by Farley Mowat
We had roast caribou for dinner. Les happily told us the deer were plentiful on the high plateau a few miles inland, but the meat we were eating was illegal for, although caribou had always been an essential part of the sustenance of the coast communities, the provincial government had now decreed they were to be “protected” so it could sell hunting licences to sports hunters from St. John’s, the United States, and Canada.
My berth for the night was a mattress on the floor of one of the two small bedrooms. John got the narrow bed, which was normally shared by the Fudges’ children. Calvin got the daybed in the kitchen, while the kids scrunched in with their parents. The little house was crowded to busting but it felt cosy despite, or because of, the blizzard raging outside. I fell asleep thinking of Les’s brother, one of the lighthouse keepers on the Penguins, marooned there long past his relief date because no vessel could get to them.
Next morning Les told us some of the men were going to try to fish despite the foul weather. I decided John and I should go too so he could photograph this mainstay of another time.
Les borrowed a big motor dory from Chesley Pink, and we set out, bundled up to the ears against a bitter wind and freezing spray. It was a hard punch to get clear of the harbour and once at sea we could find only one dory. She was fishing about a mile south of Western Head and pretty well hidden by southerly swells and a cross sea from the nor’easter. It wasn’t until we were a couple of hundred yards from her that Les was able to recognize her as his father’s boat. Clad in black oilskins, sou’westers, and rubber boots, sixty-seven-year-old Sam Fudge and his partner, Joe Touching, about the same age, were hauling trawls–half-mile-long lines with baited hooks set along them at intervals of a couple of feet. They had set these a week ago and hadn’t been able to get back out to them since.
How they kept themselves in the dory I’ll never know. They worked standing up in a sixteen-foot cockleshell that was pitching and tossing like a wild thing. We weren’t much better off. John could spare only one hand for his camera, and I had to grab his shoulders to keep him from pitching overboard. Sam’s little dory kept disappearing from sight into the troughs as we slowly circled her. Each time she went down I wondered if we’d see her come up again, but of course she always did.
Heaving and hauling back on the trawl line, the men were getting an occasional two-or three-pound cod. I was appalled to realize that they were fishing bare-handed though spray was freezing to their oilskins. As their dory plunged and skipped through the breaking seas, they had to perform a weird kind of ballet in order to stay on their feet–and in the boat. It had taken them an hour and a half to row out, and they would be able to fish for only three or four hours before it was time to row in again.
They hadn’t even finished hauling the first of three trawls when we’d had enough. We headed in through a wonderful silvery light produced by an unseen sun glinting through snow squalls and we were half-frozen by the time we got ashore, but Carol restored us with bowls of turnips and potatoes simmered all night on the back of the stove with slabs of salt beef and salt-pork ribs. Les called this the finest ballast in the world: “Hold you down in a hurrycane, so it will!”
On Saturday afternoon (“evening” in an outport), we scrambled along the shore path to visit Sam Fudge and Annie, his bright-eyed wife. They were entertaining Joe Touching and Ches Pink in their little square house below the granite outcrop called the Bishop’s Mitre.
Uncle Sam, as everyone called him, and Joe had rowed in from the “grounds” that day with about four hundred pounds of small cod in their dory. What remained after they had headed and gutted the fish would be picked up by the collector smack from Ramea when and if she could make the trip.
Joe and Sam would see no cash for their cod. Instead they would get a credit on Penney and Sons’ books of about five dollars each toward debts incurred at the company store. As Uncle Sam acknowledged, “’Tis no easy thing to stay squared up on the merchant’s books and not drop back.”
Sam and Joe’s cod would be offloaded at the Ramea plant to be filleted, packed, and frozen mainly by women and girls earning thirty cents an hour. Then the Caribou Reefer would carry the frozen fillets to Gloucester to be sold on the U.S. retail market at forty cents a pound. The system never failed to infuriate me. On this occasion, fuelled by a couple of shots of Uncle Sam’s white lightning, I let loose a tirade about the plight of the outport fishermen.
Sam and the others listened politely while I ranted about the inequities of the system and the rapacity of the “captains of industry,” as Newfoundland fish plant owners liked to be styled. To my disappointment none of the listeners rallied to my theme. A strained silence followed my outpouring, finally broken by Uncle Sam.
“Yiss, me dear man,” he said, pondering his words, “’tis hard lines sometimes. Stormy times as might make a man wonder could he do better on a different voyage.”
He paused and looked slowly around the table at his relatives and friends.
“The truth on it be, me sons…I don’t believe as he could. We shapes our course as we wants to, with them as we wants alongside.”
His glance drifted back to me.
“The truth on it be, sorr…we be well enough satisfied in this old hole-in-the-wall. ’Tis our place, you understands. A hard shore betimes, but we wants for nothin’. All the dollars they fellows in St. John’s got stowed away won’t buy what Fransway’s got. We knows where we belongs.”
This assertion seemed to change the mood. Everyone, Sam’s wife included, had another belt of the white stuff and everyone began having a proper time. People kept dropping in–sidling in through a door that was quickly opened and shut against the wheening wind and driving snow. Men, women, and children crowding into Sam’s kitchen brought something edible or drinkable. They also brought news.
We heard that Geraldine had been driven ashore in Rencontre (which didn’t surprise me) but was thought to be salvageable (about which I was dubious). In any event, it seemed certain we would not be sailing home in her. And a big longliner had just come in after having somehow threaded her way through the snakepit of shoals and sunkers surrounding the Penguins to bring off Simeon Fudge, one of the light keepers. He soon showed up at his father’s house with his very pregnant wife in tow. They were followed by the crews of the rescuing longliner and of another from Grand Bank armed with bottles of black rum from St. Pierre.
An accordion appeared and things got really lively. There was no room for group dancing, so everyone was content to step-dance solo and, as Uncle Sam happily noted, “like to have stamped me house into a pile of splits [kindling].”
There was singing too–long, narrative songs sung to ancient tunes–about sealers, whalers, captains, widows, lovers, trappers, merchants, even one about a famous life-saving dog with the inexplicable name of Hairyman.
Smoke from pipes, cigarettes, and the roaring stove swirled around us, giving the whole scene a dreamlike quality and reminding me of a “time” I had experienced in an Inuit encampment in the Barrenlands. There was the same uninhibited enthusiasm, the same joyful sense of being part of a life bigger than one’s own.
Around midnight Carol, Annie, and the other women served up an iron cauldron full of stewed turrs, with raisin duff and platters of fried cod tongues, cheeks, and sounds on the side. This was followed by lassy (molasses) pudding with rum sauce.
It became too much for John and me so we retreated into a bedroom and crashed. About three in the morning the moan of a steamer’s horn throbbed through the tumult inside and outside the house, announcing the arrival–five days late–of the westbound steamer. John and I were galvanized into action for we knew she would pause only briefly. But as we scrabbled into our clothes, Les appeared in the doorway.
“No need to run for it, me sons!” he cried merrily. “Nonia’ll not get her mooring lines back ’til you two is snug aboard. Us’ll see to that! Wind’s in our sails tonight and we be running full and by. You’m in the best of hands!”
The Whale
We passed a good part of the next three years living happily in Burgeo. Although we spent as much of our time as we could on the Sou’west Coast, demands on a writer’s life forced us to travel to the Canadian mainland and sometimes much farther afield. During the latter part of 1966 circumstances conspired to keep us away from Burgeo for almost half a year. Not until mid-January of 1967 were we free to come home.
On the fifteenth of that month we boarded the old Baccalieu at Port aux Basques. Skipper Ro Penney tugged at the whistle lanyard, and Baccalieu’s throaty voice rang deep and melancholy across the spume-whipped harbour as she backed out into the stream. Once clear of the fairway buoys, she plunged her head into a rising sea and headed east. Claire and I went below, where most of the passengers were gathered in the dining saloon for tea. As the nor’easter whined through the ship’s top-hamper and her old reciprocating engine thumped its steady beat, we listened to the gossip of the coast.
“Heard the gov’mint’s goin’ to close out Grey River,” said one young fellow.
“Hah! By the Lard Jasus!” a stubble-bearded fisherman snorted into his cup. “They fellers in St. John’s goin’ to need a cargo of dynamite to shift Grey River.”
“Fish prices is down,” grumbled someone.
“Aye,” a companion replied, “but there be a wunnerful lot of deer in the country. Thicker’n flies on a fish flake.”
Politely the owner of a Burgeo longliner asked where we had been.
I could not resist a little bragging. “Right across the Arctic from Baffin Island to Alaska. Then to Russia and all the way across Siberia.”
No one appeared at all impressed.
“Roosia, eh? Yiss…well now, no doubt you and your woman’ll be some glad to be back in Burgeo. They’s been some wunnerful glut of herring on the go there this winter. Nothin’ like it been seen for fifty year.”
At dusk next evening the steamer poked her nose into the run behind Rencontre Island and soon thereafter Captain Penney laid her sweetly alongside Burgeo’s snow-dusted wharf. As the lines were made fast, an agile little man separated himself from the crowd on the dock and came forward to meet us, his narrow face lit by a smile of welcome. Sim Spencer had come to ferry us home.
He ushered us aboard his dory, stowed our luggage, and cast off. It was bitterly cold and a film of rubbery cat-ice was rippling over the runs between the islands. Unexpectedly Sim shoved the rudder hard over, making the dory heel so sharply that Claire and I slid sideways on the wet thwart. Sim was pointing seaward, shouting one word over the clatter of the engine.
“Whales!”
Beyond the black and glistening Longboat Rocks something else black and glistening surged into view, then sank smoothly from sight, leaving a plume of mist. It was followed by another phantom shape, then another and another. These blurred glimpses made for a thrilling homecoming. As Sim guided the dory into Messers Cove, I asked when the whales had appeared.
“First part o’ December…along o’ the herring scull. They’s five, maybe six of they…the biggest kind.”
As we scrambled up onto Sim’s icy stage, the whales were lost to mind in the excitement of our long-delayed homecoming. All the lights in our house were burning. When we stomped across the storm porch and went inside, we found both stoves roaring. Fourteen-year-old Dorothy Spencer had swept and polished every inch of the house. Old Mrs. Harvey had sent over two loaves of oven-hot bread. And bubbling fragrantly on the range was a boiled dinner: cabbage, turnips, potatoes, onions, salt beef, and moosemeat.
Our home, which had stood empty for many months, was as warm and welcoming as if we had never left it. As Sim sat himself down in front of the Franklin woodstove, nursing a glass of rum, other visitors began arriving to welcome us back. Then, with familiar uproar, Albert came dashing into the kitchen bearing a dried codfish in his mouth as a homecoming present from Josh Harvey. Uncle Josh followed close behind the dog, gnome-like, and grinning thirstily as he spied the rum bottle on the table. During our absence Albert had lived with Josh and his wife, and dog and man had spent most of their time together in acrimonious debate, for both were inveterate argufiers.
Rather reluctantly, Albert delivered the cod into my hands. He sniffed in a perfunctory manner at our luggage with its foreign smells from Irkutsk, Omsk, and Tiblisi, then climbed onto the kitchen daybed, grunted once or twice, and went to sleep.
Our homecoming was complete.
Burgeo had changed enormously during the five years we had lived there. Premier Smallwood’s centralization program had resulted in the closure of several adjacent outports and the migration of their residents to Burgeo, which was a designated “growth centre.” Most of the newcomers had settled on Grandy Island as near to the fish plant as possible, with the result that the eastern portion of that island had been turned into a wasteland of rusting cans, broken bottles, and building debris. The human wastes of an exploding population had combined with the offal from the plant to thoroughly befoul the adjacent shoreline and the little coves where working fishermen kept their boats.
Spencer Lake, ever anxious to bring the benefits of modern life to Burgeo, had opened a supermarket that had put many of Burgeo’s small shops out of business. Electricity had spread its web through an increasingly congested maze of houses. In 1962 the first two cars (our Morris Minor and a Jeep for the doctor) had been unloaded from the coastal boat but by 1967 there were thirty-nine cars and trucks rattling themselves to pieces on the stony tracks within the village. They could go nowhere beyond Grandy Island because there were no roads, but snowmobiles had appeared and were snarling out across the barrens in pursuit of caribou.
There was also a fine new school, built to mainland standards, staffed by teachers skilled at denigrating the old ways and arousing in their students a hunger for the golden future promised by the industrial millennium. Unable to assuage that growing hunger locally, some men were now spending most of the year working away, either in lumber and mining camps in the north of Newfoundland or on the Canadian mainland.
Although much had changed–and very quickly–not many local people foresaw the inevitable consequences.
Uncle Josh Harvey did.
In the evenings Uncle Josh would sit at his kitchen table listening disdainfully to a squalling little radio as it yammered out the litany of hate and horror, suffering and disaster, offered up as news. When the tale had been told, Josh would switch off the radio, pour himself a belt of alky, and let fly.
“By the Lard livin’ Jasus, dem mainland fellows is gone foolish as a cut cat! Dey got to tinker wit’ every goddam t’ing dere is. And everyt’ing dey tinker wit’ goes wrong. And dat, me darlin’ man, dat’s what dey calls progress!
“Oh yiss, me son, dey believes dey’s de smartest t’ings God put on dis old eart’, dem politicians and dem scientists and all dem big-moneyed fellers. But I tells ye, bye, de codfish and de caribou be ten times smarter. Dey got de sense to leave well enough be. Dey’ll niver blow up de world, no, nor pizzen it to death.”
He minced no words when describing what he thought about the new way of life in Burgeo.
“Dem poor bastards works at de plant, workin’ for wages and t’inkin’ dey’s some lucky. I tells you what dey is, me son…dey’s slaves! De worstest kind o’ slaves ’cause dey’s grateful for de chance to work for Mister Lake in dat stinkin’ shithole for de rest o’ dere lives so dey can buy a lot o’ goddam t’ings is no more use to dey than legs on a fish. Cars, bye, and telyvision. Sewry pipes and hout-board ingines. Dem fellows don’t know no end to what dey wants no more. Dey’s comin’ out the same as people upalong in Canada and America. Dey wants it all. Mark my words, sorr, and dey gets what dey wants dey’s goin’ to choke dereselves to deat’ on dere own vomit, and likely de whole world wit’ dem.”
The pod of fin whales–almost the last of thousands of their kind that had lived in the waters off the Sou’west Coast–remaine
d on our doorstep as it were, fattening on the schools of herring. We had only to look out our southern windows to see them fishing. Standing on our porch we could even hear the mighty swoosh as they surfaced to blow and to breathe.
During Christmas week their occupancy was challenged by a fleet of seiners–great steel vacuum cleaners that sucked up herring with terrifying efficiency. The whales did not take kindly to these newcomers. A few days after the arrival of the seiners, the fin family shifted a few miles eastward to an inlet called The Ha Ha, which the insatiable seiners dared not enter because it was too well guarded by sunkers.
The whales were not alone in The Ha Ha. They shared it with a number of Burgeo men, including the Hann brothers, Douglas and Kenneth, from Muddy Hole, fishing cod nets from open boats and dories. Initially they had been alarmed by the arrival of the whales.
“She’s a right tight place, The Ha Ha, and we t’ought, what with near a dozen fleets of cod nets into it, they whales was bound to go foul of the gear or the boats. Well, sorr, they never fouled nothing. They’d pass under our dory close enough a man could have scratched their backs with a gaff, and never bothered us. They went about their business, so us fellows went about ours.”
Set in the middle of a mile-wide tongue of rocky land separating The Ha Ha from Short Reach was Aldridge’s Pond, connected to The Ha Ha and the reach by two narrow pushthroughs navigable by small boats at high tide. Fishermen used the route through the pond as a shortcut. When, on January 29, the Hann brothers left The Ha Ha heading back across Aldridge’s bound for Short Reach and the fish plant, they were disconcerted and alarmed to find a whale in the pond.
“I tells you, me son,” Douglas remembered, “she scared we some bad. She were big enough to swallow the dory and room to spare. We never wasted no time. We was out of the pushthrough into Short Reach like a rat out of a red-hot stove! We t’ought it wunnerful queer she’d got herself into the pond until we see Short Reach were pretty near choked up with herring. We supposed a good lot had spilled into the pond–the tide being right high–and the whale must have followed after so fast she never knowed it was too shoal until her belly dragged on the rocks. But she’d so much headway she drove right through; then she were trapped.”