The Boat Who Wouldn't Float

by Farley Mowat

  As soon as we moored, Théo came below accompanied by the Chef of the douane and one or two other uniformed officials. The Chef was a little sticky. He had a large hole in one of his teeth and he kept sucking at it in a pessimistic way while Théo insisted that, in our case, papers were not necessary. The Chef did not seem easy to convince. The four men argued long and hotly but to no avail until Théo had an inspiration. This is how he described it to us later.

  “I told them, you see, that since your boat did not belong to any country it could be adopted. I reminded them that we were all of Basque ancestry, and that the Basques had once been the greatest seafaring people in the world but now, having been occupied by France and Spain, we did not have a single seagoing vessel sailing under our own flag. Why not, I asked them, adopt this good little boat? We will rechristen her. We will give her the flag of the Seven Basque Provinces. Yes, and we will give her a port of registry and papers all in Basque! And then there will be one ship upon the ocean flying the flag of our ancient Motherland! What could they say?”

  What they said, of course, was yes; and they said it so enthusiastically that I never had any say in the matter at all. Which is how it came to pass that Happy Adventure ceased to be a Newfoundland vessel and became the flagship of the Basque mercantile marine.

  13. With soul so pure

  ONE MORNING before I am old and hoary I shall waken again to the sound of water slapping gently against the hull of a small vessel as she lies asleep beside the jetty in St. Pierre. I shall climb lazily out of my bunk, sniff the mingled smells of cod, coal smoke, and heather, then I shall amble across the wide Place bordering the harbour, to the Café” L’Escal.

  Madame Ella Girardin will see me coming and my croissants and coffee will be waiting on the bar. And if Ella detects a certain weakness in my gait there will be a small glass of brandy beside the coffee cup.

  Some of the quiet fellows sitting at the little table will give me a casual “bonjour.” Others may acknowledge my arrival with a greeting in Portuguese or Spanish. As I drink my breakfast I will listen to their comments on the state of the fishery and on the happenings in the world of ocean.

  Morning is talking time, but eventually I shall go out on the cobbled streets that run uphill amongst the crowded narrow houses of the little town. If it is a sunny day I may go spearing lobsters at Ravenel Bay. Or I may hitch a ride in a dory with a friend of mine from lie aux Marins and go fifteen miles to sea to jig a cod or a haddock for tomorrow’s lunch. Most likely, though, I’ll amble down to the docks to have a gam with the sailors from one of the score or so of Portuguese, French, or Spanish draggers moored to the wharf.

  In the afternoon I may make my way at a gentle pace up the long, scrub-covered slopes behind the town and amble across the rough barrens, through blue lupins and strong-scented grass, to the high-domed crest of the rock ridge behind Cap au Diable. From there I’ll look southeast over the neat reticule of the town; over the broad double harbour past Galantry Head to a far distant curl of foam bursting over the haunted reef that bears the name “Les Enfants Perdus,” and beyond that to the shores of Canada—of Newfoundland.

  After a while the fog will begin rolling in, and it will be time to descend the hill and walk through ghostly streets until I come to La Joinville, at whose long bar Jean will pour me a noggin, “to get the fog out of your bones,” and tell me fantastic yarns of the great days of Le Whiskey when St. Pierre was the focal point of interest, and sometimes of guns as well, for the thirsting millions of a prohibition-smitten United States of America. Jean will tell me again how the rows of now gaunt and empty concrete warehouses along the waterfront were once stacked to their roof beams with hundreds of thousands of cases of whiskey, brandy, rum, and wines; and he will talk again of the elusive, hard-faced men who manned the swift and often nameless ships that came and went by night; sailing for dark rendezvous with black-painted motor boats off the coasts of the New England states.

  I will do these things that I have done before; but there will be one thing I cannot do again. As evening draws down Théophile Detcheverry will not be there to welcome me into his rambling old house, and I will not be able to sit until the dawn hours watching the quick flow of passions on his saturnine and hawk-nosed face, while I listen to his great voice booming a mixture of good French and atrocious English, as he speaks of the islands he knew so well and loved so deeply. Théo is gone. But I will remember him, for it was he, more than any other man, who taught me to know the myth-shrouded little archipelago lying only twelve miles off the shores of Canada—the never-never land of St. Pierre and Miquelon.

  Because the arrangements to make a Basque lady out of Happy Adventure would take several days, Théo suggested we should have the vessel hauled on the marine railway at the shipyard. He was sure the local shipwrights would be able to find and stanch her leaks, and while she was high and dry we would have time to repaint her and generally make her beautiful for her christening.

  I was pessimistic about the chances of anyone ever stopping her leaks, but the mere prospect of not having to pump her for a day or two was so engaging that I set off at once to visit the shipyard and make the necessary arrangements.

  The yard was decrepit, sprawling, and unbelievably cluttered. On one of its two slipways a Newfoundland schooner, the Sandy Point, stood high and dry, while the other slip was occupied by a sea-worn Spanish dragger. The whole place smelled of a mixture of old wood, sun-heated iron, stockholm tar, engine oil, and black, reeking coal smoke, coming from a ramshackle building that housed a massive and antique steam engine and winch, by means of which the ships were hauled up on the slips.

  At the cradle holding the dragger, three or four workmen were hammering in big wooden wedges to hold her securely in position for a launching which, evidently, was due to take place at any moment.

  A rotund, red-faced young man with a monk’s fringe in lieu of hair emerged briefly from the steaming engine house, shouted something to the men preparing the dragger, and dashed back into his hissing inferno. I walked toward his lair and as I stepped over one of the launching rails I almost fell over a dog.

  She was asleep. She lay on her back, legs outspread, with no pretence at modesty, her head turned at a painful angle, so that her nose rested on a pillow of scrap iron. She was big and black with a white chest; and she was snoring loudly.

  As my foot came down within an inch of her face she opened one yellow eye and gave me a long, cold stare; but she continued to snore. The back hairs on my neck crawled a little as I hurried away from this monster who seemed able to observe the world with a watchful eye while she slept.

  I had not gone three paces when the whistle atop the engine house let loose a fearful shriek. The blast immobilized me but it galvanized the dog into frenetic action. She gained her feet with one leap and began to run with a loose-limbed gallop that carried her across the yard and out of sight into the maze of streets beyond.

  The whistle ceased and the rotund cherub emerged again from his hotbox, wiping his brow with his shirt. He saw me and beckoned. The gesture was imperious.

  “Allo, anyway!” he said as I approached. “I am Paulo. You like Napoleon?”

  Napoleon is not one of my favourite figures from the past, but since this was French territory and I was an alien I equivocated.

  “Je him aime beaucoup. Mais je pense De Gaulle is better!” I said carefully.

  A faint shadow of bewilderment hovered over Paulo’s rosy brow for a moment, then was gone.

  “Eh, bien!” he cried. “Then drink!”

  With which he shoved a bottle at me. It was Napoleon brandy. It was warm, but it was good.

  Between drinks (for Paulo was not one of your single-drink men) I broached the subject of hauling out Happy Adventure.

  “Pas de difficulté”! We are enchanted. One hour after we launch this dragger, then we haul you out. But, Monsieur, why you do not have another drink?”

  So I had another and then, because the effect of the enco
unter with the great black dog was still strong, I asked: “That chien, is it that she is yours? She acts like she is fou. crazy.”

  Paulo bellowed, a great gust of Napoleon-spiced mirth. “Crazee? That dog? That Blanche? Oh non, my fran. She is, what you say, more smart than me! You wait, you watch.”

  “Okay. Je watch. Mais why is it that you call her Blanche quand elle est noir as a lump de charbon?”

  “Why not?” Paulo answered with some impatience. “How many people you know called Green, eh? Or Brown or Black? What colour they are, eh? Anyhow, that dog, she has very pure soul. Sooo. Blanche, non?”

  The logic seemed irrefutable. We sat together on a baulk of timber and waited. I assumed we were waiting for the men at the dragger cradle to signal they were ready for the launch. But when after a few minutes they shouted that all was in order. Paulo only beamed at them, waved the bottle, and went on sitting.

  “Waitez vous to get up une gross tête de steam?” I asked.

  “Non. non,” said Paulo. “We wait for Blanche.”

  Then from around the town-side corner of the main shipyard building appeared a bevy of wonderfully assorted dogs. There were five of them, and they ranged from a huge, panting, lumbering, quasi-St. Bernard to a tiny, yapping, short-legged beast known in Newfoundland as a “crackie.” They came around the corner fast. Bringing up the tail of the procession was Blanche.

  Paulo bounced to his feet and vanished into his inferno. He gave three short blasts on the whistle and the men at the dragger cradle jumped off. They had hardly cleared the cradle when dogs began scrambling aboard it. They showed little enthusiasm for what they were doing and one or two of them even made faint-hearted attempts to bolt back toward the town. It was useless. Like a black devil herding doomed souls into the nether pit, Blanche anticipated these attempts, and a snarl and a snap took the spirit of resistance out of the defectors.

  The winch began to roar. The big drum began to turn and the cable to pay out. The cradle gave a jerk and began to slide down the slope toward the harbour. The dogs were silent except for the quasi-St. Bernard who closed his eyes and moaned hoarsely.

  Soon all the dogs were afloat and milling aimlessly about in the froth. The cradle sank until only the tops of its arms were showing. The dragger started her engines and steamed out into the stream. The launch was over.

  Well, it was not quite over. The harbour was now full of floating objects. Many of these were hardwood wedges but five were the heads of swimming dogs. I now began to see a point and purpose in the strange scene I was witnessing.

  Each dog swam to a wedge. Each dog, according to his or her size, ability, and strength, either grabbed hold of a wedge, or bunted one with its chest, and began laboriously dragging or pushing the heavy blocks toward shore.

  Paulo emerged beside me, grinning widely.

  “Not so crazee, eh? Blanche, she make all them damn dog work. lls ne l”aiment pas, you bet, but by God, what can they do? They work, or they have bite. That Blanche, she boss them good.”

  Blanche was the last to regain the land. She shook herself, looked searchingly over the harbour to make sure there was nothing left to be retrieved and then, without so much as a glance at her assistants, walked sedately to her favourite sleeping-place and slumped into a relaxed position in the sun. Then, and only then, did the pack begin to slink away. They had been dismissed from duty.

  I had a few questions to ask of Paulo. We adjourned to L’Escal and there he told me all.

  Blanche, he explained, did not belong to him or, in fact, to any man. She hailed originally from the small outport of Grand Bruit, on the south shore of Newfoundland, a hundred miles west of St. Pierre.

  Grand Bruit is famous for its black water dogs, which are not to be confused with either the kennel-bred Labrador or the giant Newfoundland breed. Both of these types were developed from the native water dog which seems to have evolved naturally in Newfoundland, or perhaps on St. Pierre, from a now vanished European species brought over by Basque fishermen hundreds of years ago. These dogs, whose aquatic prowess is truly phenomenal were, until recently, carried on almost every fishing vessel. They had a dual task: to act as lifesavers if a man fell overboard, and to retrieve codfish that escaped from the jigger as it was hauled to the surface.

  For some years Blanche had gone fishing with her owner who was skipper of a little two-dory schooner out of Grand Bruit. Then one bitter February night this vessel went ashore on Galantry Head of St. Pierre. Her crew and dog made it safely to shore where they were cared for until the men could arrange a passage out.

  The first passage that offered itself was aboard a big schooner belonging to Fortune Bay bound on a fishing voyage to the Grand Banks. Blanche’s master left her in Paulo’s care until he could return to claim her, but the schooner never returned to land. She went unreported, and no trace of her, or of her crew, was ever found.

  Blanche made herself at home in the shipyard. Before her coming, the shipyard workers used to have to row about the harbour after a launching, in order to pick up the drifting wedges. But one morning Blanche decided to do the job for them. She did it so well that she went on the payroll of the yard.

  Although she was very much a female she contemptuously rejected the advances of the scruffy mongrels of the town. They were not her type. Then one spring a handsome black male of her own kind arrived aboard another Newfoundland schooner. There was a whirlwind romance before her lover went back to sea—and Blanche was pregnant.

  She stuck to her duties at the yard until Paulo and the other workers began to worry about her. It was not fitting, they felt, that a pregnant lady should work so hard and in such icy waters. They tried to persuade her to take a leave of absence but Blanche refused. She had her own solution to the problem.

  One afternoon when she was about four weeks gone and Paulo signalled for a launch, instead of racing to the cradle Blanche shot out of the yard and disappeared. Paulo was surprised, but he was much more surprised when, a few minutes later, she reappeared nipping at the heels of a large spaniel belonging to the Governor of St. Pierre.

  Relentlessly she chivvied this poor beast down to the cradle, drove him aboard, and kept him there while the launch was made. Whereupon she forced him to help collect the wedges.

  “She train that dog just once,” Paulo explained, “and after that, he know what he have to do. He don’t like it. Mon Dieu, he scream like hell first time, but he have no choice. Afterward, when I blow the whistle, Blanche she go and get him. One time he go away and hide, but next day she catch him on the street and tear one ear mostly off his head. After that he do what he is told.”

  Before her pups were born, Blanche had expanded her task force and trained them so well that they could do the job entirely on their own. After her pups were weaned and had gone to sea on various ships, she maintained her shore crew, not because she really needed them but, it must be assumed, for the pleasure of making honest working dogs out of a bunch of “townee” loafers.

  “Every now and again she break in a new one,” Paulo continued. “That Doberman, he is a new one. Very bad swimmer too. I hope he don’t drown. He belong to the new Chef des Gendarmes, another damn Frenchman from Paree….” That same afternoon Happy Adventure went on the cradle the dragger had occupied and was whisked ashore. She seemed like a toy boat in the midst of all that machinery, dwarfed into insignificance by the Sandy Point on the adjoining slip.

  As Mike inelegantly put it, “Looks like the Sandy Point gave birth to a green preemy. Wonder if it’ll live?”

  Indeed Happy Adventure seemed a sickly child. Not only was her colour awful, but her general state of health left a great deal to be desired. When the caulking crew gathered to examine her dripping bottom there was much clucking and head-shaking and expressive eye-rolling.

  Nevertheless they went to work on her and they worked with a will. Unbelievable quantities of caulking cotton vanished into her gaping seams. One entire plank, so rotten that a man could shove his knife right
through it, was removed and replaced. All of her stopwaters were drilled out and new ones installed; and a number of other ailments were attended to.

  Mike and I had received specific instructions from Théo about repainting her.

  “You will please, Messieurs, remove that green!” he told us. “Her hull, she will be black. Her boot top, she will be white. Her bottom, she will be red. Below her rail, you will please to paint a yellow line. Her decks, they will be dory-buff. Her masts, you will scrape and then you will oil, and you will paint the trucks white. When you have finished she will not look like something very dead pulled out of the sea, she will look like a fine Basque ship!”

  During the next few days preparations for the christening were being completed. These were under the management of Théo’s son-in-law, Martin Dutin, who became Chef de Protocol for the event.

  Martin’s tasks included making arrangements for a Dominican Father to give the vessel a formal baptism; the manufacture of a Basque flag to be flown at our masthead; the philological problem of translating the words Happy Adventure into the Basque language; plans for the public christening ceremony; and finally arrangements for a mighty party to celebrate the rebirth of the Basque mercantile marine.

  Our launching was something of a celebration in its own right. While Blanche gathered her minions on the cradle, most of the shipyard workers and a number of Spanish sailors crowded aboard, laden with launching gifts, mostly of a liquid nature. The cradle descended smoothly and Happy Adventure floated again. Many willing hands fumblingly untied the lines that held her fast. She drifted clear of the cradle and of the busy dogs. Mike started the bullgine and we motored to a berth at the main government wharf. It had been a good launching and the ministrations of the shipyard people seemed to have cured Happy Adventure’s leakiness. This was cause for further celebration so we all adjourned to the Café L’Escal.