The Boat Who Wouldn't Float

by Farley Mowat

  Nevertheless the people of Ferryland held to their home. They held to it through an interminable series of raids by French, New Englanders, Portuguese, and just plain Buccaneers. They held on with the tenaciousness of barnacles. Several times Ferryland had to fight for its life against full-scale naval and military attacks. It survived. It and its people have survived through more than four centuries. When I knew it in the early 1960’s its nature was not greatly changed from what it must have been at its inception. Howard had innumerable tales to tell that illustrated the nature of the crucible that had formed his people. There was the story of the Masterless Men for example.

  During the eighteenth century the English fishing fleet was largely manned by men who had been driven to sea by starvation, or who had been tricked by “recruiters” into making the long, hard voyage across the seas. Having reached Newfoundland many of these men refused to return home again. Treated like slaves by the local “planters” they reacted like Spartan slaves and fled from the little harbours into the desolate interior. Here they formed a society of their own; one that endured for a hundred years. They became veritable outlaws in the romantic tradition of Robin Hood, living the forest life and robbing the rich to succour, not only themselves, but also the oppressed fishermen inhabitants of the coast.

  The interior of the peninsula became the Country of the Masterless Men. Only the best-armed bands of King’s men dared enter their domain. Secret trails ran everywhere, and the villages of the Masterless Men were hidden in a score of deep vales, one of which was within five miles of Ferryland under the loom of a massive hill known as the Butter Pot.

  The Masterless Men were never conquered and never subdued; they gradually melded with the coastal settlers and their blood still runs in the veins of the people of the Southern Shore.

  Howard Morry brought these men to life again, and others like them, as he took me on little trips along the coast to outports like Bear Cove, La Manche, Admiral’s Cove, Cappahayden, Renews, Fermeuse, Aquaforte, Bauline, and other places with equally strange names. Yet Ferryland remained the heart of his love.

  One afternoon he took me out to Bois Island which lies in the broad mouth of Ferryland harbour. Once it was well wooded, but that was in distant days. Now no trees grow on it and it is a place of fantasy.

  Forgotten or ignored by official historians, familiar only to a handful of men like Howard, it is a great fortress. Around its almost sheer perimeter is an earthwork circumvallation. At least five heavy gun batteries still lie emplaced at intervals, the muzzles of the guns showing black and stark through a guanoed growth of mosses. Magazines, the ruins of dwelling houses, and even an ancient well can still be traced. According to Howard it was first fortified before 1600 by the French. By 1610 it had been taken by the English super-pirate Peter Easton and was gradually improved until it became an almost impregnable structure and the key to Ferryland’s long survival.

  In shoal water at the foot of a great crevice lay four corroding, twenty-pound, long guns of the seventeenth century, just as they had been left when an eighteenth-century privateer attempted to steal them from the temporarily abandoned fort. Nothing else appeared to have been disturbed since the fort last lived. Here were no guides, no gravel paths, no fanciful reconstructions. Here was the true reality of the past; dimmed only and not obliterated by the flickering centuries.

  With the passing of men like Howard Morry (and they are all too few in any land) most of the rich and vital human past of Newfoundland will have gone beyond recall. And a way of life four centuries old will have vanished.

  I count myself lucky I had a chance to taste that way of life—the way of the cod fisher. One morning at four o’clock Howard woke me from a down-filled bed, fed me a whopping breakfast, and took me through the darkness to the stage head where I was to join the four-man crew of a trap boat.

  She was a big, broad-beamed skiff powered by a five-horsepower, “jump spark,” single-cylinder engine. It was calm and cold as we puttered out of the harbour accompanied in darkness by the muted reverberations from a score of other “one-lungers” pushing unseen boats toward the open sea.

  Our crew had two cod traps to examine. Essentially these traps are great boxes of netting as much as fifty feet on a side. They have a bottom but no top. Stretching out from a “door” on one side is a long, vertically hung leader-net to guide the slow moving cod into the trap. The whole affair is moored to the sea floor with huge wrought-iron anchors which are the last surviving artifacts of ancient and forgotten ships.

  Our first trap was set in nine fathoms off Bois Island and we reached it just at dawn. While the rest of us leaned over the side of the skiff, staring into the dark waters, our skipper tested the trap with a jigger—a six-inch leaden fish equipped with two great hooks, hung on the end of a heavy line. He lowered the jigger into the trap and hauled sharply back. On the first try he hooked a fine fat cod and pulled it, shimmering, aboard.

  “Good enough!” he said. “Let’s haul her, byes.”

  So haul we did. Closing the trap mouth and then manhandling the tremendous weight of twine and rope took the best efforts of the five of us and it was half an hour before the trap began to “bag,” with its floats upon the surface. As we passed armloads of tar-reeking, icy twine across the gunwales, the bag grew smaller and the water within it began to roil. We had a good haul. The trap held twenty or thirty quintals*1 of prime cod seething helplessly against the meshes.

  One of our number, a young man just entering his twenties, was working alongside the skiff from a pitching dory. He was having a hard time holding his position because of a big swell running in from seaward. An unexpected heave on the twine threw him off balance, and his right arm slipped between the dory and the skiff just as they rolled together. The crack of breaking bones was clearly audible. He sat back heavily on the thwart of his dory and held his arm up for inspection. It was already streaming with blood. A wrist-watch, just purchased and much treasured, had been completely crushed and driven into the flesh.

  The injured youth lost hold of the net and his dory was fast driving away from us on the tide rip. Our skipper cried out to us to let go of the trap while he started the engine, but the young man in the drifting dory stopped us.

  “Don’t ye be so foolish!” he shouted. “I’se able to care for myself! Don’t ye free them fish!”

  Using his good arm, he swung an oar over the side and hooked an end of the header rope with it, then with one hand and his teeth he pulled himself and the dory back to the skiff along the rope. We took him on board, but he would not let us leave the trap until every last cod had been dip-netted out of it and the skiff was loaded down almost to her gunwales. During all this time, perhaps twenty minutes, he sat on the engine hatch watching us and grinning, as the blood soaked the sleeve of his heavy sweater and ran down his oilskin trousers.

  When we got back to the stage it was ten o’clock and the sun was high and hot. Pat Morry met us with a truck and we took the lad away to the doctor who set the bones and took sixteen stitches to close the wound. I went along and as we left the doctor’s little office the young man said to me;

  “Skipper, I hopes I never spiled yer marnin!”

  No, he did not “spile” my morning. But how was I to find words to tell him what kind of a man I knew him to be? He would have been dreadfully embarrassed if I had tried.

  Whenever I stayed at the Morrys’ overnight I would go to the stage head the following morning to welcome the trap boats home. Invariably I would be joined there by Uncle Jim Welch and Uncle John Hawkins. They were eighty-eight and ninety years old respectively. Both had been fishermen all their lives but, as Uncle John put it, “We’s just a mite too old for that game now, bye. No good fer it no more.” Nevertheless they were still good enough to check each boat, to make acid comments on the quality and quantity of the fish, and to keep the “young fellers” (men of forty and fifty) up to the mark. Uncle John first went to sea in a dory, jigging fish with his father, at the ag
e of eight. He was a late starter. Uncle Jim began his fishing career at the age of six.

  The individual stories Howard Morry had to tell were legion and they were a blend of the comic and the tragic, for that is the blend of ordinary life. One evening we were talking about the priests along the coast (the Southern Shore is almost exclusively Roman Catholic) and Howard told me the tale of Billard and the goat.

  Everybody on the Southern Shore grew potatoes and Billard was particularly proud of his patch. Unfortunately one of his neighbours kept goats, and goats like potatoes too. One morning Billard was harvesting his spuds, back bent, eyes on the peaty ground, when the priest happened by. The Father paused, leaned on the fence and asked:

  “Are ye diggin’ ’em, Billard?”

  Billard glanced out under his bushy eyebrows, failed to see the priest, and met, instead, the amber stare of a particularly outrageous billy-goat peering through another section of the fence.

  “Yiss, ye whore!” answered Billard fiercely. “And if ’twasn’t fer you, there’d be a lot more of ’em!”

  The same evening Howard told me a different kind of tale. A hundred and seventy years ago a middle-aged man appeared in Ferryland. He was a runaway from a fishing ship, an “Irish Youngster”-the name given to the men and boys of any age who, fleeing starvation in Ireland, indentured themselves to the English fishing fleet and the Newfoundland planters.

  Ferryland people took him in and made him welcome but he was a haunted man—”afeard.” He was convinced he would be recaptured and returned to servitude. He stayed in the settlement for a few months, took a young girl for wife, and began fishing on his own, but fear never left him. One autumn he took his wife and two babies and rowed away down the coast to a hidden cove which no large ship and few small boats would dare to enter. Here he built a tilt (a tiny wooden cabin) and began living an exile’s life.

  Once or twice each year he would row into Ferryland to trade his salt fish for essential goods. Then he would disappear again. Apart from these rare trips he, his wife, and his two young sons lived as if they were the only people in the world. They lived from the sea and off the land, catching fish, killing caribou and ducks for meat, and growing a few potatoes in a tiny patch scrabbled out of the moss at the foot of the sea cliffs that guarded them.

  One February morning the man was stricken with paralysis. For two weeks his wife nursed him, but he grew worse. Finally she decided she must go for help. She left the boys, aged nine and ten, to care for their father and set out single-handed in a skiff to row thirty or forty miles to Ferryland. It was wicked, winter weather and the pack-ice was particularly bad that year.

  She had made fifteen miles when a gale came up and the ice set against the shore, nipping the skiff, and crushing it. The woman made her way on foot (“copying,” they call it) across the floe-ice to the land. She then climbed the ice-sheathed cliffs, swam or waded several small rivers, and eventually fought her way through the snow-laden forest to Ferryland.

  It was some time before she recovered enough strength to tell her story; and it was seven long days before the storm, a roaring nor’easter, fell light enough to allow a party of fishermen to make their way along the landward edge of the ice to the distant, hidden cove.

  They were met by the two boys; shy to the point of utter silence at this intrusion of strange faces. The men went up to the little house and found it snug and warm and tidy; but the bed was empty. They asked the two boys where their father was and the eldest, the ten-year-old, led them off to a lean-to shack some distance from the cabin. They opened the door and there they found the missing man.

  He was strung up to the roof beam by his feet and he had been neatly skinned and drawn.

  “You see how it was,” Howard explained “The boys had never looked at human death before. But they had seen a good many deer killed and had watched their father draw and skin them, and so, poor little lads, they thought that must be the right way to treat anything that died, be it man or beast. They did the best they could….”

  5. Corsets, cod, and constipation

  THE TIME I spent with the Morrys was all too brief. I continued to spend most of my hours, by day and by night, in a mazed struggle to transform a living nightmare into a bearable reality. As the days passed and the work seemed to get no forwarder, I began to feel that Enos and Obie and I were doomed to spend the rest of our lives up to our knees in gurry and frustration. The days slid by—literally slid—until one morning the moment of truth was at hand.

  The day had come when Jack was due to arrive from Toronto at St. John’s airport. The day had dawned when he and the little schooner would come together for the first time.

  As I drove Passion Flower toward the grey city I was in a subdued and apprehensive mood. However it occasionally happens that the black Fates which haunt our lives feel pity for their victims. There was a considerable amount of fog over the Southern Shore that morning. Since this was the usual state of affairs, I gave it no particular heed. It was not until I had felt my way through St. John’s to the airport, there to be told that all flights had been cancelled for several days because of the fog, that I realized I had been reprieved.

  I went at once to the forecaster’s office. He warmed my heart and brought me joy by predicting that the airport would remain fogbound for some time to come.

  “How long?” I asked.

  “Difficult to say, old man. Not less than a week, I’d guess.”

  Feeling positively carefree I wrote a note to Jack explaining that, since there was no phone at Muddy Hole, I would have no way of knowing when he arrived. And, I added, since there remained a certain amount of work to do on the boat, I felt I should not waste time making speculative trips to St. John’s on the off chance that Trans-Canada Airlines had managed finally to find the place and effect a landing. I suggested that when he arrived he should rent a small truck (preferably one with four-wheel drive), pick up various items of ship’s stores that I had ordered locally, and which I listed for him, and make his own way to Muddy Hole. I left these instructions with a young lady at Trans-Canada’s information desk.

  Some people may wonder why Jack did not come by rail instead of air, but if any such people there be, they do not know anything about the Newfoundland railroad system.

  It is a narrow-gauge railway running five hundred miles, mostly through uninhabited wilderness, from Port aux Basques to St. John’s. And it is an antiquity out of another age. Its schedule is so uncertain that under the seats of each coach large wooden boxes are stored. These contain emergency rations for use in case the train is unduly delayed. There are authentic records of the train having taken up to four weeks to cross the island.

  The most prolonged delays usually occur during the winter but serious delays can happen at any season for a variety of reasons: fog so thick the engineer cannot see where he is going; rutting bull moose challenging the locomotives to unequal combat (unequal because the moose seldom win); explosions of boilers; windstorms that blow the cars right off the track; temporary loss of passengers who wander off to pick berries while the train is climbing a grade, etc., etc. Not for nothing did Canadian servicemen stationed at St. John’s during the war give the train its enduring name—the Newfoundland Bullet.

  There have been many poignant happenings aboard the Bullet, but perhaps none holds quite so much pathos as the story of the young lady travelling east from Port aux Basques. As the days drew on she grew increasingly distraught. Every time the conductor passed through her car she would stop him and ask anxiously how much longer the trip would take. He did not know, of course, and eventually he became impatient with her. Why, he asked, was she in such a plunging hurry anyway?

  Modestly she told him. She was expecting a baby.

  “Ye should have knowed better than to get on the Bullet, and you in this condition!” he told her indignantly.

  “Ah, Sorr,” she replied, “but I wasn’t in this condition when I got on.”

  Jack McClelland preferred n
ot to take a chance, so he came by air.

  I might have guessed that the Fates were only playing with me when they offered a week’s respite. The morning after I returned from St. John’s I set off with Obie in Passion Flower to visit Shoe Cove, some distance down the coast, in hopes of finding spars for the vessel. Just before noon we were both rendered nearly blind by an unexpected burst of sunlight as the fog rolled out to sea. In far away St. John’s people stopped in the street to speak to friends they had not seen for many a day, and to stare upward as they heard the unfamiliar thunder of an aircraft’s engines.

  I have never been able to decide whether I am glad I was not present when Jack arrived at Muddy Hole, or whether my absence should have been a matter for regret. I missed witnessing a scene which has since become part of Southern Shore folklore.

  Jack’s plane arrived in St. John’s at a quarter to one. He disembarked, got my note, and sprang into action. He is like that. He springs into action. On this occasion he did not spring quite as lithely as usual because he had recently put his back “out” and as a consequence was wearing, under his Savile Row sports coat and sharkskin slacks, a fearsome device composed of rubber, steel, and whalebone that would have been the envy of the tightly corseted ladies of the Victorian era.

  Nonetheless he sprang to such effect that in less than two hours he was heading for Muddy Hole. Some of the spring went out of him as he drove south, and all of the springs went out of the brand-new, chrome-plated, red-painted convertible Buick which (it was the only such car on the island) he had managed, with his usual ability to overwhelm the better judgement of those he deals with, to rent from St. John’s leading garage.