by Farley Mowat
“They’s warm-water boats,” her skipper had told me. “Good enough for the summer fishery, I daresays. No better’n man-traps in a winter gale when ’tis freezing hard. Aye, the plants got they cheap enough. ’Twill be us as pays the price.”
Marie Penney’s accountant, a St. John’s man who was sitting beside me at her table that evening in Ramea, put it somewhat differently, “Unfortunately the fishery is a risky business, and we all have to share those risks. Most everyone does so willingly, I believe. Newfoundland fisherfolk wouldn’t expect it to be any other way.”
We made an uneventful passage from Ramea to Grey River. Closing with the snow-streaked and ice-sheathed cliffs that masked the entrance, we shot through the narrows on a rising tide to moor alongside the decrepit wharf.
This was my third visit to Grey River, and I thought I had established good relations with its residents. To my surprise and chagrin, I was met this time with overt hostility. Previously I had been friendly with Frank Young, a man of my own age who, like me, was a veteran of the recent war. He was on the wharf with a number of other men as we came alongside. When I greeted him, he shook a fist at me.
“Best you stays aboard dat t’ing and goes on wit’ her, or could be the worse for ye!” he warned. “And de fellow wit’ de camera too!” he added.
We were lucky to be in the minister’s company. Telling us to remain aboard for the moment, Mark went ashore to see what was bothering the stony-faced men on the wharf.
It did not take him long to find out. Six months earlier I had written an article about the coast-boat service for Maclean’s magazine. Titled by the magazine’s editor “Any Old Port in a Storm,” the piece had been an affectionate look at the steamers, their crews, and the outports they served so well. Unfortunately, it had been illustrated with a drawing of a mythical outport that, by pure coincidence, looked somewhat like River. Furthermore, the scene was peopled with caricatures of what the Toronto artist thought Newfoundlanders looked like. A copy of this magazine had somehow made its way to Grey River and the inhabitants had concluded I was making mock of them. As Mark explained it, “They were fit to be tied. Only it was you they wanted to tie…to a stake.”
Although they listened to Mark’s assurances that I had meant no harm (River folk would not call a clergyman a liar), few of them, especially the Young clan, were inclined to forgive and forget. They believed they had every right to be furious with me for exposing them to contempt and ridicule if nothing worse. Mark managed to establish a truce of sorts before he went off to stay at the home of Aunt Fannie Young, widow of Tom Young, who had been in effect the king of Grey River. Aunt Fannie, a wise and witty woman in her seventies, retained some of her husband’s authority. Now she exercised it with Solomonic skill by sending de Visser and me to stay at the home of Frank Young’s widowed mother, Melita.
“Hospitality is as sacred here as in the tents of the Bedouin Arabs,” Mark explained, “so, whether he likes it or not, that makes Frank Young your protector.”
Aunt Melita gave us her best bedroom. Though not much bigger than a horse stall, it was spotlessly clean. We shared its sagging double bed whose mattress, rather loosely stuffed with seabird feathers, smelt of the ocean and long-departed fish. An ornate chamber pot under the bed posed no problems for me, though John could not bring himself to use it. Nor did he care to avail himself of the holes in the floors of the fish-splitting rooms at the seaward ends of fishing stages. He yearned for privacy, but River was so tightly encompassed by cliffs and water that such was virtually impossible to find.
We tended to keep close to Mark. One bitterly chill morning we accompanied him as he gave communion to Aunt Fannie’s mother, ninety-eight-year-old Lizzy Warren. Though bedridden, Lizzy, at her own insistence, lived alone in the tiny house she had come into at her marriage, cared for by members of her extensive family. Unable to speak, she was nonetheless intensely aware. There was no doubt that she thoroughly enjoyed our visit, especially the communion wine, which she sipped with lip-smacking relish, refusing to relinquish the chalice until it had been drained.
The single downstairs room, which had originally served as kitchen, dining, and living room, was the old lady’s bedroom. Long ago its earthen floor had been covered with worn sails soaked in tar then covered with sand to produce a surface not unlike linoleum. Over the years rough-sawn wooden walls had been covered by layers of painted canvas until they had acquired something of the cracked and murky patina of Old Masters’ paintings. A huge and ornate cast-iron stove dominated the room, whose sparse furniture included two or three birch-framed chairs with seats woven from caribou rawhide.
The walls bore only a single decoration: a large and yellowed photographic enlargement hanging slightly askew in a frame glued together with bits of cloth. The picture was of a raffish-looking, heavily moustachioed man in a cloth cap standing on a wharf beside a worn-looking woman dressed in black. The pair stared fixedly at the camera as the man passed the woman a bottle of what might have been cassia wine from St. Pierre. Although the photo had been dimmed by decades of wood smoke seeping from the kitchen range, I could see that the couple were toothless.
“Nary a dentist on the coast, those times,” Mark explained as we walked away from the house. The woman in the photo was Lizzy Warren herself, he said, but Mark did not know who the man might have been–perhaps Lizzy’s husband.
“Maybe she was thinking of him and that picture when she drank the communion wine. I hope she was. Poor old thing never had much happiness in her life. Widowed by the Great War, she supported herself and several children by cutting birch logs way back in the country to sell for firewood to visiting vessels. She and her elder children had to haul the wood on little slides for they had no dogs, you know. They hauled the birch billets miles and miles over rocky barrens, then down the cliffs to the cove along a gulch so narrow it is barely passable to a man on foot. A week of cutting and hauling might have fetched Lizzy fifty cents from the cook of some fishing schooner forced into the cove by weather.
“Certainly those were hard times in Newfoundland, especially in remote little places like this. Yet they were all in the same boat, so nobody was better off than any other. It was all for one and one for all–a way of dealing with life we seem to be fast forgetting.”
All but a handful of the River folk were Youngs, Lushmans (sometimes spelled Lishmans), or Warrens. Lushmans constituted the second-largest clan, and Fred Lushman, grandson of the Skipper Frank who had been instrumental in saving Howard Blackburn, was their doyen. An eighty-year-old with a failing heart, he shared his home with three “loan children,” two boys and a girl.
Loan children were an integral part of the coastal communities. It was normal practice for large outport families (and most were large) to “loan” children to people who had none of their own, especially to older folk and those who were incapacitated. Thus it was that, by mutual agreement, Frank Young’s oldest son lived with his grandmother Melita, while another and younger son made his home with Aunt Fannie. This custom also had the advantage of spreading the burden of feeding and clothing children throughout the community. Since everyone lived in everyone else’s pocket, loan children suffered no sense of alienation or loss of familial identity. Furthermore, they acquired stature in their own eyes and in the eyes of their peers by shouldering responsibilities for their elders. They earned the affection and regard of the older people, who automatically became surrogate aunts and uncles.
Mark took me to visit Uncle Fred Lushman, with whom we drank endless cups of tea served by the shy twelve-year-old granddaughter who looked after his kitchen needs.
Fred described in loving detail the life he had led as a furrier and countryman. In July of almost every year of his adult life, when canoe travel was at its best, he had paddled a hundred miles or more inland to Bear Pond (really a lake–many Newfoundland lakes are called “ponds”) to a cabin rebuilt time and again by four generations of Lushmans. Here he would spend the summers quite alone, rea
dying his outlying camps, drying or smoking caribou meat and fish, and cutting firewood to last during the long winter months ahead, which would see him snowshoeing through the forests and across the barrens trapping martin, lynx, otter, wolves, and foxes.
Fred never harmed the bears. He regarded them almost as companions in a world where he might not encounter a fellow human being for weeks on end. Nor did the bears bother him. It was as if a pact existed between them.
Early in February Fred would close out his traplines and set out for home, dragging a slide piled with furs over the still-frozen water routes. If, as sometimes happened, he was caught by an early thaw, he would pitch camp and remain where he was until the ice was gone from rivers and lakes. He would use this time to build himself a canoe of willow or birch branches sheathed with caribou hides, in which to complete his journey to the coast.
Arriving back at the settlement, he would exchange his furs for credit at a small store owned by the Penneys of Ramea, a credit that he could only hope would be large enough to provide for his family’s needs.
I noticed he wore a bear’s incisor hung from a brass chain around his neck. The great tooth glowed like an opal from long and intimate contact with his skin.
“’Tis what I keeps to mind I of them times,” he said softly when I admired it. “I misses them bears some bad. They never done no harm to I, nor I to they.”
He had something else to show us. Twelve years earlier while gunning for turrs at the mouth of Grey River, he had shot a “pinwin.” He described the bird as goose-sized “wit’ stubs for wings…mostly black and white it were, wit’ a bill onto it like a splitting knife.”
His description was so evocative of a great auk that momentarily I entertained the wild hope some of the vanished birds might have survived into our times. Responding to my excitement, Uncle Fred sent a boy to fetch the bird’s “head bone” from among the rubbish stored in a nearby shed. The lad brought back a skull with the spear-like mandible of a yellow-billed loon. Largest of the loons, and a rarity even in the High Arctic where I had encountered it two decades earlier, it is virtually unknown in Newfoundland. My disappointment was eased by the realization that at least the memory of the penguin still survived here, a mere dozen miles from the clutch of sea-swept islets where multitudes of great auks had lived and bred.
We were still at River when February went out like a lion and March roared in like a polar bear, bringing freezing rain, pelting sleet, and a huge sea pounding against the coastal cliffs. In the midst of this fearsome weather Geraldine, looking even scruffier and more dishevelled than usual, arrived to take us home. First, though, Skipper Linton told us he would divert to Fransway to deliver supplies to Penney’s store there.
Heedless that there was still, in his own words, “a living starm outside,” he decided to depart for Fransway forthwith. Mark wisely declined to go, preferring to wait for the long-overdue coastal steamer to pick him up and take him back to Burgeo. We should have followed suit but I was so anxious to take advantage of an opportunity to turn de Visser and his cameras loose on Fransway that I insisted we board the old smack, where she lay grinding and thumping against the wharf.
Built of local spruce, Geraldine had several times been repaired above decks but her bottom had never been replanked. In consequence she was “cheesy” below the waterline, a condition that made her especially vulnerable in heavy weather. She really should properly have been condemned, and probably would have been had Linton Oxford not been her skipper.
A short, squat, morose man of about sixty, Linton was widely reputed “not to give much of a damn” whether he lived or died. His wife was a termagant who would not allow him to enter their prim, spotless, and childless house wearing boots or working clothes, nor would she permit him to smoke, drink, or entertain his friends and shipmates there. In consequence, he had long since taken to spending more and more of his time aboard the Geraldine until he could hardly be persuaded to go ashore at all.
His crew for this voyage consisted of a skinny youth from Sydney who had a guitar and fancied himself a troubadour. The other crewman served as cook and sometime engineer.
Rivière Enragée was living up to its ancient name. Fuelled by a falling tide, three days of gales, and a stupendous southerly sea, it had become a chaos of the waters. One look was enough to convince me that Geraldine would certainly founder if she dared the narrow exit. I assumed our skipper would think so too and turn back to wait for better weather, but I did not know Linton Oxford. Geraldine plunged into the maelstrom at full throttle.
The cook vanished into the engine room. A terrified troubadour crawled into the forepeak to await his end. De Visser and I huddled in the narrow confines of the wheelhouse, holding on for dear life as the old vessel pitched, tossed, and corkscrewed. Her skipper seemed stitched to the wheel, except that every now and again he would pop up and down like a yo-yo. This was because he was so short he could barely see out the window. Not that it mattered much. There was precious little to see except walls of water and a dizzying vortex of swirling snow and spume.
Somehow Geraldine endured until Rivière Enragée spat us out into the heaving grey wastes of the open ocean. Then our skipper put the wheel down and set a course as close as he dared to the coastal cliffs. Masked as they were by curtains of spray, they were unreliable visual guides. I think he must have taken his bearings largely from the chilling sound of mighty seas bursting against unyielding rock.
Then the engine quit.
Wind and water began to drive us helplessly back to the westward. The cook appeared in the companionway to tell us the gas line was clogged. Brusquely ordering me to take the wheel, Linton plunged below, where he and the cook disassembled the fuel system and cleared it, spilling a gallon or so of gasoline into the bilges in the process. The fumes filled the wheelhouse, and when Linton pressed the starter button I expected us to go up in roaring flames. But no, the engine caught and we were again underway, labouring painfully eastward down the coast.
Now the skipper tried to contact Fransway on the ship-to-shore radio. His antiquated transmitter would work only if he thrust a pencil into its guts and wiggled it around until some errant and unseen wire made contact. I watched tensely, for much might depend on his success. Geraldine was not well equipped with survival gear. She had no life jackets and, although she did have an old dory strapped across her stern, its bottom had been stove in by some long-ago accident and never properly repaired. The radio would be our only hope if things were to go lethally wrong.
Grey River and Fransway are only twenty miles apart. Three hours of punching through the blizzard had put us about halfway between the two, yet Linton was unable to raise either on the radio. Finally he flicked the pencil away in disgust.
Through Geraldine’s frosted windows, I could see an ominous encrustation of ice building on her foredeck. As its weight increased, her bows plunged deeper and deeper into the heaving seas. There seemed to be nothing we could do about it. Anyone venturing out on deck to try to beat off the ice would almost certainly have gone overboard. But our skipper had a trick up his sleeve. He put the wheel hard over and headed the old boat toward the cliffs, while John and I clung to the wheelhouse stanchions and eyed each other with a wild surmise. Through the starboard window I glimpsed a black loom of rocks streaming with cascades of foam. Then we saw boiling surf close on the other side!
I shouted a warning.
When Linton ignored me, I realized he was deliberately taking us into a foam-filled cleft studded with sunkers that lay between the roaring cliffs and a maze of reefs and islets.
Called Cape Harbour Run, this churning slot turned out to be less than a hundred feet wide and crooked into the bargain. Dories from the abandoned settlement of Cape la Hune used to pick their way through it in calm weather. Dories. Not forty-footers. And not in a Force 7 gale.
I do not know how our skipper managed it. He did not offer to tell me, then or later. I suspect he may have succeeded because he really did no
t care whether he did or not.
When Geraldine staggered past the lighthouse at West Point Head and crawled into Fransway, the harbour seemed more like a centrifuge filled with howling squalls and hurricane gusts than a sanctuary. Nevertheless, the wharves were lumbered with herring seiners and draggers sheltering from the storm. Their crews watched in disbelief as Geraldine struggled toward them, so far down by the bow she must have looked more like a submarine than a surface vessel. Interest in us was particularly acute because some of the skippers had heard Linton on the radio, and all had been dreading the prospect of having to put to sea in an attempt to rescue us.
Heedless of the weather, several local residents came out on a spray-swept wharf to take our lines. Among them was my friend Leslie Fudge. Now he led de Visser and me to his own small house, where we were warmly welcomed by plump and jovial Carol, who revived us with steaming bowls of rabbit soup.
Hot grub, a belt of rum, and the heat from the blazing wood-stove made me so drowsy I didn’t notice the sound of a boat getting underway. It was Geraldine setting off again into the teeth of the gale. According to Les, Linton was bound for Rencontre West.
“What the hell for?” I asked incredulously.
“Well, sorr, they’ve some beer still to the shop there, and Skipper Linton’s some t’irsty man.”
Carol’s eighteen-year-old brother, Calvin, was home from working on a lake boat up in “Canada” all summer. He had planned to spend a while with relatives at the other end of the village but our arrival had scotched that. If he went now it might look as if there wasn’t room for us in the house, and that would reflect on the Fudges’ ability to provide hospitality. A touchy point. I also learned that it would be necessary for Les to take us to visit every single one of the family connections to show he and Carol weren’t trying to hoard us. Visitors had to be shared, just like everything else in an outport.