by Farley Mowat
PLACENTIA HARBOUR 24 DECEMBER
YOUR BOAT SUNK DORY SAVED HOMEWARD BOUND HAPPY
CHRISTMAS
EPHRAM
Ephram Cook had kept his message to within the ten-word limit permitted before an additional fee per word would have been charged. A few days later (after he had turned over to me the dory, the compass, and the pair of oars), he apologized for having sent me a collect telegram. He would not have done so except that every cent he and his cousin possessed had gone down with the ship.
The dory turned out to be the most memorable Christmas present I have ever received. She served Claire and me throughout the years we lived in Burgeo as our principal means of transport within the settlement and for exploring the outer islands and nearby coasts.
We spent a wonderful winter in Burgeo, managing to accomplish a lot of work at typewriter and drawing board despite the distractions and attractions of exploring a new world. Then, in March, a letter came from my U.S. publisher inviting us to Boston for a week. When Spencer Lake offered us passage on the Swivel to Gloucester (only a few miles from Boston), we decided to take a break.
Meanwhile an immense tongue of arctic pack ice had thrust far south, reaching the northeastern coasts of Nova Scotia. Consisting mostly of old polar ice almost as hard as concrete, it posed a grave danger to ships not specially strengthened for ice navigation.
The Swivel was not ice strengthened, nevertheless on April 4 we sailed aboard her. Two days later she lay helplessly embedded in the pack a few miles to the north of ill-omened Sable Island. We knew that if the wind came westerly, the ice would drift clear of Sable’s engulfing sands, but if it blew from the east we would be in serious trouble. We also knew there would be no help from three icebreakers then stationed on Canada’s Atlantic seaboard. The most powerful of these was out of action due to engine trouble. A second was unsuccessfully trying to free a freighter jammed in the pack in Cabot Strait. The third was immobilized in heavily raftered ice off Louisbourg.
Farley–winter work.
It was some comfort to find we had company. The floating continent of ice was inhabited by companies of harp seals, whose females had given birth to white-coated pups on the floes only a few weeks earlier. Hundreds of sleek pelagic seals of all ages and sizes were to be seen from Swivel’s deck. Utterly beguiled, Claire and I watched as they porpoised through narrow leads or hauled themselves out on the floes to bask in the spring sunshine. They were totally at ease in what looked to be a fearsomely inimical environment. For them this icy world was no frozen desolation–it was a glittering paradise. Our admiration for them was tinged with envy.
They were viewed quite differently by some of the ship’s crew. Although Sou’west Coast men were not and never had been sealers, two of our deckhands had brought rifles aboard with which they began blazing away at the seals. Magenta-coloured swirls in the green waters and crimson splashes on white ice marked the hits. Most of the seals shot on the floes were mortally stricken yet a good many of the wounded managed to slide off the pans to disappear–doubtless forever–into the black depths.
When I demanded of one of the gunners why he was shooting seals he replied with some asperity, “Because dey’s dere!”
To which his companion added, “’Tis for the sport, ye see. And what odds? Dey’s t’ousands and t’ousands o’ dose fish-eating buggers. Rats of the sea, we calls ’em.”
Claire was distraught and sickened by this butchery. I was furious. It cast a shadow over us–one that would spread and darken in the decades ahead during which I would make several journeys “to the ice” with sealers from the Magdalen Islands in the Gulf of St. Lawrence, with others from the northern coasts of Newfoundland, and with Norwegian sealers at the great sea-bight to the north of Newfoundland.
I went on these bloody expeditions to record and to bear witness against a holocaust that was consuming as many as a million seals a year, a massacre committed with the full support of Canada’s federal government and of the legislatures of the several Atlantic provinces, a slaughter of wild creatures on an almost inconceivable scale actively or implicitly sanctioned by most of the Canadian media and by all-too-many citizens of my country.
An atrocity that is being continued to this day, I hold it to be a heinous crime against life on earth.
The Petit Nord
Summer that year was the foggiest in memory on the Sou’west Coast. Most of the time we might as well have been living at the bottom of a barrel filled with grey cotton wool. We hardly glimpsed the sun until late July when we travelled by coast boat to Port aux Basques to try to trace the tenth-century explorations of northern Newfoundland by an Icelander named Thorfinn Karlsefni.
We needed a car but none was available in Port aux Basques so we rode the Bullet 130 miles north to see if we could rent a vehicle in Cornerbrook. Although the largest town in western Newfoundland, all it had to offer was a three-ton truck or a Vauxhall–a British-made sedan suitable for elderly ladies to drive on English country lanes. Dubiously we chose the Vauxhall.
The sun blazed down as we drove north through forests ravaged by pulp-and-paper companies. Despite this desecration, the Bonne Bay valley–an enormous chasm carved by glaciers–turned out to be one of the most magnificent spectacles either of us had ever seen. We would like to have lingered in it but we had a rendezvous to keep at Port au Choix, a hundred miles farther north, with archaeologist Elmer Harp.
We ferried the Vauxhall across Bonne Bay to the beginning of a not-quite-completed road that skirted the western shore of Newfoundland all the way north to the Strait of Belle Isle. It was gravel-surfaced, strewn with fist-sized rocks, and deeply pitted with thank-you-ma’ams.
The Vauxhall skittered and bounced along through billowing clouds of dust at a reckless forty miles an hour. On our left the glittering Gulf of St. Lawrence rolled to a distant horizon, a mighty sea in its own right. The Long Range Mountains reared to starboard, forming the spine of Newfoundland’s Great Northern Peninsula, the Petit Nord as it was more familiarly known.
An hour beyond Bonne Bay we came to Cow Head, where we stopped to give the Vauxhall and ourselves a rest. Originally Seacow Head, this small peninsula jutting into the gulf derived its name from herds of walrus that used to haul out upon its sandy inner beach. Although they are now almost exclusively arctic animals, the great tusked creatures were, prior to the sixteenth century, enormously abundant in the Gulf of St. Lawrence. European entrepreneurs put an end to that. They slaughtered the seacows by the hundreds of thousands for oil, ivory, and leather until, by early in the twentieth century, the last of the gulf walrus had been destroyed.
Claire and I went for a walk along the isthmus behind the head, whose high sand dunes had been carved away by westerly gales, exposing an ancient beach studded with whale and walrus bones and several large boulders that, we discovered, had once served as anvils for the shaping of stone tools and weapons. Each of these was surrounded by a litter of flint flakes and discarded cores from which points and blades had been struck off.
A hammer stone of dense, black basalt rested atop one of the boulders. Laboriously shaped by grinding and pecking, and polished by generations of use, it perfectly fitted the human hand. It fitted mine so well I felt compelled to strike a few flakes from one of the many discarded cores nearby.
“Who do you suppose used these things?” Claire wondered.
“Beothuk Indians, maybe. More likely some of their distant ancestors, but God only knows how many thousands of years ago. Perhaps Elmer will be able to tell us.”
Elmer Harp and his student crews had spent several summers excavating prehistoric habitations at Port au Choix, an almost-island peninsula jutting out into the gulf. He was especially interested in sites once occupied by a mysterious people who were neither Eskimo nor Indian. Eskimo legends refer to them as Tunit. Modern archaeologists labelled them Dorset people because our first material knowledge of them came from excavations at Cape Dorset on Baffin Island.
For several hundred years
they dominated the west coast of Newfoundland, from which they inexplicably disappeared some time between AD 500 and 1000. My studies of early Norse voyages to Newfoundland suggested that Thorfinn Karlsefni’s expedition had made disastrous contact with the Tunit somewhere on the west coast of the Petit Nord. So Claire and I had come to Port au Choix to see what Elmer could show us.
The Tunit site Elmer was studying lay just behind a crescent of sloping beach facing the gulf at Philip’s Garden, named after an early settler who had discovered that potatoes prospered especially well there. The garden had not been cultivated for twenty or thirty years and was ablaze with wildflowers. The splendour of wild iris, buttercups, daisies, and a score of others was due to the garden’s remarkably rich soil, which, Elmer explained, was composed mainly of organic detritus resulting from the occupancy of the site by fifty or more generations of people of the Dorset culture.
Elmer and his students had uncovered the remains of two score Tunit houses within a space barely two hundred yards long and a hundred wide. Although reduced by time to shallow pits about fifteen feet square, these had once been semi-subterranean winter houses, turf-walled and roofed with poles covered by caribou or seal skins. At least during its final occupancy, Philip’s Garden had been the more or less permanent residence of a goodly number of people, not simply a campsite of transient nomads.
“The last time it was inhabited–probably about nine hundred years ago if the carbon-14 dates we’ve been getting are reliable–there could have been a hundred and fifty people, though some would likely have been away catching salmon in the mainland rivers, hunting caribou in the mountains, or collecting seabirds and eggs from the offshore islands,” Elmer explained.
Unlike post-Columbian Europeans at Port au Choix who made their livelihoods from codfish, these early settlers relied on pelagic seals. In the spring they ventured far out onto the ice, returning to land towing sleds laden with skins, fat, and meat from both young and adult seals. Unlike modern seal hunters who slaughter seal pups for their pelts alone, the Tunit wasted nothing.
The importance of their centuries-long dependence on seals can be gauged by Elmer’s calculation that he could fill a couple of freight cars with bones his crews had already unearthed at Philip’s Garden. Small wonder the soil was so miraculously fertile.
Claire and I spent a few days as volunteer diggers, concluding it might have been no bad thing to have lived at Philip’s Garden a thousand years earlier. Although Elmer could not tell us why or when the Tunit disappeared from Newfoundland, I believe the answer lies in the singularly close relationship between them and the pelagic seals.
By the middle of the tenth century the climate of the northwestern Atlantic region had warmed significantly. Winters became so mild that what little ice formed in the Gulf of St. Lawrence could no longer have provided safe nurseries. In consequence, the seals would have been forced to abandon the gulf and seek safer ice off the coast of Labrador. As they retreated northward, so did the Tunit.
Two or three centuries later, when the warm cycle ended and the return of cold winter weather made it possible for the seals to re-occupy their old breeding grounds, the Tunit could not follow for they had been overwhelmed by a new adversity. Their world had been invaded by a belligerent new people who called themselves Inuit and for whom the Tunit were no match. The harp and hood seals reclaimed the Gulf of St. Lawrence, but the Tunit never did for they had vanished from the earth.
Although Port au Choix taught us something about the lives of the vanished Tunit, it had nothing to tell us about the Norsemen we were seeking, so we pushed on. The Vauxhall shuddered and juddered northward to Plum Point, where we turned east off the coastal road on a trail bulldozed over the Long Range Mountains by a lumber company. The road, such as it was, descended through what had once been heavily wooded valleys to the head of a great inlet called Canada Bay. We were bound for the outport of Englee at the mouth of this bay. We tried to reach it by road but, when the Vauxhall sank to her belly in a mud wallow that might have given pause to a water buffalo, we abandoned her and completed the last fifteen miles of the journey by boat.
Perched on a rocky peninsula, Englee was dominated by three families who among them seemed to own everything of value, including a lumber mill, a salt-fish operation, the one and only general store, and a fish-filleting plant. The latter was under lease to Spencer Lake’s Caribou Fisheries, which each spring despatched Arthur Moulton from Burgeo to run the Englee plant and process fish caught by two deep-sea draggers on the banks off Labrador.
Englee was first occupied by English speakers around 1850, when intrepid fishermen from Notre Dame Bay began rowing and sailing their open bullyboats to the Petit Nord looking for new cod grounds. For a century prior to that, the peninsula had been French territory, with Normans and Bretons sailing to it every spring, fishing from its harbours until late in the autumn, then returning to France. The English, however, came to stay.
At first the French tolerated these squatters but, as their numbers increased, there was conflict and bloodshed. In the end the English seized possession and sent the foreigners packing, but victory did not ensure a peaceful future. Fractious internal struggles–mainly religious–continued to make life lively. By the time of our visit to Englee, six denominations–Pentecostal, Apostolic, Salvation Army, Church of England, United Church, and Roman Catholic–were competing for its fewer than two hundred souls, each sect maintaining its own place of worship and running its own school.
The United Church, which had been dominant for years, was faring badly. A previous minister had fathered so many illegitimate children within and without his flock that a large part of his congregation had defected and become Pentecostals. Then one of his successors had been forced to quit after being discovered in bed with both his landlord’s daughters simultaneously. He too then formed his own church of the apostolic breed. The temptation to investigate these aspects of life in Englee was strong but I had other fish to fry.
Arthur Moulton had passed the word around that I was looking for objects and sites from earlier times. One day an elderly fisherman, Fred Fillier, invited me to look at his garden, of which he was exceedingly proud because of the enormous cabbages and turnips he grew in it.
“’Tis the finest kind of dirt,” he told me, “but full of old Indian stuff.”
He let me poke around for myself and within half an hour I had culled a tobacco tin full of flint scrapers, points, and blades from the same sort of rich black soil that characterized Philip’s Garden. Evidently the Tunit had lived along all the coasts of the Petit Nord, strengthening my belief that the skraelings referred to in the Karlsefni sagas had been Tunit.
Finding evidence of a Norse presence was another matter. I was hopeful when one of the plant workers, who was building a house on the edge of the settlement, told me he had come upon a “skiliton”–a very old one with a smashed-in skull but no traces of clothing or other possessions. When the local ministers and the priest concluded this was the relic of a “pagan” from the dark and distant past and so could not be buried in sanctified ground, the plant worker bundled the bones into a soap-flakes carton and abandoned them under a bush on a nearby hill.
I asked to see the remains and was taken to the spot. The carton had disintegrated, allowing the mahogany-coloured bones to spill down the slope with the skull resting against a clump of moss. Covered in black mould, it could tell me nothing until it had been cleaned. Since the only source of running water in Englee was the fish plant, I took it there and as surreptitiously as possible began washing it in a basin provided for the employees.
Unluckily, a woman filleter saw what I was about and panicked. She was a big woman with a powerful voice, and if Arthur Moulton had not appeared from his office I expect there would have been a mass exodus from the plant that morning. Assuring the anxious workers that the “head bone” I was washing came from a bear, Arthur hustled me out of the place. Nor would he let me take my find into his home. I had to prom
ise to put it back where I found it. Instead, I now confess, I hid it at the bottom of my kit bag wrapped in a sweater, where it remained until we returned to Burgeo.
The skull found a resting place in the provincial museum at St. John’s, where it was identified as “female, probably native and possibly Dorset [Tunit], though conceivably early European.” Death had apparently been due to a crushing blow to the side of the head.
Next morning Arthur seemed anxious to send me on a voyage to the northward aboard the plant’s collector smack delivering salt to summer fishing stations along the otherwise unoccupied coast between Canada Bay and Hare Bay. Claire elected to remain at Englee but I seized the opportunity to examine nearly fifty miles of coast that might well have been visited by the Norse.
Skipper Alf Pollard welcomed me aboard the twenty-ton Hedley J. Davis. An elderly vessel, she was nearing the end of her time but Skipper Alf–“sixty years old and fifty of they in the fishery”–proudly insisted “she were still good for it.”
He might have been speaking of himself as well. One of twelve children raised at Hooping Harbour on “oatmeal, venison, herring, berries, and salt fish,” he and his wife had managed to produce only ten offspring, a deficiency about which he was somewhat apologetic.
“’Twere me own fault, certainly, being as I were at sea most of me time. Me woman were good for half a dozen more youngsters. A girt strong woman, she kept busy on the stages and the flakes making salt fish until an hour or so before her time would come and a child be born. T’ought nothing at all of it.”
The Davis was heavy laden with several tons of salt in wooden barrels. Her crew consisted of the skipper and two fourteen-year-old boys, one of whom was Alf’s son. They were a smart pair of hands and in their father’s generation would likely have become skippermen themselves. But now they had only the summer months to learn the seaman’s trade. In winter they went to high school in Roddickton and saw their home, and the sea, only on weekends.