The Boat Who Wouldn't Float

by Farley Mowat

  Most of the residents of the Southern Shore were equally helpful. They and their ancestors had lived for centuries at the mercy of the merchants so they knew exactly what we were up against and they felt for us in our almost continuous need.

  Foremost amongst them was Monty Windsor, a soft-spoken, thoughtful man who lived in a rambling house on a tiny, almost insular, peninsula in Aquaforte Harbour. The house had been both imposing and handsome when the Windsors built it nearly two hundred years earlier but it was now grown grey and sad. Monty Windsor was almost the last of that name in Aquaforte. He showed me the family Bible in which were recorded the births and the deaths of generations of Windsors dating back to 1774. Few of the men had died in bed. Most of them perished at sea, some as fishermen, some as sailors, some as whalers, some as privateers. It was a strange old book whose margins had been used for a variety of non-religious, but equally significant purposes.

  Inked in a flowery and faded script at the end of Deuteronomy was a recipe for the cure of “throttles” (diphtheria). It called for the patient to smoke a clay pipe loaded with oakum (teased-out strands of tarred hemp rope) which had first been soaked in brimstone. After smoking this mixture he or she was to swallow a pint of black rum drawn straight from the keg.

  Modern medical scientists may scoff, but it seemed self-evident to me that any bacillus or virus that could survive such a treatment would indeed have to be a super-bug. Again, any human being who could withstand the treatment probably had little to fear from germs in any case.

  For generations the Windsors had run a whaling factory, a salt-fish plant, and a number of big fishing schooners, but now that was finished and all that remained was a warren of collapsing buildings on the harbour side. These structures held many memories of other ages but they also held treasures for such as us. Here we unearthed a great, two-bladed brass propeller that must have been made half a century earlier but which fitted the shaft of our engine perfectly. We found scores of blocks intended for three-masted schooners and enough smaller blocks to complete our own running rigging. Shackles, belaying pins, mast hoops, sister hooks—in fact, most of what we still needed—were to be found somewhere in the dusty corners of the Windsor buildings.

  There remained one requirement that had us stymied. We needed two new spars and they were not to be found. Old masts abounded on the beaches and in the rotting hulls of abandoned schooners, but they were either too big or too old. After four centuries of ship building, wood gathering and forest fires, there was hardly any standing timber left on the Southern Shore. Nothing remained but twisted black spruce scrub—with one exception.

  Across the narrow harbour from Monty’s house was a stand of almost virgin spruce. It was, in a way, a sacred grove. It had belonged to the family since the arrival of the first Windsor and had been jealously preserved by each succeeding generation as a source of spars, gaffs, and booms for the schooners of the Windsor fleet. Although that fleet had vanished many years earlier, the grove remained sacrosanct. While those trees still stood, undefiled and proud, something of the Windsor heritage remained intact. This, in any case, was how Monty felt about the grove. However when he heard we were having trouble finding spars, he sent a message down to Muddy Hole inviting us to visit him.

  We came, Jack and I, and Obie and Enos, and when we reached Monty’s house he led us down to a scarred old dory lying on the shore. It was the last vessel of any kind the Windsors owned. There were two axes and some rope lying on the dory’s bottom.

  “You fellows paddle across to the grove, yonder,” Monty told us in his quiet voice. “Climb up the slope a-ways to where you sees a big white rock, and just astern of it you’ll find a stand of spruce as straight and true as any on this island. Take what you needs. And make good and sure you gets the best there is.”

  We did as we were told. Standing on the steep slope, in the odorous shadows of the trees, Enos marked the victims and we cut them down, limbed them, hauled them to the water’s edge, and towed them back to the harbour side. I went up to pay Monty for them but he would have none of my money.

  “Don’t ye be talkin’, Skipper. There’ll never be need of another one of us cuttin’ a stick out of that grove. Likely there’ll never be another Windsor go to sea. I’ll take it fine to know your little bummer’s well spar’d with Windsor wood. It’s what those trees was growed to be.”

  Spit-and-polish yachtsmen may shudder at the thought of anyone cutting down a tree one day and stepping it as a mast two days later with the sap still flowing out of it. Let them shudder. Those spars are still in the vessel as I write and they will last her lifetime, for Newfoundland black spruce, grown on the edge of the ocean, is one of the toughest woods in all the world. However it does have one peculiarity. The grain does not run straight up and down as in trees that grow in more favoured locations. In order to withstand the might of the everlasting gales, shore-grown black spruce grows twisted like a corkscrew or a barber’s pole. This gives it great strength but, as the dead tree dries, it tends to unwind. What this meant to us was that both our masts gradually untwisted, turning the crosstrees or spreaders in a circular movement. The cure was simple enough. Every month or two we simply eased off the stays, lifted up the masts, and re-stepped them after giving each a quarter turn. No problem.

  The stepping of the masts was a great day at Muddy Hole. To celebrate the occasion Jack made a rapid trip to St. John’s and. finding the pettifoggers off their guard, he actually managed to buy a case of rum.

  Most Southern Shore Newfoundlanders acquire a taste for rum soon after abandoning their mothers’ breasts, and by the time they are grown men they have developed a high degree of immunity to it, but it is not total immunity. Up until this day I had been master of the rum situation and had governed the issuing of rations according to the three cardinal tenets of rum drinking in Newfoundland. The first of these is that as soon as a bottle is placed on a table it must be opened. This is done to “let the air get at it and carry off the black vapours.” The second tenet is that a bottle, once opened, must never be restoppered, because of the belief that it will then go bad. No bottle of rum has ever gone bad in Newfoundland, but none has ever been restoppered, so there is no way of knowing whether this belief is reasonable. The final tenet is that an open bottle must be drunk as rapidly as possible “before all t’good goes out of it.” Having learned these rules I made it a point never to produce more than one bottle at a time.

  Unfortunately Jack did not know the rules and I did not have enough foresight to brief him. When he arrived back from St. John’s I was away at the other end of the harbour. He carried the case on board the vessel and lovingly unpacked it, placing all twelve bottles on the saloon table, lined up like twelve little soldiers.

  Enos and Obie came below to watch him, and Jack told me later that the ruby glow given off from the bottles, as they sat in a ray of sunshine coming through the forward portlight, was reflected in the oddest manner from the eyes of his two companions.

  Jack then went back to the jeep for another load of supplies. When he returned to the boat every bottle was open and the corks had vanished. He went on deck to ask Obie about this phenomenon and Obie, wordless as usual, simply pointed to the water of the cove where twelve corks were floating seaward on the receding tide like a child’s flotilla.

  It was at this moment I returned and at once I realized we had a crisis. Jack was for recorking the bottles with plugs of toilet paper, in lieu of anything better, until I explained that such a departure from tradition would certainly result in a mutiny and might well get us run out of Muddy Hole. The die was cast. There was no turning back; there was only one thing to be done.

  “Look,” I said in a whisper I hoped would not carry to the deck, “by afternoon every one of those bottles is going to be empty. That is a fact and you can rely on it. And if Enos and Obie do all the emptying there’s going to be damn little work done on the boat in the foreseeable future. We just have to sacrifice ourselves, Jack. Start drinking
!”

  Neither of us are born Newfoundlanders but we did the best we could.

  The unclear events of that unclear day can only be hazily reconstructed but one of them stands out. That was when we went ashore to get the new mainmast which Enos had been shaping upon a pair of saw-horses in his front yard. The mast had to be carried about a quarter of a mile down the slope then out on the rickety stage and finally swung into the air and stepped aboard the boat. In preparation for this Obie and Enos went below and when they came on deck there were only eleven little soldiers left on the table. Then the two of them swaggered up to where the mast lay and picked it up, one at each end.

  The weight proved a little too much for Enos—it weighed a good three hundred pounds—so Obie shifted to the middle of it, taking the entire strain on his own shoulder, and began to trot down the slope. Obie is a big man and very powerfully built but that mast diminished him until he looked like a small child carrying the biggest caber any Scotsman ever hefted.

  Jack and I stood stunned and watched him go. He gained momentum with every plunging step. Enos ran along beside him, a sprightly terrier barking encouragement.

  They reached the narrow stretch of level ground at the land-wash and Obie’s speed did not diminish. Enos stopped encouraging him and began to yell in a rising inflection:

  “Fer Jasus’s sake, me son, slow down!”

  It was no good. Gravity and momentum and various other physical laws which I don’t understand had taken full control. Obie went thundering out along the stage—which shook and quivered like a spider’s web—and he went right on off the end.

  He and the mast made a fantastic splash and the sound brought the girls and the men at the fish plant running to the wharf to see what had happened. They saw Obie astride the mast, laughing like a gawk—a Newfoundland seabird—and paddling toward shore with his big, splayed hands.

  That incident established the mood of the day. A dozen men from the plant abandoned their work and came to lend a hand. They fished the mast and Obie out of the soup and then the whole lot of them plunged into the cabin. When they emerged again there had been a slaughter amongst the soldiers but the crowd was now good for anything. They hefted the mast into the air, swung it around by main strength, and dropped it onto its step with such enthusiasm that I expected it to go right through the hull of the boat, skewering her forever to the bottom of Muddy Hole harbour. Then they all went back below for a moment, came out on deck again, picked up the foremast and flung it into place. Then they all went below again.

  Still trying doggedly to implement our plan Jack and I attempted to get below too but there was no room. When we eventually reached the table there was one bottle still more or less inviolate, so we did our duty.

  The centre of activity shifted away from the boat after that. Someone was moved to dig up a can of pure alcohol, smuggled in from St. Pierre, which he had been saving for Christmas. I am told that, late in the day, Enos decided everyone should have a feed of fresh meat—which meant wild meat—and having shouldered a swile gun he disappeared up the slope looking for a caribou. There has not been a caribou within walking distance of Muddy Hole for fifty years, but this was of no moment. Miracles can happen.

  None did this time. Instead, Enos lost his precious antique, steel-rimmed glasses somewhere in the scrub woods beyond the settlement. Since he was almost totally blind without them it took him until noon the next day to find his way back to Muddy Hole. That whole day was a total loss to us. Without his glasses Enos could not work, and without Enos, Obie would not work.

  The situation was saved when Jack hired the entire juvenile population to go on a spectacle hunt. He persuaded the schoolteacher, a pale young man who did not like teaching anyway, to declare a holiday and he offered a prize of one dollar in silver coins to the person who found Enos’s glasses.

  The youngsters went at the job with marvellous enthusiasm. They scoured the countryside for miles around and eventually, and against all odds, they found the missing spectacles.

  They were hanging from the branch of a spruce tree, some ten feet above the ground. To this day, nobody has any sure knowledge of how they got there. The story that they were tossed into the tree by an irate caribou cannot be substantiated, but neither can it be categorically rejected.

  7. Full speed astern

  AFTER SPENDING a single night under Enos’s roof, Jack insisted we shift aboard the boat. He was reluctant to give reasons but the presence of seven nubile young women seemed to unnerve him. His back was still a dubious quantity. In any event, we took up housekeeping aboard our own little vessel.

  When I originally gave Enos instructions for converting the boat into a cruising yacht he appeared to understand me well enough, but when he began doing the work my wishes came into conflict with centuries of tradition—tradition which dictated that the space occupied by people on any vessel must be reduced to the irreducible minimum, leaving as much room as possible for fish, engines, and other really vital things. Tradition also dictated that the accommodations must be as uncomfortable as possible, presumably to ensure that the crew had small alternative to remaining on deck working their fishing gear, even in the midst of a winter gale.

  Enos’s attempts to carry out my instructions, in opposition to his own deep-rooted instincts, led to a compromise that was no happy one. He began by building the immense cabin trunk, which I have already referred to as looking like an upside-down coffin, over the fish wells; but although he made it as high as a barn on the sides, he did not camber the roof, with the result that there was only five feet of headroom down below. It was necessary to walk about in the cabin with one’s knees well bent or else with one’s head laid over upon a shoulder. Tall men could not walk at all. They had to crawl.

  The cabin was of ample length but Enos had found a way to fix that too. He partitioned off the after-third to house the great green monster that was our engine. There was no doubt about it—the engine had the best accommodation on the ship.

  In what small space remained Enos roughed in the accommodation for human beings, and the verb is fully descriptive. He built two bunks right up in the eyes of the vessel, hard against the chain locker, and he built them to traditional specifications: sixteen inches wide at the head, twelve inches wide at the foot, and sixty-six inches long. He somehow also managed to tip the bunks so that the occupant’s feet were six inches higher than his head. As a final touch, he made the side-boards (which are intended to keep you in place when the vessel grows lively) out of unplaned black spruce, than which there is no more splintery material known to man.

  All in all, the design was diabolically efficient, for it guaranteed that any man who could stay in those bunks longer than twenty minutes at a time had to be close to dissolution.

  In Enos’s view, living space on a fishing vessel ought to consist only of a place to sleep and a place to cook. He therefore turned the small remaining space in the cabin into a galley. He provided a place for a stove, and enough lockers wherein to stow hardtack, salt pork, flour, and turnips for at least forty men on a voyage to Tierra del Fuego and back again—non-stop.

  Lockers (cupboards to landlubbers) were the one thing the cabin did not lack. In days to come, members of the crew who had suffered as much mortification in the bunks as the flesh could endure sometimes crawled into the lockers, shoving aside their contents, in order to get a little rest.

  When I first saw what Enos had done I ordered him to tear everything out and start again. This soured him and a sour Enos was an intractable Enos. He told me it would take not less than two months to change things around and so, perforce, I had to let the matter drop. However I did prevail upon him to add a saloon table. Although it was very small it pre-empted most of the remaining floor space.

  This was the home Jack and I moved into. It was not yet painted. It was filled with oddments of gear, pieces of wood, coils of rope, and a stench that drew its potency equally from the bilges and from the fish-plant soup in which we floated. Ho
me was unprepossessing but it was at least free of ebullient and uninhibited women—and it was very conveniently located in relation to Enos’s fish store.

  During the first ten days we lived aboard we did not suffer much discomfort from the bunks because we seldom had a chance to use them. We worked by day, and we worked by night. We ate when there was nothing better to do and though I consider myself a competent cook my culinary productions were not up to much during this period.

  I cooked on a gasoline stove and the staple food was cod. This was not a matter of choice. It resulted from a desperate attempt on our part to prevent the ship from reverting to her original role and filling up to the hatches with codfish. The fishermen in Muddy Hole were, one and all, hospitable and generous men. Every morning when they returned from hauling their cod traps each of the boats would come alongside and her skipper would present us with a fine, fat cod for dinner.

  Because the harbour was the most public place in Muddy Hole and our boat was almost never free of visitors, we could not dispose of the surplus fish over the side. Had it been reported that we had thrown away one single fish, every inhabitant in the settlement would have been hurt to the quick, and we would have become virtual pariahs.

  So we ate cod in unbelievable quantities. We ate it boiled, fried, poached, and once, when Jack undertook to cook dinner, raw. Nevertheless, we could not begin to keep up with the supply until Obie took pity on us and converted our surplus into salt-pickled cod which we stored in a huge barrel in his store.

  By the last week in July the vessel was beginning to look vaguely shipshape. She was rigged with gear that was heavy enough to meet the needs of a vessel three times her size. Her sails, cut from fourteen-gauge canvas, were bent; and I may say they were not easy to bend, since they were made of a material with the stiffness and weight of galvanized iron. The propeller had been shipped during a hideous episode which saw Jack and Enos and me wading knee deep in slime throughout most of one interminable day. The bare places on her upperworks and decks had received at least one coat of paint—variegated paint, because we had to use the odds and ends we could find at the bottom of paint cans scrounged from fishermen’s stores. Water and gas tanks had been installed and the water tank had been filled by Jack. The source of water was a spring half a mile away on the hillside which dripped a quart of water an hour. It took Jack two days to fill the tank.