Bay of Spirits

by Farley Mowat

  She was a rough-looking little thing, measuring thirty feet on deck with a beam of nine feet and a draft of four feet six inches. On close inspection she looked as if she might have been flung together by a band of Neolithic builders equipped with stone tools. Flush-decked, she had three narrow “fishing wells” in each of which a man could stand while jigging for cod. A dark hole aft housed the enormous phallus of the single-cylinder, make-and-break engine that was her chief means of propulsion. Her two masts were hardly more than sticks stayed with lengths of old telephone wire, while her sails–not much bigger than bedsheets–were as sere and patched as Jacob’s coat. It did not appear that the two Fennely brothers who owned her relied much on sail.

  Her holds and bilges had never been cleaned and were encrusted with a glutinous layer of slime, old blood, and fish scales. This was not because of bad ship-keeping. It was because, as Manuel Fennely explained in the accent prevalent on the Avalon, “de bummers be built of green wood and when dey dries dey opens up. Divil a seam can ye keep tight wit’ caulkin’ but dey seals dersels wit’ fish gurry, and dat keeps dey tight.”

  Although her faults (some of them) were apparent, she was only five years old and the price–nine hundred dollars–did not seem exorbitant to me. It was, in fact, about twice the going price for her kind, but Harold refrained from telling me this and congratulated me on having struck a shrewd bargain.

  Jack’s reaction was different. When, a few months later, he beheld her for the first time he stared unbelievingly.

  “My God, Farley! Were you out of your mind? Or drunk? Or both?…What are you going to call her, supposing she floats at all?”

  “Happy Adventure,” I replied humbly. “Harold suggested it. It’s the name of a pirate ship that worked Newfoundland waters a couple of hundred years ago.”

  “Fucking appropriate!” said Jack succinctly.

  Having bought the vessel, I made arrangements with her builder, a skeletal, walleyed fellow named Neddy Coffin who lived in nearby Fermeuse, to restore and refit her as a proper sailing ship with accommodations for a crew of two. Then I flew back to Ontario, satisfied I had acquired the means of entering into the heart and soul of Newfoundland.

  I returned to Fermeuse at the end of June to claim my ship. At first I could not find her. Thirty or forty trap boats, skiffs, and dories were slumbering at their moorings in Fermeuse harbour, which was dominated by a fish-filleting plant spouting a plume of oily black smoke from its iron chimney. It was a peaceful scene, typical of most of the hundreds of little outports that still clung to the coasts of the Rock. But where was the green schooner that should have been waiting for her new skipper?

  A little boy appeared beside me, as if sprung from the rocks.

  “Would you happen to know,” I asked, “where the little bummer that used to belong to the Fennelys might be?”

  He nodded and led me at a trot between two decayed warehouses to a spindly stage of peeled spruce poles.

  Moored to it was a boat. The tide was out and she was aground and lying on her side amid broken bottles, rotting kelp, dead fish, and nameless slimy objects. Her hull had received no attention since I had last seen her, and the remains of her green paint hung from her in scrofulous tatters. Her deck presented a patchwork of gaping holes surrounding a huge, unpainted wooden box that reached from the steering well almost to the base of the bowsprit. It made her look as if she was carrying her own coffin on her back.

  She was a spectacle that left me breathless.

  “Lard Jasus, sorr!” said my guide with sincere appreciation. “Don’t she be a wunnerful quare sight?”

  I had given Neddy Coffin detailed instructions for converting the vessel into a small cruising yacht, but my wishes had conflicted with centuries of tradition, which dictated that space allotted to people aboard a boat must be kept to the irreducible minimum so as to leave as much room as possible for fish.

  Neddy’s attempts to obey my instructions, in opposition to his deep-rooted instincts, had led to no happy compromise. He had begun by ripping off the deck and building a cabin-trunk raised just high enough over the hull to provide a bare five feet of headroom. Then he had further shrunk the available living space by partitioning off the after third to house the monstrous engine, which, in his view, was of greater importance than the crew.

  Built in the 1920s at a foundry in Lunenburg, the engine was a monolithic chunk of cast iron weighing five hundred pounds, equipped with a flywheel almost the size of a freight car wheel. To start it you poured half a cup of raw gasoline through a priming cock on the top of the single cylinder then laboriously turned the flywheel by hand until (and if) the engine fired.

  Neddy had roughed out the accommodations to include two plank bunks, each sixteen inches wide at the head and twelve at the foot. They were sloped in such a fashion that the occupants’ feet would normally rest six inches higher than their heads. What little space remained was mostly occupied by a galley equipped with a two-burner gasoline stove and enough lockers to hold the supplies of hardtack biscuit, salt pork, flour, tea, sugar, and turnips normally carried by fishing vessels of Happy Adventure’s ilk. With the exception of a small battery-powered radio and flashlights, she consumed no electricity at all. Her running lights and cabin lights were oil-fuelled. Her pumps and all her gear, including winches, were hand-powered.

  Completing the work required to make her more or less sea-worthy turned out to be a long and tedious business. It was not until the end of June that we felt ready to embark upon our maiden voyage. Considering what he had endured in preparation for the voyage, Jack demanded that our first port of call be some special place. The choice fell on St. Pierre and Miquelon, which we thought we could reach in three or four days.

  Happy Adventure made a brave sight as she ran down Fermeuse harbour toward the open sea. With all sails set she lay over a little and snored sweetly through the water, actually overtaking some powered skiffs bound out to the fishing grounds.

  All that morning we sailed south on a broad reach, keeping a two-or three-mile offing from the grim sea cliffs. Then the wind switched into the sou’east to become a dead muzzler right on our bows, bringing with it the threat of fog.

  With difficulty we started the engine and by four o’clock Cape Race was looming bleak and barren off to starboard. And there we stuck. The engine thundered and the water boiled under our counter, but a powerful current had us in its grasp and the massive headland of the cape refused to slip past. Off to port an ominous grey curtain of fog was driving in from the Grand Banks. At six-thirty Jack went below to rustle up some food. An instant later his head appeared in the companionway.

  “Christ, Farley! The bloody boat is sinking!”

  I jumped to join him and saw water sluicing across the floor-boards down below. Jack was working the hand pump as if his life depended on it. It dawned on me that his life did depend on it, and so did mine.

  Then the pump jammed.

  It was a foolishly complicated thing whose innards consisted of a mass of springs and valves easily jammed by the bits of flotsam and jetsam floating in the bilges. Jack held a flashlight while I unbolted the pump’s faceplate. Instantly all the springs and valves shot out and went ricocheting around the engine room like a flight of manic bees–before falling into the swirling water in the bilges.

  Improbable as it may seem we found them all, put back the faceplate, and began to pump. We pumped and we pumped–and the water level rose until it reached the flywheel, which began sending a Niagara of spray onto the red-hot exhaust pipe.

  We pumped.

  The fog closed in inexorably until the darkness surrounding us became almost absolute. I steered what I hoped was a course for Trepassey harbour, where we thought we might have a chance of beaching the vessel on a non-lethal shore.

  Shortly before midnight I saw a faint, flashing light and headed for it, hoping it marked the harbour entrance. I did not need Jack’s warning shout to tell me time was running out. The rising water had r
eached the carburetor, and the engine had begun to sputter.

  It coughed. Stopped. Picked up again. Coughed. And stopped for good. Silently in the black night the little ship lost way. Then her forefoot struck something. She jarred and made a strange sucking sound. She had run ashore!

  Trepassey, clinging forlornly to the rocky southeastern snout of Newfoundland, is a windswept, desolate little place whose houses straggle dismally around the edge of its harbour. It is, as they say in other parts of Newfoundland, “where t’fog is made.”

  I believe it. During the long days we lay there repairing the leak (it was in the propeller shaft) and waiting for better weather, we lived in a world of uncertain shadows where nothing seemed quite real. The fog was almost tangible. After a week of waiting for it to lift, we were desperate enough to depart for St. Pierre, though the murk was still so thick we could hardly see the length of our own vessel.

  Just after noon the shadowy shape of a big motor vessel, which had picked us up on her radar, loomed alongside.

  “Where you bound, skipper?” someone hailed.

  “St. Pierre!”

  There was a long, thoughtful silence, then, “Well, bye, I don’t say as you’re going to make it steering the course you’re on. Unless you plans to take her up Branch River and put her on a railroad train. If ’twas me, I’d haul off to port about nine points.”

  Her diesels roared as she pulled away and quickly disappeared.

  I altered course ten points, just to be sure. The compass now indicated we were steering for Bermuda, a thousand miles or so to the southwest. I wished fervently we had had our compass adjusted before sailing. As the hours dragged on, we reluctantly admitted to one another that we really did not know where we were.

  Jack found this unsettling because in five days he was due back at his Toronto office. Muttering darkly, he went below to try to get a weather forecast on our small radio.

  He emerged in a few minutes to say quietly–too quietly: “Farley, you aren’t going to want to hear this but they’re putting out an all-ships warning. Tropical storm coming up from the south with winds of sixty knots.”

  We spread our charts out on the wet deck and pored over them for a long time. First Jack would pore, then I would pore. This made us feel better, but was of no practical use. We did not have a clue where we might be. Jack thought it might be best to head southward and try to ride out the coming storm in the open ocean rather than search for some unseen harbour and end up on the roaring rocks. In the end we simply steered straight ahead and hoped for the best.

  Jack McClelland lays out a course.

  The fog grew thicker. Somewhere the sun set. We did not bother lighting our oil-burning navigation lights for they would have been invisible from more than a few yards away. We shivered in damp oilskins as we blundered on into the heart of darkness. We told each other this was how mariners of ancient times–the Norse in their longships, the Basques in their cranky vessels, Jacques Cartier in his caravel–must have felt as they ran west into the dark unknown.

  When a light breeze began to fill the sails, we shut down the noisy engine and ghosted along, ears straining for any sound. In the small hours of the morning we finally heard, very distant and indistinct off the starboard bow, the faint moan of a diaphone–a foghorn.

  Diaphones can be identified one from the other by the patterns of the sounds they make. Thus, one may blow three five-second blasts at three-second intervals, while another blows for ten seconds at half-minute intervals. By timing the distant moans and then consulting the Light and Foghorn List we concluded that the one we were hearing must be on Little Burin Island on the western coast of Placentia Bay. Eureka! We started the engine, pushed it to full speed, and homed in on the horn in hopes of reaching sanctuary in Burin Harbour before the storm broke.

  There was a problem. In order to hear the horn we had to stop the engine. It seemed to resent this treatment and became increasingly reluctant to run again. By dawn (indicated by a very slight brightening in the murk around us) the engine was proving almost impossible to restart–and we were close enough to shore to hear the blood-chilling roar of heavy surf bursting on rocks. The next time I stopped the engine, the horn blasted out so close at hand it almost seemed to be at our masthead.

  A few days later the keeper of the light on Little Burin Island would tell us: “Heard you fellows out there for hours and hours. Couldn’t make out what you was up to. Your engine would run for a bit then shut off and I never knowed was you gone ashore or what. Then, be Jasus, you’d be comin’ at me again. The last time I t’ought you was comin’ right up the rock and into me front door!”

  We never did see Little Burin Island but somehow Happy Adventure found her way past it and into Burin Inlet, where we drifted through a grey soup. Somewhere a dog barked and a church bell was ringing. Jack swung the lead from the bows and when he got four fathoms the anchor went over. The heavy chain rattled out and Happy Adventure came to rest.

  I woke about noon to find the cabin full of sunlight. The fog had gone and the day was brilliant. We were at anchor in the middle of a fleet of trap skiffs and dories. An elderly man wearing his Sunday best was rowing a dory toward us. He paused a few feet away and leaned on his oars.

  “Mornin’, skipper. Come in through the fog, did ye?”

  I admitted that we had.

  “Well now. Don’t know as ever I see a thicker nor a blacker one. Don’t know as I’d a-cared to bring a vessel through it.”

  We invited him aboard for a drink, after which he carried us ashore for Sunday dinner with his wife and family. Only then did we discover he was the captain of a coastal trading ship and realize how high a compliment he had paid us. He did more. In view of the approaching storm, he insisted on piloting us to a new anchorage at Spoon Cove, the most sheltered nook in Burin Inlet.

  Such was our welcome to the Sou’west Coast of Newfoundland.

  Jack was unable to enjoy it for long. There was a phone in Burin, with which he foolishly called his office, to be ordered home at once. That afternoon a hired car took him to St. John’s, leaving me and Happy Adventure to ride out the gale in the snug shelter of Spoon Cove.

  Two days later I was joined there by Mike Donovan. Mike, who was currently Newfoundland’s director of Library Services, had been one of my lieutenants and closest friends in northwestern Europe during the war. On the pretext of inspecting libraries on the Burin Peninsula (there weren’t any), he had now absented himself from St. John’s to help me sail Happy Adventure on to St. Pierre.

  Mike, who described himself as a “long, lean drink of Irish bog water,” had a black sense of humour and a talent for getting into and out of difficulties. I welcomed him with open arms, into which he placed six bottles of rum, the bulk of his luggage.

  Mike was not what one would call a seasoned mariner. He had lived most of his life in Ontario and had only been to sea as a passenger in troopships crossing the Atlantic. I gave him a crash course. I showed him over the vessel, pointing out and naming everything of importance; then I ran him through such standard procedures as making sail, lowering sail, handling the sheets, steering with a tiller, letting go the anchor, and spinning the flywheel of the engine. He proved adept at all these things and I was much heartened, until I sent him off in our little dinghy to practise rowing and he turned it over on top of himself. When he was hauled, shivering and trembling, onto Happy Adventure’s deck, he put on his broadest smile and broadest Irish accent.

  “Faith and begorra! And wouldn’t that be just the dandy rig for swimmin’ in the rain?”

  Mike’s ignorance of the sea and ships had one advantage: he did not know enough to be nervous. In his eyes Happy Adventure was the staunchest little vessel ever launched. He trusted her absolutely, and kept on doing so even when she did her best to disillusion him. Not, mind you, that he failed to take precautions. Before he squeezed into his bunk that first night he hammered a large St. Christopher’s medal into the plank above his head.

&nbs
p; I am no Roman Catholic but I left the medal there after Mike’s eventual departure. Somebody must have been keeping an eye on us in the days ahead. Whether it was St. Christopher or the Old Man of the Sea I do not know. It may have taken both of them working as a team to do the job.

  Two days after Mike joined the ship, we set sail for St. Pierre, still fifty miles to the westward past the toe of the projecting boot of the Burin Peninsula. In honour of this, Mike’s first voyage, I served a special breakfast–boiled rounders with hot pork fat poured over them. A Newfoundland delicacy, rounders are small cod that have been sun-dried “in the round” rather than split. They have a flavour and aroma not unlike old cheese. Mike had never tasted them before, but he was game.

  Entering Placentia Bay, Happy Adventure began pitching into a big, slow, queasy swell–a legacy of the tropical storm. As she rose and fell Mike turned white, lurched to the rail, and lost his breakfast. When he had finished he announced that he did not really care for rounders–“not twice on the same morning.”

  The breeze freshened until we were bowling along under full sail. To take Mike’s mind off his troubles I gave him the tiller. He had some difficulty at first because, unlike a steering wheel, a tiller requires the steersman to push it in the opposite direction to the way he wishes to go. He was beginning to get the hang of this when we passed a pod of pothead (otherwise called pilot) whales: sleek, black beasts as long as a dory. They were pursuing a school of squid with such singleness of purpose that some of them surfaced and blew their fishy breath right alongside, causing Mike to lose his rounders yet again.

  In mid-afternoon I slung my binoculars around my neck and climbed to the mainmast crosstree to see if I could spot the distant loom of St. Pierre. Instead, I saw a glistening black object of enormous size close ahead. I took it to be one of the great whales–a finner, or even a blue, the largest creature on earth. However, as we came closer I realized it was not a whale but a basking shark. It was immense. Lazing on the surface with its dorsal fin standing up like a trysail, it appeared quite unconscious of our approach, or at any rate quite unperturbed. Since it was longer than Happy Adventure, perhaps it assumed we would get out of its way.