by Farley Mowat
Michael Johns of Conne River once told me, “Our people was right sorry for them poor folk. We give them what we could, for they was always needy.”
Living conditions at St. Alban’s started to improve early in the twentieth century as exploitation of the rich timber resources of the bay and the adjacent interior began. There had long been some lumbering at Head of the Bay, providing wood for local use, especially for ship building. Now lumbering burgeoned into an industrial operation. Job Brothers and Perlins, both from St. John’s, built lumber mills in the bay, and a boom began. Initially St. Alban’s supplied most of the labour for log cutting and gathering but when the operators began selling massive quantities of logs for pulp and for pit props in British coal mines, more men were needed and a migration into the bay from fishing outports on the coast began.
Yet although St. Alban’s grew, it never seemed to prosper. Because of the inflow from coastal settlements there was generally a surplus of labour and this enabled employers to hold wages down to a pittance. Even as late as 1963 St. Alban’s two lumber mills were paying wages of only fifty cents an hour, while requiring that employees buy all their goods at company stores, where the markup was double that of independent shopkeepers.
Conditions improved during the war. In 1940 Bowater, the British pulp and paper empire controlling most of Newfoundland’s forests, moved into Bay Despair and launched a huge operation cutting logs for pulp and for timber. Every available man, both from inland and from the coastal settlements, was hired. By 1942 twenty to thirty thousand cords of pulp a year were being shipped out of the bay to Bowater’s paper mill in Cornerbrook on giant barges towed by ocean-going tugs. In the mid-1950s, the bottom fell out. Although Bowater was still able to sell twenty-two thousand cords of pulp logs each year for export abroad, it found the profit margins insufficient so it closed the whole operation down, throwing the entire labour force of the region out of work virtually overnight.
Conditions in St. Alban’s soon verged on the desperate. Unwilling to return to scrabbling for subsistence, most people went on the dole, more or less permanently.
George Collier, onetime foreman of a Bowater camp, explained. “The company pulled out ’cause they’d cut too much wood too quick, they weren’t enough left to make the kind of money they was after. We was no use to them no longer so they cut us adrift. Us’d had ten year of fair good times. Built good enough houses. Women and youngsters had clothing and gear fittin’ for them for once. There weren’t much us could do after that but go on the dole. Since most of the near woods has been cut and what little’s left is too costly to go after, I don’t says as but we has to stay on the dole. I tell ye, if Joey Smallwood was to send for we to move to someplace as they was work, us’d be off like a shot. But seems like ’tis only fishermen he wants to move. That man must surely hate the sea.”
By 1963 lumbering in Bay Despair had been reduced to supplying three small mills from the wreckage of the forests Bowater had devastated to such effect that it may well take centuries before trees stand tall again in the country around the bay.
Claire and I rowed ashore to be met on St. Alban’s sawdust beach by the village’s newest resident, a wiry man of about my age. He introduced himself as Doctor Carlos Rodriguez, born in Peru, son of a Japanese mining engineer and an Indios mother.
When Carlos was seventeen, his father took him to Japan to study medicine and there, in 1941, he was conscripted into the Imperial Japanese army as a fighter pilot. He survived the war, graduated as a doctor, married a Japanese girl, and started a family. However, racial prejudice was rampant in Japan and when, because of his mixed blood, he found himself being treated as something of a pariah, he decided to take his family to Peru. There he ran foul of the local medical establishment, which found him embarrassingly overqualified. So when he heard that Newfoundland was recruiting doctors, he decided on one more move, hoping to find a place where he and his would be acceptable. Soon after the family’s arrival in St. John’s, the Department of Health sent them to St. Alban’s.
Carlos greeted us exuberantly, insisting we come to his house, where we met his lovely wife, Teruko, and their four handsome sons, Raphael, Romeo, Hilario, and Antonio. Unable to speak more than a few words of English and very shy, Teruko was eager to make a friend of Claire. Carlos seemed equally pleased to have me to talk to. He enthused about the idyllic life he was going to create for his family, one that would be free of the problems that had bedevilled them in Japan and Peru. He showed me plans for a Japanese-style home he intended to build on a point of land across the harbour, complete with a tea house and a Japanese garden. Teruko showed us examples of her beautiful calligraphy and insisted on dressing Claire in her own bridal kimono–a gorgeous concoction of silks.
We found St. Alban’s to be a motley collection of shoddily built and badly maintained houses. There was a grimy, smelly, and hopelessly ill-equipped four-room school, and two small sawmills stood mired in their own sawdust at the edge of the landwash. All of this was overshadowed by a colossal church towering stark and white above the dishevelled community. This immense structure–the second largest wooden church in all of Newfoundland–was the creation of two men: Father Hayes, long-time priest of St. Alban’s, and Sam Cox, a carpenter from Gaultois. In 1950 the priest decided to replace his rather ordinary though adequate church with something truly magnificent–something approaching the regal grandeur of one that loomed over the Quebec city of Trois-Rivières. He had seen that one in a coloured photo on a postcard and asked Sam Cox to build one like it.
Sam was only a boat builder but, finding the challenge irresistible, he set to work to raise Father Hayes’s vast edifice without benefit of blueprints or plans and with only the small photo as his guide. All his figuring and planning was empirical, and he made his own sketches on wrapping paper.
Ten years after it was begun, the new church was finally completed. Only Father Hayes had any real idea of what it cost his parishioners but it was said that the carved oak pews imported from Italy were worth thirteen thousand dollars. This from a community most of whose able-bodied men were on the dole.
The bishop came and consecrated the new church, and then a strange thing happened. Murmurs of resentment about the cost began to reach Father Hayes, and he was so outraged he refused to hold services in what he was now sometimes referring to as “the cathedral” or even to open its doors to his parishioners.
While we were in St. Alban’s, the imposing door to the new church remained closed and locked. Jack Spencer, who lived at Milltown but was welfare officer for the entire bay, told us Father Hayes intended to keep it locked until his congregation had cleansed itself of malice.
“I think,” said Jack solemnly, “that won’t happen soon. They’re a right stubborn lot. I’ll tell you what they’re like. In 1955 everybody around Head of the Bay got together and raised the money and give the labour to build a doctor’s house and dispensary at St. Alban’s–it being the biggest place–so as to persuade the Department of Health to send in a doctor.
“The first they sent was a young Irishman, fresh out of college, I suppose, and with a pretty good opinion of himself. When he come off the steamer at St. Alban’s he looked the new house over, and all hands thought he’d be right happy with it. But no. You see, it was heated with wood stoves the same as all the houses in the bay, and that waren’t good enough.
“He wanted one of them new furnaces like the rich folk in St. John’s, that you don’t need to poke billets into every hour or two to keep it going.
“Well, skipper, people had put a lot into the place, and St. Alban’s folk let him know they weren’t planning to spend any more on any newfangled stove. Nothing much happened till winter come and heat was needed. Then, ‘I needs a furnace,’ this young fellow says, ‘or I can’t answer for what could happen.’
“When the next steamer come in from Port aux Basques there weren’t no furnace aboard of it. None on the next one neither, or the one after.
�
�’Twas a bad winter for the flu hereabouts. When it hit St. Alban’s, people came crowding into the dispensary. Here’s what the new doctor told them.
“‘You don’t have the flu. What you’ve got is rheumatic fever. ’Tis pretty bad. You must get into your bed and stay there so long as I says. It could be six weeks, but you got to stay there never moving unless you must or the fever will find your heart and that could be the end of you.’
“There was near seven hundred souls in St. Alban’s them times. It should have been a pretty lively place but by the time December come, she was so quiet you’d have thought ’twas a ghost town. By that time half the people was flat on their backs in bed, afraid to move a muscle for fear they’d find their hearts. And the other half was staying in to look after the sick, and deathly afeared they’d come down with the fever too.
“I don’t know where it might have ended but Emmy Collier, a right devil of a woman, got suspicious. She wrote a letter to the department in St. John’s and when she never got an answer, sent off a telegram. St. John’s sent a telegram back to the doctor asking him what was happening.
“Next day the doctor was on the wharf at Milltown ready to catch the steamer, all his gear along with him. He sees Ches Strickland and tells Ches, ‘P’raps you better send word to St. John’s the folks in St. Alban’s is took pretty bad. I’d send it meself but I has to fly back to Dublin to look after me poor old mother.’
“Ches called St. John’s and next day a float plane with a doctor aboard shows up at St. Alban’s. The doctor took one look ashore and flew right back out. Day after that, planes come in thick as flies to a dead moose and they was full of doctors and nurses and the like.
“They went right at it…but do you think they could get them St. Alban’s folk out of their beds? Told them as they only had the flu, but nary a one believed them. Them people was taking no chances. After a while they did begin to get their legs under them and hop about, but very, very careful, and ’twas a couple of months afore the last of them left their houses.”
The Rodriguez family persevered at St. Alban’s for two or three years–until their dream of creating a Shangri-la could no longer be sustained. We never learned what became of them after they left the Bay of Spirits and the island of Newfoundland.
Basques and Penguins
A spell of splendid autumnal weather set in so we cast off from Milltown and went rambling: first to Conne River, where as usual we anchored off and rowed ashore to visit Michael and Emilia John. Though Emilia was now almost helpless, she still retained her sparkle, pressing our hands warmly and stroking Claire’s cheek as fondly as if Claire were her own daughter. Michael did not leave her side for more than a minute or two.
“Not much time left,” he murmured in a quiet aside. “Not going to waste none of it.”
They insisted we have a meal with them and share a grilse–a young salmon–caught that very morning by one of the younger members of the band. We would gladly have stayed several days at Conne but a sou’west breeze was making up, and when Happy Adventure’s anchor began to drag we hurriedly went aboard and got underway.
That night we sheltered in Jack Damps Cove and slept easy under a gigantic moon. In the morning the wind was gone so we motored the short distance to the mouth of Little River. Not to be mistaken for Little Passage, Little River paralleled the Conne. It was singular in that it drained a large and tidal salt-water lake. Ches Strickland at Milltown, who at one time ran a little mill on the river, had told us about it.
“She’s a kind of a tickle, you might say, running into the heart of God’s country. White pine growed so tall in there one time that navy ships used to get their masts out of it. The bestest timber ever sawed on this coast come from Little River. ’Twas a wunnerful sight…afore Bowaters got into it! ’Tis the only place on the Sou’west Coast a man can sail right into the country. In that little t’ing of your’n, skipper, you could go far enough to shoot yourself a bear or a moose right from the deck. Here now, I’ll sketch you off a chart of it.”
Sketch in hand, I poked Happy Adventure’s nose into Little River. Narrow and steep-sided, it had ample depth but also a furious current from the falling tide and the river’s natural flow. Our little ship had to fishtail her way upstream like a salmon. With the engine going full and the propeller churning furiously, it took us two hours to go three miles.
We emerged from the river into a big body of water. Instead of being surrounded by the formidable hills and cliffs that characterized most of Bay Despair, the lake was cradled in rolling lowlands. These had been covered by dense forest but now were mostly reduced to tangles of stumps, felled and discarded trunks, and brush piles–just awaiting a spark before bursting into a monumental conflagration. It was a depressing spectacle. Despite the fine weather, I felt as if we were heading into something akin to Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.
Ches’s sketch showed an anchorage at the eastern end of the shallow lake. Feeling our way across was tricky work, sometimes with only a foot or two of water under the keel and with the knowledge that if we went aground the falling tide would strand us there until the next high tide. Happy Adventure was not flat-bottomed so she would fall over on her side if the water ebbed from under her.
Suddenly a ramshackle skiff propelled by a rattling old outboard shot out of a hidden cove toward us. Its unshaven occupant, a shifty-eyed young man, glumly warned us that when the tide was out we would find ourselves high and dry in the middle of a swamp. He may have been trying to get rid of us; I suspected he had a still hidden in his cove. We took no chances. Happy Adventure came smartly about and we ran back to Little River. The tide and current soon shot us downstream to the safety of Long Reach, where we set course for Roti Bay.
We were greeted at the mouth of the bay by the big seal who seemed to be its guardian. He accompanied us right to the inner end, where we found an indifferent anchorage on sand bottom in a bowl almost surrounded by barren hills plunging steeply into the water. An ideal place for blow-me-downs. Dropping our heaviest anchor, we rowed ashore, landing on sheets of silvery-coloured slate in which millions of tiny purple garnets were embedded, giving the rocks a glittering iridescence. We were tempted to take the time for some serious prospecting in hopes of finding garnets of gemstone size but were afraid to leave Happy Adventure in such an exposed situation. As beautiful as the inner bay was, it wasn’t safe to linger so we moved on to Clay Hole, where we went ashore to dig a bucket of clams and fill another with winkles and blue mussels. Windrows of tiny winkle shells stippled the landwash, each with a neat little hole bored into it by a carnivorous snail called the wolf whelk. These pierced and empty shells seemed to beg to be strung together as necklaces. That evening as we ate a supper of clams and mussels in which we found many minute seed pearls, Claire whimsically speculated about the prospects for a jewellery factory in Roti Bay. “Pearl, garnet, and shell necklaces for very little people.”
After a couple of days and nights of amorous indolence we again set sail, ghosting past Raymonds Point to Harbour le Gallais, a place which had been highly recommended to us by the Dominies. This superb harbour was sheltered by a line of hills crouching like a flock of broody old hens. We anchored in a tight little inner cove separated from Long Reach by a neck of low land and went ashore to explore this grassy spit. It had once been cultivated and still boasted a gnarled old apple tree and a quantity of late but juicy raspberries. There was also a dilapidated tilt ten feet long and eight wide with log walls that stood only three feet high. Despite this, its birchbark-covered roof was so steeply pitched there was headroom inside, where, instead of a stove, was an open hearth with a hole in the roof to serve as a chimney. Two narrow pole bunks cradled mattresses of spruce boughs. There were no windows, and the slab door hung on leather hinges. Cecil Dominie would later tell me he remembered this tilt from his childhood days and that it had been rebuilt several times since then. It stood as an unintended memorial to almost-forgotten times.
Halfway along
the spit we came upon three circular depressions, each about twelve feet in diameter, similar to the fire pits built under the great iron or copper cauldrons in which early Basque whalers had rendered whale blubber into oil. Morgan Roberts had found evidence of a forge on this spit, so I searched the shoreline and discovered several lumps of fused coal and ash with metal slag embedded in some of them. I also found a few fragments of bricks and roofing tiles of the sort brought from Europe by fifteenth-and sixteenth-century Basques for the construction of their tryworks.
A more enigmatic discovery was the remains of a stone-built roadway running at least two miles west from Harbour le Gallais past Patrick Harbour to Grip Island Cove. It appeared to be five or six feet wide except where it had been washed away by the encroaching sea or obliterated by frost settling. Its construction must have demanded great labour. Large foundation stones had first been laid and bedded, then covered with smaller stones carefully fitted to make a “cobbled” surface. Where it passed through bogs and wet places, it had been ditched for drainage.
The purpose of this formidable piece of construction was a mystery. The inhabitants of the abandoned fishing villages of historic times would hardly have built it for they had no wheeled transport and, moreover, like everyone on the Sou’west Coast, travelled and moved their goods almost exclusively by water.
Many years later I was to see roads comparable to it at an excavated and partially restored Basque whaling station in Red Bay, Labrador, dating to the early sixteenth century. These roads had been used to bring cartloads of blubber from shoreside flensing platforms to centrally placed trypots. I believe that, four or five centuries ago, the fires of a Basque tryworks must have been sending pillars of black, oily smoke into the skies above Harbour le Gallais.