The Farfarers

by Farley Mowat

  The wind fell out as Farfarer entered Okak harbour, leaving her becalmed. She was soon surrounded by small boats filled with excited paddlers who eagerly took her lines and pulled her to the shore, where she was gently beached beside a well-built, but smaller, local vessel.

  The landing was directly in front of a pair of long houses from whose low, turfcovered roofs blue tendrils of smoke curled. Farfarer’s people wrinkled their noses to catch its fragrance, for spruce smoke was something which, in their treeless land, they seldom had the pleasure of savouring.

  The voyagers were made much of by the residents, since ships that plied between Crona and the western grounds seldom visited Okak. Farfarer’s skipper was asked why he and his people had come so far south.

  “ We’ve heard the talk about an inland sea full of tuskers. Maybe ’tis only a Tunit tale, but we thought we’d come along and look, so it please you.”

  Not all his listeners were pleased since, unexplored as it might be, they considered the southern territory their own preserve. However, the valuta men who owned the local ship lying alongside Farfarer reacted with enthusiasm. They explained that they themselves were anxious to make a voyage of southern exploration but were hesitant about venturing into a part of the world dominated by forest people.

  “Our ship is small,” their skipper explained. “Too small to carry men enough to deal with the forest folk if they come against us.” He paused and glanced at Farfarer. “ But your ship now ... she could easily carry another dozen or so able-bodied men alongside your own. With two well-manned vessels we’d be all right. What say we go south together?”

  It was a sensible offer.

  The two young Tunit who had come from the south the previous summer willingly agreed to serve as guides. Farfarer’s skipper questioned them closely about their country. They told him they lived on the western shores of an island so vast few people had ever travelled right around it. It was separated from the mainland to the north, they said, by a strait of swift water running out of the inland sea. They added that they shared this great island with forest-dwelling people, but were quick to assure the valuta men that these were peaceable folk with whom one could get along.

  When asked why Tunit chose to live so far south of their compatriots, and in a country so alien to their ancestral tundra world, they replied it was because the inland sea was filled with uncountable numbers of seals and other sea mammals, including walrus, and, as the questioners surely ought to know, Tunit were preeminently People of the Seal.

  So it was that preparations went forward for a joint endeavour; and in a few days both vessels were fully stored and manned for a southern voyage.

  PART THREE

  ALBAIN-THE- WEST

  CHAPTER TWENTY - THREE

  THE GREAT ISLAND

  NEWFOUNDLAND IS LIKE A MIGHTY GRANITE STOPPER stuffed into the mouth of the Gulf of St. Lawrence. Four times the size of Iceland, twice that of Scotland and England combined, equal to that of California, it turns its back on North America. Jutting six hundred miles farther into the Atlantic than Halifax, and nearly twelve hundred miles farther than New York, it is the most easterly part of the continent.

  During the last glaciation this great island was overmastered by a tyranny of ice that stripped away its vegetation and soil, scarifying its face with titanic furrows. When the ice eventually melted down to a glitter of lakes and rivers, life crept back over the bare bones slowly and with difficulty. Although the glacier itself was gone, something of its frigid presence remained. Out of the arctic sea flowed (and still flows) an oceanic river chilling the shores of Labrador and eastern Newfoundland and, in winter and early spring, investing them with enormous ice fields sprinkled with bergs.

  For the most part the island is inhospitable to human beings beholden to the plough. Much of the interior became and remains a thickly thatched tangle of spruce and tamarack. What the forest did not claim was largely given over to rock or muskeg barrens. Pockets of soil capable of nurturing deep-rooted plants existed, but only in a few places.

  However, what the land would not readily give, the surrounding seas could and did. After the passing of the glacier, life exploded in the offshore waters. Fed by nutrient-rich cold currents, plankton bloomed, producing a living soup in which untold multitudes of fishes spawned. Horizon-filling flocks of sea fowl fed on small fry, and whitened islands and sea cliffs with their guano. Every autumn millions of pelagic seals came out of the Arctic to winter and, in the spring, to bear their pups on pack ice off the northern bays and in the Gulf. Pods of whales both great and small in numbers unsurpassed by those of any other place on earth lazed along the high sweep of rocky coasts. Hordes of walrus invaded bays and fiords and sported in sandy lagoons. Grey seals and harbour seals, together with vast shoals of porpoises, thronged the island’s inshore waters. Lobsters, mussels, clams, winkles, and crabs encrusted its reefs, tidal flats, and shore rocks. Salt-water otter, the now-extinct sea mink, and both black and white bears laid claim to the landwash. Salmon, sea trout, eels, shad, and other fishes came crowding into streams and rivers in such multitudes their turmoil made the waters seem to boil.

  Map of Newfoundland.

  The infinite variety of life within and upon the seas surrounding the Great Island flourished with such profligacy as to make the Gulf of St. Lawrence of those times the marine equivalent of Africa’s Serengeti Plain.

  It was life in the sea that enabled human beings to thrive on the island. The sea continued to sustain them until almost the end of the twentieth century, by which time modern man’s genius for destruction had so wasted the surrounding oceanic life that it finally failed its human dependants.

  People may have reached the island as early as eight thousand years ago. These first-footers, called palaeo-Indians, were followed by, or evolved into, what is known as the Maritime Archaic culture. Although the earliest Maritime Archaic sites so far discovered in Newfoundland only date back about 5,000 years, sites occupied some 7,500 years ago have been found on the Labrador shore of Belle Isle Strait at a point distant only about a dozen miles from Newfoundland.

  The first comers prospered in their insularity. Their descendants eventually became the people European arrivistes would name Red Indians—because of their lavish use of red ochre. We remember them as Beothuks.

  About three thousand years ago ancestors of the Beothuk began sharing their island universe with forebears of the Tunit. No evidence has so far come to light of conflict between these two very distinct peoples and cultures. But then, live and let live seems to have been the norm in tribal and communal relationships the world over, so long as human populations were small, and natural resources remained in sufficient supply so that people were not forced, or lured, into fatal competition with one another.

  In the tenth century A.D. Newfoundland was sufficiently well peopled, and the bounty of land and sea was more than enough to provide for all.

  Both Okak Albans and Tunit were apprehensive about encountering Innu on the voyage ahead. The outflung Kiglapait massif which forms the southern lip of Okak Bight constituted a cordon sanitaire between the peoples of northern and southern Labrador. It seemed no light matter to venture beyond it.

  The two southern Tunit were much less perturbed, partly because they had always lived amicably with forest dwellers of their own country and partly because Innu had given them no trouble on their northern voyage.

  July was ending as the two vessels sailed out of Okak, passed under Cape Kiglapait, and entered the unknown. Fog enveloped them as they nosed cautiously into the island-studded labyrinth of Nain Bight.

  Though the fog concealed them from hostile eyes, it made for painfully slow progress. Nevertheless, the Tunit pilots took the ship unerringly from island to unseen island, apparently by a sense of smell—or so it seemed to the Albans. No Innu were encountered or even glimpsed. Indeed, the outer islands seemed home only to birds and beasts of the sea.

  Six days out of Okak the southeastward-trending and
increasingly heavily forested coast began running almost due south, and two days later swung southwest. The two vessels had reached the mouth of what is now Belle Isle Strait.

  Their pilots guided them along the north shore of this strait of swift water towards its narrowing throat until less than a dozen miles separated Labrador from Newfoundland. They kept a good offing, for spirals of smoke rising from the sombre mainland forests spoke ominously of the presence of Innu. Reaching Point Amour they turned away from Labrador to make a crossing of the strait.

  The inflowing tidal current ran so powerfully it threatened to sweep them west into the Inland Sea. But it was not the untrammelled power of the tidal stream that most impressed the Albans during the crossing—they were awed by the truly prodigious numbers and variety of animal life filling the strait. They encountered pod after pod of great whales—greys, rights, blues, humpbacks, and finbacks; feeding, frolicking, or simply making a passage. The day would come when this concentration would bring down upon the whales such an enormity of slaughter as to virtually eliminate their kind from the inland sea; but that bloody time was still several centuries in the future.

  Gaining the Newfoundland shore not far from Flower’s Cove, the voyagers coasted south-southwest, continuing to give the land a good berth, not now for fear of Innu but because the low shore was so hedged with shoals and reefs as to be almost unapproachable.

  A day or so later they crossed the island-filled Bay of Birds, now St. John Bay. They were not alone upon it. In the opalescent pre-dawn, a cluster of men whose hair and clothing were streaked with red ochre had gathered beside two twenty-foot birch-bark canoes drawn up on a stony mainland beach. At a signal from their leader, a tall tawny man, they had waded into the surf, carefully holding their fragile craft clear of kelp-slimed rocks. As the sun exploded over the rim of hills behind them, they had paddled towards offshore islands already haloed by a glitter of wings.

  Phalanx after phalanx of arrow-swift murres and puffins filled the air with the sibilant rush and rustle of flight. Massed echelons of snowy gannets rowed steadily overhead on black-tipped wings. Terns, kittiwakes, and larger gulls flew arabesques. The sky everywhere seemed alive.

  The sea also was visibly alive. Flying through water instead of air, virtually endless flotillas of great auks streamed past. As one such company came porpoising between the canoes, the men ceased paddling and their leader touched an amulet made from a great auk’s mandible hung from his neck.

  The morning was half spent before the paddlers reached the island of their choice. At their close approach, a myriad of birds began rising from it. Soon they were taking wing in such numbers the sky was obscured as if by a blizzard. The sun’s light seemed dimmed. The surface of the sea hissed with the rain of droppings falling into it. Winged masses descended upon the human intruders like tornado funnels. The rush of air through stiffened pinions and the harsh clangour of bird voices made it hard for the men to hear one another’s shouts as they leapt overside to carry their canoes through the surf of a low-lying island.

  They moved with shoulders hunched as if against the weight of life above them. Not twenty feet from the landwash they were met by serried ranks of great auks so closely packed as to stand almost shoulder to shoulder. This was an army of occupation a hundred thousand strong.

  The nearest auks faced the invaders with bodies erect and fearsome beaks thrust forward. The men moved warily, each holding a long, pointed paddle before him like a lance. The leader fingered his amulet once again and, in a voice inaudible above the cacophony, apologized for what was to follow.

  The paddles became flails. The big birds began falling back, stumbling into those behind. Confused by the crush, those in the rear struck angrily at their neighbours until chaos rippled through the massed battalions.

  The intruders continued flailing, crushing skulls and breaking necks. It was all done in a furious hurry, as if the raiders feared a counter-attack. Not half an hour had elapsed before they began retreating to the canoes, dragging tows of slain birds behind them.

  Loading and launching was accomplished with the urgency of thieves. Half choked by the almost palpable stench of guano, the hunters were hurriedly paddling away from the island when they saw Farfarer and her consort on the seaward horizon. The Beothuks were appalled by the size of these intruders. Turning their backs, they exerted all their strength to drive the heavily laden canoes towards the safe refuge of the mainland shore.

  The crews of the two vessels never noticed the distant Beothuk canoes. Their attention was concentrated on the out-thrust peninsula which forms the lower lip of St. John Bay; for this was the home of the two Tunit pilots.

  One summer day in 1963, my wife and I arrived at that same peninsula, now called Port au Choix. We came by land in an old Vauxhall to visit Elmer Harp, an archaeologist from Dartmouth College who had been investigating the prehistory of Port au Choix since 1949.

  Having established ourselves in a pink-painted room in Billard’s Tourist Home—the only accommodation available in the little fishing community—we followed a guide over the bald pate of Point Riche to the site where Elmer and his students were excavating the remains of a large Tunit settlement.

  It was sited on a crescent of sloping beach facing the Gulf, at a spot locally known as Phillips Garden, not because someone had once planted potatoes there, but because from early spring until late autumn the place is ablaze with wild flowers. Protected on three sides by a fringe of wind-swept spruce, it is a natural garden whose splendours of wild iris, buttercups, daisies, asters, and a score of others such are due to a remarkable layer of rich, black soil.

  This fertile ground is mostly composed of organic detritus laid down by generations of Tunit who lived here for a thousand years or more.

  Within the rather small compass of the garden (it is barely two hundred yards long by one hundred broad), Elmer’s crew had located the remains of some forty Tunit houses. Most were semi-subterranean winter homes, now visible only as shallow pits about fifteen feet square. Once they had been turf walled, and roofed with poles covered by seal or caribou skins. This had been no transient habitation of nomads but the more-or-less permanent settlement of a goodly number of people.

  How many? Rather reluctantly Elmer hazarded a guess: “Maybe fifty, maybe more; though at any given time some would have been away catching salmon, or hunting caribou in the mountains. Not a big crowd by our standards, but a lot to find in any one place in those times.”

  Unlike the post-Columbian Europeans who eventually settled at Port au Choix and made their livelihoods mainly from fish, the Tunit for the most part had been dependent on pelagic seals—harps and hoods—multitudes of which still gather in the Gulf every spring to bear their young on the shifting pack. Prevailing winds and currents tend to drive the floes south and east, bringing floating seal nurseries close to out-thrusting points of land, of which Point Riche is a salient example. Two thousand years ago, Tunit hunters ventured out from Point Riche upon the moving floes, returning to the land towing sleds laden with the fat and meat of young and adult seals.

  The success and duration of these ancient hunts can be gauged by Elmer’s calculation that he could fill a freight car with the seal bones his crew had already unearthed. However, it must be remembered that these bones represented the accumulation from animals killed over the span of a thousand years. The number taken in any given year would have been minuscule compared with the more than a million harp and hood seals butchered in the Gulf in 1997 and 1998, many of them shot at sea and never recovered, in an ongoing holocaust orchestrated and subsidized by the governments of Canada and Newfoundland.

  Seal products, whether fresh meat, rendered oil, or sun- or firedried flesh, provided the Tunits’ staple food. They also caught salmon and other fishes; took seabirds and their eggs (more than two hundred great auk mandibles were found in one Port au Choix grave); and lobsters that, as late as 1906, were still so abundant in St. John Bay they kept ten canning factories busy. Shel
lfish and berries were collected in quantity, and Tunit hunted caribou, which formerly came down in great numbers from the Long Range Mountains to winter along the coastal plains.

  Tunit were not the only people to take advantage of the fecundity of the region. Beothuks shared it on what appear to have been amicable terms. It is more than likely that Beothuks and Tunit borrowed from each other’s technologies and cultures. They may also have exchanged genes.

  Having spent time as volunteer diggers in Phillips Garden immersing ourselves in a now vanished way of life, Claire and I concluded it might have been no bad thing to have lived in this place a thousand years earlier, either as Tunit or as Beothuks.

  The approach of the two ships to Point Riche was observed while they were still afar. By the time they poked their heads into the little cove just to the east of Phillips Garden, a crowd of men, women, and children had gathered near the shore. Any apprehension they may have felt at the appearance of these huge craft evaporated as the Tunit pilots shouted greetings and assurances.

  While the Tunit from Ungava and Okak mingled with local people, the Albans sought information about what lay ahead and, in particular, about tuskers. They learned that walrus were abundant in local waters and on some of the islands, but it was in Tusker Bay, seven days’ travel to the south, that they truly teemed. During certain seasons, so the visitors were told, walrus thronged there in such abundance that neither Tunit nor Beothuk cared to risk boats or canoes amongst them.

  Talk like this whetted the valuta seekers’ desire to press on, but they had to contain their impatience. Nearly a week passed before their pilots were willing to proceed, and then they insisted on bringing along a throng of Port au Choix compatriots.