The Boat Who Wouldn't Float

by Farley Mowat

  Enos departs at 7 A.M., the last I hear of him is a grand final expectoration on deck. I hope it is only tobacco juice and spit, not bacon. Jack can’t stand much more…. At 8 A.M. the sewage tank at the plant got up its first full head of steam and let her rip. The discharge shot ten feet out of the pipe and did not quite clear H.A.’S deck. Most of it hit the mainmast and was deflected into the cockpit. Discharge continues about once every hour. Like Big Bertha at the siege of Paris, but Paris never could have stood up to this barrage…. Out of rum. Last bottle seems to have disappeared…. Tide fell and rose again, one foot short of refloating us…. Jack offered to sell H.A. “as is, where is,” to local fisherman for fifty dollars. Was refused…. Manager fish plant came along at noon, asked us to move. Said we are interfering with flow from sewage pipe. Jack made highly personal suggestion to manager where he could put sewer pipe. Was refused…. Discover no rum available closer than St. John’s. Jack beginning to talk longingly of life of book publisher in Toronto…. Small boy aboard at 4:30 offers Jack a rusty tin can full of cod’s tongues for ten cents. Was refused…. Stink in cabin so atrocious Jack opened portlight over his bunk, forgetting next discharge from pipe was due. Failed to get portlight closed in time….

  It was a hideous day but the climax came that evening. Just after supper, for which neither of us had any stomach, Jack decided to light the gasoline lantern. This lantern was a piece of equipment we seldom used, preferring to depend on the dim light from two small oil lamps which, we felt, were less likely to ignite the ever-present raw gasoline floating in our bilge. However this night we needed the big lantern, not only because its garish flare might brighten the general gloom, but also because it would provide much-needed heat which, to some small extent, might dispel the stinking damp that filled the cabin, and that had turned our sleeping-bags and clothing into clammy corpse shrouds.

  For safety’s sake Jack normally took the lantern on deck or ashore before lighting it, but this evening he was not normal. He may even, although he denies it, have had some hope in his subconscious mind that the thing would explode and put us out of our misery. Whatever the case, he chose to light it on the saloon table, and when he opened the valve to prime the generator, he opened it too far and left it open too long. When he touched a match to the mantle a three-foot flame leapt into instant life.

  Whatever desire for self-immolation may have lurked in the back of Jack’s mind, it was no match for his instinct for self-preservation. Thrusting a long wooden spoon (with which I had mixed our codfish stew) under the lantern’s handle, he leapt for the companionway, scrambled through it, and disappeared into the night waving his flaming torch and shouting, “Fire!” at the top of his lungs.

  There were a great many boats and vessels moored to the wharf that night, including three big, new side-draggers that boasted all sorts of modern equipment, including Foamite fire-control systems. Acting on the assumption that it would be quicker to take the fire to the extinguisher than to wait for the extinguisher to come to him, Jack made straight for these draggers. His path took him between several rows of forty-five gallon drums, painted red, and filled with gasoline for the use of the smaller fishing boats. His urgent bellowing and the great flare of light that accompanied him alerted all the crews of the moored boats, and by the time he neared the draggers he had a large, attentive, and terrified audience.

  What the final outcome might have been is anybody’s guess. I like to dwell on the possibility that Jack might have succeeded in boarding one of the draggers bearing his burning offering and there been received with such a blizzard of CO2 foam that he would have been buried alive.

  The reality was not quite so dramatic. Before reaching the first dragger Jack discovered that the wooden spoon had caught fire and was burning briskly. He knew he was not going to make it. Reacting with the split-second reflexes for which he is justly famed, he swerved to the dockside and flung spoon and lantern into the cold sea. There was a brief final flare as the last of the gasoline burned on the surface before darkness closed down upon us all.

  By the time Jack fumbled his way back to Happy Adventure (he had been half-blinded by the glare), I had lit the cabin lamps. We said nothing to each other; we just sat in silence until, half an hour later, heavy boots clumped on our deck and a gruff voice asked permission to come below.

  Permission being granted four very large, very muscular, fishing skippers crammed their way into the cabin.

  They said they had heard we were having trouble refloating our boat. They said they would deem it an honour (those were not exactly the words they used) to give us a helping hand. They said their crews were already rigging wire warps from our bows to the main winch of the biggest dragger. Would we, they asked, come on deck and be ready to move our vessel to a much better mooring at an unoccupied government wharf on the other side of the harbour, as soon as they had hauled her off the mud?

  I thanked them but pointed out that I would never be able to find the wharf in darkness and in fog and so would prefer to moor alongside one of their draggers for the night.

  They said they understood how I felt, but two of them would be delighted to pilot us across the harbour. No, they would not come aboard Happy Adventure in order to do this; they would pilot us from a motor boat bearing a large light and keeping well out of our way.

  The kindliness of Newfoundland fishermen has to be experienced to be appreciated.

  When morning dawned we found ourselves free men again. We were lying at a very long wharf built by the government in the wrong part of the harbour which is where the Newfoundland government normally builds such wharves. There was nobody else at this wharf and no houses anywhere near it. We had it all to ourselves and through the next three days kept it all to ourselves despite the arrival, because of a storm warning, of great numbers of vessels. They so crowded the fish-plant wharf that there was not room for them all and many had to anchor in the stream. Jack had the feeling we were being treated as pariahs until on the evening of the third day we were joined in exile by the Jeannie Barnes.

  She was a slab-sided steel monstrosity, fifty or sixty feet long. She had something of the look of a seagoing power yacht but this was negated by her incredible state of dishabille. She seemed to have just escaped from the Sargasso Sea after having rusted there for many decades. Nevertheless we were delighted to have company and we hurried to take her lines. Her skipper and owner, a raffish, bearded, and slouching chap with very few teeth left in his head, but with an ingratiating smile, thanked us kindly and invited us aboard to meet the rest of the crew: his twelve-year-old, red-headed son and a nondescript, mumbling fellow who was cook, deckhand, and engineer.

  The Barnes was not a member of the fishing fraternity. Her skipper-owner eked out a living carrying small freight consignments here and there about the coast, showing movies to outport villagers, selling patent medicines, and in general picking up a dollar anywhere and anyhow he could. Over a cup of dreadful coffee he asked us what we were doing on the wrong side of the harbour.

  “How come they kicked you off the plant wharf, eh? Well you don’t have to tell me unless you wants. They’re a nasty bunch over there. They won’t hardly part with a drop of gasoline on tick. Won’t give a feller no credit at all. I told ’em last time I filled up there I’d pay ’em when I got the money, and one of these years I may.”

  Having indignantly denied that we had been kicked off (a denial which the skipper took with obvious scepticism), we invited him to come aboard our vessel. We had a new problem and we had hopes he might help us solve it.

  As was so often the case aboard Happy Adventure it was an engine problem. The bullgine had learned how to heat herself up until she got so hot that when we tried to stop her we could not do it. Disconnecting the battery did no good because the igniter, having become incandescent, would continue to fire the gasoline charges anyway. The only way we could stop her was to turn off the gasoline tap at the main tank, and it then took up to five minutes for her to consume the
gasoline remaining in her huge carburetor before she would finally give up the ghost.

  She revealed this distressing new trait the day before the Jeannie Barnes arrived, when we made a voyage across the harbour to the wharf of a small merchant who sold fuel, food, and sundries to fishermen. His dock was crowded with small boats and so, for safety’s sake, I ordered Jack to stop the engine while we were still some distance, off. The engine refused to stop and we ploughed ahead at full speed. I managed to heel her over in a sharp turn, doing no more damage to the moored boats than to skin the paint off a trap skiff. Shaken to the quick, I headed the vessel back toward the centre of the harbour—whereupon the engine stopped. Naturally it would not start again.

  We dropped anchor and there we lay for three hours, the cynosure of all eyes, while we waited for the engine to cool. When we eventually got it going again we crawled fearfully back to our isolation berth, not having enough courage to make another pass at the merchant’s wharf.

  In order to regain our mooring at the government wharf we cut off the gas while well off shore, let the engine die, and then used our little dory to tow the schooner ignominiously to her berth.

  The skipper of the Jeannie Barnes diagnosed our trouble in a wink. “Your checks is wore out,” he told us.

  We politely asked what checks were and he explained tolerantly that they were small brass valves which controlled the water circulation through the cooling system.

  “Where,” I asked, “can we get new ones?”

  “Well, I suppose you got to go to St. John’s, me son. Only place you’re likely to find ’em.”

  There seemed to be a conspiracy on foot to send us back to the grey capital of Newfoundland.

  Fortunately Trepassey possessed a telegraph station from which I dispatched a long, somewhat garbled but urgent S.O.S. to the one man in St. John’s upon whom I knew I could depend. His name was Mike Donovan and he was then the Director of Provincial Library Services. While stationed in Holland after the end of the Second World War Mike Donovan stole a German v-2 rocket. After painting it blue, building a wooden conning tower on it, and brazenly calling it a one-man submarine, he shipped it back to Canada as a glorious souvenir. I felt that a man of Donovan’s talents could surely help us out of our dilemma.

  Mike delivered true to form. The following day, the inhabitants of Trepassey were electrified to see a small pickup truck come bucking across the caribou barrens behind the village. It made its way erratically in leaps and bounds to the government wharf. A very drunken, very Irish, very voluble little man tumbled out of it and identified himself as “a friend to old Mike, ye know.”

  He was also a friend to us. At considerable risk to life, limb, and his precious little truck, he delivered to us two sets of checks and the nine bottles remaining out of the case of rum Mike had entrusted to him.

  We did not grudge the little man his cut. He had earned it fair and square.

  The skipper of the Jeannie Barnes shared some of the rum with us and in turn repaired our engine and presented us with several very old and incredibly dirty charts. He also gave us compass courses designed to keep us clear of Cape St. Mary’s and to assist us in crossing the wide mouth of mighty Placentia Bay although, as he unnecessarily pointed out:

  “They won’t be all that much good to you without you find a compass better’n that bate-up old piece of junk you got.”

  Despite his pessimism about our chances, we were grateful to him and we were sorry to see him go when, late one afternoon, he cast off his lines and his boat went grumbling off into the fog, trusting to her battered radar set to show her the way to her next port-of-call.

  We never saw her or her crew again. Three weeks later the Jeannie Barnes was missing. The body of the red-headed little boy was picked up in a cod net a few miles off the Southern Shore. The bodies of the skipper and the mate were never found. The Barnes had been returning to St. John’s in heavy fog, with her old radar out of order, when she disappeared.

  Probably she was cut down by a foreign dragger which had been taking advantage of the fog to fish inside the three-mile limit—but only the unanswering sea will ever know what really happened.

  10. The foggy, foggy dew

  WE SPENT five days waiting for good weather before reaching the conclusion that to wait was vain. Good weather and Trepassey did not go together.

  So early on the sixth day we cast off our lines, started the bullgine, and steamed off into the fog. We now had a definite destination in mind, if not in view. We had given up our original intention of sailing to the tropics because it was clear from a scrutiny of our log that, even if we maintained our current rate of progress, it would take us sixteen months to reach the Caribbean; twenty-nine months to reach the Azores; and seven and a half years to reach the South Pacific. We did not have that much time. Consequently we chose as our alternative the island of St. Pierre.

  While hardly tropical in character, and able to boast of no brown-skinned wahines, this little island did offer certain compensations. It was a foreign land, flying the French flag. It was, and remains, famous for having the cheapest and most abundant supply of alcohol to be found anywhere on or near the North American continent. But perhaps St. Pierre’s greatest attraction for us was that it lay no more than one hundred and twenty miles to the westward of Trepassey and only a few miles off the south coast of Newfoundland. We felt we had at least a chance of reaching St. Pierre before winter closed in upon us.

  Visibility in Trepassey harbour itself was surprisingly good as we set out. We almost saw the fish plant, and we certainly knew where it was because the wind was blowing from it to us. Once, as we thundered through the harbour channel, we caught an indistinct glimpse of land off the port bow. It may have been Powles Head, the entry landmark. If so, it was the last landmark we were to see for a long time to come.

  Trepassey Bay was black with fog. We had gone no more than a mile when, faint-heart that I am, I decided it would be hopeless to proceed.

  “Jack,” I said as firmly as I could, “we’ll have to put back to harbour. There isn’t a chance we’re going to find St. Pierre in fog like this. Considering the state of that bleeding compass, we’re more likely to end up in Ireland instead.”

  Jack fixed me with a cold stare and there was no mistaking the threat of mutiny in his voice:

  “The hell you say! Mowat, if you turn back now I swear I’ll do an Enos. I’ll leave you to rot in Trepassey harbour to the end of your born days! Besides, you silly bastard, how do you think you’re going to find Trepassey again? I’m going below to work out a course to clear Cape Pine. You keep this boat heading as she is or else…!”

  He vanished and I was alone with my thoughts. I had to admit he had a point. Although we had found Trepassey harbour once in heavy fog we weren’t likely to be as lucky a second time, and the rocks and reefs on both sides of the entrance were particularly fearsome and unforgiving. Also I was pretty sure Jack would make good his threat, supposing we did regain the harbour, and the prospect of being marooned alone with Happy Adventure in Trepassey was too horrible to contemplate. The lesser of two evils would be to continue out to sea. I held the little vessel “steady as she goes,” but with my free hand I pulled out my own personal bottle of rum from its hiding place in the lazaret, and poured a good dollop overboard for the Old Man. Happy Adventure puttered blindly on into the dark and brooding murk and I was soon fog-chilled, unutterably lonely, and scared to death. Since rum is a known and accepted antidote for all three conditions I took a long, curative drink for each separate ailment. By the time Jack reappeared on deck I was much easier in my mind.

  By 1000 hours we had run the required distance to clear Cape Pine (distance run was measured on an ancient brass patent log towed astern of the vessel), and were ready to alter course to the northwest, to begin the twenty-mile crossing of the mouth of St. Mary’s Bay. But now a problem arose—we did not have the faintest idea what our compass error was on such a course. All we could do was alter nine
ty degrees to the north and hope we were actually sailing northwest despite what the compass had to say about it.

  The knowledge that we were by then in close proximity to St. Shotts did nothing to bring me peace of mind. Having once been to St. Shotts by land, as a visitor, I had no desire to return to it unexpectedly by sea, as a piece of business. The bare possibility gave me such a bad attack of shivering that I had to send Jack down below to check the pumps while I took another cure.

  It was a curious thing, but whenever I felt a pressing need to reach for the bottle Jack seemed perfectly willing, and even anxious, to nip below and give me privacy. Sometimes he even anticipated my need. At the time I thought this was only happy coincidence. But at the conclusion of the passage when I was cleaning up in the engine room, I found, under a pile of rags, a bottle that was the twin of the one I kept hidden in the lazaret. Like mine, it was completely empty.

  The crossing of St. Mary’s Bay began uneventfully. There was not a breath of wind. There was very little sensation of movement because there were no reference points for the eye to find. We seemed poised and immobile in the centre of a bowl of calm and leaden water a hundred feet or so in circumference.

  This was a region where we knew we could expect to encounter other vessels, particularly draggers and fishing schooners, with the consequent danger of collisions. Being without radar we had to rely on other boats to spot us and keep out of our way. Nor could we have heard their fog-horns above the roar of the bullgine. We ourselves did not need a fog-horn-the engine made more noise than any horn could have done.

  Just after noon the fog to starboard suddenly grew black as the shadowy shape of a vessel came into view about fifty yards away. She was a big power schooner on a converging course with us and her rail was lined with gesticulating figures.

  We were so glad to see other human beings in this void that we ran close alongside and stopped our engine. The big schooner did likewise and the two vessels drifted side by side. “Where you bound, Skipper?” someone called across to us.