Bay of Spirits

by Farley Mowat

  Crowding on all sail, we went belting down the coast. Before long we overtook the Penneyworth dragging for redfish. Skipper Max wished us a good voyage by sounding three long blasts on his siren.

  A heavy swell–legacy of the gales of the past several weeks–was running, but Happy Adventure rode the grey-beards at a good seven knots, sending spray over her bows and attracting a pod of about thirty pothead whales. They seemed to think we were inviting them to join in a game. Porpoising in the breaking seas, they spouted so close aboard that we could smell their fishy breath.

  It was a magnificent day and a magnificent sail with perfect visibility. The granite wall of the Sou’west Coast stretched to the horizon ahead and astern. Swells booming in from the south were bursting fifty feet high against the cliffs. A few small and cottony clouds floated high above; otherwise the sky was a translucent sapphire bowl.

  As we passed the red ochre mass of Cape la Hune, the wind freshened right out of the west, allowing me to steer a course for Richards Harbour “wung out” with the mainsail to port and the mizzen to starboard and every sail drawing full and hard. This was as close to flying as our little vessel was ever likely to get.

  Dusk was falling, and we were going at such a clip we sailed right past the crack in the wall that gave access to Richards Harbour. Only a quick glimpse of a house alerted me. We hove to, doused sail, started the engine, and headed into the cleft through a combination of heavy swells and rising seas. We shot through it to find ourselves in the tranquility of the hidden harbour.

  The old-fashioned brass patent log we had been towing astern showed we had sailed fifty-two nautical miles in just under nine hours–something of a record run–but then I botched it by hitting the small wharf so hard the impact shook several empty herring barrels into the harbour. However, Richards Harbour was running true to form and only one person, a youngish man, was on hand to witness my disgrace, although plenty of others probably saw it from behind curtained windows.

  Ephraim Sims, just returned home after a year spent in St. John’s, took our lines and helped me make fast. I inveigled him aboard for a drink then asked him about the origin of the harbour’s name. He told us the place had been settled around 1840 by a deserter from a British naval vessel whose first name was Richard but who never did reveal his surname. When I began asking further questions about the history of the place and its people, Ephraim politely excused himself and went ashore.

  Although the next day was Sunday, no service was held in the little church. It had been without a resident minister for ten years and the schoolteacher–who acted as lay reader–was away for the summer. We walked along the paths in a watery sunshine that imparted a strange sense of unreality to the scene. People dressed in their Sunday best stood or wandered about aimlessly. They spoke when spoken to, but volunteered nothing of themselves even when we admired their tiny gardens, the earth for which had been laboriously collected far in the country in baskets and pails, and which grew little but turnips and cabbages.

  The gloomy atmosphere becoming more than we could endure, we decided, despite a bad forecast and the thunder of great seas bursting into the narrow entrance, to make a run for Pushthrough, perhaps stopping en route for a look at McCallum, another settlement with a reputation all its own.

  Once outside, we found the wind had fallen light. A huge swell was still running and fog was thickening. I set a compass course to clear Whale Rock, at the mouth of Bonne Bay, but either I erred or the current took us astray for we found ourselves enmeshed in a maze of sunkers and reefs and had to run hastily out to sea. Eventually we did find Whale Rock and steamed gratefully past it into McCallum’s harbour.

  In earlier times when it had been called Bonne Bay Harbour, the settlement had been renowned along the coast for its vigour and independent nature. However, around 1920 it fell under the baleful influence of a stranger who tried with some success to turn it into a kind of feudal barony.

  At the time of our visit, McCallum was ruled by a man named Riggs (no relation to Captain Ernie Riggs, skipper of the Baccalieu) whose rule was absolute. Ches Strickland, the Milltown merchant, had warned me about “the King of McCallum.”

  “Never cross him, me son. He’s the law on that part of the coast. Even the Mounties don’t go in there. Best steer clear of him.”

  Riggs discouraged the use of cash in his bailiwick. All internal business was conducted on the debt-and-credit system. Imported goods had to be bought through his store (it was the only one in McCallum) and all local produce sold to him. The de facto banker for a community of about 150 people, he was also the postmaster, receiving their welfare, unemployment, and pension cheques. Instead of cashing these, Riggs had the nominal recipients endorse the cheques over to him, then entered the sum, or a portion thereof, as a credit in the debt record he maintained for every adult in the community. So did he maintain the traditional way of doing business that had afflicted Newfoundland for centuries.

  We moored alongside a fine new wharf built by the federal government at Riggs’s behest and found it mostly occupied by Riggs’s store, his warehouse, his fish flakes, and his 150-ton schooner.

  He himself was not in residence, which may have been as well for he treated strangers with suspicion. So did his subjects. Those we met were distinctly, even truculently, unfriendly.

  We did not remain long. That night I wrote in my journal: “Except for Riggs’s house, which is by way of being an outport mansion, McCallum has the worst collection of hovels I’ve seen in Newfoundland. They are small, pinched, and decrepit, and the people seem slovenly and dour. Perhaps it’s just as well it had its name changed. Bonne Bay doesn’t suit it at all.”

  From McCallum we worked our way through an inside passage until we were abeam of Pushthrough, but decided to give it a miss in favour of Raymonds Point. As we entered Long Reach the fog dissipated, the skies cleared, and a warm westerly breeze allowed us to shut down the engine (which had been stifling us with diesel smog) and enjoy a lovely sail. We peered into the little coves and harbours along the way, promising ourselves to visit all of them someday.

  Another storm was forecast so I moored at the remains of Raymonds Point wharf with a web of warps and hawsers that could have held the Queen Mary in a hurricane. Safe again in the arms of what we privately called Bay Desire, we went happily to bed.

  Next morning we found ourselves floating in a soup of little shrimp about an inch in length, transparent except for black eyes and pink blood systems. These were the legendary krill that once sustained countless species, from great baleen whales to wandering albatross. At Raymonds Point that morning the krill were being pursued by multitudes of mackerel and young cod engaging in a feeding orgy that churned the water. We watched, fascinated, as the krill flipped themselves into the air in their efforts to escape, forming little iridescent clouds through which silver-and-blue mackerel shot like javelins.

  No Dominies were in residence so a day or two later we left a message in their tilt and sailed for Gaultois to buy kerosene for the lamps. As we entered Little Passage, we disturbed hundreds of black-backed and herring gulls gorging themselves on krill. Several bald eagles looked on hungrily from nearby cliffs.

  A rising headwind and lowering skies warned of weather coming so we put our lines ashore at the Gaultois fish plant wharf, where we could feel secure, if half stifled by the pungent stink. We were moored alongside Teressa G., whose life I had helped save the previous year at Hermitage.

  The gathering storm brought in several other vessels, including two of the last of the big bay schooners, Shirley Blanche and Joan and Arthur, who loomed over Happy Adventure like a pair of mallards over a duckling. The Castaway appeared from Burgeo with Spencer Lake aboard and, shortly afterwards, the Swivel, skippered by Jim Moffat, arrived to load frozen fillets for transport to Gloucester. These vessels and their people created a festive scene and mood. So much visiting, drinking, yarning, and eating was going on that Gaultois could almost have been re-enacting what had once
been the most important event of the year on the Sou’west Coast–Settling-Up Day.

  From its inception in the seventeenth or eighteenth century, Settling-Up Day in Newfoundland was always September 7. On that day the clerks of Newman’s in Gaultois would roll puncheons of rum out on the wharf and knock out the bungs so all comers could help themselves. What followed was an uninhibited celebration that lasted until September 10, by which time almost everyone who dealt with Newman’s at Gaultois would have arrived. Then the free booze was cut off and settling up began in earnest. One by one the fishermen were allowed into the merchant’s office to be told how much they owed the firm, and what credit remained to pay for their purchases for the ongoing year. It was very seldom that a fisherman came out ahead at settling up.

  While Newman’s (which also had branches at Cape la Hune and Pass Island) remained the main merchant on the coast, the people certainly did not become rich, but then they did not starve either. However, at the end of the nineteenth century, Newman’s sold out to Job Brothers, a St. John’s firm that was singularly avaricious even by Newfoundland mercantile standards. Thereafter, instead of being a celebratory festival, settling up became a torment. The prices Jobs demanded for most goods rose steadily. The prices paid the fishermen for their produce fell steeply. Job Brothers made enormous profits, which attracted other and equally rapacious merchants until the bubble burst worldwide and the Great Depression of the late twenties and early thirties set in. Those years, which continued until the Second World War, were the darkest that outport Newfoundlanders ever knew.

  When the weather (and my head) had cleared sufficiently, we sailed across to Hermitage Cove where, to our great surprise, we found that Sandy and Kent Hill had stopped fishing for a living. Instead, they were casting concrete blocks that could be easily mortared together to make fireproof chimneys. Since the chimneys of most outport houses were only sheet-metal stovepipes that had a dismaying tendency to overheat and set the buildings on fire, the Hills’ version proved an instant success.

  It was a sobering glimpse into the future for, if the Hills had given up fishing, it meant the game was drawing to a close, with all that this implied for the people of the Sou’west Coast.

  Sandy was unapologetic.

  “Got to do something, skipper. Not enough fish still on the go to feed a cat. Can’t feed we at the two and a half cents a pound Spencer Lake and the other fish plants pays. Seems Joey Smallwood’s going to have his way. Fishermen’ll have to get out of it or starve.”

  Now we tried to make a run for St. Pierre. When easterly weather slowed our progress, I started the engine to help us along. All went well until we were off Pass Island, where the bedding bolts holding the engine in place let go. I noted bitterly in the log: “Those goddamn St. Pierrais installed it with black-iron lag screws instead of bronze bolts, and they’ve corroded away to nothing!”

  The wind stayed easterly, preventing us from making headway under sail alone so reluctantly we turned back to Gaultois, the nearest place repairs could be effected. Before we could set off again a full gale blew up, putting an end to any hopes of reaching the French Isles this season. Though Claire was desolated, I was secretly relieved. My love affair with St. Pierre was over.

  We waited out the gale with Happy Adventure nuzzled up against the wharf while rain thrummed on her decks and the wind whined in her rigging. I lit our miniature coal stove and stoked it to a red glow. Claire busied herself with watercolours while I pecked away at my portable typewriter. For variety, we read, or listened to the thin voice of a distant CBC station in Nova Scotia.

  On the third day the wind fell light and we decided to run back into the bay. As Claire was letting go our lines in the misty morning, a white-haired man wearing an old-fashioned seaman’s jersey appeared in a dory alongside. Without a word he placed several freshly caught mackerel on the deck, smiled at Claire, and rowed away. We had no idea who he was. He seemed like a visitor from an earlier time.

  We lunched on his mackerel as we made our way through Little Passage to moor again at Raymonds Point. None of the Dominies had yet returned so I helped myself to a salt fish from Cecil’s tilt and brought it back for Claire to cook for supper. As the afternoon waned, the sun came out, revealing a dory being rowed toward us by the elderly fellow who had given us the mackerel in the morning. He came alongside and this time introduced himself.

  Although crippled by rheumatism, seventy-year-old Wilson Northcote had rowed the eight miles from Gaultois to pick berries at Raymonds Point! Disappointed at not finding the Dominies, he was happy to see us. When we invited him to share our supper, he accepted with shy grace. A big, soft-spoken, sheepdog sort of a man, Wilson had been born at Little Passage, where his mother died when he was ten. When he was thirteen his father drowned, and Wilson became head of a family of two brothers and a sister. Through the rest of his teen years, he supported them all by going to sea as a deckhand aboard a Gaultois schooner fishing the Grand Banks. At nineteen he became mate of the vessel then went on to become skipper of her and later of several others. During the succeeding fifty years, he captained twenty-three transatlantic passages under sail. When engines replaced sail, he came ashore. By then his wife had been twenty years dead. Now he was living with his daughter, who was married to “a fellow with ulsters” who had not worked for decades past.

  Wilson Northcote was not that sort.

  “I’se the kind of fellow has to keep underway. ’Twould be the end of I and I stayed to home. I jigs cod from me dory most of the winter and sells it to Lake’s plant at Gaultois, though you might better say I has to give it away. Summertime I sets lobster pots, jigs squid, sets a net for salmon, and when I feels like it picks berries at all them old places that’s gone out now.”

  Among the stories he told us of his time at sea was one about a voyage he made as a young hand in a schooner homeward bound from Oporto after delivering a cargo of salt fish.

  “Our Old Man liked a drop, you understand. He were dead drunk in Oporto and stayed that way the first nine days at sea. Might have stayed that way till the last trump hadn’t we rushed his cabin and took away his drink.

  “We never done it just for badness, you understand. He were the only one aboard could navigate deep-sea. Without he, we never would have knowed where we was to.

  “When the Old Man sobered up enough to come on deck and take a sight, it come out we was south of the Azores and nigh a thousand miles off course.

  “Well, me dears, that were a pickle! The skipper were all for putting in to the Azores for more supplies, but we knowed what he were up to. We kept the schooner full-and-by and told the skipper he’d have his drink the day and hour we raised Cape Race. He swore pretty bad, but done his part and when we got home we was but two weeks overdue.”

  Leaving Wilson to his berry picking, we sailed for Head of the Bay to telegraph Jack, telling him of the change in plan. I instructed him to fly to Gander, rent a float plane there, and join us in Milltown. He replied that he would arrive in mid-September.

  We expected to remain a few days at the Milltown wharf, but soon had reason to think otherwise. At midnight the Bar Haven arrived under command of a new skipper, who overshot the wharf. Bar Haven’s steel prow came within a foot of cutting off the bowsprit, where I was standing clad only in underwear, desperately trying to fend off the steamer with a boathook.

  That was bad enough. Worse was to follow an hour or two later when I was awakened by a great scurrying on deck. I shone a flashlight through the nearest porthole into the red-eyed face of a very large rat who seemed determined to come in. Charging out through the companionway, I found half a dozen rats skittering about the deck. They retreated to the wharf, but reluctantly. It was clear to me that, like General de Gaulle, they planned to return.

  I manned the fort against them until morning, when I discovered they were from the old and decrepit coaster Glimshire, which had put in to Milltown wharf a few days earlier leaking so badly extra pumps had to be put aboard to k
eep her afloat. Her rats, being nobody’s fools, abandoned her for the temporary security of the wharf. However, they were seafaring rats and anxious to find another vessel. Determined it would not be Happy Adventure, we departed to visit St. Alban’s, in Ship Cove, four miles to the southwestward.

  By far the largest settlement in the Bay, St. Alban’s was an anomaly in that most of its hundred and sixty families were Roman Catholics. They were also among the poorest folk in the region. According to the welfare officer, three-quarters of them depended on the dole, and some families had been on it for two generations.

  The first settler here had been one of Newman’s indentured workers named Collier who, about 1840, fled into the bay to escape economic serfdom and religious harassment. One or two other Catholics joined him, hoping to scratch out a living with the help of the nearby Conne River Mi’kmaq, the only other Roman Catholics in the region. In 1857 a British naval vessel charting the bay found four families in Ship Cove–three Colliers and one Organ. Word of the existence of this little Catholic enclave spread, and a trickle of families began arriving from Placentia Bay. Children were born apace, and the settlement grew rapidly.

  Avoiding the sea because its waters and shores were dominated by Protestant fishermen, St. Alban’s people turned to the land for their support. They had a hard time of it. Until the later years of the nineteenth century, they lived in low-ceilinged, windowless log cabins barely heated by open fires or clay fireplaces; burning cod liver oil in their lamps; making their own clothing from a rough material called twincey; and baking their bread (when they had flour or meal) in iron pots heaped over with embers. For the most part they subsisted on country meat and fish with what little flour, cornmeal, and oatmeal they could trade for the few saleable products they produced, chiefly birch and spruce bark for lining the holds of ships carrying salt bulk fish to foreign ports.