by Farley Mowat
One of the last of the light keepers was Henry Marsden, whom I met in Francois in 1966. He and his father before him, and his father before that, had kept the Penguin light through almost a century.
“When our people first come to Fransway they was still penwins out there. Me old granddad see them when he were a youngster. He remembered fleets of English and French fishing vessels laying off the islands on a civil day, sending their boats ashore with most of the crews for to kill birds or take their eggs. They druv the penwins into pens made out of rocks and clubbed they to death. Birds of the flying kind was so many they could kill all they had a mind to just by swinging flails into the air. To make sure the eggs they got was fresh, they’d tromp and smash all the eggs they could see, then come back a day or two after to load up with fresh eggs.
“Them old-timers used to store their ships for the whole summer season with birds and eggs put down in hogsheads filled with salt. But the biggest part of what they took off the Penguins was used for bait in the hook and line fishery. Oftentimes ’twas all the bait they ever needed.
“Vessels come all the way from the Boston States for eggs and feathers. More come across from Spain and Portugal for the ile. They brought along big coppers [cauldrons] and built fires under they, stoked with penwins or other iley birds, sometimes dead, more times still alive. They tried the ile out in the coppers, barrelled it up, and took it aboard for to light the lamps in Europe.
“In me own times fishermen from La Poille to Grey River used to come out in early summer and camp on Harbour Island and fish from there through the hatching season, with birds for bait. ’Twere wunnerful fine trawl bait, certainly. Well, bye, now they’s no more birds to speak about…nor fish neither. ’Tis the way things goes.”
Shape Changer
Having helped bring Happy Adventure home to her mooring in Messers Cove, Jack reluctantly departed on the next westbound coast boat, leaving Claire and me to get on with life in Burgeo.
Perhaps the most momentous event that winter was our acquisition of Albert, a young water dog from La Poille. As big as a Labrador retriever, he was a sway-backed creature, black as ebony except for his white chest, and equipped with webbed feet, the tail of an otter, and the attitude of a lord of the realm. He quickly became an integral member of our little family both ashore and afloat, where he demonstrated that he was a proper seadog: sure-footed, ready for anything, and afraid of nothing.
That summer Claire and I decided to visit a place to the east of Burgeo known to early French mariners as Rivière Enragée, but called by the English settlers Little River, Grey River, or simply River, though in fact it wasn’t a river at all. It would have been better described as a fiord, gulf, or bay even if it did partake of some of the qualities of all three.
It was a shape changer. There was an opacity and obscurity about it that had made it notorious on the Sou’west Coast. Everyone had a story about it: generally a derogatory one. Having heard a number of these, we wanted to investigate but it was not until late in July that we could find the time. Claire tells the story of what ensued.
We moved aboard Happy Adventure anchored in the cove below our house and waited for good weather. It came on a Sunday. At first the air was so still the pealing of the church bell sounded as if it were right alongside instead of a mile away but when we got up a little breeze came puffing out of the west.
“Fair breeze making up, skipper!” the elder Sim Spencer called from shore. “Carry you to Portugal if you’ve a mind to sail there.”
“Not going that far,” Farley shouted back, but already he was preparing to let go the mooring, while I took the gaskets off the sails.
We sailed slowly eastward under the comforting loom of majestic cliffs and headlands, alone on a vast and quiet ocean. It seemed as if the whole wide world belonged to us and I felt sorry for city friends who couldn’t be here to share the wonderful freedom. For lunch we sat in the cockpit and ate bread, cheese, and sardines, and drank red wine from St. Pierre, a standard sort of meal when we were underway in good weather.
By four o’clock we were off the abandoned settlement of Bear Island in the mouth of White Bear Bay, thinking we might anchor here for the night, but there was still lots of light left so we sailed on until Farley pointed the bow toward a barely visible cleft in a wall of rock.
We lowered the sails, started the engine, and were soon steering into a grim-looking canyon, but no sooner had we entered than a wall of turbulent green water rose dead ahead, thundered toward us, and burst over us. Everything loose on deck and below rolled or was washed into the scuppers or the bilges as our ship pitched and tossed as if she were on a roller-coaster ride. Spray drenched me as I hung on with one hand and grabbed at loose objects with the other. Farley clung to the tiller, trying to keep us in the middle of the narrow run, while our dory, which we had in tow, went charging madly off in all directions.
The turbulence ended as suddenly as it had started. We had passed through the narrow entrance to a fiord and were entering a broader stretch of relatively smooth, black water. About a mile ahead I could see a little cluster of houses hemmed in by high, brooding hills reflecting the last glow of the sun.
I wondered how the people there managed to live with furious over-fall at the fiord’s mouth. From everything we had heard about them, they were a puzzle. Even the name of their village was uncertain. The chart we were using called it Jerts Cove, though everyone else seemed to know it as Grey River, or just River.
Its three dozen small houses stood out as vividly as images in a child’s colouring book. Bunched together at the foot of a rocky slope, they seemed to have been built on one another’s shoulders. From high above them a sparkling stream plunged down to run between the houses on its hurried way to salt water.
As we drew closer, we could see a lot of people moving toward the small and rickety wharf. By the time we reached it, most of them had crowded onto it.
We knew that few strangers ever visited Grey River. It was not on the route from anywhere to anywhere. The coastal steamer could enter only when tide, fog, and wind permitted, and when it did manage to get in it seldom stayed more than a few minutes. Very few Burgeo folk had ever been there. They and most other people along the coast seemed to consider the River folk backwoods primitives who talked with a funny accent, wore shabby clothes, were a bit thick between the ears, and couldn’t fathom the worldly ways of their sophisticated cousins in places like Burgeo, Ramea, or Port aux Basques.
Even the children in Messers Cove made fun of Grey River’s reputed sloth and poverty. They told us the people there wore second-hand rags, so that was where Burgeo folk sent old and worn-out clothing. Everyone was on the dole, they said. Burgeo people sang a song about River.
You goes down to Grey River,
the sun shinin’ down.
You’ll see all the young folks
a-layin’ around,
waitin’ for the steamer
to come down the shore
and bring they their cheques
from the government, sure.
The provincial government had made several attempts to relocate the Grey River people to some larger centre such as Burgeo, but not a single family had succumbed to the inducements or the threats from St. John’s. Even though months might pass without a visit from a doctor, a year might go by without a teacher, or several weeks pass without freight or postal service, River folk seemed unshakeable in their determination to “stay where they were at.”
Thirty or forty people of all ages had gathered on the wharf to stare at us as if we were some peculiar creatures the sea had brought to their door. There were blond little girls in faded cotton dresses that hung to a matronly length, little boys in pants with missing knees and shirts with tattered elbows. Almost every child was wearing identical red plastic sandals that, we later discovered, were the only kind of child’s footgear available in River’s one poor excuse for a store.
The women wore an incongruous assortment of moir�
�, taffeta, rayon crepe, and faded pastel cotton clothing that had the indefinable aura of castoffs. I knew this was where many of Margaret Lake’s and Marie Penney’s old clothes ended up, and thought I could recognize some of them, which made me feel embarrassed for the wearers. All the women and the girls over the age of ten were crowned with the same style of home permanent–corkscrew curls as tight as those on a Persian-lamb coat. My hair–straight as a ruler–must have seemed badly out of style.
The older men stood grouped together in the middle of the crowd. Dressed in shapeless and well-worn woollen pants, heavy flannel shirts, and cloth caps, they smoked pipes, chewed tobacco, and watched us fixedly. After what seemed to me like a very long time, one of them ventured a few words to Farley.
“You got only your woman aboard, skipper?”
“That’s right. There’s just the two of us,” Farley replied.
“He’s the captain and I’m the crew,” I added, hoping to get at least a smile.
Every face remained expressionless.
“Any chance to buy a salmon for supper?” Farley asked no one in particular. Grey River was famous for its salmon.
“No, sir. No fishin’ Sundays. ’Tis a sin.”
We went below then, resigned to making do with canned bully beef. While we cooked and ate our meal, some of the onlookers drifted away, to be replaced by new ones. Despite their silent vigil, we took our coffee up on deck, where I watched an entire village fade into the obscurity of dusk then reappear as, one by one, oil lamps were lit, bringing a gentle, golden glow to forty or fifty curtained windows. The soft and subtle light seemed to draw the watchers away from the wharf. At last we were left alone. We crawled into our sleeping bags and fell into an impatient sleep, eager as tourists for morning to come and bring the opportunity to explore this strange place.
Grey River’s thirty-four houses were crowded into a space smaller than a football field. It was stony, steeply sloping land, directly below a monolithic wall of rock that looked about as accessible as Mount Everest. Apparently no one had ever climbed it. I guessed that life here was challenging enough that people did not deliberately look for ways to make it harder.
A gravelled path led up the slope from the wharf into the haphazard knot of houses and sheds. The houses were the usual square, two-storey structures of outport Newfoundland, but even more colourful than usual. Some were turquoise with canary-yellow door and window trim; some pink with blue doors; some orange with green porches.
Although several boats had been fitted with make-and-break engines, there was not one motorized vehicle on the land. In fact, the only things on wheels were a few wheelbarrows. There were not even any horses because there was no pasture and, anyway, a horse would have to have been half mountain goat to get about. There were scraggy-looking sheep wandering everywhere, foraging on meagre tufts of greenery growing from crevices in the rocks. The sheep even crowded hungrily into the cemetery, which was the one patch of level ground that hadn’t been pressed into service for a house site or a garden. Every tiny patch of usable soil was surrounded by a stick fence to protect a few precious potatoes or turnips from the plague of sheep.
All of this was more or less familiar to us, except for one thing. There were no dogs. There was only our Albert, who stayed close to our heels, a little intimidated by the hordes of sheep, which, far from being afraid of him, crowded around as if about to mob him.
Grey River children were as curious as the sheep. As we wandered through the community, women cautiously drew back the curtains to peer out at us and men eyed us askance from sheds and fish stages. But the children’s interest in us was so intense it overcame their shyness. Soon a coterie of youngsters was following close behind, their numbers growing until we formed a Pied Piper procession. They were fascinated by Albert because, we would learn, most had never before seen a dog except when a fishing schooner came into the River with a dog aboard. Dogs were not welcomed and no dog had roamed around River for at least half a century until we brought Albert ashore.
The children were making the most of this novelty. Had he been a camel or a giraffe, Albert could hardly have excited them more. When one brave youth actually dared touch his back, there was such a shout from the rest of the children that Albert lost his usual bold composure and headed back for the boat.
An outport lacking a contingent of black water dogs seemed an inexplicable thing to us. We questioned several residents about it, but the River folk were evasive. It wasn’t until near the end of our visit that we got a clue about this mystery, and not until some months later that we were able to unravel it.
The children seemed to accept us but the adults we encountered on our walk gave only polite nods in passing. Except for one hefty woman with an inquisitive expression who bravely accosted us at her garden gate.
“I heard they was strangers comin’ round so I says I got to see ’em for myself,” she proclaimed, staring expectantly at us.
“Well, it’s a fine day,” Farley offered.
“Yiss, me dears, fine day for the wash.”
While swatting at black flies we chatted about her potato garden and about our “pretty little boat.”
“Don’t have no stomach for boats meself,” she told us, “though when me man gits home he’ll take we in the dory up to Seal Brook berry pickin’.”
“Is your husband away at sea?” I asked.
“No, me dear girl; he’s gone bukams. Been gone a nice while, he has. Gone bukams last year besides.”
We didn’t understand what she was talking about so when we were out of earshot, we asked the children what she meant.
“Means her man gone bukams, sure,” one lad replied with evident surprise at our ignorance. Since he didn’t seem ready to elaborate, we dropped the subject. Perhaps, we thought, the poor man was in a sanatorium or an asylum.
We came to a grey-haired, elderly fellow sitting on the deck of a canary-yellow house, whittling. A dozen hens kept him company, and perhaps gave him courage because he beckoned with his knife and called out, “Fine day to ye, skipper, and you too, missus.”
“That it is,” Farley replied. “What are you busy making?”
“Me brooms, is all. Come up on deck if you’ve a mind. You and your woman, come up now. Henry Young be my name.”
We unlatched the gate and climbed up on the porch, to find him carving something that looked almost as ancient as the concept of a house itself. It was a broom made from a four-foot length of a young birch tree. Originally about two inches in diameter, it had been reduced to half that by a thousand deft knife strokes splitting paper-thin shavings from the top end toward the bottom, where they hung down like a woman washing her hair. The shavings were then bound around with a strip of willow bark to form a thickly tufted head somewhat longer than that of a store-bought straw broom. As we watched the long shavings grow magically toward the end of the stick Henry was working on, he told us he made hundreds of these brooms every year.
“Sells ’em to the fish plants up and down the coast. Finest kind for sweeping they wet cement floors. Plants pay I fifty cents a bundle for six brooms. Got ten bundles going off on the steamer tomorrow, and she comes in.”
I picked up a finished broom that was leaning against the wall. It looked exactly like the kind ridden by witches in the fairy tales I had read and looked at as a child.
Grey River country.
At this point Henry’s wife timidly opened the door, having nerved herself to speak to me.
“Come in, me dear. Can’t bide out here with the men. Come into me kitchen, sure. I’ll bile the kettle.”
Her smile revealed that, like so many outport women of her generation, she had no teeth at all. I followed her in and she shoved a huge, cast-iron kettle over to the hot side of the wood range. “This old thing,” she said, noticing my interest in the battered kettle, which could have been a museum piece from the Middle Ages, “belonged to me poor old grandmother, it did, and her grandmother too. Foinest kind, it be. I leaves the
water into it all night and it never colours. Yiss, me dear, the foinest kind.”
Now that the ice was broken she became as friendly as a puppy, keeping up a steady patter of conversation, only part of which I could understand. She used the same dialect spoken in Burgeo but with a different cadence. Though the two settlements were only about thirty miles apart as the gull flies, she herself had never been so far afield and Henry had been to Burgeo only three times in all his life.
We got back to the wharf just as a shabby workboat from the Lakes’ plant in Burgeo arrived. The Lump, as the plant workers called this relic, was used for such messy chores as hauling loads of fish gurry out to sea to dump. We were surprised to see her so far from home and even more to see the Reverend Mark Genge aboard. Based in Burgeo with his young family, he had the charge of the three parishes of Burgeo, Ramea, and Grey River.
“Did you have a good voyage in that old stinkpot?” Farley asked.
“Oh yes. Thank the Lord it’s a mausey day [a civil day].” He mopped his high brow with his handkerchief. “And we came in on the slack of the tide. I’m no sailor, you know, but this morning ’twas smooth as ile.”
We invited him aboard for something to settle his nerves and his stomach.
Farley wanted to know why the bishop would send him to the Sou’west Coast, given that he was a poor sailor.