The Boat Who Wouldn't Float

by Farley Mowat

  Mike hoisted the sails. A southerly zephyr filled the unseen canvas and the vessel began to move. Oregon let slip our line and vanished. We were alone—almost. Out of the Stygian darkness came a final admonition from the Pilot.

  “Don’t forget, steer half a point to nor’ard of your course when you get clear of the Plate Rock. Big tide running out of Hermitage Bay will set you off to eastward.” So much for secrecy in St. Pierre.

  We sailed for an hour in order to be reasonably sure we were out of earshot of the islands before starting the bullgine. Jean-Pierre had done a good job on her but he had failed to muffle her thunderous voice.

  The voyage north past Miquelon was uneventful; in truth, it was tedious. We steered a compass course. Periodically we stopped the bullgine and hauled the patent log to check the distance run. after which we listened hard for several minutes. We heard nothing except once the mew of an unseen gull. Dawn came and the fog lightened, becoming opalescent grey instead of charcoal black. Our world was again a fog-bounded hemisphere, a hundred feet in radius, in which we did not really seem to move at all. Yet by ten o’clock we had logged thirty nautical miles, and were only twenty from our rendezvous.

  We were by then in international waters where we had no reason to be apprehensive about a confrontation with the R.C.M.P. Being sticklers for the letter of the law themselves, they were not likely to attempt an act of piracy by boarding us “on the high seas.” However we were well aware they had radar—excellent military radar—with which they could detect and follow us miles away, while we could not hope to detect them until they were alongside us.

  We decided to stop the engine and lie-to until it was time to steam toward the rendezvous. But here a problem arose; one that I had not previously considered. Our navigation was entirely by dead reckoning; by compass course and distance logged. We had no other way of knowing where we were. Once stopped, we would begin to drift with the currents that run along Newfoundland’s south coast, and we would have no way of telling how far, or in what direction we were drifting. When we again started the motor and got under way we would be proceeding from an unknown point, with no true idea of the distance or direction to our destination.

  When I confided this difficulty to Mike he reacted in a manner that suggested he was not yet quite ready to take his papers as a master mariner.

  “If it’s only the drift you’re worried about, Farley, why don’t we just throw a chip of wood overboard and see which way it moves. Then we’ll know which way we’re drifting.”

  That was one of the longest days I ever spent at sea. We sat there, somewhere in the Atlantic, from ten o’clock until nearly five o’clock. For a wonder the sea remained calm. There was not even a swell to give the illusion of life in a dead world. We saw and heard no living thing. The silence became so oppressive that we brought the little transistor radio on deck, and listened with actual gratitude to whining imitation cowboy songs. Still, the time barely dripped away. Seconds became minutes and minutes hours. I felt a tearing impatience to get the engine started and to head for where I hoped Pass Island might still be found.

  At a quarter to five I could stand it no longer. “Start her up,” I told Mike. “We’ll go in slow. If we get there too early we can always stop and wait again.”

  It was a fantastic relief to be under way, even though I was now by no means sure of the correct course to steer. We stopped the engine every half hour and stood on listening watch, in the hopes of hearing the powerful fog-horn on Pass Island. It did not prove powerful enough. We never heard it.

  At 6:52 we stopped the engine for the fourth time. And at 6:52:01 we heard the hard rumble of big diesel engines close on our starboard bow!

  Although we had schooled ourselves to endure just such a shock as this, our psychological preparations proved to be inadequate. The sound only lasted a few seconds and then was abruptly silenced, but neither of us was able to move a muscle for what seemed like an eternity. How long we held our immobility I cannot say, but just as we were both beginning to think we had been the victims of a trick of acoustics a God-almighty siren went off right in my ear.

  It was the loudest and most hideous noise I have ever heard. It was a blaring agony of sound that all the cab drivers in New York, gathered together and sounding their horns in one manic rage, could never equal. It was appalling! It was also unmistakable—there was no room for doubt about its ownership.

  Mike and I responded with a pure Pavlovian reflex. I flew to the port trough and Mike to the starboard one. We stripped the lashings off like so much tissue paper, flipped the locking lugs, and hauled back on the levers. Bags and crates went overboard with a single colossal splash. We collided in the companionway as we both dived below to jettison through the portholes six bottles of more-or-less legitimate rum, plus two corkscrews and a bottle opener!

  Our duty done, we sat and waited. For a good ten minutes there was not a sound of any kind, then there was the rumble of diesels starting up. The sound crept closer and died to a slow mutter.

  “Hey,” asked a husky voice, “anybody on that boat?” Lying alongside, with her big bows towering high above us, was the R.C.M.P. Blue Iris. Grouped around her machine-gun were half a dozen policemen, made up to look like sailors. They were smiling.

  Their leader, captain, inspector, or whatever the R.C.M.P. call their skippers, was smiling widest of all.

  “Thought you was the Marie Céleste,” he said cheerfully. “Don’t you fellows know about fog-horns? You could have run us down if we hadn’t been watching you on radar for the last few hours. Where ya going anyway?”

  I have previously noted that Mike was possessed of an extraordinarily quick mind. He broke into fluent Spanish, waved his hands and arms wildly, rolled his eyes, and pointed to the outlandish name written large upon our bows, and to the garish Basque flag that hung despondently from the main truck.

  Taking the cue, I added my bit.

  “Es Baska sheep amigos, hasta la vista, adios, oui, oui, si, si, si!”

  For a moment the policemen looked thoroughly bewildered then, concluding with true Anglo-Saxon arrogance that we could not understand their language, they broke into talk amongst themselves.

  “Holy Jehoshaphat, will you listen to them Frogs!” one of them said.

  “Sure scared the ass clean off them, anyway,” another added.

  “Yeah. Made them dump their load so quick I bet they never had time to think. What a sick bunch they’re going to be when they find out they was six miles off Pass Island and three outside the legal limit!”

  Up to this point I had not harboured any personal ill will toward these men. But at this revelation I got mad. Abandoning my Spanish role, I unleashed all the vitriol at my command:

  “Why, you red-coated tomato-livered pisspots!” I began. “You….” But there may be youngsters listening.

  The policemen blanched visibly. Then the leader found his voice.

  “You cut that out!” he yelled. “You just watch your lip, buddy! We’re on to your salt-bag tricks. If you think your chums hanging about in them boats over there,” and here he pointed fiercely off to starboard, “are going to get a drop of that stuff you dumped, you better think again. We’re staying right here until it all comes up and we’ll sink every bloody case. All right, Jones! Back her off. Let’s get clear of this stinkbox!”

  The Blue Iris’s mighty engines thundered and she went astern, vanishing almost instantly into the foggy murk.

  As soon as she was out of sight Mike turned to me and I to him—and we grinned at each other like a pair of idiots.

  No, we had not gone out of our minds. The truth was we had a lot to grin about. In the first place we now knew approximately where we were, and where the Manuels were awaiting us. And in the second place, but, wait a minute….

  We started the bullgine and steered cautiously to the eastward for an hour. When we again stopped and listened we had not long to wait before hearing the dull boom of a heavy shot-gun. Fifteen minutes lat
er we saw the shadow of a boat. It was the Manuel brothers’ big trap skiff. It, and three more like it, were anchored on the Pass Island Banks. All four skiffs hauled their grapnels and clustered close about us.

  Almon was the first aboard, and as I shook his big, hard paw, his bright blue gaze took in our empty decks. He did not need to be told what had happened.

  “Hard luck, skipper!” he said, and chuckled.

  “They caught us fair and square, the bastards,” I replied bravely. “About six miles to the sou’west of here. We had to dump the works. And they intend to stay right there until the stuff comes up.”

  By this time half a dozen other burly fishermen had swarmed aboard. They heard my sorrowful tale and they could not contain their feelings. They began to giggle, to guffaw, to whack each other on the back with man-killing blows.

  “It’s not that bloody funny,” I said, when I could get a word in edgewise. “We overdid things a bit and dumped our own stock over too.”

  “Me son. me darlin’ man,” said Hondas when he could speak through the tears of laughter streaming down his cheeks, “dat’s what I calls makin’ a good try onto it! But don’t you worry none. You lads’ll not go dry this night!”

  Nor did we. Abandoning our sunken cargo to the tenacious lads on the Blue Iris we got under way. Piloted by Almon, we motored down into Hermitage Bay. Three hours later Itchy lay snugly at anchor in Selbys Cove and Mike and I were enjoying the hospitality of the little village. It proved to be as “wet” as Hondas had prophesied it would be. We went from house to house, and at each we had to tell our tale again, and at each we were solaced with alky and hot water.

  About two o’clock in the morning, by which time the party had engulfed the entire village, a young man came running into Hondas Manuel’s house, his face alight with excitement.

  “They’re a-coming in!” he cried. “I hears them, byes!”

  En masse, the villagers made for the community stage at the foot of the little cove. Mike and I were swept along with them. The muted mutter of engines was strong in the dark night. A light glimmered briefly in the fog and then, one by one, the three big trap skiffs we had met earlier on the Pass Island Banks appeared out of the black mist and ran alongside the stage.

  They were log-loaded. Between them they must have held at least forty cases plus a dozen kegs.

  The cargo that was lovingly unloaded from the skiffs was the real stuff; whereas the cargo we had carried from St. Pierre consisted of fourteen wooden cases—filled with rocks—ballasted with fourteen salt bags—filled with sand. Our role, as determined for us by the Hondas brothers, had been that of a stalking horse charged with deflecting and preoccupying the hounds of the law, and so leaving the skiffs that had waited for us off Pass Island free to make their unobstructed ways to Miquelon and back again, untroubled by interference from Blue Iris.

  As Hondas remarked to us, after thanking us on behalf of all the thirsty folk of Hermitage Bay:

  “They’s more an one way to skin a cod…or cod a Mountie; and we’se the byes what knows ’em all!”

  17. Westward No!

  WE DID NOT linger in Selbys Cove—departing well before noon—and giving Pass Island Banks a wide berth. We saw nothing of Blue Iris. Presumably she was still hovering over the sunken kegs, like a broody hen guarding a batch of infertile eggs.

  Itchy’s performance on this voyage had been exemplary. She had done everything we asked of her and had produced no unsettling surprises. Of course she still leaked, but we had grown accustomed to this, and the hourly pumping routine had become so automatic we could almost do it in our sleep. At long last she seemed ready to set out on a major voyage, but it was too late. Mike had outrun his time and, having established as many branch libraries on the Newfoundland coast as the circumstances allowed, had reluctantly to take his departure and return to St. John’s.

  I spent another week in St. Pierre, toying with the idea of shipping Paul or Théo as mate for a voyage to the Caribbean, but the hurricane season had begun, and when the next bad blow sank two large fishing vessels on the St. Pierre Bank, I was persuaded that the Grand Voyage should be deferred until another year.

  Having resolved to leave Itchy in St. Pierre for the winter, I enlisted Théo, Paulo, and Martin to look after her, supposing that three godfathers would be three times as good as one. I instructed them to have her hauled on the slip and safely stored ashore until it was time to launch her in the spring. Then I returned to the mainland and to a winter of routine, buoyed up by dreams of the coming summer.

  This time Jack McClelland could not share my dreams. Rumours about Itchy’s antics had reached the ears of his business associates and members of his family, none of whom considered him expendable.

  “If I could afford to quadruple my insurance coverage,” Jack explained sadly, “I imagine there’d be very little objection to my sailing with you. But there’s no way I can afford the premiums my agent wants. He says they’d be cheaper if I were going to make a lunar voyage in a Yankee rocket.”

  I was not too disappointed. Much as I admired Jack, I had developed an ever greater admiration for the young lady who had been, for a brief period, a member of my crew at St. Pierre. My discovery that Claire would be available, aye, and ready, to make a cruise with me during the coming summer did much to alleviate my distress at Jack’s defection.

  I had no word about Itchy during the winter but this did not disturb me because none of my St. Pierre friends was much at letter writing. However in May I received a vaguely worded cablegram from Martin. The gist of it was that there had been a small accident and Itchy had “pierced herself,” but was “not much hurted” and, I gathered, could easily be repaired. I guessed there had been a minor mishap during the launching. Feeling full confidence in my three friends I cabled a reply ordering repairs to be made forthwith and, oh depths of foolishness, informing Martin that the schooner was well-insured.

  In mid-June I headed east. A groaning old Dakota aircraft deposited me, with a belly-shaking jolt, on the cow pasture at St. Pierre.

  To my surprise (for I had cabled advance notice of my coming) none of my friends was on hand to greet me. When I set out to find them it was like trying to locate a grain of uranium without a Geiger counter. Everyone I talked to seemed singularly evasive; even somewhat anxious to get away from my company. Much puzzled, I sought out the incomparable Ella Girardin at L’Escal and from her received the first hints that all was not well with my little ship. She told me enough to send me streaking for the shipyard.

  My poor little vessel was still high on the slip. She looked like an antediluvian monster that had just been fished out of the La Brea tar pits. She was enslimed from the tops of her masts to the bottom of her keel with foul black muck that stank like a sewage farm. Her decks seemed inches thick in the stuff and her cabin was more like the inside of a septic tank than a home for people. Most shocking of all was the condition of her stern. A good six feet of it seemed to have been chewed off, leaving her looking as pathetic as a duck that has backed into a high-speed fan.

  I was standing, dazed, below her ruptured stern when one of the dockyard workers passed by. He did not stop, but after nodding his head at the-mutilated and encrusted vessel he took his nose meaningfully between thumb and forefinger. At that gesture I saw red. I went looking for Paul, or Théo, or Martin, with the purposefulness of a Malay villager running amok.

  I did not find Théo—he was believed to be in Miquelon. I did not find Martin—he was supposed to be camping somewhere on Langlade. I did not find Paulo—he was reputed to have shipped aboard a freighter for the West Indies. However, after three days of fury and frustration, I did find enough wisps and fragments of the story to be able to piece them together into a coherent whole.

  What had happened was, in a sense, my own fault. In asking three men to take charge of Itchy I had revealed a monumental ignorance of the Gallic temperament. Each felt that he alone should have been put in full command and the result was that none
of the three did anything. The schooner was left to spend the winter at anchor in the harbour, unloved and unregarded, while my three friends waged war amongst themselves. Nobody won that war—but Itchy and I assuredly lost it.

  Somehow she survived the fall and winter gales. Then, in early March, the arctic pack-ice beset the islands. A few days later a westerly gale drove the ice solidly into the harbour. The pressure broke the hold of Itchy’s anchors and she was driven, stern first, against the projecting timbers of an abandoned wharf. One of the timbers pierced her counter and she went down in three fathoms of filth; for the inner harbour at St. Pierre is nothing more nor less than a sewage basin for the whole community.

  Martin, Théo, and Paulo were distraught but spent their energies in useless recriminations against each other. Itchy stayed on the bottom, sinking deeper and deeper into the slime, until the receipt in St. Pierre of my cable containing the magic word “insured.”

  St. John’s, Newfoundland, does not hold a monopoly on mercantile piracy. St. Pierre, much as I love the place, has its own breed of brigands, and when word got around that Itchy was insured, they went into action. A group of them refloated the vessel (using oil drums that were lashed alongside her and then pumped full of air) and took possession of her as a right of salvage. They had her hauled on the slip, nominally for repairs, but when they discovered she only needed cleaning out and the replacement of one plank in her counter, they arranged to increase the repair costs by the simple expedient of tearing off six feet of her stern with crowbars.

  The “repairs” were not undertaken immediately, as I had ordered, because the shipyard had enough work to do and it was felt it would be more thrifty to save Itchy for a slack period. She was still being saved when I arrived.

  I am not particularly proud of my behaviour during the several weeks that followed, but then I am not particularly proud of the way the St. Pierrais behaved either. We fought. We fought bitterly, continuously, cunningly, and sometimes viciously. It took six weeks for me to get the. boat ready for sea again. It was a black period of obstruction, misery, and near madness as I wrestled with brigandage and venality?” harbour muck and shipyard sloth.