persona of a born-and-bred Newfoundland fisherman, I thought I might a
t least approach them in a familiar context as a sailor manning one of their own boats.

  One mid-January day in 1960 I drove to Toronto to see Jack McClelland, head of McClelland & Stewart, the firm that published my books in Canada. Jack was a close friend so we migrated to a bar where I unburdened myself of the plan I had been developing.

  “I want to go back east, Jack. The salvage book I’ve written and the trips I’ve made down there have given me a taste for the place.”

  “More likely a taste for the local rum.”

  “That too, of course. But the thing is I’d like to get me a boat, sail right around Newfoundland, then write a book about it.”

  Jack rose to the lure like a hungry cod to the jigger.

  “Hell of a good idea! I’ve still got a yen for salt water myself, from my navy days. Maybe we could get a boat together. What would it cost?”

  “Peanuts, Jack. Newfie’s full of little fishing schooners that’re being replaced by power boats. They’re a bit old and a bit smelly maybe, but dirt cheap. We could fly down; pick up something suitable; have her refitted locally; then this summer cruise around Newfoundland. After that? Well, how does Tahiti sound?”

  It all sounded fine to Jack. Since he could not spare the time to go boat-hunting, it was left to me to put the plan into action. In February I flew to St. John’s, where Harold Horwood grandly offered to help me find a suitable vessel.

  We visited many fishing villages clinging like treacle to the wave-battered cliffs of the Avalon Peninsula and examined a multitude of vessels ranging from small and ancient “bully boats” to a venerable two-hundred-ton, three-masted schooner. Most were no longer seaworthy, but eventually we found a small schooner of a kind known as a Southern Shore bummer hauled out at the little outport of Admiral’s Cove, not far from Fermeuse.