by Farley Mowat
The Hill brothers had done something about that. First they built a small sawmill. Then they spent a winter in the woods at the foot of Bay Despair cutting the timber needed to build a big, partly enclosed motorboat along the lines of the Nova Scotian Cape Islander, a vessel capable of fishing almost any species in almost any weather and in all seasons. Next they bought five hundred dollars’ worth of nylon twine and made a fleet of deep-water gill nets.
Then they went back to fishing.
Starting early in the spring, they netted salmon followed by herring, then cod, turbot, sole, and halibut. And they fished lobster with four hundred wooden traps they had also made themselves.
Spring, summer, and autumn, they spent every day (except Sunday) working as many as twenty nylon nets wherever the fish were to be found in Hermitage Bay and Bay Despair. Evenings they gutted and otherwise prepared what they had caught, either aboard their vessel or at one of their several camps throughout the region. Twice a week they sailed to the plant at Gaultois to sell their catch. Live lobster and fresh salmon fetched ten cents a pound; cod in salt brought six cents a pound; fresh cod ready for filleting, one and a half cents per pound.
Hardly munificent earnings, but for the Hills it was enough.
“We don’t want for nothing,” Sandy told us. “Got good houses over our heads. Don’t owe nobody nothing. All our youngkers–Kent’s got seven and I’ve six–gets proper schooling. Two of them’s already teaching and I’ve a girl away at university in St. John’s. We eats well. We dresses warm. And we never goes short of a drop, or of friends and neighbours to help us down it. You could say we was pretty well contented.”
They gave me a fat cod they had caught that day and, when their work was finished that evening, came aboard Happy Adventure. While Claire quietly “sketched them off” they talked warmly of their younger years lived in a community of five families at Barasway de Cerf, a cove in Bay Despair. There they had enjoyed such a satisfying life that they and their families had remained at Barasway de Cerf until their children’s need for greater education in the modern world became paramount. Only then had they (reluctantly) moved to Hermitage Cove. They continued to spend their summers at the barasway and returned to it during the rest of the year whenever the opportunity arose.
“’Tis home, you understand. And I’ll tell you, skipper, and you too, Missis, they’s no better place upon this earth.”
The next day being Sunday, the Hills insisted Claire and I accompany them and their families to morning service in the sparse old Anglican church, then join them at Sandy’s house for an enormous meal prepared by his wife, Irene, and three stunning daughters.
Ruddy-complexioned like her husband and brilliantly blue-eyed, Irene had been a beauty–was one still. Before her marriage she had “belonged” to Brunette Island, where her father had been one of two lightkeepers caring for one of the most important lights on the Northwest Atlantic seaboard. The light tower, an immense inner cylinder of stone surrounded by a second cylinder, contained living quarters for two families that, in Irene’s time, had numbered twelve children between them.
“One for each of the twelve brass oil lamps that give out the light,” she told us. “When we was growed enough, we was each allowed to care for one of the lamps–fill and clean it and polish the mirrors and the lenses to the satisfaction of our dads, as was the keepers. So you see, we helped make the light shine out across Fortune Bay so sailormen and fishermen could find their ways safe home.
“If I never does nothing else, I’ll always be some glad I could do that much for they.”
The Hills adopted us into their community, apparently without a second thought and without reservation. Our problems became their problems. One evening I explained that we must soon sail to St. Pierre so Claire could fly back to Toronto, but that I was most reluctant to leave Happy Adventure on the French Islands for a second winter and, moreover, reluctant to leave the Sou’west Coast at all.
“No need to, bye,” said Kent. “Take the missus on the coast boat to Fortune and the Spencer out to St. Peter’s. Then you come back the same way. Winter your vessel here in Hermitage. You can be certain sure we’ll keep a sharp eye onto her. Or you could sail her back into Bay Despair. Visit Sandy and me at the barasway on the way. Look around so much as you like and when you has to go back up-along, you could haul her out for the winter at Head of the Bay. Dolph’d look after her like she was his own.”
To my delight, Claire agreed. “We could start off again in Bay Despair next summer, Farley, and you’ve said Harold Horwood wanted to sail with you on the Sou’west Coast. Perhaps if you wired him, he could come down and keep you company until it was time to haul Happy Adventure out.”
Bay of Spirits
We boarded the Bonavista on a Tuesday evening. One of a newer breed of coastal boats, she was eastbound under the command of Captain Roland Penney, a ship-handler of legendary skill whom we had already met. As we stood hand in hand by the rail bidding a sad adieu to our little ship forlornly tugging at her anchor in the barasway, Skipper Ro came out of the wheelhouse to welcome us aboard. Following our gaze, he murmured just loudly enough for me to hear: “Maid or a vessel…don’t pay to leave ary one too long on their own. Could be gone out of it when you comes back again.”
The warning brought me no solace, since not only was I about to part from Claire but within a few weeks would also have to part from Happy Adventure. I would as soon Skipper Ro had kept his maxim to himself.
Our voyage aboard the Bonavista was pleasant enough. She was crowded with sociable people. Some were destined for medical treatment in St. John’s; others (mostly men, but some women) were bound “away” looking for the work they could no longer find in the outports. One middle-aged fellow from Jerseyman Harbour was going home after spending eleven months on a scallop boat fishing out of Lunenburg. A score of younger men were off to lumber camps in the interior of the island in hopes of finding a few weeks’ winter work cutting pulp. Several teenagers were heading for boarding schools in the capital. Few of these travellers would see their homes again for many weeks or months, yet all were in good spirits. Two harmonicas and a guitar were seldom silent, and the passenger saloon was a babble of song and gossip.
When we docked at Harbour Breton so many people crowded aboard to visit that it became almost impossible to make one’s way along the decks and alleyways. One visitor had no difficulty doing so. He was a big black water dog who boarded every steamer to collect scraps from the cooks. He made his way rapidly to the galley, clearing a path for himself by using his nose to goose everyone who stood in his way.
Because Claire and I were preoccupied with thoughts of what our futures might portend, we did not take much pleasure in the voyage. Although Claire’s prospects must have been dauntingly uncertain, she was more worried about those confronting me and how I was going to deal with them. My stated plan was to spend September in Bay Despair aboard Happy Adventure, nominally gathering material for a prospective book. But Claire rightly guessed I was deliberately delaying my return to Ontario while I tried to resolve the problem of whether or not to abandon my marriage.
We disembarked from the Bonavista at Fortune and next day the venerable Spencer ferried us across the narrow waters to St. Pierre, where we spent two foggy and miserable days waiting for a plane. On the third day I stood beside the sodden runway and watched a lumbering DC-3 disappear into the murk, carrying Claire away to what seemed like an unimaginably distant place.
The deprivation I felt was so overwhelming that my first inclination was to get mindlessly drunk. Then it occurred to me that something of Claire’s presence might still linger aboard Happy Adventure and I was filled with a consuming compulsion to return to Hermitage.
This turned out to be easier said than done. That night St. Pierre was pummelled by a sou’easter that grounded planes, locked fishing vessels in harbour, and disabled a passenger liner a hundred miles east of Miquelon.
For hours I paced, prowled, and gro
wled through the storm-lashed streets of St. Pierre, unsuccessfully seeking a way to rejoin my little ship. The Spencer remained securely moored to her wharf at Fortune. The skippers of the St. Eugène and the Attaboy (the latter a retired rum-runner), which were the two most sea-worthy launches on the islands, would not even consider putting out in such weather. Even the usually indomitable Théophile Detcheverry failed me for he would not commit his beloved Oregon to the turmoil raging in the waters between St. Pierre and Newfoundland.
Two days after Claire’s departure I happened on Pierre Tenier, a gaunt sometime-fisherman (more usually a handyman around the harbour), who owned a decrepit power dory of Oregon’s lineage and who was always short of money. Pierre had been drinking at the Joinville bar when I encountered him. Without much hope I asked if he would ferry me to Hermitage.
“Peut-être…peut-être.” Maybe–he said muzzily. “Combien?”–how much?
Thirty dollars was all the cash I could command. It proved enough.
Pierre agreed to start at dawn next day by which time the storm was expected to have moderated. Indeed it had, though it was still blowing half a gale and, as he pointed out, the seas were très formidables. He suggested we might postpone our departure until the following day but when I snarled at him–threatening to drown my frustrations in booze paid for with the charter money–he reconsidered.
Before we were even clear of the Passe du Nord-est, his dory, Petite Céleste, was pitching and rolling like a demented pony desperately anxious to rid herself of a rider. Her motion was so extreme that I was ready to turn back but, astonishingly, Pierre was not.
We were not alone. He had shipped a crew consisting of his own nine-year-old son together with a fourteen-year-old lad who today would be described as “learning disabled” but who, in those times, was just called simple. The dory had no pumps so it was the boys’ task to keep her afloat by bailing her out with wooden scoops.
To help maintain her trim, I huddled in the bow (where the motion was worst) while the others crowded into the stern sheets, attempting to shelter from spray and driving rain under a piece of tarpaulin that soon enough was torn from their hands. Clustered close around the tiller, the three of them seemed diminished to the size of hand puppets by the mighty seas rolling up behind us.
I was having serious second thoughts about this voyage but, unimpressive as she may have looked, Petite Céleste was a staunch little vessel and her three-horsepower, single-cylinder engine was as resolute as the heart of God. It never missed a beat, which was as well for if we had lost steerageway the dory could readily have broached, rolling over in the troughs and pitching the four of us into the dark depths.
But as frightened as I was, I was exhilarated too. Although my stomach sank as the dory plunged through the breaking crests, my spirit soared. If there can be direct communion between man and the world womb, this was as close to it as I was ever likely to come. I still retain a vivid image of the rocks of les Enfants Perdues as we drove past. I can smell the rank tang of sea-wrack on them, feel the driven spray from towering pillars of foaming waters thundering skyward like aqueous volcanoes, and hear and feel the dolorous clamour as they fell back into the ocean.
I also remember the only meal we attempted: chunks of salt-water–soaked bread with uncooked sausages and stinking cheese that had to be hacked up with a large, sharp knife while the bucking and kicking dory tried to send us flying. Pierre and the boys appeared to relish the fare. I limited myself mostly to brandy.
Heaving and plunging through a chaos of cross-swells that kept us all bailing, it took the best part of the day to make good the fifteen miles between St. Pierre and Danzig Head on the Burin Peninsula. From there we had a relatively sheltered run into Fortune harbour, which we found packed with fishing vessels waiting out the storm.
The wind fell out that night so next morning we set off across the mouth of Fortune Bay in calm but misty weather. The mist soon thickened to a proper fog and Pierre’s ancient compass, whose needle showed a decided preference for southwest no matter which direction we were actually heading, was little help. We were guided instead by the extraordinary hearing of our young simple. Perched in the bow, he could detect the vibrations of distant diaphones at a distance beyond any normal human hearing, first on Brunette Island, then on Pass Island, enabling us to steer a course toward each in turn.
When we had approached close enough to Pass Island to be able to make out the dim outline of the coast near Basse Terre Point, I took over the navigation using an old White Rose Gasoline road map of Newfoundland in lieu of a chart. It was of some slight assistance in finding our way along the south side of the Hermitage peninsula to Dawson’s Cove, an outport only five miles distant across the peninsula from Hermitage. I chose to go ashore here. Pierre and his crew lingered only long enough to refill their fuel tank before heading for home, some fifty miles to the south.
Harold Horwood had reached Hermitage by coast boat two days earlier and was waiting for me aboard Happy Adventure. We wasted no time getting underway and by next evening were back in Milltown, whose post office would provide my link to Claire during the succeeding weeks.
Harold and I made a number of short local voyages out of Milltown, then he wanted to take a look at the outer coast so one fine morning we sailed to Long Reach and headed out toward the mouth of Bay Despair.
A spanking nor’west breeze made Happy Adventure fly along like a water witch, her red sails taut as drumheads and the water swooshing under her forefoot. As often happened in Long Reach, we were accompanied by dolphins. Land, sea, and sky seemed possessed of a vivid vitality that moved Harold (who normally eschewed displays of sentiment) to say he had never felt closer to the primal essence of his native land.
Next morning we ran past Pushthrough out into the open sea, where we encountered a terrific swell and a stiff nor’wester. Happy Adventure bucked into it, keeping closer than may have been wise to the lowering coastal cliffs as we looked for the hole in the wall called Richards Harbour.
I was afraid we might have overshot it when Harold spotted a crack in the massive coastal barrier. Since daylight was almost gone, we could not tell whether the opening led to a safe haven or to a dead end. I started the engine while Harold got the canvas off and we nosed into the narrow gut on a rising tidal stream that shot us into a mountain-ringed basin a quarter mile across. A few houses and a dwarfish church clung to the steep southern shore and several trap skiffs rode uneasily at anchor.
Richards Harbour.
Richards Harbour was an outport with a murky reputation, according to Skipper Riggs.
“Quare folks there. ’Tis the only place on the coast where folks don’t come running to the wharf when the steamer calls. Seems like they shuts their doors and draws their curtains. They’s a saying you might hear: Dogfish [a small species of shark] makes better company than Richards Harbour folks.”
Certainly our arrival triggered no apparent interest. When we moored at the head of a rickety stage, nobody came down to help us with our lines; when I went ashore to see if I could buy some fish for supper, the few people I met seemed distant to the point of rudeness. A worried-looking woman running the settlement’s one and only store in the front room of her house sold me some salt cod but, as I left, hastened to shut the door behind me, as if relieved by my departure.
“Unfriendly bunch,” I told Harold as we ate our meal. “I wonder why.”
I would not get an answer until January 1965, when a small helicopter arrived in Burgeo, where Claire and I were then living, to fly the doctor from Burgeo’s cottage hospital to Richards Harbour. The doctor invited me to go along for the ride.
“St. John’s wants me to evacuate a patient from there but I know in advance he won’t be going out, so you might as well have the seat.”
We had a rough flight along a wind-lashed coast to land on the only level spot in Richards Harbour, the site of a house that had burned to the ground a few months earlier. We were met (not greeted) by three
glum men who ushered us into the kitchen of an unpainted house half-buried in drifted snow. Here we found ourselves facing several more grim-faced men, and a very angry woman of about fifty.
“Simeon’s not going wit’ ye!” she shrieked as we came through the door.
The doctor sought to calm her.
“All right, my dear. You’re his mother. If you won’t let him, then he won’t go. But since I’m here I must have a look at him so I can tell St. John’s he’s all right.”
Beckoning me to follow, he headed up the narrow stairs before either the woman or her formidable escort could intervene. We found thirty-six-year-old Simeon Pink locked in a small room whose one tiny window had been boarded over, leaving only a narrow slit to let in some daylight. There was no furniture other than what had presumably been a mattress but was now so ripped as to be unrecognizable. Simeon was squatting on it, naked except for the torn remnant of a shirt. He blinked and smiled at us as we stood in the open doorway, smiled and drooled.
“Mad as a March hare,” the doctor murmured. “Born that way. He should have been shipped to the mental hospital years ago but the people here would never let him go.” The doctor’s examination was superficial and our stay short. As we hurried back to the helicopter, I felt as if many eyes were watching us depart, none of them friendly.
I would later hear more about Richards Harbour from an Anglican minister who spent three decades on the coast. According to him, the community was afflicted by a genetic defect resulting in one and sometimes two or even three children in each generation being born “idiots.”
“It was and is a tragedy, not just for the poor children but because most people on the coast have always believed insanity was a curse–the Devil’s work. So Richards Harbour people tried their best to conceal what was happening there. They hid the idiot children away. They cared for them as best they might, but kept them out of sight. They thought if other people found out, Richards Harbour folk would become pariahs. They kept their secret so long as they could, and even now won’t face up to it.