by Farley Mowat
“Don’t be forgettin’ we!” people shouted as Happy Adventure drew slowly away from Garfield’s stage.
So we began the long outside run toward the distant Canadian mainland. The coastal cliffs mounted ever higher as we slipped past Pushthrough and then the naked capes of the great inlet of Facheux Bay. We might have put in to Muddy Hole had not Cecil Dominie warned me, “Folks there is right cross-grained,” adding that a few years earlier during a sou’east gale, seas bursting inside the cove had smashed three of its houses and all of its dories.
Concluding that discretion was the better part of valour, we pressed on and, as dusk fell, rounded Pinchgut Point to enter one of the most spectacular harbours in Newfoundland.
Called Francois on the chart (but Fransway by those who live on the coast), the settlement consisted of sixty or so houses ringing the narrow shore of what looked like the crater of an extinct volcano that had been flooded by the sea. One entered the harbour through a narrow, crooked slit in a massive basalt barricade a thousand feet high; crater walls soared high above the skim of human habitation, forever threatening it with destruction from falling ice in winter and rocks all the year round. It was definitely an up-and-down sort of a place. As one of its inhabitants would tell us, “You needs claws on your elbows to keep a holt in Fransway.”
Its people were imbued with the kind of vigour that characterized the residents of Stone Valley, though at first they seemed somewhat cool to strangers. When we eased alongside one of Fransway’s three small wharves, nobody showed any interest in us except for one small boy and the inevitable black dog. Both eyed us cautiously but neither would take our lines. Then, as I jumped ashore to make the vessel fast, a strongly built middle-aged woman came out of a large store attached to the wharf. This was the widow Durnford (pronounced Dunford), owner of both wharf and store. She acknowledged my introduction with a nod before informing me in forthright style that she had no “fresh stuff” for sale and did not accept “furrin money” for what stock she had. Furthermore, I would have to move my boat because her own small coaster, the Mayflower, was due in that evening.
Claire and I were down below eating supper and rather lugubriously contemplating the coolness of our reception when there was a rapping on the cabin trunk. At my invitation, a wisp of a man with an endearing smile eased down the companionway to present us with a steaming pot of boiled dinner.
Wharf at Francois.
Leslie Fudge, his wife, Carol, and their three children lived in a little house perched precariously over the landwash not far from Durnford’s wharf. They had seen our reception by the widow and Leslie had come to make amends. It was the beginning of a friendship that would endure for many years.
Bad weather kept us tied up to one or other of the three wharves for the next several days during which Leslie, Carol, and their children became our hosts, guides, mentors, and providers. Accompanied by the older Fudge children, Claire and I ambled around the gravelled paths that served as roads, among close-packed houses that elbowed one another for space upon the narrow fringe of shore. Massive crags loomed all around. One of these, an enormous semi-detached pillar called The Friar, seemed poised to come crashing down at any moment and annihilate half the settlement.
There were no gardens because there was neither space nor soil. Few dogs were to be seen, but there were any number of lean, short-tailed felines that looked as if a bobcat had been one of their ancestors. A brook and waterfall in the middle of the village provided clear, cold water for all; a tidy little Anglican church offered the grace of God to those who required it. The harbour was dotted with dories coming or going or nodding at their moorings. Several larger vessels lay at Durnford’s; at the adjacent government dock; and at a wharf and store owned by John Penney and Sons, of Ramea, a group of islands twenty-five miles farther west.
There were almost 400 people in the settlement, with 113 children in the four-room school. Except for a few men who went off to the woods to work as loggers, and the shopkeepers, lighthouse keepers, and Leslie Fudge (who could not go to sea because he was subject to chronic seasickness), almost all the able-bodied men and older boys were inshore fishermen.
They fished year-round from their big dories, to such good effect that Penneys kept a small power schooner in Fransway to carry the catch to the company’s filleting plant at Ramea. Fransway men fished even when the weather was foul enough to keep the coastal steamer tied up.
“She’s a hard coast, me son,” the skipper of the Mayflower told me. “Open to every blow from east through south to west. T’ick a fog, oftentimes. Wintertime the dories gets iced so bad you got to beat it off with an axe. Some got engines now, though most still goes at it cross-handed with the oars, and maybe a scrap of canvas to steady her in a blow. I don’t say as but they’s the bestest seamen in this old island.”
A storm that came on while we were there brought some draggers in for shelter. These big steel vessels bullied everyone else away from the government wharf and tried to do the same at Durnford’s, but changed their minds when widow Mae Durnford came out on her dock with a shotgun cradled in her arm. Canadian draggers (“fish killers from away”) were not loved by inshore fisherfolk.
Discovering that Leslie was an expert carpenter, I got him to fix a broken gaff and a cracked boom and make some other repairs on Happy Adventure that were beyond my own rough-and-ready skills. His talents were extraordinary but he was so self-effacing they were only accidentally revealed. Shyly he offered to help me deal with a fuel problem in the engine. This he did by gently disassembling, fixing, and reassembling the entire fuel system, which was of British origin and unlike any he had ever before encountered.
The storm was succeeded by a fog so dense as to be almost palpable. I would never have dared venture out into it even had Happy Adventure been equipped with radar or other modern aids to navigation. The Mayflower possessed none of these but her skipper thought little of choosing this impenetrable morning to set off on a voyage.
Six hours later Leslie shouted to me from the window of his house.
“Best show a leg, skipper. Beer truck’s comin’ in.”
I could hear the drumbeat of the Mayflower’s engine approaching through the fog, but not until she was alongside Durnford’s wharf and had begun unloading the first of some sixty cases of beer did I realize she was it.
Mae Durnford had political friends in faraway St. John’s. A few years earlier, when she learned that a few carefully selected outports were to be permitted to open beer stores, she had applied for a licence. Alas, Fransway’s church was presided over by a temperance-minded minister who was able to scuttle the widow’s plan. Undaunted, she applied for a beer store in Rencontre West, a nearby settlement of about a dozen families guarded by the fourteen-hundred-foot mountain bastions of Blow-Me-Down and Iron Skull. The place was considered almost inaccessible even on the Sou’west Coast and perhaps because of this it had no church. Never mind. It now found itself with a beer store–the only beer store for seventy miles along the coast. And Mae became a wealthy woman.
When we left Fransway, a fair breeze sent us westward on a broad reach past the superb palisade of cliffs and headlands guarding Nick Powers Cove, Aviron Bay, Cul-de-Sac, and La Hune Bay. Holding close to the coastal rampart, we could plainly see the high-water mark of breakers on the cliffs, below which no vegetation could maintain a hold against the sea’s assaults. This boundary stood about eighty feet above normal high-tide line. I concluded I never wanted to be on this coast in a small vessel during a southerly gale.
Passing Cape Island, we were tempted to run into La Hune Bay to see how the members of the bridal party we had met in Milltown were faring but I was reluctant to waste a fair wind so we sailed on.
I am sorry now. Two years later Cape la Hune was “closed out.” By 1966, when Claire and I did visit it, all that remained was a small Masonic Hall, a few collapsing sheds, and the usual debris of an abandoned settlement. A large lithograph of King George V and Queen Mary sti
ll hung on the wall of the hall as a token of times past.
When I walked along the cape’s sandy shore, I found several flint points fashioned by Beothuk hunters who had made the cape their departure point for canoe expeditions to offshore islets to hunt nesting seabirds and collect eggs. I also found flints of the so-called Dorset culture, an Eskimo-like people who lived on this coast long before the start of the Christian era. On a later visit, Claire and I would examine a cave near the mouth of La Hune Bay where the Beothuks had buried their dead. Local fishermen had carried off the skulls, fixing them to the mast tops of their dories, perhaps as gestures of bravado.
Sailing past Cape la Hune, we held well off shore to avoid two nests of reefs, sunkers, and breakers known as Cape Rocks and Gulch Cove Sunkers. We saw little of them, for which I was properly thankful, but did see plunging flights of gannets, wheeling multitudes of terns and kittiwakes, and bullet-swift companies of puffins and guillemots (called turrs in Newfoundland). These all testified to the presence of good fishing grounds and added a living element to a waterscape undisturbed by any other vessel. Itchy sailed alone on a coast that had once swarmed with fishing boats.
By dusk we were approaching the Ramea Islands, a handful of barren rocks some seven miles off the mainland shore where there was a good harbour, a store, and a fish plant owned by a woman who was even more redoubtable and remarkable than the widow Mae Durnford.
Ramea harbour was a busy place. Fifteen or twenty large dories were coming or going, or lay hauled up on the hard in St. Pierre fashion. Several longliners tugged at their moorings. Two power schooners shared John Penney and Sons’ dock with two large steel draggers whose crews were busily unloading fish.
We tied up to a vacant corner of the Penney wharf, and I went to the fish plant office to ask permission to lie there overnight. A cheerful young man ushered me to the inner sanctum: a large, second-floor room overlooking the harbour, furnished with padded chairs, a lounge, an old and well-polished mahogany desk, and, on one wall, a pair of large and primitive oil paintings of fishing schooners. Behind the desk sat not the male titan of industry one might have expected, but a woman who could have modelled for a sentimental Hallmark grandma card. Crinkly grey hair crowned a round, rather homely but jovial face. Blue eyes peered at me sharply through glittering, rimless spectacles.
“I am Marie Penney,” she announced firmly. “Please sit down and tell me what we can do for you.”
This, of course, meant: tell me who you are and what you are doing in my kingdom.
Ramea– Penneyworth in foreground.
For that is what Ramea was. As the owner of John Penney and Sons, Marie Penney was central to the operations of two fishing companies, three fish plants, and several retail stores that, together, dominated the coast from Bay Despair almost as far west as Port aux Basques. Though the plants at Gaultois and at Burgeo were nominally owned by Marie’s daughter, Margaret, and her husband, Spencer Lake, Marie Penney had a hand in both.
Not for nothing was she known as the Queen of the Coast.
Born at Notre Dame Bay in the north of Newfoundland, she had married John Penney, the easy-going inheritor of a long-established family business that was then following the salt-cod business into decline. Marie changed the company’s course. Although John continued to issue the orders and sign the cheques, Marie really ran the company. Recognizing that freezing plants were the wave of the future, she saw to it that Ramea was in the forefront of changing ways.
While John drank more than was good for him, Marie made such a success of the family business that in 1948 she could afford to make a “gift” of $25,000 to the federal Liberal Party to ensure John a senatorship in Canada’s Parliament. His induction was one of the two highlights of her life. The second was when she was invited by the governor general to dine with the Queen of England at Rideau Hall.
Thereafter Marie’s world began to come unstuck. The first blow was John’s death, brought about, so it appears, largely from apathy and alcohol. The second was when their only child, Margaret, who was as vivacious and wilful as her mother, ran off with Spencer Lake, a married man from St. John’s. Equally shattering: Spencer was a Protestant and the Penneys were formidably Roman Catholic.
I knew none of this when, scruffy and unkempt, I introduced myself to Marie Penney.
“The author of People of the Deer!” she said, to my surprise. “I have read your book. I do not agree with your opinion of the missionaries. Nevertheless, I am happy to meet you…. And what brings you here? Another book perhaps? Well, you and your wife must come to Four Winds–that’s my home–for dinner tonight.”
When I brought this invitation back to Claire, together with a description of our hostess, she was shaken. As she would later write:
Farley and I had been living for six weeks in the cramped quarters of our rather grubby little schooner, dressed in sturdy pants and sweaters. I had only one summer dress with me in case of special occasions, and it was a bit mildewed and rolled up in a plastic bag. Well, it would have to do, but I was certainly not overdressed for what followed.
Four Winds was by far the largest house in Ramea, if not on the Sou’west Coast. It stood on a hill raised well above the other houses on a small and treeless island. A square, solidly built frame structure, it was exposed to every wind that blew.
Its broad front door opened into a welcoming centre hall with hardwood floors, an upright piano, and a flight of broad, polished stairs. To one side was a formal living room filled with Victorian furniture. On the other side was a spacious dining room with a grand table and matching chairs. Mrs. Penney’s favourite room, to which she graciously led us, was at the back of the house. It was lined with books and framed family photographs, and furnished with cosy armchairs. This was where she entertained guests before dinner, with sherry brought from Spain in her own ships, served in crystal goblets by her Portuguese houseman.
We dined at the huge mahogany table set with a white damask tablecloth, sterling silver cutlery, bone china from England, and monogrammed linen napkins. The effect of finding all this in an isolated little village in the middle of an ocean was a culture shock. Why, I wondered, would Marie Penney live in this remote place? Most of Newfoundland’s merchant class lived in St. John’s, far from the smell of fish. We would learn that Marie, despite her elite lifestyle, felt a strong connection with and responsibility for “her people,” as she called them. Her attitude may have been colonial, or even medieval, yet I didn’t sense any undercurrent of resentment from the other islanders. It seemed that most Ramea people were proud to have this worldly but kindly woman living among them.
At the end of the evening I explained to our hostess that we would have to sail on next morning. She refused to hear of it.
“You are not to take your little schooner out of Ramea until I tell you to! There is so much here for you to see. Kevin, my nephew, will be your guide. Whatever you wish to do, please tell him and he will arrange it for you. Just don’t forget–if the weather’s fit there’ll be croquet on the lawn tomorrow. I shall expect you two to be there.”
Kevin Smart, a lean and intense young man, was learning the fisheries business from his aunt. When I told him I’d long wanted to see what life aboard a dragger was like, he arranged it for me.
The Penneyworth, smallest and oldest vessel in the company fleet, no longer fished far from home. I boarded her at four next morning and was welcomed by Skipper Max MacDonald, Mate John Symes, Engineer John Harvey, and a young deckhand named Rodney. The sixty-foot wooden vessel’s Kelvin diesel thumped to life, the lines were let go, and, huffing black smoke from her exhaust, Penneyworth put to sea.
We steamed toward the mouth of White Bear Bay (Wiper Bay, it was called locally) and just as dawn was breaking shot the net over the starboard side to begin the first trawl of the day. Penneyworth towed slowly over a very rocky bottom while Skipper Max kept a sharp eye on his depth finder for warnings of snags that could “hang us up.” When I asked why we were fishing
such rough bottom, he explained that our quarry–redfish or brim as most fishermen called it–had been “pretty well fished out on the good grounds,” by which he meant the level, sandy, or muddy underwater banks.
Until the recent catastrophic overfishing of haddock and the steep decline in cod stocks, redfish had been considered “trash fish.” Now they were being rapaciously pursued, to be marketed as ocean perch. At first, catches of redfish had been enormous, and draggers twice the size of the Penneyworth had been able to fill their holds while within sight of their home ports.
“Them days they only kept brim fourteen, sixteen inches long. Smaller stuff was shovelled over the side. Nowadays we keeps anything ten inches long, and they’s getting scarce. No use to keep anything smaller than that. The fillets offen them is too small to feed a cat.”
“Well,” said I, “at least the small fry you pitch overboard stand a chance to grow to a useable size. Maybe you’ll catch them another day.”
Max looked at me as if in sorrow at such ignorance.
“No, sorr. They’s gone for good.” And he explained how the rapid decrease in pressure as the trawl is hauled to the surface dooms the fish it contains.
“They blows up like balloons and their eyes pops out. They never gits down below again. The gulls and dogfish gets they and that’s the end of it. Likely in a few more years us’ll see the end of the brim altogether.”
We shot our first trawl at 0530 and hauled back at 0630. As the two “doors” that keep the mouth of the net open underwater came aboard, the bag (or cod end) came to the surface a hundred yards astern–a rosy mound of dying fishes gleaming in the light of the rising sun. The cod end was hauled aboard to spill about fifteen hundred pounds of brim onto the deck. Almost all the fish were too small to be worth keeping.