Bay of Spirits

by Farley Mowat

  “One toime him and the mate had a fight and that night–we was in Gloucester and a big starm was called for–he loosed our lines from the shore bollards and made them fast to some oil barrels waiting shipment on the dock. Well, sir, along about midnight she began to blow a gale, and the first we knowed the schooner had pulled the barrels into the harbour and we was adrift and like to end up on the rocks. We’d have lost her that night, only she took the ground on a mud bank. That was the last time I saw Joe, but not the last I heard about he.

  “One winter evening a year or two later he undertook to row a young woman teacher over to Pushthrough for to catch the steamer. Halfway across Great Jervais Bay he stops pulling and tells her what he wants. When she says no, Joe pulls out the plug in the bottom of the dory and it begins to fill. When ’twas half full the maid must have changed her mind ’cause he put back the plug, bailed out the dory, and after a time landed her on a rock near Pushthrough harbour mouth, where it took her half the night to call somebody to help her git ashore.

  “I never heard tell of Joe Rose again. But if you goes over to Great Jervais, take a care.”

  Before we could attempt the trip the fog began to thin. Pushthrough was slackening the chains and we wasted no time making our escape. Claire cast off the lines while I started the engine. We had no more than cleared Dawson’s Point when the blatting diaphone at the still-invisible lighthouse fell silent. The shroud began to part and pale streaks of sunlight gave us our first glimpse into the yawning throat of Bay Despair.

  The opening before us had a stunning majesty: a great gulf slicing into a thousand-foot-high rocky plateau whose cliffs plunged into dark waters of almost unimaginable depth; although we were enclosed by land, we were now sailing over the deepest abyss to be found anywhere adjacent to the shores of Atlantic Canada. The sea floor here lay an extraordinary half a mile below Happy Adventure’s keel–a plunge cauldron scoured out by the melting of mile-high glaciers fifteen thousand years earlier, but now a void of darkness, silence, and unknown things.

  The names on the chart indicated that earlier arrivals may have felt much as we two did: that they were entering a world beyond the provenance of ordinary mortals.

  Three miles to starboard of us Wreck Cove gaped hungrily. Three miles off the port bow was Old Harry Head, Old Harry being the pseudonym seafarers gave to the Devil. Behind the Head was a black-walled cove called Davy Jones’s Locker, the traditional mariners’ name for the place where drowned sailors gather. Four miles directly ahead of us towered Goblin Head, with three brooding clefts in the wall behind it called Great, Middle, and Little Goblin Bays.

  Such was the vestibule of the Bay of Spirits.

  We set course across it under power and as we putt-putted along were accompanied by three playful minke whales, each about Happy Adventure’s length, who demonstrated their agility by surfacing and blowing almost under our bowsprit, then swooshing off at flank speed before the cutwater could touch them. Claire was engrossed in their performance, but I was looking over my shoulder at a fog bank that was following us into the Bay. When I drew Claire’s attention to it she remarked, “I should call you Foggy Farley! It seems to follow you around like a pet dog.”

  “Take the helm!” I ordered brusquely and went below to see if I could squeeze another knot out of the engine.

  Here I should explain that the new diesel behaved with the utmost fidelity, but since it had no controls on deck one of us had to go below to the “engine room” to change pace or to start or stop it.

  The great eastern arm of the Bay is split by a ten-mile-long island. The main passage, to the southward, is called Long Reach and the much narrower one to the north, Lampidose Passage. The strangeness of that name attracted us, as did the promise of an escape from the pursuing fog, so we headed for it. This meant hugging the southern shore of the Goblin Peninsula, whose cliffs, towering high above us, were stained with impressionistic swashes of colour–gold, silver, sulphur, bronze–the leachings of unseen mineral deposits.

  The Lampidose was an awesome place, a spectacular gorge winding sinuously between other-worldly hills. When a faint breath of wind touched us from astern we stopped the engine, hoisted all sail, and ghosted along in solitude and silence. There was no indication that anything human had ever passed this way. Nor were any natural inhabitants visible–not even an errant gull.

  When I wondered aloud if we might not have passed through the gates to the underworld and be caught in the implacable current of the River Styx, Claire accused me of morbidity. In truth, I felt exalted, as if we were in the presence of the elder gods.

  However, the fog demons still pursued us and by the time we passed Margery Head were so close that I started the engine and shamelessly ran before them. When a narrow opening in the cliffs to the northward offered a haven, I turned into it, and so we found ourselves in Roti Bay.

  Hubert Bullen had described Roti Bay to me as “a worm-gut off the Lampidose. Full of wind as a horse’s belly. You go in there, you wants to be good and certain you got good anchors and plenty chain…or that little hole-in-the-wall’ll fart you right back out again.”

  Although the fog did not pursue us into Roti Bay, the wind was rising and the sky darkening ominously. The chart showed only one tiny cove, Clay Hole, where we might hope to find safe anchorage. We eased Happy Adventure into it between two rocky arms and over kelp-covered shoals until we had only three fathoms under us, then I let go our biggest anchor, praying that the flukes would dig deep into a bed of clay.

  Ebony clouds were soon swooping down to mast level as a sou’easter gathered strength, storming over the high surrounding hills, whining and moaning in our rigging. I furled the sails, made all shipshape on deck, then ducked below, slamming the companion hatch tight shut behind me.

  Claire already had the galley stove roaring and dinner cooking. The lamps flickered cheerily, steam filmed the portholes, shutting out the gathering storm, and I poured us both a drink.

  So began one of the most memorable nights we ever spent together. We seemed divorced from the rest of humankind. It was almost as if the last trump had sounded and we alone were left. The sou’easter boomed and bellowed like the voice of God. Mighty gusts struck us, heeling the vessel over while her rigging keened like pagan pipes. She tugged at her chain like a restive horse, surging forward in momentary calms, then sagging back as new gusts struck her.

  She was alive! The night was alive! And so were we!

  Implausible as it may seem, we felt no fear of the imponderable forces raging around us. As the gale rose to a crescendo of sound and fury, we made love then slept sweetly in one another’s arms while Happy Adventure surged under us.

  Once during the night the wind veered suddenly, spinning our little cockleshell around and making the chain growl in the hawse pipe. Claire did not awaken, and soon the wind veered back and all was well again.

  The gale dropped before dawn and I went on deck at first light, to be greeted by a chorus of ravens’ and gulls’ voices echoing and re-echoing around the enormous amphitheatre of the surrounding hills. A moose came splashing along the shore, glanced at Happy Adventure lying a boat’s length away, nodded as if to itself, and wandered on. Claire joined me with a pot of tea and we sat contemplating our spectacular haven. It was a transcendental moment.

  After breakfast we rowed ashore looking for fresh water to fill our tank. We had been unable to fill it at Pushthrough because a drought had emptied the wells there. The drought had also afflicted Roti Bay so that all the little streamlets draining into it seemed to have dried up. We followed one of them–a staircase of clattering white stones ascending a steep slope through a tunnel of wind-stunted spruce trees. To our delight it led us to a rock pool filled with crystalline water.

  We were hot so we stripped off and took a bath surrounded by giant fern. Descending the staircase hand in hand we found a little beach and became children again, chasing around in search of scallop shells to use as shovels, then squatting naked while
digging in the sand and mud for clams. We filled a bucket with clams before rowing back to the vessel to cook a chowder for our lunch–a chowder that turned out to be full of mini-pearls.

  The sun shone brilliantly and the bay underwent a sea change. The formerly grey and brooding hills glowed with a delicate green sheen, and the indigo waters below them were stilled, except for a friendly little riffle on the surface. A harbour seal swam to within a few feet, then bobbed half out of the water in order to satisfy its curiosity about us. A pair of ravens swooped down from a high peak to the north where they perhaps had their nest, and they bombarded us with raucous questions until they were distracted by an intruding eagle and flapped off to chase him away.

  It seemed to me that the ravens were not just guarding their own bit of territory–but the heart and, as it may be, the very soul and essence of the vast watery world of Baie d’Esprits.

  Head of the Bay

  On a warm and sunny morning hazed by pungent wood smoke drifting south from the island’s interior, which was then ablaze with wildfires, the friendly harbour seal escorted us out of Roti Bay.

  We had no particular destination in mind, only the desire to sail deeper into the mystery. The breeze was light and favourable as we ghosted through a broad reach hemmed in by eight-hundred-foot hills that grew increasingly wooded the farther north we sailed.

  We saw plenty of life: gulls, eagles, waterfowl, and a pod of porpoises, but no sign of mankind. We had sailed a good twenty miles into the land and begun to wonder if we had sailed out of human ken when we opened a cove to the westward fringed by little houses and dominated by an enormous church. The chart told me this was St. Alban’s. We had returned to our own kind again.

  Sailing on through a narrow tickle we headed somewhat reluctantly for another cluster of houses with a sprawling lumber mill in its midst. This was Milltown, the premier community in Head of the Bay. We tied up at the government wharf.

  One of the people who drifted down to look us over was Dolph Roberts, a slightly built, fair-haired man I had met and travelled with for three days in 1957 aboard the Baccalieu. Now he took Claire and me under his wing Newfoundland style. Loading us into his old car, he drove us to Deepwater Point, where Head of the Bay’s road system (it amounted to about three miles of dirt-and-gravel “moose trail”) terminated at what had been a thriving shipyard built by Dolph’s uncle, Morgan Roberts.

  Basques, French, and Portuguese had all made good use of the tall and vigorous stands of white pine, spruce, and hardwoods originally found inland from the head of the bay. Those who followed did even better. Between 1900 and the end of the Second World War, local shipwrights launched more than two hundred sailing vessels here, some of them being as much as three hundred tons. Most of these had been employed in the “three-cornered trade”: fishing on the Grand Banks or down the Labrador in summer; voyaging to Europe in autumn with salt fish; returning home early in the winter via the Caribbean, where they took on cargoes of sugar, salt, and rum.

  The man who built some of the best of the bay schooners (and the last of them–a ninety-tonner launched in 1953) was Morgan Roberts. Eighty years old when we met him, he was a massively built man still “full of piss and vinegar,” as his nephew admiringly put it, who welcomed us to a sprawling wooden house built in the grand manner and furnished with a semblance of mid-Victorian pomp and splendour. It even boasted a bathroom, complete with a huge, claw-footed iron tub in which Claire and I were invited to luxuriate.

  Sadly in need of paint and repairs, the house overlooked a placid cove and the ruins of the sawmill and shipyard upon which the now-exhausted Roberts family fortune had been built. At Morgan’s benevolent command, we dined with him and Dolph at an elaborate mahogany table set with strangely assorted but genuine silver and oddments of imported chinaware. The meal consisted of canned Spam accompanied by a pallid salad made from sliced onions and bits of wild watercress. It was served with panache by one of Morgan’s cousins, a heavy-set woman with a moustache and a great, gurgling laugh, who, after the death of Morgan’s wife, had become the doyenne of the establishment.

  While we were eating, the Glimshire (another of the surviving quartet of lumber hookers) eased in on the rising tide and anchored just offshore to load a cargo of “sticks” (pulp logs) Dolph had cut during the winter and rafted ready for her. The rusty music of her old winch and of men’s voices echoing over calm waters became the background for Morgan’s story.

  In the mid-eighteenth century three Roberts brothers with their wives and children had fled from the French occupation of Placentia Bay in thirty-foot open bully boats propelled by oars and lug sails. Sailing west along the coast they became the first English to settle at Hermitage Cove, a harbour that had formerly served as a summer fishing and whaling station for Basques and Portuguese.

  Hermitage Cove was not far enough west for two of the Roberts brothers so they set sail again. One was never heard of afterwards; the other settled in what would become Pushthrough, and it was there in the year 1800 that Morgan’s great-grandfather had been born.

  Morgan’s branch of the family lived in and fished out of Pushthrough for three generations, carrying their salt cod to Placentia or St. Pierre to trade with the French for what they needed.

  “Everybody lived out on the coasts, them times,” Morgan explained. By which he meant everyone of European blood. Except for an occasional renegade from the coast fishery, nobody except Indians lived in the labyrinthine interior of Bay Despair.

  However, in 1856 a transatlantic cable company began constructing an overland telegraph link from St. John’s to Port aux Basques, running just inland from the foot of the great fiords and bays of the southern coast. Soon a relay operator and his family were established at Head of the Bay, and another at the inner end of the arm called Bay the North. Thereafter, Englishmen who had been working as indentured labour (and hating it) for Jersey fishing companies along the coast began slipping away inland to try making a livelihood felling trees, pit-sawing the resultant logs, and floating the timber out to the coast to sell. Some even tried to establish little farms.

  By 1870 two such families were living at Head of the Bay. One of these traded a barrel of gunpowder to the local Mi’kmaqs for the “use of” some three hundred acres of foreshore. In a similar exchange the other settler attempted to pass off a barrel of spoiled flour mixed with coal dust. When the Mi’kmaqs spotted the swindle and complained, the settler ran them off “his” land with a pitchfork, and when they returned to argue their case, he shot one of them stone dead–a not unusual way of settling disputes with natives in Newfoundland, as elsewhere in the Americas.

  In 1890 Morgan’s father decided to abandon the fishery at Pushthrough for the life of a logger and sawyer. He sailed his family to Head of the Bay, where they lived in a log shanty for the two years it took to cut and saw enough logs to build a proper house. There were several strong-backed sons, so the family made rapid gains. They acquired an old sawmill from one of the Jersey merchants at the coast and before long the Robertses were sending shiploads of lumber as far afield as St. Pierre. From this it was no great leap to establishing a small shipyard.

  Between 1904 and 1948 the Robertses built at least one vessel a year–mostly fore-and-aft schooners, but some square riggers, including a 190-ton three-master. Most of the lumber hookers Claire and I became familiar with in the bay and along the coast had been built in the Robertses’ yard from models carved and whittled by master ship-wrights who never worked from paper plans. Morgan showed us several of the models he himself had designed and made. They were in fact half-models, each lovingly fashioned to a shape determined by the eye of the carver and by the infinitely long tradition of the sea. Morgan explained that he would work at a half-model, a touch here and a shaving there, until “she looked just right.” He would then slice the model into sections and, with dividers, take measurements, which he would multiply by whatever scale was required and apply directly to the planks and timbers waiting in the
yard.

  Because the water behind Deepwater Point was very shoal, large vessels had to be launched on their sides and at high tide. It sometimes proved necessary to dig a channel as much as a hundred yards long through the muddy tide-wash to get them afloat. No matter. When they finally floated free they did their builders proud. One of the Robertses’ schooners won international renown by making a passage laden with salt fish under sail alone to Portugal in just nine days, returning in eleven: a round trip of some five thousand miles.

  The last vessel off the Robertses’ ways was the 140-ton Shirley Rose, built in 1944; and then the Age of Sail was dead.

  The Robertses had also engaged in the thriving trade, legal and illegal, between the bay and St. Pierre. Produce from the bay shipped to the French islands consisted mostly of lumber, firewood billets, and barrel hoops and staves but also included turnips and potatoes, salmon, and game, especially caribou and moose. Return cargoes included sugar, French cloth, household goods, and barrels of Martinique rhum, little if any of which was ever seen by the government excise cutters patrolling the waters between the French Isles and Newfoundland.

  “Give us a good puff of wind and we could show our heels to any of them, even the fastest steam cutter they ever had,” Morgan happily remembered.

  His memories were sadly at odds with the present. The shipway below his house was now a graveyard of abandoned hulks–“come home to die.” A rank growth of underbrush almost completely hid the marine railway. The smithy and the sail-maker’s loft had collapsed. The mill, where lumber for the shipyard had been sawed, was still recognizable as such for Dolph had managed to keep it going until a few years previously.