by Farley Mowat
It was the way of such as he. As children, they had memorized the compass bearings between their small outports and those they needed to visit and had continued to do so as they grew older, until the memories of those who became skippers embraced the courses to almost every port in Newfoundland as well as many in the Caribbean and even in Europe.
Such men could afford to treat the charts in cavalier fashion, but I was not similarly blessed. Humbly I accepted a gift of the Spencer’s old chart. With it in hand, Claire and I set off next morning across the wide mouth of Fortune Bay. A spanking sou’wester filled our red sails until they were drawing taut as the proverbial drum. We rol-licked along at six or seven knots, lee rail almost under and salt spray whipping into our faces.
The P and W Davis and Happy Adventure at Pushthrough.
The breeze fell light as we approached Brunette Island midway across. That was as well since Brunette was guarded by a veritable minefield of reefs and sunkers through which I navigated very nervously indeed while Claire exclaimed over Brunette’s massive sea cliffs worn into weird shapes, crowned with patches of green turf, and cleft by black hollows and sea caves where seabirds wheeled. This, her first real glimpse of the Sou’west Coast of Newfoundland, gripped her as it had me.
“I think,” said she presciently, “I’m going to like it here.”
Six-mile-long Brunette had been home to more than a dozen fishing families until recently. No one lived upon it now. Abandoned houses at Mercer Cove were greying bones, and even the great light at Mercer Head, once so vital to coastal navigation that it had been tended by two families, was now an automatic robot, heedless of human hands.
Claire was incredulous when I told her the people had been removed from Brunette by Joey Smallwood as part of his centralization policy and had been replaced with buffalo!
“Harold Horwood told me about it,” I explained. “One of Joey’s wild schemes was to turn the spruce barrens in the middle of the Burin Peninsula into a buffalo ranch to provide Newfoundland with a homegrown supply of beef. So the government brought an entire herd of buffalo from out west somewhere and just turned them loose on the barrens. Trouble was, there was no grass, and buffalo don’t eat spruce trees. They were soon starving so the local lads went out and shot most of them, ‘to put the poor things out of their misery,’ is what they said. Then Joey had the last dozen or so rounded up and ferried out to Brunet, where the trees had all been burned or cut off centuries ago and there was some grass.”
If Claire had reservations about this improbable tale, so, I must admit, had I. But a few weeks later, while passing Brunette’s western cape in a dory, I saw a huge black creature standing on a distant headland. And in the spring of 1963 a fisherman found a shattered and rotting buffalo carcass at the foot of Brunette’s sea cliffs where it had fallen or, perhaps, jumped. It must have been the last of the herd.
At day’s end we were approaching the entrance to Hermitage Bay and Bay Despair. By then the wind had gone sou’easterly and was making me anxious to find a port before darkness and the inevitable fog could overtake us. According to the chart, the nearest harbour was a tiny indentation with the improbable name of Pushthrough. I set a course for it. Sure enough, the fog caught up with us and we had to feel our way blindly the last few miles, steering toward an eerily wailing diaphone on Pushthrough’s invisible lighthouse.
Our first intimation that we had arrived was a near collision with a spidery wharf from which three startled boys peered down at us. Perhaps they thought Happy Adventure was the reincarnation of one of the pirate ships that haunt the Newfoundland coasts and the imagination of every boy who lives there. Instead of taking our lines, these three fled into the night, presumably to spread word of what the sea had washed up on Pushthrough’s doorstep.
This was Claire’s first outport and nothing would do but that we immediately go ashore for a walk-around. Darkness, and a fog which by then was “thick as molasses,” combined to prevent us from seeing very much. We did, however, get a good whiff of Pushthrough’s pungent aroma of salt fish, wood smoke, barrels of fermenting cod liver oil, and rotting sea-wrack, and we heard a few sounds of life, notably the scuttle of spectral sheep from close underfoot, and the foghorn’s ceaseless dirge.
Feeling our way past wooden houses that glistened with moisture, we tried to peer through heavily curtained windows but failed to discern more than indistinct shadows. Nor did we encounter a single human being.
Claire had had enough.
“This place is spooky. Let’s go back to the boat.”
We stumbled back to the wharf and to our own little cabin warmed by our Peanut stove and brightly lighted by two oil lamps in gleaming brass gimbals. While Claire cooked supper, I told her what little I knew about Bay Despair.
“It’s a bit like the fiord country of Norway, only without high mountains–an enormous water hand with spread fingers thrusting deep into the rocky vitals of Newfoundland. It isn’t really a bay at all–more a maze of fiords, inlets, runs, and passages. A fantastic water world all of its own.
“Nobody knows when Europeans first saw it or who they were, but Basques, Portuguese, French, Spaniards, Englishmen, and Yankees have all poked around in it. At least four centuries ago they were fishing and whaling near its mouth, and a few sailed deeper in, looking for hideouts probably. They included brigands, pirates, deserters from naval ships, and runaways–indentured men and women who were virtually slaves–from fishing stations along the outer coast.
“Of course they weren’t the first people here. The first comers seem to have been a people ancestral to the Beothuks–the Red Indians of the history books–who were exterminated by white Newfoundlanders before the end of the nineteenth century. I’m told the bay still has a few Indians but they are Mi’kmaqs who came here from Nova Scotia in the eighteenth century.
“Until about 1850 the Mi’kmaqs were the only people living far back in the bay, though by then there were two dozen little fishing settlements near the outer coast, each with from one to a dozen families, cut off from everywhere except by water, making their livelihood mostly from catching and salting cod.
“Most of those little places are gone now and the rest are, as Newfies say, ‘fast going out.’ Pushthrough’s one of the survivors.
“Lumber companies began using the bay after the last war to reach the inland forest country. Some settlements–mostly of loggers’ families–grew up at what’s now called Head of the Bay. But even they are shrinking away now because Newfoundland’s forests have been pretty well stripped.
“The settlements have been like limpets, clinging here and there without ever really getting their toes or their claws in. About all that’s left of most of them now are names on charts, and a few bones and relics buried under the moss where people used to live.”
Claire shivered slightly.
“You make it sound very bleak. Perhaps Bay Despair is a good name for it!”
“No. It’s full of life, really. Not a lot of people, but lots of life. And Despair isn’t its real name anyway. On eighteenth-century charts it’s called Baie d’Espoir–Bay of Hope, itself a corruption of the first name on record: Baie d’Esprits–Bay of Spirits–which seems to have been what the aboriginals called it. Baie d’Esprits–Baie d’Espoir–Bay Despair–it’s a name-changer. We’ll just have to find out for ourselves what it’s really like.”
At the mouth of the bay on that first night I wrote in my journal:
After dinner of ham and eggs we read for a bit then went on deck to pee over the side and make the water sparkle with a billion tiny stars of phosphorescence. The fog pushed down making us shiver so we hustled below, where we made love before gently falling asleep to the sound of the foghorn endlessly repeating its message to vessels wandering on the sea:
C-o-m-m-m-m-to-me…C-o-m-m-m-m-to-me…C-o-m-m-mm-to-me…
When we woke next morning the horn was still going strong, warning us not to even think about trying to sail. I stuck my head out the com
panionway and the fog seemed almost impenetrable. Then out of the murk loomed the shadowy shape of a big schooner bearing down on us and only a few yards distant. My heart was in my throat as she slipped by about an arm’s length away, to thump against the wharf where we were moored.
The P and W Davis was a rough-built, big-buttocked coaster from Head of the Bay bound for Fortune with an immense deck-load of fresh-cut timber, and her holds stuffed with firewood. Her crew consisted of two fourteen-year-olds who, I decided, must have been among the luckiest boys alive, spending their summer moseying in and out of little harbours from Port aux Basques to St. Pierre under the amiable eye of their uncle, Skipper Hubert Bullen.
The boys went off visiting friends ashore while Hubert, a long-faced fellow with a lugubrious air but an amiable smile, came aboard of us for a gam.
Born at Man O’ War Cove near Head of the Bay, Hubert had grown up at his father’s small shipyard there. However, he preferred sailing to building vessels and by the age of twenty had earned his Master’s coasting ticket. Now, at forty-five, he built dories and skiffs during the winters, and in the summer skippered the Davis, carrying lumber and firewood to little places along the Sou’west Coast that had long been denuded of their own stands of timber.
“’Tis nought but the barest kind of a living. Hard toimes now, me son. They’s but four lumber hookers left in the Bay. Was a dozen or more when I were young. All of they be old and going out now, though I hopes the old Davis’ll last me toime.”
Hubert talked sadly too of the decay of the salt-cod economy that had sustained the thousand or so small communities on the coasts of Newfoundland through at least three centuries, and of its replacement by the frozen fish industry operating factories in a few widely separated communities and fed by company-owned deep-sea draggers and seiners instead of by inshore fishermen in their own small boats.
Claire had been sketching him while he talked. Now Hubert peered with astonishment at the result.
“Well, me dear! You’ve took me off right proper! And skipper here says as you can handle a vessel, too.” He turned to me. “You’m some lucky man, is what I says.”
The Davis’s arrival seemed to awaken Pushthrough. Men and boys drifted down to the dock to look us over. They were a polite if somewhat distant lot who did not speak until spoken to. I couldn’t tell what they thought of Happy Adventure but there was no doubt as to their admiration for my crew. When Claire went on deck to hang a dish towel in the rigging, I overheard one young fellow tell another: “Yiss, me son! I’d be some pleasured going to sea along of she!”
By noon the murk had thinned a little so Claire and I went for an exploratory walk. We followed a stony path almost to the lighthouse, which was so veiled in fog we could hardly make out its shape. We did not approach too closely because of the diaphone’s stomach-shaking whoops.
Cautiously making our way back along the cliff edge, we came upon the whitening skeleton of what had once been a sailing vessel on the rocks below, then a scattering of grey, unpainted houses crouching askew among enormous, dripping rocks. Here we encountered a covey of cats, who eyed us suspiciously, and a few people, most of whom also seemed to eye us askance. However, one elderly man greeted us and then asked us to his home for a mug of tea.
Sandy Kemp was another retired skipper of the once-innumerable sailing ships, which now were almost gone. He had spent most of his adult life at sea, largely as master of trading vessels going to and from “the Boston States.” We were surprised to learn that he and his wife, Millie, who had often sailed with him, had made more than a dozen visits to New York and were far more familiar with its urban sophistication than either of us were.
Why, I asked, had he continued to live in Pushthrough?
Skipper Sandy considered the question while his “crackie dog,” a pint-sized mongrel named Pinch, considered whether or not to chew me up.
“To tell the truth of it, skipper, I hardly knows. P’raps ’twas because this is where us belongs….”
Sandy and Millie refused to let us leave until we had shared a boiled dinner with them. Then, accompanied by the indefatigable Pinch, Sandy took us on a walkabout of Pushthrough, ending at a large abandoned house on the outskirts of the settlement.
It had been built by a Massachusetts man named Chambers, who, down on his luck (or in flight), had found his way to Pushthrough aboard one of the local schooners and settled here. An avaricious entrepreneur (“he had silver dollars for eyes”) he had gained control of the only local commercial enterprise, Pushthrough Trade, with its retail store, fish flakes, and plant for making salt cod; its three big schooners; and the largest wharf in the harbour. To crown his enterprise, Chambers had built a twelve-room mansion–in an outport where the next largest of the three dozen houses could boast only five small rooms.
“A right quare fellow,” Sandy remembered. “Married two maids and both died on him with nary a child. At the end he lived all by hisself in that big old house. The salt fish business went under. Pushthrough Trade was took up by a St. John’s merchant. The schooners was lost or laid up. Just after the war, he give it up and died. When his will was read it said for him to be shipped back to the Boston States. Because, you understand…he never did belong to Pushthrough.”
Peering through uncurtained, salt-encrusted windows, we could glimpse dark, heavy furniture, including a parlour organ. Nothing except the body had been removed and no heir had ever put in an appearance or made a claim on the house or its contents.
“She’ll stand like that ’til she rots, like the old schooners that was run ashore in Rotten Row at the bottom of the harbour,” Sandy told us. “One thing is certain sure. They’s nobody here likely to go aboard of this one.”
On our third day of being fogged in Hubert came aboard to warn us that the coast steamer was due sometime after dark and he and I would have to shift our schooners or risk being squashed. We shifted across the narrow tickle to a ruined wharf on the other side. I was just making fast there when another timber hooker, the Winnie Pearl, emerged out of the murk heading toward us at full speed. Transfixed, I watched her skipper give such a demonstration of seamanship as I have seldom witnessed.
Foaming full tilt down a tickle less than a hundred yards wide, the Winnie Pearl never slowed until she was her own length away from a horrendous collision. Then she smartly dropped both her anchors and, in the manner of a runaway horse, surged to such a sudden stop that she sagged back on her haunches. As she did so someone aboard flung a line ashore, where someone else quickly snubbed it around a rock. Then, still under full power, the eighty-foot vessel pivoted right around and came gently to rest alongside the Pushthrough trade wharf, her bows pointing toward the harbour entrance.
“How the bloody hell did he do that? And why?” I demanded of Hubert, who was standing calmly by.
“Well, skipper, he got no reverse gear on that old engine, and he don’t dare slow her down for fear she’ll quit. So that’s the only way he could a-done it. And ain’t he going to be some wild when he hears he got to move again to let the steamer in!”
Claire drifted off to sketch Pushthrough in the mist, but I had a task below. This was a special day for us–the day one year earlier when we first knew we were in love. In celebration I was preparing a feast of fresh codfish caviar, cold mackerel salad, and codfish bouillabaisse, all to be washed down with bottles of white wine cooled in the bilges.
After the dinner we were galvanized from post-prandial stupor by the rude bellow of the steamer’s horn. We hurried on deck to watch the thousand-ton Baccalieu ease into the berth being vacated by an indignant Winnie Pearl. Then we joined most of Pushthrough’s population on the dock, for this was “steamer time,” the chief event of the week in any outport on the Sou’west Coast.
Baccalieu’s decks were crowded with people and cluttered with deck cargo ranging from a big new trap skiff to a one-ton truck. Passengers and residents mingled on the wharf, where Claire and I were spotted by Captain Riggs, waved aboard,
and taken to his cabin for a drop of brandy. He was gloomy about the weather.
“Radio’s callin’ for a sou’easter and heavy fog, me Little Man. Seems like ’tis all they got for us this season. Don’t say as how I could get along at all in this one but for the radar.”
I took this with a grain of salt. I was convinced Skipper Riggs could have smelled his way into every nook and cranny on the coast of Newfoundland.
Unfortunately, I could not. Baccalieu steamed off into the murk but we remained weather-bound in Pushthrough for the next three days.
The damp became so pervasive that green mould was sprouting on much of our food, on the wet and slippery planks of the cabin floor, even on our clothing. When Claire undertook to examine my beard for signs of greenish growth, I understood she had had enough of Foggy Hollow and I had better take her somewhere else.
Great Jervais seemed a possibility. This was a now-abandoned settlement a mile or so to the north of Pushthrough where, according to Sandy Kemp, the weather was quite different.
“Near always warmer there,” he told us, then added darkly: “Some says ’tis because ’tis closer to the Other Place, being as it was purely papish, you understand…afore the Devil chased they out of it.”
Settled in the nineteenth century by a few fugitive Roman Catholic families from St. Pierre who had fallen foul of their own people, Great Jervais had been remarkably successful, growing to some forty families and rousing envy and suspicion in the neighbouring communities, all of which were staunchly Protestant.
According to Sandy, something fell and mysterious happened to Great Jervais in 1937, something that caused a number of deaths, followed by the total abandonment of the place.
“None of we ever knowed what it was. Some thinks it was sickness carried them off. Others says ’twas the Devil come to claim his own. I only ever knowed one fellow from there. Name of Joe Rose [originally LaRue]. Was a deckhand on my schooner for a voyage or two. A proper jinker he was. Nothing he ever done come right.