by Farley Mowat
The harbour was as busy as a through way. Ferries nipped across our bows and stern. Big ships hooted and boomed at us on all sides. Claire, at the tiller, was chivvied by a tug and its tow until she nearly burst into tears. I could see the towers, minarets and domes of Expo, but I could not see how I was going to reach them. At this juncture yet another motor boat bore down on us like a hyena on a hapless groundhog.
Only—this was no ordinary power boat. As she came foaming toward us her blue hull began to look familiar. Painted huge on her bow was the inscription MP 43 and suddenly I recognized her as the Blue Heron, sister ship to the Blue Iris.
“Oh my God!” I cried despairingly to Claire. “The blue doom has us!”
“The long claw of the Sea Puss gets us all, in the end,” Claire replied unhelpfully. “Well, Skipper, let’s see you talk your way out of this one.”
The point was that we were flagrantly illegal. Not only did we fail to have our vessel’s name on her bows, according to marine regulations, but we did not have our official number painted on them either, as is sternly required by the Canada Shipping Act. To make matters worse, we were not flying the prescribed Canadian ensign at our mainmast. We were flying the flag of the Basque provinces with, underneath it, as a courtesy to Quebec, the fleur-de-lis. I could only hope that MP 43 did not know who we really were and that we might bluff our way to freedom.
Blue Heron throttled back abeam of us. A smartly uniformed Mountie with a loud-hailer stepped out on the bridge. “Ahoy, the Happy Adventure! Follow me, please!”
And with that, the police vessel swung around our stern and took station dead ahead.
For one moment I was tempted to dive below, open the seacocks, and scuttle my ill-fated schooner; but the spirit had gone out of me. I was beaten, and I knew it.
Blue Heron led us up the harbour at a funereal pace until we neared a mighty breakwater in front of the islands upon which Expo towered. Four fast speedboats now appeared and raced toward us. The drivers had walkie-talkies, and were dressed in some sort of esoteric uniform I did not recognize.
Blue Heron now veered off, put on speed, and raced away while the four whining speedboats formed up, two ahead and two astern, shepherding Happy Adventure inexorably toward a gap in the seawall.
As we entered the narrow gap I was appalled to see puffs of blue smoke rise suddenly from the pierheads at either side. We were deafened by a series of terrible concussions.
“Duck! For the love of God!” I screamed at Claire and Albert. “Now they’re shooting at us!”
However Claire, brave woman that she is, did not flinch. Standing proudly at the bow she looked straight ahead, daring the Fates to do their worst. Albert stood beside her, solid and indomitable. They were a sight to make a man’s heart catch with pride.
As the echoes of the fusillade died away, Claire spoke.
“Ooooooh, Farley,” she cried ecstatically. “They’re giving us a reception… isn’t that nice!”
The words were barely uttered when we were deafened again, this time by such a cacophony of blasts, toots, whistles, hoots and screeches that I let go of the tiller and clapped my hands to my ears.
We had passed through the gap and directly ahead of us was a huge artificial basin containing what must have been one of the most glittering arrays of expensive yachts ever gathered together in one place. All of them were sounding their noisemakers. People stood on their decks, waving glasses and bottles and flags. The din was indescribable. I glanced over my shoulder expecting to see a Royal Yacht entering in our wake—but there was nothing to be seen. Slowly it was borne in upon me that, inconceivable as it seemed, all this hullabaloo was being raised for us.
The speedboats guided us to the number one berth, directly in front of the main buildings of this exotic marina, and there we were moored by a quartet of eager young men between two floating palaces that, together, must have been worth the equivalent of a shah’s ransom. A bosun piped us ashore to where a posse of officials waited. One of them made a little speech welcoming us to Montreal and to Expo 67, then a familiar face moved forward from the crowd. It belonged to a senior executive of Expo, and a friend from long ago.
I grabbed him by the arm.
“What in hell is this all about? I’ve never been so bloody scared in all my life!”
Grinning, he explained. In our remote fastness of Burgeo it had not occurred to us that the outer world would ever hear, or could possibly have cared, about our voyage. We had been wrong. Expo knew; Expo cared. From the time we passed the pilot station at Escuminac Point in the mouth of the river, Expo had been getting reports of our erratic progress. We had been under surveillance all that time.
“Mind you,” my friend told us, “nobody ever expected you’d actually make it. The betting odds were twenty-five to one against. I lost a bit myself. I thought you’d sink for good long before you reached Quebec. The boat that wouldn’t float! What’d you do? Fill her up with ping-pong balls?”
“Quiet!” I muttered urgently. “Don’t say things like that. Not when she can hear you, anyway.”
But I am afraid she must have heard. That night we celebrated the end of fourteen hundred miles of struggle, of wrestling with adversity in all its manifold forms—in proper style.
It was late the next morning before we awoke. The sun was streaming into the cabin through the big forward port. I lay for a while and thought about the voyage. Then I turned my head toward Claire’s bunk.
“Well, dear, it’s all over now. Want some coffee? I’ll put the kettle on.”
I swung my legs out of my bunk…and stepped into twelve inches of cold water.
She had done it again.
21. Envoi
FOR THE NEXT five days Expo repented of its folly in welcoming the boat that wouldn’t float. Happy Adventure had opened up so badly that we could only keep her head above water by continuous pumping with several electric pumps, and the somewhat malodorous jets that these flung against the millionaire yachts to either side of us were not appreciated. Expo officials kept moving us farther and farther into the hinterland of the Marina. We never saw our executive friend again, and he probably wished he had never seen us. All our efforts to staunch the leaks failed, and finally, in absolute desperation, we sailed our sinking vessel out of there, heading west in hopes of finding either a mud bank or a shipyard before it was too late.
We needed neither. Two hours after she left Expo, Happy Adventure stopped leaking, as suddenly and as inexplicably as she had begun.
A week later she, and we, arrived at the little Lake Ontario town of Port Hope, where Claire and I had bought a house. There were no facilities there to haul the vessel, so she had to stay in the water that winter. She did not like it. In January, when she was surrounded by ice not quite strong enough to bear a man’s weight, she opened up again. We saved her-just-but I had two memorable and unintentional swims amongst the ice-floes, while trying to reach her from the shore.
This being almost the last straw, I had her hauled that spring at Deseronto, on the Bay of Quinte, and she spent most of 1968 ashore, while experts came and looked at her, and probed, and fiddled, and admitted themselves baffled. Once in a while we would launch her on trial. She would leak like a sieve, so we would haul her up again. By the end of the summer I was ready to abandon hope. I told Don Dawson, the shipyard owner, to tear the engine out of her, strip her of anything useful, and let her die.
Don is a strange sort of a man. He cannot easily endure defeat. Without consulting me, he made one last attempt to discover Happy Adventure’s fatal flaw. One October day he phoned me.
“Farley? Listen now. I launched your boat last week. She’s been sitting in the water ever since, and she hasn’t leaked a drop. I think I’ve found the trouble.”
Of course I did not believe him, but being an eternal optimist I was persuaded to rescind her death sentence.
A few days before she was due to be launched in the spring of 1969 I visited her. As always, she looked a bit
ungainly out of water, and she looked totally alien amongst the rows of slick motor-cruisers and fibreglass yachts. She was a sad, forlorn little ship; and I was suddenly stricken with guilt.
I thought to myself that she had been good to me in her way, and loyal too. And I thought what a dirty trick it was to bring her into exile in this land of fresh (polluted) water, toy boats and play boats, and there to let her rot her heart away.
On a sudden impulse I said, “Never mind, old girl. I’ll tell you what. Come summer, if you stay afloat and mind your P’S and Q’s, I’ll take you back where you belong. What do you say to that?”
She said nothing then, but as I write these words she has been afloat for a month, is tight as a drum, and is in better health than I have ever known her to enjoy. That is her answer. So one of these days Claire and I and Albert and Happy Adventure will turn eastward, down the long, long river, to the salt and living sea; to the silence and the fog; to the world in which my little ship was born. Happy Adventure will be going home.
BOOKS BY FARLEY MOWAT
People of the Deer (1952, revised edition 1975)
The Regiment (1955, new edition 1973, paperback edition 1989)
Lost in the Barrens (1956)
The Dog Who Wouldn’t Be (1957)
Grey Seas Under (1959)
The Desperate People (1959, revised edition 1975)
Owls in the Family (1961)
The Serpent’s Coil (1961)
The Black Joke (1962)
Never Cry Wolf (1963, new edition 1973)
Westviking (1965)
The Curse of the Viking Grave (1967)
Canada North (illustrated edition 1967)
Canada North Now (revised paperback edition 1967)
This Rock Within the Sea (with John de Visser) (1968, reissued 1976)
The Boat Who Wouldn’t Float (1969, illustrated edition 1974)
Sibir (1970, new edition 1973)
A Whale for the Killing (1972)
Wake of the Great Sealers (with David Blackwood) (1973)
The Snow Walker (1975)
And No Birds Sang (1979)
The World of Farley Mowat, a selection from his works
(edited by Peter Davison) (1980)
Sea of Slaughter (1984)
My Discovery of America (1985)
Virunga: The Passion of Dian Fossey (1987)
The New Founde Land (1989)
Rescue the Earth! (1990)
My Father’s Son (1992)
Born Naked (1993)
Aftermath (1995)
The Farfarers (1998)
THE TOP OF THE WORLD TRILOGY
Ordeal by Ice (1960, revised edition 1973)
The Polar Passion (1967, revised edition 1973)
Tundra (1973)
EDITED BY FARLEY MOWAT
Coppermine Journey (1958)
Text copyright © 1969 by Farley Mowat
Revised text copyright © 1974 by Farley Mowat Limited
Illustrations copyright © 1971 by B. Arthaud, Paris
All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system, without the prior written consent of the publisher—or, in case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency—is an infringement of the copyright law.
National Library of Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Mowat, Farley, 1921—
The boat who wouldn’t float
“An M&S paperback”.
eISBN: 978-1-55199-231-0
1. Happy Adventure (Schooner). 2. Sailing. 3. Newfoundland—Description and travel—1951–1980. I. Title.
FC2167.5.M69 1992 917.1804’4 C92-095241-0
F1122.M69 1992
We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program and that of the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Media Development Corporation’s Ontario Book Initiative. We further acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council for our publishing program.
McClelland & Stewart Ltd.
The Canadian Publishers
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Toronto, Ontario
M5G 2E9
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v1.0
FOOTNOTES
*1 A quintal is the ancient and traditional measure used by the cod fishers. It is equal to 112 pounds, dry weight, of salt fish.
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