Bay of Spirits

by Farley Mowat

  Phil had been a fisher since the age of nine, handlining from a dory with his father. By the time he was fifteen, he was spending his winters on the stormy waters of Cabot Strait, fishing from small schooners in the worst of the winter weather. In summer he had gone down the Labrador in larger vessels to fish among the icebergs there. Now that the schooner days were finished, he fished with his son Ralph close to home–Hermitage Bay in winter and Long Reach in summer.

  “’Tisn’t the best, you understands. But ’tis all we got left.”

  He and Ralph had a venerable three-horsepower engine in their dory and fished with the latest in nylon nets.

  “We gits out to the grounds quicker now than in old times and catches fish easier than ever we could fishing cross-handed. Our gear’s better than ever it were…but the fish is fewer and far between. Nowadays we got to find four or five dollar for every dollar us needed when I were a youngster, but the merchants hardly pays no more for fish than in olden times. ’Tis all a wonder to me.”

  Most autumns when Phil “settled up” at Garland’s store (the principal merchant at Gaultois) it was to find himself in debt.

  “I got no learning so’s I can’t rightly argue with what the merchant’s got wrote down. But I knows he sells our salt fish to the Portuguese for forty dollars a quintal and pays we five. I knows he buys molasses, butter, and other stuff in St. John’s for a few pennies a pound, and we pays dollars. They’s not much as I can do to keep out of the hole, but I hopes my boys’ll get enough learning to come out in the clear.”

  Phil Dominie did not speak of such matters with bitterness, or try to excuse his lack of financial success. He was proud of never having taken the dole or any other government assistance, and of having always managed to provide for his family, as well as assisting his neighbours when they were in difficulty.

  “Us al’ays gives the other fellow a hand,” he told us earnestly, leaning forward to tap my knee for emphasis. “Us has to do that, you understands. ’Twas the way she al’ays been upon this coast.”

  Perhaps partly because Claire and I were so very much in love, Raymonds Point seemed an enchanted place. For several days we explored it and its neighbouring coves, sometimes by ourselves, sometimes accompanied by the boys and their dog. We daydreamed (and talked to the Dominies) about the possibility of buying the little school, converting it to a home, and settling here.

  They welcomed the idea.

  “Yiss, bye!” Phil said. “Suppose you and the maid drops anchor here, you can have the school and welcome. Never be short nothing you need. Stone Valley’ll see to that, be it grub, or firewood, or company.”

  Although the odds were that we would not be taking him up on the offer, we hesitated to say so even to ourselves. I temporized by telling the Dominies we had to return to Milltown for our mail then visit Hermitage and perhaps St. Pierre. After that, we would see.

  “Good enough, skipper,” Phil replied, “but promise we you’ll not go clear without you puts in to Stone Valley.”

  We made sail for Milltown and, not long after, raised the Hills’ boat coming our way. I hauled into the wind and the brothers came alongside. On this occasion the floating fish market provided us with two fine lobsters.

  Lobsters were out of season but, as Sandy explained, “these come up hanging onto the cod net and we never had the heart to heave they overboard for fear they’d be drownded.”

  Late that afternoon we moored at the Milltown wharf, where I went ashore to collect the mail. Jack had written to tell me the Seamen’s International Union wanted me to come to New York to discuss writing a book about the S.I.U. and suggesting a possible fee of forty thousand dollars–a colossal sum for a freelance writer in those times. Jack had added a caveat: “Take the money if you must…and if you want to risk ending up in a cement overcoat at the bottom of New York harbour. But get yourself another publisher.”

  Although the temptation was strong, the thought of giving up Bay Despair for New York appalled me. When I broached the idea with Claire, she resolutely turned it down.

  “I’ve been so happy to be away from life in a big city, Farley. Please don’t drag me back into one again.”

  I never loved her more than at that moment.

  Next day we sailed from Milltown, through Little Passage and across Hermitage Bay to Hermitage Cove. A short-lived but ferocious storm that broke over the cove that night did not dampen the “time” we had been promised. Enlivened by fiddles, harmonicas, and a quart or two of the white stuff, the party at Sandy Hill’s lasted until dawn.

  I went on deck about ten next morning to check our mooring lines (we were lying at the dock) and was appalled to see coils of black smoke pouring out the cabin windows of the Teressa G., a big motor launch from Gaultois belonging to Garland’s stores. She too was lying alongside the wooden wharf, a scant fifty feet ahead of us. Instinct told me to let go our lines and get out of there, but I delayed in order to raise an alarm by sounding our fog horn.

  Hastily roused, the crews of two big herring seiners from Nova Scotia that had come in to shelter from the storm and were moored well astern of us and the Teressa G. now saw the smoke and ran to let go their lines. Although well equipped with fire-fighting gear, they clearly had no intention of trying to save the burning vessel. I started our engine and was about to cast off when a dishevelled Claire emerged from the cabin.

  The frightening pillar of smoke from the burning boat, and two lesser plumes belching from the exhaust stacks of the seiners, apprised her of what was happening. All she said was, “What can I do?”

  I don’t know what was going through her mind but I could see she wasn’t going to panic so I changed my mind.

  “Stand by to take Itchy to the other side of the harbour! You might have to do it on your own. I’m going to see what I can do for the Teressa.”

  She nodded and I trotted off down the wharf. Jumping aboard the Teressa G., I cautiously opened her cabin door, but could not enter. Choking billows of smoke repulsed me. I hoped there was nobody down below.

  Now the elderly skipper of the doctor’s boat limped onto the wharf dragging a large CO2 fire extinguisher. Taking it from him, I unleashed a gush of foam through a cabin window of the burning vessel. This had some effect in slowing the flames, which were now visible within. Then Teressa G.’s mate, half-dressed and very groggy, appeared and with the help of several others we got a bucket brigade going until a hose could be rigged from shore and the fire was finally doused.

  Then, and only then, did the seiners return to the wharf. When nobody would take their lines it seemed to dawn on them that they were no longer welcome. As they departed, one of their skippers bawled to the other in a voice that could be heard all across the harbour: “Fuckin’ Newfies!”

  Herbert Kendal, skipper of the doctor’s boat, was a fount of information about whaling on the coast, something in which I was much interested. His great-grandfather had been brought out from Bristol about 1815 to be a whaler at Gaultois, where the Jersey firm of Newman’s had built the first English whale “factory” on the Sou’west Coast. Herbert’s grandfather and father had both whaled for Newman’s and he himself had also done so until just after the turn of the twentieth century, when steam-driven Norwegian whale catchers arrived to sweep the local seas clean of leviathans.

  “Afore them Norwegian killer boats with their cannons, their exploding harpoons, and their bomb guns come on the coast, we whaled from longboats. There was eight men to a boat: boat steerer, six men to row, and the harpooner. Them times whales was so plenty in Hermitage Bay you had to look out not to run into they. When I were a lad, one time I counted ninety spouts in sight at the one time off of Fox Island, and all big fellows too.

  “Me old father and me was jiggin’ squid one time and a pod of finners was fishin’ ’em too. They was so fixed on the squid one breached right under the dory. Never seen it, I supposes. Dory and all went into the air and we into the sea. Father got back to the dory somehow–neither him nor me c
ould swim a stroke–and hauled me into it with the gaff as was floating alongside. We was all right then but I don’t doubt that finner found his back right sore.

  “Biggest whale ever I see was a sulphur bottom [blue whale] as Father and his crew got fast to off Pink Bottom. They put the harpoon into she just after dawn, and she towed them like a kite all the rest of the day. Took they away out to sea, then back down to the bottom of Hermitage Bay afore they could get nigh enough to lance her to death.

  “She were too big for the whale boat to tow back to the factory so Newman’s sent their steamer Greyhound. That whale measured out at ninety-seven and a half feet, with a calf inside was near twenty feet long, and it not yet born!”

  Hermitage Cove turned out to be as far to the eastward as we would get. Summer was running out, and we had not found the place to settle for the winter. We decided to forgo St. Pierre and look to the west by visiting Stone Valley.

  A big sea gave us a rough farewell crossing of Hermitage Bay until we sailed into the shelter of the steep-walled little fiord called Little Bay, where we found Stone Valley’s thirty or so trim and shipshape-looking houses stacked so tightly in a rocky gorge that they were practically standing on one another’s shoulders. Though painted in a variety of colours, all were much alike in size and shape. The dozen or so smart-looking motorboats in the harbour were also remarkably similar to each other as, we would soon discover, were the cats, the hens, and indeed the people. Walking about in Stone Valley gave one the rather unsettling sensation of being in a house of mirrors.

  Because the shore cliff was so steep there was no proper wharf and I could see no place to moor until a young lad came rowing out in a dory and piloted us to Garfield Strickland’s stage. Here we tied up with our mainmast spreaders practically poking a hole in Garfield’s kitchen window. A dozen or more people crowded onto the rickety stage to welcome us, Cecil Dominie prominent among them.

  “Some glad to see your leetle boat come down the bay,” he told us as he led the way to his and Clara’s snug house clinging to the steep slope like the nest of a cliff swallow.

  “See, skipper, Phil were here yestiday so all hands knowed you was thinking to light at the Point. We hopes you does and calls Stone Valley home.”

  Clara Dominie took us on a walkabout. Climb-about would be more accurate. Perched on shores–stilts made of peeled logs–the houses crowded as close together as a flock of seafowl poised for flight. Handrails on the narrow paths more or less secured us from plunging into the harbour below. As Clara explained with a grin, “They’s nary a bit of flat ground here, me dears, less’n it be made of wood.”

  The reference was to the floors of the houses.

  In fact wood, not stone, was the true leitmotif of the place. Although the men were expert fishermen, catching herring, mackerel, salmon, lobster, and cod, most had concluded the inshore fishery was doomed and were making or trying to make their livings using other skills. One of their specialties was building boats–mostly skiffs, but some as large as a forty-foot Cape Islander they had launched the previous year.

  They were marvellous carpenters. During the heyday of the herring fishery, they had produced barrels in such quantity that in one year they sold seven thousand dollars’ worth–an astronomical sum for the time and place. They could and did build almost anything that could be made of wood, literally from cradles to coffins. Their coffins were famous for lightness, durability, and tightness. Ches Strickland of Milltown had told me, “A Stone Valley coffin won’t leak nary a drop was you to sail it out to the Grand Banks.”

  They also made household furniture of all kinds: not the rough-and-ready stuff any outport man could fashion, but tables, chairs, daybeds, and ornamental items with the craftsmanship of cabinet makers.

  They did everything from scratch–from felling logs far inland, floating them down the rivers to salt water, then rafting them behind their boats to Stone Valley, to milling them into lumber with machinery they mostly made themselves.

  Garfield Strickland, to whose stage we were moored, had just completed a beautifully built twenty-eight-foot trap skiff. The day after our arrival we helped launch it then moor it alongside Happy Adventure to await the arrival of the coastal steamer that would deliver it to a customer in Placentia Bay.

  Greatly impressed by the quality of his work, I wondered if Garfield would be interested in repairing Harold’s old schooner, Fort Amadjuak, for me. When he said he might, I found myself in a bit of a quandary. The fact was that Claire and I were beset with uncertainties about where we should settle. Although enormously attracted to Bay Despair, we felt it might be too difficult of access, especially while I was researching my history of the island and would need to get in and out quickly and often. We had begun considering “dropping the hook” in Cape Breton, or perhaps some place in the southwestern corner of Newfoundland. In any event we had pretty well concluded we should sail to the westward and see what offered. If nothing suited, we could always come back to Bay Despair.

  Meantime, we decided to enjoy a few days exploring the Little Harbour fiord so we set off for Sam Hicks Harbour, which lay a few miles farther into the land. We did this despite (or perhaps because of) the fact that Cecil had warned us against the place, saying vaguely that “Sam Hicks were a hard place for luck.”

  It turned out to be the visual antithesis of Stone Valley for it boasted several acres of green and level land, a vigorous stand of birch and spruce, and a stream full of brook trout. Sam Hicks Harbour seemed almost to beg for human occupancy, yet was uninhabited and appeared at first glance always to have been so.

  However, as we rowed around it in our dinghy we came upon a massive platform about forty feet wide made of flat, carefully fitted stones and extended from somewhere below low-tide line to well above high-tide mark. Its purpose puzzled me, until I recalled that the ancient Basque whalers had built similar structures to serve as slipways up which whales could be hauled for flensing.

  Peering over the side of our dinghy we could see a tangle of large, greenish-white objects on the bottom of the harbour somewhat resembling the tangles of dead-fall logs in a blasted forest. These were the bones of long-dead leviathans. When we walked the landwash, we came upon many water-worn bone discs, oval in shape, an inch in thickness, and the size of dinner plates–spacers from between the vertebrae of very large whales.

  Back at Stone Valley I questioned Garfield about our finds. He was evasive, muttering that “they mought have been some quare fellows there one time, no doubt.” When I pressed him, Garfield admitted that around the middle of the previous century an Englishman named Sam Hicks (“me woman’s great-granddad”), together with a few other families, had tried to settle the harbour that bears Sam’s name but, after a few years, gave it up and moved to the hard scrabble of Stone Valley.

  Persistent questioning brought out some reluctant explanations for the move. After three houses had been built, so Garfield said, it proved impossible to build another at Sam Hicks Harbour. Every attempt to do so collapsed, or the structures “was pushed over at night and broke up like lobster pots hit after a horrycane.” But, Garfield insisted, storms could not be blamed for the damage because it had taken place even on windless nights.

  “Dey was other t’ings…strangers wearing clergymen’s clothes seen walking along the shore.” Then two settlers going to the stream one night for water found “a dark-skinned babe” lying dead at the watering place. Hesitant to touch it, they went for assistance, and when they returned the body had vanished.

  Sam Hicks’s own house had apparently (and unwittingly) been built across an unseen path. Unknown people were seen walking toward the house and passing through a wall, to emerge on the far side of the structure. Yet people inside the house neither saw nor heard anything unusual.

  Even more disturbing was the fact that the settlers’ boats would not stay on their moorings. They inexplicably went adrift even in calm weather, and some disappeared altogether.

  As a consequence of
these and other strange occurrences, the settlement was abandoned and people avoided the place thereafter.

  There were exceptions. A sometime Stone Valley schoolteacher, Levi Dominie, told me that in the 1880s, when he was “still a suckling,” his mother and his aunt, both of whom were strong-willed women, took him with them in a dory to Sam Hicks Harbour on a berry-picking expedition.

  The women pulled the dory’s bow up on shore there and, leaving the baby aboard sleeping in his cradle, began gathering raspberries along the landwash. Levi’s mother, who had been glancing back every few minutes to assure herself the child was content, was appalled to see a naked man, his head hidden by long black hair, rise out of the water beside the dory to stand waist-deep, staring down at the infant.

  Though terrified, the women “screeched at he” and began pelting him with stones; whereupon he dived and swam away, surfacing only to breathe. Emerging at the mouth of Dory Brook he ran up the bed of the stream and disappeared into the woods.

  “Arter that,” Levi concluded his account, “Stone Valley folk give that place a wide berth. My mother told me the berries there was some good, but not good enough to take her back. No, nor nobody else as has so much sense as a crackie dog…if you’ll pardon me for saying it, skipper.”

  Queen of the Coast

  Parting from Stone Valley was not easy, nor were we allowed to leave empty-handed. Garfield Strickland filled our fuel tank then refused payment. Cyril Dominie topped up our supply of alcohol, also gratis. Someone contributed a quintal (about a bushel) of salt cod. Ladies piled our cabin with fresh bread, pies, cakes, bottled mackerel, and jars of berry jam and gave us cushions artfully embroidered with local scenes.