Bay of Spirits

by Farley Mowat

  The place no longer had human residents, but it had others. Among them was a colony of terrestrial shrimp barely half an inch long, living in burrows along a sandy ridge a good fifteen feet above storm-tide line. Never before, and not since, have I met their like.

  The harbour itself held an astonishing abundance and diversity of creatures. Through diving goggles Claire and I watched huge schools of cod minnows and other fry slipping like beams of light among wavering fronds of seaweed. The intertidal zone was home to innumerable razor and soft-shelled clams, and to weird-looking scarlet mud worms, some of them six inches long. The bottom was clustered with masses of blue and horse mussels–the latter being oyster-shaped bivalves weighing up to half a pound. Scattered among them were moon snails as big as oranges. Scores of bay scallops regarded their surroundings through tiny blue eyes dotting the rims of their partially opened shells. Rock crabs with bodies larger than my hand sidled over to me as I waded out, while, deeper down, great green lobsters prowled stealthily.

  No man-made aquarium could have compared. Richly fertilized with the flesh and bones of great whales that had been flensed upon its shore, the harbour offered an excellent substitute for the Hill Brothers’ Floating Fish Market. Our pram became a shopping cart into which we loaded mussels, clams, scallops, and crabs. I also baited and set an old lobster trap that had washed up on the shore.

  One morning I was awakened soon after dawn by a peculiar clacking sound. When I went on deck to investigate, I found a number of scallops the size of soup bowls marooned at the edge of the landwash by the ebb tide. They were flapping upper and lower shells together, a manoeuvre that, when done beneath the surface, would have propelled them through the water as if equipped with miniature pulse-jet engines. When I flipped these stranded ones back into the water, they shot off into the depths like underwater Frisbees.

  We spent several idyllic days exploring, swimming nude in the relatively warm waters of the cove, picking berries, and lying on Happy Adventure’s sun-warmed deck sipping rum and lime while speculating about what the sea might offer for dinner. Perhaps small, delicately fleshed grey sole hooked at the harbour entrance? Or sea trout from Snooks Harbour, which (greatly daring for it lay on the other side of Long Reach) we visited one day in our little pram.

  As Jack’s arrival date approached, we reluctantly headed back to Milltown. Off Raymonds Point we again crossed paths with a school of white-sided dolphins, nearly colliding with one who may have been dozing on the surface. It was that kind of a day. Long Reach was experiencing that rarity of rarities on the Sou’west Coast: a perfect calm. Not a cat’s-paw ruffled the molten surface of the gloriously somnolent bay. I stopped the engine while Claire made clam chowder for our lunch, and the only sound to be heard was the rustle of distant waterfalls.

  We were sad to tie up to the Milltown wharf for this was the end of our summer cruise together. Soon Claire would sail for Burgeo aboard the steamer, leaving Jack and me to follow in Happy Adventure.

  When the Baccalieu steamed into Milltown a day late, she had a CBC film crew aboard. The director, Jerry Richardson (unbelievably wearing jodhpurs and a beret), hustled on board Happy Adventure to tell me he and his team had come to shoot a film called Men and Ships which I was to write and host!

  I was stunned to hear it, for I knew nothing about any such film. When I protested, adding that my own plans would prevent me from taking any part in the project, Richardson was not at all disconcerted.

  “Well,” he said brightly, “we sent you a telegram at Burgeo telling you about it. Now, when and where do we start shooting?”

  “God only knows! I never got a wire because I wasn’t there. CBC never had an okay from me. Sorry, Mr. Richardson, but I can’t just drop everything, not even for the Holy Mother Network.”

  Richardson was undismayed.

  “Okay, then. Guess we’ll just ride along on the Baccalieu and shoot what we see. You can write the story later.”

  Captain Riggs, who had come aboard for a chat with Claire and me, listened to this exchange with bewilderment. When Richardson had left us, the skipper shook his head.

  “Seems like they television fellows do things ass-backwards, wouldn’t you say? A powerful quare lot!”

  Although night had fallen and it was too dark for small planes to be flying over the wilderness of central Newfoundland, a little Cessna on floats came whining out of the dusk, made a no-nonsense landing, and taxied to the wharf. Out clambered Jack, suitcase in hand and a half case of rum under his arm. Within the hour, our change of crew had been effected and Baccalieu was carrying Claire away.

  Jack really should have concealed the rum. As he tried to settle himself aboard Happy Adventure, we were inundated with a flow of visitors drawn to us as bees to clover. Dawn found us being nuzzled by the old schooner Queen of Roses, who had come bumbling up to the wharf for a load of lumber.

  “I hope to God she doesn’t drink!” was Jack’s heartfelt reaction to her arrival.

  Soon after first light, we got underway with a beam wind to speed us on our way through Dawson’s Passage, past Flobbers Cove, and into Long Reach. By then it was blowing half a gale. Happy Adventure stood up to it, red sails drum tight and her rigging taut as fiddle strings. Jack was in an ecstasy and would not hear of it when I wanted to reduce sail, nor would he allow me to put in to Raymonds Point.

  “Drive her, Farley! Drive her!” he cried, crouched over the tiller, a familiar glitter in his eyes. When we were abeam of Harbour le Gallais, labouring through quartering seas breaking clear across the cabin trunk, I mutinied, pushed Jack out of the cockpit, and ordered him to take in sail while I ran the vessel into shelter.

  We snugged down for the night in Patrick Harbour, having had a magnificent sail through a majestic world of wild water and pristine lands. Jack was exultant. He would not go to bed but insisted on sitting on deck until dawn, nominally (and quite unnecessarily) keeping anchor watch, but thinking (or so I imagine) of the not-so-distant days when he had captained a motor torpedo boat in red and roaring action in the English Channel.

  When we woke next morning, the gale was still howling through the rigging and huge seas were whitening the length of Long Reach. It was no day to go to sea, and I wanted to walk westward from Patrick Harbour anyway to see how far I could trace the mysterious stone roadway. As a precaution before leaving Happy Adventure on her own, we dropped a second anchor.

  We landed the dinghy where the inhabitants of the cove had once been used to pulling up their boats. In 1940, as a consequence of the “hard times” of the thirties, the six families then living here had moved to Head of the Bay hoping to better themselves working in the woods for Bowater. Hardly a trace of their occupancy remained. If the site of their now-vanished houses had not been marked on the 1885 chart of the bay, we might never have located it at all. After a diligent search through the long grass, we turned up a few fragments of a cast-iron stove and two slabs of native granite set on end that, we supposed, were homemade gravestones.

  With difficulty, for it was heavily overgrown, we followed the old road to towering Grip Head and the snug cove lying between it and Grip Island. (Grip, an antiquated British term for eagle, is still current on the Sou’west Coast.) We explored Grip Cove’s shore, finding no evidence of habitation–except that a section of the landwash within the cove had evidently been cleared of boulders and levelled to form a spacious haul-out. Significantly, the roadway ended here. Its purpose now seemed clear: Grip Head had provided an ideal place to land whale carcasses for cutting up, but Harbour le Gallais offered a much better site for a tryworks, being well protected from the weather and providing safe anchorages for the awkward wooden whaling ships to lie while their cargo was being prepared.

  Jack and I continued on to Lobscouse Cove but found no further extension of the road. We built a fire by the shore of that cove and cooked a scoff of potatoes, salt pork, and onions, then sat by the coals drinking black tea and yarning about the lives we had lived during the w
ar, and those we had hoped to lead when peace returned.

  “Goddamn it, Farley,” Jack said moodily, “I never wanted to spend the rest of my life in an office in Toronto. Why the hell can’t you and I just keep on sailing…east…south…west…anywhere the fucking wind will take us?”

  I had no answer for I was doing just about what he lamented his own inability to do, and I did not want to rub it in. After we had returned to the vessel, he drank silently for a while before crawling into his bunk and going to sleep. His words had unsettled me. Only a few hours of daylight remained but the wind had dropped so I upped the anchors, hoisted sail, and got us underway.

  I had it in mind to take a look at a place I’d heard about from John Foote at Pushthrough. This was a cove called Cul-de-sac, six miles north of Pushthrough. Although reputedly a well-sheltered place, it had apparently never been inhabited, not in human memory at least.

  “Nobody goes nigh it,” John had said.

  When I asked why, he had told me told that “a long time ago” the corpse of a giant squid had been found floating at the entrance to Cul-de-sac.

  “I never knowed anyone who seed it hisself, but they say ’twas some big. Arms onto it as round as a man’s leg and twice as long as a skiff. Eyes the size of saucers, and a beak in its head could have tore a cow apart. ’Tis what the old folks said, and I never heard nothing different. Folks stays clear of Cul-de-sac.”

  This was the sort of challenge a fool cannot resist. While Jack snored in his bunk I set course for Goblin Head, then altered north across the deep, which here was a stygian abyss the chart said was at least half a mile deep. We were over the centre of the deep when Jack grumpily emerged from the cabin. He looked ahead to where a huge gash gaped between eight-hundred-foot-high cliffs. It led into Cul-de-sac. We entered the gulch under power and travelling dead slow. Warily I eyed the brooding cliffs on either side. Although Jack had scoffed at the giant squid story, I kept an eye on the black, oily-looking water around us, just in case.

  The gulch became a canyon a hundred yards wide flanked by ever steeper and higher cliffs. I slowed the engine until we were barely moving while Jack stood in the bows anxiously swinging the lead. I held on until Happy Adventure timidly nosed into a walled basin of singularly forbidding aspect. Such was its stark desolation that I offered no argument when Jack came aft and, putting his foot on the tiller, forced it hard over. Happy Adventure came about and as we scurried out of Cul-de-sac he apologized.

  “Sorry, Farley. I felt like a rat in a trap in there.”

  Happy Adventure had barely reached open water again when the wind gusted up out of the southeast, blowing hard right into the mouth of Cul-de-sac. I did not care to imagine what might have happened had we anchored in the inner basin. And I forgave Jack his mutinous behaviour.

  Well, almost. Knowing full well that he had a delicate stomach, I nevertheless cooked a ripe and somewhat maggoty piece of salt cod for supper. When he turned green around the gills, I felt I had tied the score. I also felt a wee bit guilty so I tried to make amends by offering to take him to the head of Bay the East to another place I had heard about–a door-sized oval hole carved by nature through a rock buttress some hundreds of feet high, accessible only to creatures with wings.

  “You’ll like it, Jack. It’s called Virgin’s Hole.”

  As we motored past Old Harry Head a fitting on the engine gave way, releasing a geyser of hot oil under sixty pounds of pressure. I killed the engine and the vessel, pitching heavily in a rapidly rising sea, began to blow toward Old Harry’s rocks and reefs, a hundred yards or so to leeward.

  Jack immediately hoisted sail and kept Happy Adventure heading into the wind while I replaced the fitting, refilled the reservoir, and started the engine…just in time to claw out of Old Harry’s grasp.

  The engine room was a hellish place, dripping with black oil and so slippery underfoot I had to crawl through it on hands and knees. Regaining the deck, I found Jack holding a course that would clear Pass My Can Island and take us east of Great Jervais Island. By now, however, the wind was gusting to forty knots, and the seas rolling in from the ocean were too big for us to face so we bumbled through a maze of shoals and sunkers to take refuge in Pushthrough.

  We moored at a ruined wharf on the east side of the small and crowded harbour. Though we had had a gruelling run, it had restored Jack’s happy temper. After we cleaned up the shambles below decks, he went ashore to acquaint himself with a “typical” Newfoundland outport. Meanwhile I twiddled the dial of our little radio, looking for a weather forecast.

  I found an “all ships warning” of a full-fledged storm with winds exceeding fifty knots. The only safe moorings in the harbour were already occupied by a dragger and the two schooners Winnie Pearl and Glimshire. The skippers of both invited me to moor Happy Adventure outside of them, but that would have been to court destruction if the storm hauled into the northwest as was predicted.

  When Jack came back aboard, we did the only thing we could: let go our lines and skittered down into the northwestern bight of Great Jervais Bay to seek refuge in the nook called Rotten Row, a sort of elephants’ graveyard in which generations of derelicts had been condemned to end their days. We felt our way past a number of wrecks but each time Happy Adventure eased into what looked like a safe little hole she was blown out of it again.

  It was nervous work but finally we found a hole where the anchor caught and held. Hastily we ran lines ashore then rowed our second anchor out and dropped it in position to prevent Happy Adventure being driven onto a frothing sunker in our lee.

  Williwaw gusts drove rain squalls flat across the seething surface of the bay, battering us from all directions. We did not really care for we were as secure as good anchors and good lines could make us. With the little stove glowing in the cabin and a little rum glowing in our veins, we ate pea soup and biscuits by the flickering light of oil lamps and were content.

  Once the storm had passed, we motored back to Pushthrough, where Jack made use of Glimshire’s radio to try to extend his time away from work. The gods of Business proved unrelenting. His presence back in Toronto was not just required, it was demanded. Since we were now well into the season of autumnal gales, I decided we had best take advantage of whatever good weather was granted us and run like hell for Burgeo, where Jack could catch the steamer to Port aux Basques. If we dallied, there was every likelihood of our being driven into some remote cove en route, to be trapped there for days.

  Early next morning we bade a fond farewell to Bay Despair and took the inside passage across Bonne Bay to the open sea. The weather could hardly have been better: a bright, clear day bringing a lively breeze from off the land. Sailing full-and-by Happy Adventure slipped along the coast past Richards Harbour, then headed across the broad bight enfolding the grand fiords of Hare, Devil, Rencontre, and Chaleur, intending to close with the land again at the entrance to Aviron Bay.

  Things were going so well I was tempted to take a chance with Jack’s schedule and do something I had wanted to do since 1957 when I had first travelled this coast aboard the Baccalieu.

  “We’ve been going great guns, Jack,” I said as we looked at the chart. “The forecast is terrific. We’re almost sure to make Burgeo in another day. Two at the most. What say we take a little jaunt off course and go see the Penguin Islands?”

  He eyed me dubiously.

  “Sun getting to you? Or have you been nipping? I happen to know there’re no bloody penguins north of the equator. Penguin Islands! Are you out of your mind?”

  “You’re right and you’re wrong, Jack. There aren’t any penguins in the North Atlantic–now. But up until a hundred or so years ago there used to be millions of goose-sized, black-and-white birds that couldn’t fly in air but could underwater. They were the original penguins. We mostly know them now, if we know them at all, as the great auk.”

  “Aren’t they extinct?”

  “Yiss, me son. Slaughtered for oil, meat, eggs, and feathers until by 1860
or 70 there wasn’t a damn one left alive. After that the name got transferred to much the same sort of bird in the Antarctic–your modern penguins. But fifteen miles off our port bow is a handful of barren little rocks and islets once a major breeding ground for the great auk, and where it’s possible some of the very last of the real penguins lived. I’ve only seen it from a distance. I’d like to go ashore there. With this breeze we could make it in less than three hours. What say?”

  As always, Jack was game.

  All went well for a while, but when we were still two or three miles short of our objective the wind went easterly bringing the threat of foggy weather. Already a haze was obscuring the sun and the scattering of tiny islands ahead of us. We were close enough to count and identify most of them…and close enough to see great gouts of white water spouting into the air from the impact of the long ocean swell on the rocks, reefs, and sunkers comprising the little archipelago.

  Jack looked at me questioningly.

  “All right, mate,” I said. “This is no place for the likes of us. New course is nor’nor’west-half-north for Grey River. I’ll take in sail.”

  So the Penguins fell astern and I never did get the opportunity to go ashore upon them. But I no longer want to, for they are cemetery rocks. Through the five or six centuries since their discovery by Europeans, they have witnessed some of the most atrocious massacres ever perpetrated by our kind. Although they are not now completely devoid of avian life, what remains is but a thin, sad vestige of what once was. Where millions of great auks, gannets, guillemots, puffins, cormorants, gulls, terns, and sea ducks once congregated to lay their eggs and raise their young, now only a few tens of thousands still gather in early summer to propagate. The twin Gannet Isles, Colombier (Sea Pigeon) Isle, Lord and Lady Islets (the now all but vanished eastern harlequin duck was known as the Lord and Lady Duck), Turr Rocks (Guillemot Rocks), Flat Isle, and Harbour Isle, the only one ever occupied by man, are mostly desolate now. Even the lighthouse on Harbour Isle, once kept by men from Francois, is now an automated robot.