The Boat Who Wouldn't Float

by Farley Mowat

  They were also a greatly relieved pair, as I discovered when they followed me below to warm themselves with rum and coffee. They told me they were inward bound from Selbys Cove in Hermitage Bay on the Newfoundland coast, forty miles to the north of Miquelon.

  “We’s come for a drop o” stuff, ye know,” Almon explained. “And me dear man, when we come alongside o’ you, we was sure and believed ’twas the Mounties waiting for we. A hard crowd, they are too!” For once his smile faded a little.

  “Aye,” Hondas put in, “ ’twould have meant hard times in Selbys Cove if they’d a took we, wit’ t’ree weddings comin’ up next week and nary a drop to drink!”

  After the Manuels had had their “warm” I accompanied them up to the village to meet their merchant, a local fisherman who also ran a small “export business”, and who welcomed the Manuels hugely. Having been assured by all hands that the wind would not get any stronger, I was persuaded to sit with the three men in the kitchen while they talked about the “game.”

  More than a hundred and forty years ago the British government, acting on behalf of the predacious merchants of St. John’s, decided to stop free trade between the scattered and isolated fishing outports of Newfoundland’s south coast, and St. Pierre and Miquelon. And so began a struggle that continues to this day. The authorities refer to it as the war against smuggling; the people concerned refer to it simply as the “game.”

  For seven or eight generations boats have been putting out on foggy nights from tiny coves of Newfoundland’s coast to feel their way in blackness over the uneasy seas to Miquelon or to St. Pierre. In the old days they traded fish bait, salmon, firewood, caribou meat, and furs, for sugar, flour clothing, tea, and rum.

  In recent years the pattern has changed. There is no longer a shortage of staples in southern Newfoundland but the shortage of alcohol remains as acute as ever it was. The night-time customers who come to Miquelon now pay cash, not for rum. but for pure grain alcohol. Alky, as it is called, is supplied tax-free in five-litre cans (two cans packed in a wooden case), or in twenty-litre metal drums at a cost of about fifty cents a litre. A litre, properly diluted with water, is the equivalent in potency of three or four quarts of legal booze.

  Until Confederation with Canada, the Newfoundland government’s preventive force consisted of a number of old revenue cutters manned by native Newfoundlanders whose sympathies lay with the fishermen. In those days few arrests were made. However after Confederation the prevention duties were handed over to the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, a notoriously efficient and unsympathetic organization.

  The R.C.M.P. set out in earnest to kill the game, bringing into use fast motor vessels, such as the Commissioner Wood, a real gunboat, half as big as a destroyer, manned by twenty or thirty policemen and fitted with quick-firing cannon, radar, special radios, and a host of modern aids in the preservation of law and order. By all realistic calculations, the R.C.M.P.—the Mounties—should have been able to win the game hands down. That they did not do so, and have not yet done so, is a proper tribute to the independence, intelligence, skill, hardihood, and thirst of the fishermen of southern Newfoundland.

  When the Manuel brothers returned to their skiff I went with them to help load their cargo. It consisted of six crates of alcohol-twelve cans in all. As we were heaving the crates aboard I noticed there were a number of large sacks of something in the fish hold.

  As each crate came over the rail Hondas attached a line to it, and at the other end of the line tied one of the sacks. These sacks were filled with salt. The salt had been supplied free, as a fisherman’s subsidy, by the unwitting Canadian government—a delicious touch of humour. The Manuels explained to me that this salt was their “insurance.”

  “If one o’ they cutters comes onto we, we heaves bags and boxes over side. The salt, bein’ heavy, takes the boxes straight down below, and there they stays ’till the salt melts into the water. How long that’ll take depends on how much salt you uses and what kind o’ bag. A brin bag’ll soak out fifty pounds o’ salt in fifteen hours; but fifty pounds in a flour sack’ll take nigh onto twenty-four hours. You can time it pretty close, you know. And when ’tis time for the crates to come afloat why there’ll be a couple o’ dories nearby, jiggin” for cod as innocent as you please. The dorymen puts the cases into their holds, covers ’em up with cod, and that’s an end of it, and the Mounties not a whit the wiser.”

  The Manuels found a sympathetic listener in me, for I am in favour of anything that takes the mickey out of duly constituted authority, whenever that authority intrudes on the freedom of the individual. I am also in favour of inexpensive booze.

  When the loading was completed Almon gave me a long speculative look. He was making up his mind about something. Finally he spoke.

  “Skipper,” he said slowly, “ ’tis a fine little vessel you’ve got. I wouldn’t doubt she’d carry a fair cargo. What would ye say to a little voyage down into Hermitage Bay?”

  I hesitated for a good tenth of a second. “I’d say yes.”

  We shook hands all around and had a final tot. The Manuels climbed aboard their cockle-shell and the overloaded skiff puttered off into the embracing blackness of fog and night.

  The Manuels’ invitation was not destined to be accepted immediately. On our return voyage from Miquelon to St. Pierre the next day. the bullgine ran out of goodwill and reverted to her usual bestial nature. She could be made to go only if I squatted over her whirling flywheel with one finger pressed against the igniter rod. This rod was hot. The fumes from the engine were suffocating. And the posture I had to maintain, in order to avoid being emasculated by the flywheel, was so crippling that it was some hours after we reached St. Pierre before I could stand upright.

  That night, after our guests had departed, I made a solemn vow that Itchy would not sail again until the bullgine had been brought to heel once and for all. There would be too much at stake to allow us to take risks when she made her next voyage.

  15 Voyage of the Oregon

  I TOOK THE PROBLEM of the bullgine to Paulo who arranged for St. Pierre’s most talented mechanic to deal with it.

  This man, Jean-Pierre, a squat, black-bearded fellow who wore a greasy beret pulled down over his ears like a helmet could make or fix almost anything. During the war years he made an airplane with which to defend his home islands in the event that the Luftwaffe dared to threaten them. On its maiden flight from a pasture south of the town it hit a passing cow and, although the cow was killed, Jean-Pierre was uninjured. “Très fort! Cet aéroplane!” he told me with the pride of a good workman.

  Jean-Pierre thought it would take three days to rebuild the bullgine, and on one of those days Théophile invited Claire and me to take a trip in his great dory, Oregon.

  Théo’s dory did not derive her name from a state in the American union but from a ship. The orginal Oregon was a big passenger liner. During the war while she was making a passage from Europe to Halifax laden with refugees (most of whom were women and children), she had engine trouble and fell behind the rest of her convoy.

  She was then not far off the French islands and so her captain decided to put into St. Pierre for repairs. He had never been there before and his charts were not up-to-date. Because of the war the lighthouses and fog-horns were not functioning. Nevertheless Oregon’s master attempted to enter the North Channel in darkness and in fog; without radar and without a pilot.

  That same night Théo was returning in his dory from a trip to Miquelon, feeling his own way through the fog by means of the special senses which he and his race had long since perfected. He heard the steamer before he saw her and changed course to see what manner of ship was attempting the entry channel on such a night.

  She loomed up suddenly ahead of him, a monstrous black shape that he at first took to be a German warship, the Scharnhorst, making a raid upon the islands. However as he swung along her cliff-like side he realized that she was a passenger vessel.

  He also realized that s
he was in desperate danger. She was proceeding directly toward St. Pierre Rock which lay in mid-channel less than half a mile ahead of her.

  It is not easy for a man in a small boat, in almost total darkness, and without lights, to attract the attention of bridge officers on a big ship. Théo did it. He afterwards claimed it cost him his voice, although anyone who has heard his bass bellow will not take that claim too seriously. In any event he did make himself heard and persuaded the captain to stop the ship. He then boarded the big vessel, backed her clear of danger, and piloted her into the harbour.

  Théo refused to accept a reward for saving the ship and, in all probability, the lives of many of her passengers. He asked only that he be permitted to name his dory after the vessel in memory of the event.

  Ostensibly, the voyage on which Claire and I had been invited was intended to carry Martin Dutin, a young teacher named Bernard, and their wives to the Grand Barachois of Miquelon, where they were to spend a few days hunting and fishing. But for Claire and for me it was to be a holiday cruise, during which we would explore some of those places along the island coasts that were particularly dear to Théo and which he wished to share with us. Poor Mike was left behind as Itchy’s chaperone.

  Very early on a sunny morning Claire and I made our way to the Hard where Oregon lay waiting. The dory was high and dry on the beach, enveloped in the now familiar stench of rotting cod livers. Twenty-five feet long, flat bottomed, and completely open, she looked awkward and ungainly as she lay upon the land.

  We found the rest of the party already assembled, accompanied by the usual hampers of good things to eat and drink. Théo greeted us wearing a boiler suit and a tropical pith helmet. Théo was a man of many heroes and he not infrequently imitated them in dress. This day he was honouring a rather ill-assorted couple: Winston Churchill and Field Marshal Rommel.

  The capstan was slacked off and Oregon slid heavily down wooden rollers into the sea. We set course out of the harbour on still waters under the unfamiliar benison of a rising sun. Wisps of mist still clung to the highlands but there was no fog to hide the world from our view. The ladies made themselves comfortable under rugs up in the bows and we gentlemen congregated aft around the big tiller—and passed the bottle.

  Amidship, a four-horsepower version of my bullgine muttered and stuttered. Théo’s knowing hand was never far from it, for it was as temperamental as all its kin. Théo had kept it running for more than thirty years, having inherited it from his father. It was a mass of brazing, welding, soldering, and grafted parts, but still it ran, after its fashion. It drove the four-ton bulk of Oregon along at a good pace, so that she went hissing and plunging over the ever-present swell, with the lift and liveliness of a Viking longship.

  Leaving the North Channel we turned under the monumental loom of Grand Colombier, a mere dot of an island that rises sheer from the sea to a height of more than six hundred feet. Flocks of puffins wheeled away from the cliff-faces as we approached, and a blood-red light was reflected in the swirling waters from the ruddy rocks. It was a forbidding yet fascinating sight, and Bernard and I determined to land and scale the heights.

  I am sure nobody but Théo could have put Oregon alongside those cliffs in the heaving, foaming surge that fringed them. With consummate skill he somehow managed it. As the dory swept in upon a surge we leapt from the bows to the slimy rock. Théo immediately reversed the engine and the dory drew safely clear again.

  It was a long, hard climb, made particularly memorable by the fact that the cliff was riddled with abandoned puffin burrows, interspersed with other holes in which there lived a myriad of large, brown rats. Originally the island had belonged solely to the puffins, but years ago a ship was wrecked upon it and the only survivors were some rats. They made themselves at home and eventually established a symbiotic relationship with the puffins. According to Théo the rats survived mainly by eating dead puffins, puffin guano, young puffins in season, and unhatched puffin eggs. The puffins, for their part, discovered they could reduce the necessity of making long and tedious trips to sea each morning to fish for food, by entering the rats’ burrows and feeding on baby rats.

  The puffins had finished breeding when we were there but the rats were at home in numbers. They did not seem to like us much, nor did they fear us, and several times I found myself staring eyeball to eyeball at a large rat that seemed prepared to defend its territory by force.

  Gaining the crest we discovered one of the oddest little worlds I have ever seen. The top of Colombier was a flat plateau, three or four acres in extent, surrounded by a rim of rock ten or fifteen feet in height. A lush growth of mosses, lichens, small bushes, and flowering plants carpeted the enclosed space, in the centre of which lay a small, ultramarinetinted pond. Berries grew all about in great profusion.

  When I mounted the natural rock palisade surrounding and protecting this minute paradise, I looked across the intervening straits to see the islands of St. Pierre and Langlade looming like truncated mountains, standing up to their shoulders in green waters. Those waters were so far below me that I mistook a passing dory for the fin of a great shark. The sky was an ephemeral blue but there was a misty flame in the east, producing an antediluvian effect, as of colossal images set in the midst of a dead sea.

  We descended again through the cliff dwellings of the indignant rats and leapt aboard the waiting dory. Oregon crossed the wide channel called La Baie without difficulty although through it there runs a murderous tide rip. We then came under the massive lee of the cliffs of Langlade. Passing the bottle and lifting our faces to the warmth of the rising sun, we puttered along under the corrugated face of the big island until we reached Cap Percé and Percé Rock. Percé Rock is a bastion flung out by the high cliffs, and pierced by a tunnel, through which the dory stuttered in an echoing passage that sent a flight of resting stormy petrels flitting away like monster butterflies.

  We moved on to Anse aux Soldats, where there was a tiny pebble beach sternly circumscribed by sea cliffs, on which lived two families who made their year’s livelihood during the few brief days of the annual capelin run.

  To this minute strip of beach the mysterious small fishes called capelin come in early July in erotic millions. They ride the waves high up on the beach; gleaming green males and less flamboyant females, side by side. As the wave withdraws they lie in a glittering and living carpet, shimmering in ecstasy as the females discharge their eggs and the males their milt. With the next wave they wash back into the dark sea.

  During the brief period of the run the little fishes are shovelled up in immense numbers and spread to dry in the sun on the beach stones and on wire racks. Tons of the dried fishes are shipped to France where they are sold as a delicacy. When toasted and eaten whole, accompanied by good red wine, they are a gourmet’s dream.

  The capelin fishers, a jovial lot, came down to welcome us and there was much badinage and laughter from strong men and stout women. There was also one small boy who had put to sea to greet us in a miniature dory no bigger than a bathtub. In this pumpkin seed he dared the surging surf to fish for lobsters amongst the very claws of the sea cliffs.

  We would have been content to linger here, but our safari leader hurried us back to Oregon and on we went, passing the ominous bulk of Cap aux Morts, and bringing into view a vast bight, at whose far horizon the sun reflected a threadike ribbon of saffron light from La Dune—a seven-mile-long isthmus of sand that tenuously connects Langlade with Great Miquelon.

  That curving yellow scimitar was only just visible on this, a clear white day without a trace of fog. It was easy to understand why it became a dreaded killer of men and ships on days when the fog drew down; or on black nights, when the great winds send the driving seas streaming in driven spume across the hidden shoals. No one knows with any certainty how many ships La Dune has killed, but there is a map extant that charts the burial places of more than a hundred vessels that were betrayed onto this strand of death. Their bones litter its empty beaches still.


  Our destination, the Grand Barachois, is a vast salt-water lagoon embraced within the hour-glass base of the isthmus where it connects with mountainous Miquelon. The narrow entrance to the Barachois is impassable except at the turn of the tide by reason of the fierce currents that sweep in and out of it—so we had to wait a while. It was a pleasant wait. We beached Oregon midway along the isthmus on the gleaming sands and went exploring.

  Flocks of plover scampered in front of us where immense jellyfish, purple and gold, fringed the waterline. Beyond the shore the dunes lifted and rolled, devoid of life except for stunted clumps of sand grass and a herd of little horses long gone wild, that threw up their heads at us, snorted fiercely, and went streaming off into the hazed distance.

  There was little life, but there was much evidence of death. Within an hour we counted the remains of a dozen vessels, most of them wooden ships, and some of very great age. Along the centre of the isthmus, a full two hundred yards back from the beach on either side, gigantic seas had built a solid windrow of ships’ timbers and other wreckage.

  Scattered amongst the bones of men’s handiwork were the bones of the greatest of all living creatures—skulls, ribs, baleen plates, vertebrae of blue and fin whales. The skull of one blue whale, half buried in the shifting sand, was so vast it towered over the tallest of us, and there was room on its broad crest for six people to sit in comfort and drink a respectful toast to a vanished giant.

  It was with difficulty that Théo marshalled us back to Oregon. It was past time for us to go, because the tide had already begun to fall as we drove through the shoals to the mouth of the Barachois and into its narrow entrance.