The Boat Who Wouldn't Float

by Farley Mowat

The place was truly magical. There was a faint almost intangible mist although the sun burned clear above us. Distant objects wavered and grew unreal in a combination of mirage and haze. The mercury surface of the broad lagoon shimmered in strange patterns, the cause of which was not at once apparent to us. It was only when Oregon had fought her way, fishtailing like a salmon, through the entry against the swirling outflow that we could see and identify hundreds of sleek, black heads bobbing up and down, each sending out its own spreading cosmos of silvered ripples.

  Miquelon’s great lagoon belongs to seals—to the big, gentle grey seals. Their rookeries once gave life to a thousand off-shore islands and reefs from Labrador south to Cape Hatteras, but the grey seals fell easy prey to man, not because they are stupid but because they are possessed of remarkable innocence combined with great curiosity. For more than fifty years their only remaining haven was the Grand Barachois. Now, under protection, small colonies have moved out from this place to reoccupy some of their old haunts. Meanwhile the Barachois harbours as many as three thousand of them, young and old.

  The Barachois is shoal, being nowhere more than three feet deep at low tide, and its bottom is the home of millions of clams that provide an inexhaustible food supply for the seals, and an infallible source of codfish bait for St. Pierre fishermen. Shell piles thirty feet tall, rising like white pyramids in the unclear distance, testified to the wealth of the lagoon.

  At low tide two-thirds of the Barachois dries out in a random pattern of sand and mudbanks, with narrow and extremely shoal channels full of racing waters running between them. As we entered, the tops of the banks were just beginning to emerge, and Théo had to use all his skill and knowledge to find and to stay in the channels.

  The rest of us were free to stare with incredulity at the myriad seals that rose around us and stared back. They were of all ages and all sizes, from pups of the year that thrust their wrinkled faces up to peer myopically at us from a few yards away, to ancient bulls weighing at least four hundred pounds that stood on their tail flippers, raising their bodies high out of the water to glare at us with a hint of challenge.

  As the dory galumphed its way along, the seals gathered from distant parts of the lagoon until we were surrounded by them. The current-roiled waters were filled with twitching whiskers and pop-eyes. We passed one partly exposed bank upon which more than a hundred had already hauled out to sunbathe. They turned as one to watch us pass, but the day was too drowsy for action and they soon went back to sleep.

  It took Théo an hour to wend his way to the northern shore, under the loom of the Miquelon mountains, where Martin had a little hunting cabin. Here our passengers debarked, but we three crewmen had no time to go ashore. The tide was falling fast and we knew that if we did not immediately escape we would be marooned in the middle of the watery waste for ten hours or more. We fled for the entrance of the lagoon.

  Because the St. Pierre and Miquelon dories must be beached each night their owners have invented a remarkable method of protecting the shafts and propellers. The shaft is equipped with a universal joint at the point where it descends through the bottom of the boat; and toward the stern there is a wooden-walled well. When a dory approaches shoal water, a handle protruding from this well is hauled upward and the propeller and shaft are lifted into the well, leaving the bottom clean of all protuberances.

  As Théo sniffed for a passage where none seemed to exist, he delegated me to stand by the handle and, at his warning shout, to haul the propeller up before it struck bottom. Several times we lost the channels and drifted in three or four inches of water over the bars, but always we found another channel with sufficient depth to permit us to lower the propeller and put the engine back to work.

  Then, halfway to the entry, I was just a trifle slow in answering Théo’s bellow. There was a shuddering impact, the engine stopped, and we found ourself disabled.

  We still had oars—or sweeps—massive fifteen-foot things, one of which was as much as a man could handle. However St. Pierre was twenty miles or more away. I assumed we would row back to Martin’s shack from which point a ten-mile overland walk would have taken one of us to Miquelon, to arrange for a tow or perhaps to procure replacement parts.

  I did not know Théophile Detcheverry. We rowed, if that is the word for manipulating the huge sweeps between their wooden thole-pins, the other way. We rowed and we rowed, frequently grounding, until we reached the entrance channel. Here we anchored in deep water in order to examine the damage.

  Since Oregon was far too heavy to permit the three of us to haul her out and, since Théo could not swim, and I was too much of a gentleman to delegate the job to Claire, I stripped off my clothing and went diving. The water was bitterly cold but crystal clear. My first dive showed me that the propeller shaft was hopelessly bent. This, together with other damage, was beyond our means of repair. The best I could do was to attempt to release the shaft, so that the propeller could be hauled up into its housing out of the way.

  This took some time and it attracted an audience. During my third dive I found myself staring, from a range of three feet, at a large, female, grey seal. At least I assumed it was a female, for it seemed to take an intense and uninhibited interest in me, thrusting its inquisitive head so close that, in my nudity, I would have blushed had I been able. Not being able (because I was blue with cold), I swam ashore where I stood, shivering and indignant, trying to explain my predicament to Claire and Théo. They were unsympathetic. Théo assured me that, in my semi-frozen state, I would be quite secure from sexual molestation. Claire merely smirked.

  I went back to work and this time there were three seals waiting to give me a hand, or whatever it was they had in mind. Turning my back on them I finally freed the propeller, surfaced, and climbed aboard.

  “You see,” said Théo, and I think he was a little disappointed, “nothing happened, eh?”

  I was at a loss to guess what Théo planned to do next but he soon told us. “Maintenant,” he said firmly, “we sail home!”

  I had not known we had a sail—and what a sail it proved to be. I think it must have belonged originally to a Greek trireme for it was of unbelievable antiquity. Of leg-of-mutton cut, it was so thin and sere that what wind there was (and there was hardly more than a zephyr) blew right through it.

  With the aid of the sweeps we bucked out through the wild rip, where the incoming swell met the outgoing tide, until we were again in the open ocean.

  Now the shore mist, which had seemed so lovely while we were in the Barachois, became an enemy, for it obscured the low line of the dunes and dissolved the images of Miquelon and Langlade. We were soon alone upon an empty ocean with no land in sight.

  Not that there was any reason to worry about getting lost. Oregon did have a compass. Théo proudly produced it from under the thwart and casually set it on top of the engine hatch—on top of three hundred pounds of iron. The compass must have been, I think, Chinese, circa twelfth century. Its cover glass was so sand-etched that it was impossible to read the card. However since the pivot and the card were rusted into one, this hardly signified. The fact was we had a compass. Théo never looked at it, which may have been just as well.

  Oregon sailed on. The sail kept falling down as its rotten halyards snapped. Then the lashings on the boom began to part. That sail was down for repairs more often than it was up. No matter. We idled in a generally southerly direction with a growing sense of unreality and, strangely, of contentment. We should have been distraught but we were not. We stretched full length on the hatch boards in the late afternoon sun, drank wine, ate pâté de foie gras, chatted, snoozed, and whiled the time away with a lack of concern that, in retrospect, is difficult to explain. We might well have whiled away an entire infinity of time—had not the wind begun to shift. Mysteriously, it began to swing until it had gone through a full one hundred and eighty degrees, and had settled into the southeast.

  Théo and I exchanged glances, although we said nothing aloud. There was no po
int in speaking our thoughts to Claire, but both of us knew that such a switch, at such a season of the year, under such conditions as had prevailed all day, meant storm.

  I was not much worried even then. There was something about Théo’s craggy certainty and something about the enduring qualities of Oregon that banished fear. Even if we were in for a blow I felt sure Oregon would weather it. Nevertheless, I was glad when the shore mist vanished and we found ourselves in sight of Langlade, and about five miles off its shores.

  We could get no closer to the land because Oregon, having no keel, would not sail to weather. The wind was now rising briskly on our starboard beam and the sail, shrunken by repeated repairs into a mere rag, was moving us along at two or three knots. We were going generally in the direction of St. Pierre and were not dissatisfied with our progress, until Théo gestured with his head and I looked astern. The grey-black loom of fog was rolling in across the hills of Langlade, rolling implacably toward us.

  At this juncture the rotten mast broke in half. We could have jury-rigged a sweep to take its place, but Théo vetoed this. The sweeps were needed. We would now, he told us, row to the eastward, until we gained shelter from the approaching storm under the lee of Langlade’s cliffs.

  So row we did, and made pathetically little progress for the current was setting off the land. And then we saw another motor dory hugging the shore under Anse aux Soldats, and going hell-bent for the beach at Grande Rivière. Claire promptly climbed up on our engine hatch and began waving Théo’s yellow oilskin jacket on the end of a boathook. She waved it bravely, but either the distant dory did not see us, or was in too much of a hurry to reach shelter herself to come to our assistance.

  The fog began pouring off the cliffs of Langlade and soon that island vanished. Théo and I rowed. God, how we rowed! The fog rolled closer, a scant two miles away, and we knew we were not going to make it to shore. Then Claire leapt to her feet again, balanced herself precariously, and began to wave her flag so furiously I thought she would go overboard. She had heard the distant mutter of another engine. We rested for a moment and listened too. Then, very faintly, we saw the shape of a vessel at the edge of the fog bank. She was making knots toward St. Pierre.

  Now we all waved, and Théo roared. I blew a huge conch horn that was normally used for a fog warning. The stranger vessel held to her course, entered the fog bank, disappeared, and then miraculously reappeared heading directly for us.

  She was the St. Eugène, a big power launch belonging to the commune of St. Pierre and used as a passenger boat between that place and Miquelon. When she came alongside and took our tow-rope, her skipper told us that neither he nor any member of his crew had seen or heard us. However an old woman (the widow of a dory fisherman lost on the Plate Banks many years earlier), who was sitting wrapped in a blanket in the stern, thought she glimpsed a boat far out to sea. She was ignored until she became so insistent that, despite his own anxiety to reach port, the skipper turned back out of the fog to set her mind at rest.

  He also told us that the first hurricane warning of the season had been issued, and all shipping had been advised to seek shelter immediately.

  To say that Claire and I were happy to be under tow would be an understatement; but Théo was not at all happy. While I took the tiller he stood amidship. arms crossed, head hunched forward between his massive shoulders, ignoring the good-natured banter from the crew of the St. Eugène, and seemingly unaware of the world around him. For him this was ignominy. For the first time in his seafaring life he had been forced to take a tow.

  Sea and wind were rising fast as we rounded Colombier. We never saw its towering cliffs because by then the fog had become an all-embracing shroud. As we entered the channel, St. Eugène slowed till she barely had steerage way, and we became aware that the black fog on every side was alive with ships. Their sirens and fog-horns sounded all around us, and they began looming up ahead, astern, abeam, until we seemed to be completely hemmed in. They were Spanish trawlers, sixty of them, feeling their way in by radar from the Grand Banks on the wings of the hurricane warning.

  Théo and two of his sons hauled Oregon high on her slip. Claire and I went off to drink and eat, and to be happy we were ashore upon a solid rock, as the hurricane began to whine and whistle through the chimney-tops of St. Pierre.

  Théophile did not join us. He spent that entire night out in the open, in the wind, in driving walls of rain, repairing his beloved dory. That was the kind of man he was: Churchill and Rommel both.

  16. The game is played

  ONE OF THE THINGS the Manuel brothers impressed upon me during our meeting in Miquelon was that St. Pierre harboured R.C.M.P. informers. These spies reported the departure of all suspicious vessels by shortwave radio to police cutters lurking outside French territorial waters. Because of this, most Newfoundland boats engaging in the game chose to make their runs to and from Miquelon but, for reasons which will appear, it was necessary for Itchy to make her departure from St. Pierre.

  It was not easy to keep our intentions secret. Not only did most St. Pierrais seem to be privy to our plans from the outset, but a number of them tried to become personally involved.

  One day at the dark of noon Jean, Martin, Frederico, François, and several other acquaintances made their surreptitious way across the Place, pausing to let a squad of gendarmes (who were practising a march-past) go by, before sneaking aboard our boat, unobserved except by about a third of the population of the town.

  Each of them was carrying something. Frederico had a case of Lemon Hart 151 overproof rum, thinly disguised in newspapers. Martin had two demijohns of red wine wrapped in an old petticoat. Over his shoulder Jean carried a cotton sack through which the shapes of a dozen brandy bottles were plainly visible.

  Mike, meeting them on deck, nearly had a fit. The mainsail had been hoisted in order to dry it out, and he had the presence of mind to let fly the halyards, bringing gaff and sail crashing down to conceal our visitors and their parcels under one lumpy, writhing mass of canvas.

  These parcels were not an integral part of our cargo. They were gifts, which the donors hoped we would be obliging enough to deliver to friends of theirs in various Newfoundland outports.

  Some necessary modifications to our vessel were carried out at an abandoned wharf on the far side of the harbour. With the help of Paulo and Théo, we built wooden troughs, twenty inches wide and twenty inches high, along each side of the cabin trunk. Each trough was fitted with cross-cleats, to hold our cargo in place, if we ran into rough weather. Strips of canvas lashed over the troughs were designed to protect the cargo from spray and rain.

  The reason for storing the cargo on deck was, of course, so that it could be readily jettisoned if we were challenged by a police cutter. Here Paulo’s genius came into play. He constructed a hinged system which would enable us, by means of a wooden lever, to tip each trough over its respective rail, so that we could rid ourselves of the whole of our cargo in a matter of seconds.

  We were to take our departure from St. Pierre at 0400 hours, two hours before dawn, on the given day. Our course was to be almost due north until we were abeam of Miquelon, after which we would be in international waters where we could idle along secure from molestation until evening. At dusk, we were to move to the edge of Canadian territorial waters, three miles off Pass Island, which guards the eastern entrance to Hermitage Bay. Three or four skiffs from Selbys Cove would be waiting for us at this rendezvous, having spent the balance of the day jigging cod in the vicinity. In case we encountered fog, we were to locate the rendezvous by listening for the sound of a ten-gauge shotgun being fired at irregular intervals.

  At dawn, on the day before our departure, Théo went off to sea for a day’s fishing. He caught no fish. Instead he visited a friend at Soldier Bay, from whom he acquired fourteen bags of “insurance” for our cargo. Théo had previously cached the cargo itself—fourteen crates of it—in a cave near Cap Percé. Just after dark he stopped at this cave and recovered
the cases, before proceeding with great caution back to St. Pierre. He had need of caution. Oregon was so grossly overloaded that if Théo had leaned over the side to spit he would probably have capsized her then and there.

  It was, naturally, a foggy night. The certainty of fog was one of the few things we were able to rely upon. It was also raining a little, and conditions were sufficiently miserable that even the intrepid St. Pierrais preferred to stay at home, or in the warmth of the bars. The last visitor left the dock where we were lying shortly before midnight.

  At 0300 hours Mike and Paulo and I were sitting in the cabin, nervously nipping, when there came a gentle bump alongside. We hustled on deck to meet a grinning and perspiring Théo. He had stopped his engine opposite the Hard (as any returning fisherman would normally have done), and then had rowed the heavily laden boat into the inner harbour to our berth.

  There was more rowing still to do; but first we transshipped the cargo, stowing it in the troughs and battening it down under the canvas covers. Then we silently cast off our moorings and gave Oregon a tow rope. Mike and Paulo joined Théo in the dory to help him man the sweeps, leaving me to steer Itchy.

  I will never know how Théo found his way across the harbour, out the entrance, and down the North Channel; but after an hour the tow-line slackened and Itchy drifted alongside Oregon. In a hoarse whisper Théo told us we were at the mouth of the North Channel and had nothing ahead of us but open sea. It was then 0400 hours and time for us to part, but somehow I did not feel like parting. I made the excuse that we had all better have a farewell drink. We would maybe have had a second, had we not been transfixed by a booming voice coming out of the fog from a few feet away.

  “How long you fellows going to fool around? You want to wait until the sun comes up?”

  The voice belonged to our old friend, the Chief Pilot of St. Pierre. He had with him three or four cronies. They had come out to make sure that Théo’s navigation was up to snuff and to be on hand to wish us luck.