The Colony of Unrequited Dreams

by Wayne Johnston

  As we drew closer to them, some of them at last noticed the ship and stopped walking. Some dropped to their knees or toppled over onto their backs, others stared as if they doubted that what they saw was real. The crew poured over the side and led the sealers or carried them on stretchers to the ship.

  We moved on. I had counted twenty-three men. That left eighty unaccounted for. I stayed at the porthole. The ship came hard about, and for half an hour we crashed on through the ice, then stopped again.

  My heart rose when I saw what looked to be the balance of the crew standing on a mile-wide ice pan in the near distance. From on deck, there were shouts of “Hurray” and footsteps thumped on the ceiling overhead as once again the ship’s whistle sounded.

  Gradually we drew up close to the ice pan. Mooring lines with grapnels on the end were cast onto the ice, and the pan was slowly pulled towards the ship until it thumped against it.

  For several minutes after the ship stopped, no one disembarked. I saw what I had not been able to through my binoculars: that these were not survivors but a strange statuary of the dead. I was not repulsed by what I saw. I could not take my eyes away.

  Two men knelt side by side, one man with his arm around the other, whose head was resting on his shoulder in a pose of tenderness between two men that I had never seen in life.

  Three men stood huddled in a circle, arms about each other’s shoulders, heads together like schoolboys conferring on a football field.

  A man stood hugging himself, his hands on his arms, shoulders hunched, in the manner of someone who has momentarily stepped out of his house into the cold in shirtsleeves to bid a guest goodbye.

  One man knelt, sitting back on his heels, while another stood behind him, his hands on his shoulders, as if they were posing for a photograph.

  Two sealers stood in a fierce embrace, the taller man with both arms wrapped round the other, holding him against his chest, while the arms of the shorter man hung rigid at his sides.

  Four men lay on their stomachs side by side, all facing the same way as if they had lain down for some purpose or agreed together that they would.

  Only a few men knelt or lay alone, perhaps those who had lasted longer than the others.

  One man sat by himself, his elbows resting on his drawn-up knees, his bare hands frozen to his face.

  The storm had started out as freezing rain. A man who must have been among the first to fall lay encased within a mould of silver thaw.

  I later learned that some who, in their delirium, thought they saw a light ran off in pursuit of it and were never found.

  Joined in some manner of embrace were men who before this journey to the ice had never met, men who had outlasted those they knew best and for warmth or fellowship in death embraced some stranger.

  They were all there, the boys too young and the men too old, who to get a berth had lied about their ages or agreed to half a share; boys younger than me and men older than my father.

  Perhaps, too tired to walk but still standing, they had been buried in snow that had blown away when the storm let up, by which time they were rooted in the ice that lay like pedestals about their feet.

  Some men lay in the lee of a low shelter they had managed to erect, a wall of ice and snow that was barely three feet high.

  I recognized a few of them, but only because of some distinctive article of clothing, like the orange watch cap of the man who every morning made the tea. He lay on his side, his knees drawn up almost to his chest, his head resting on his hands, which were clasped in a prayer-like pillow, palm to palm.

  They had been transformed by their passion on the ice. Each had assumed in death some posture emblematic of his life. Or else they were refined to men that no one knew, as if in each face and posture was inscrutably depicted the essence of the person they had been.

  Everywhere lay evidence of futile acts of courage and self-sacrifice. A man stripped down to his undershirt and coveralls lay prone beside a boy bulked out in two sets of clothes.

  In various places the snow was scorched where small fires had been lit. From each a smudge of soot trailed out, a stain left from the smoke that had been flattened by the wind.

  I did not want to see them moved or see the scene disturbed. I closed the porthole and sat down on my bunk.

  I heard above the wind and the droning of the ropes the sound of ice being hacked and chopped. I heard the coal crank of the hatch at the far end of the ship lurch into motion. The chopping and shouting and winching of the crank went on for hours. When it stopped, I considered opening the porthole but could not bring myself to do it.

  I looked around the sleeping quarters at all the empty bunks. Not all the men had been lost. Not every bunk represented a man who would not be going home. It was impossible to tell which ones did. Three-quarters of them did, but I didn’t know which ones. Except for the bunk of the man who made the tea.

  Something deep within me, which I hadn’t known was there, gave way. My body grieved but not my mind. I felt as though someone who was sitting right beside me was crying, and though I wanted to console him, I could not.

  I felt the ship reach open water. The grinding of the ice against the hull ceased suddenly, the keel rocked from side to side until it balanced and we moved smoothly on. I got up and pounded on the door to be let out. As if, in all the commotion, I had been forgotten, I heard the sound of footsteps running. The hatch slid open and I saw the sky.

  The wind was northerly, offshore, so we could smell the land despite the fresh fall of snow. I had never sailed beyond the smell of the land before and so had never sailed back into it like this. Six weeks we had been at sea. A week longer than it took Cabot to sail from Bristol to Cape Bonavista. I could not only smell the land but also taste it in the air, the coppery metallic taste of rock borne by the wind across the ice. And soon I could smell the city and see the blue haze of woodsmoke in the sky. The Basilica of St. John the Baptist loomed up from the cluster of the buildings on the hill. I could not believe that the city and the ice were of one world. The city looked so reasonable, so plausible, a site in which atrocities not only did not take place, but which also somehow prevented them from taking place elsewhere.

  I looked up and saw the signalman waving his flags from his bunker on the hill above the Narrows, waving to the keeper of the lighthouse at Fort Amherst and to the captains of the pilot boats. The foghorn blew from then until we docked, and minutes after the foghorn started the bells of both basilicas began to ring.

  Word that we had picked up the men of the S.S. Newfoundland reached St. John’s just hours before we arrived early in the afternoon. No one knew at that point how many had died. It was known only that some had survived and some had not. There were rumours, too: one that the Newfoundland alone had ridden out the storm, and that on board her were men who were saved from other ships. Women who did not know their husbands had died consoled women whose husbands had survived.

  Our sails were down, our flags at half-mast as we steamed slowly through the ice, leaving behind us a wake of open water that stretched for miles. I stood by myself on deck. Above me, in the massive scaffolding of masts and spars and rigging ropes, were the small figures of men motionless and stark against the sky, a uniformly grey, after-storm sky that would persist for days. They stood on the horizontal spars as we had after the blessing of the fleet, a hundred feet at least above the ice, hands gripping the rope ladders in which other men sat as though on children’s swings. Black smoke billowed from the towering smokestack halfway between mid-ship and the stern. The ship was under full throttle but barely moving, so thick and compressed was the ice. But at last we broke through the raft ice near the Narrows. The men in the rigging, who at this point would normally have clambered down, remained aloft.

  Twice as many people as had turned out for the blessing of the fleet were on the waterfront. It looked as if the entire population of the island, ordered to evacuate, were awaiting the arrival of some massive ship. They had come ill-dressed
from their row houses on the heights, down hills so steep that even when the ground was bare you could hardly keep from running. On this day it was so slippery that it was better to walk up to your knees in snow than risk the streets. They had come well-dressed from the valley sides and from the homes along the city streams, and in leather aprons and overalls from the factories of Water Street and the cod-crammed stores of Harbour Drive. There were so many people that some could get no closer to the harbour than the “coves,” the little streets that from Water Street led down to the apron. They stood on rooftops, on ledges, hung out of windows in threes and fours.

  We docked at the berth the pilot-boat captains had cleared when they heard the ship was coming. Even the sheltered harbour was partly clogged with ice because of the storm, but a passage had been cleared from the Narrows to the apron.

  The crowd was eerily silent at first, but all at once there was an anxious babble of queries, pleas for reassurances and a murmuring of rumours and conjecture. I saw no one I recognized, though I found out later that many people who had come out to meet me were there, my family, my publisher, Fielding. All that had sustained my mother through the storm was the knowledge that I was not allowed to leave the ship.

  When the gangplank was lowered, the ’Stab made room for a handful of thick-moustached men in bowler hats and heavy overcoats, officials of the company that owned the Newfoundland. First, the injured were removed. Two sealers carried a man with heavily bandaged hands and a face blistered with frostbite down the gangplank on a stretcher. He held his hands gingerly above his chest and stared at them, seemingly oblivious to the crowd through which the sealers bore him to a covered Red Cross cart. Men all but mummified in bandages were carried off on stretchers. A few were greeted by relatives weeping with relief, but most, not being from St. John’s, were merely gawked at. Only when a pair of sealers rashly took it upon themselves to roll back the tarpaulin that covered the hold did those at the front of the crowd see what the company that owned the S.S. Newfoundland had ordered that no one be allowed to see.

  “Put that tarp back on, for God’s sake,” Captain Wes Kean roared. The two men hastily rolled the tarp back into place. “What is it?” people said. A man blessed himself, and along the edge of the apron men and women dropped to their knees and leaned their arms on the wooden beams along the dock.

  Word of what had been seen spread through the crowd. People related to crew members of the S.S. Newfoundland fought to get closer while the constabulary at last linked arms and would not let them through. “Did Andrew Hodder make it?” an old man shouted up to the men who still stood on the cross-spars of the ship. Everyone stared up at them. I did. I expected them to know the answer to the question. They were like birds perched among the leafless branches of a tree. “Does anybody know if Andrew Hodder made it?” the old man said again, as if he could not fathom their silence.

  Soon such questions were being shouted from throughout the crowd, hopefully, despairingly. The men in the rigging seemed to look beyond the crowd at the city that stretched out behind it. A member of the ’Stab climbed the first few rungs of the rigging rope on the mainmast and asked that the immediate families of the crew of the S.S. Newfoundland proceed to the Harvey and Company warehouse. “Immediate families only,” he shouted.

  The rest of us stood still and watched as, wide-eyed with bewilderment and dread, the suddenly conspicuous relatives slowly made their way eastward down the apron, the onlookers parting to let them through and to see them better. The man who had blessed himself wandered off with his hand on the near shoulder of a woman who walked, head down, beside him.

  I rushed off the ship, ran down the gangplank into the crowd, who clutched at me, begging me for news. The earth was so suddenly solid and motionless beneath my feet that my legs buckled. I would have fallen had I not been so hemmed in. When I was deep enough into the crowd that none of the people I was passing had seen me leave the ship, I slowed down, tried to catch my breath and, when I couldn’t, began to run again. My ability to suspend belief in my own mortality was for the moment gone. Death, who I had thought would stay on board, who I had thought was on the ship only because the sealers were, was right behind me.

  Once I was out of the crowd, a spell of dizziness hit me like a gust of wind. I stumbled backwards and almost fell, lurched against the side of a warehouse, hands on the wall, head hung, shoulders heaving. I turned my back to the sea and the ship and looked up at the stunted, wind-levelled spruce trees of the Brow.

  In the days to come, I and all the newspaper reporters of St. John’s pieced together the story of the men of the S.S. Newfoundland. They were caught out on the ice because they had had been sent away from the Stephano, the ship that was nearest to them when the storm began, sent back to their own vessel by Captain Abram Kean, father of the Newfoundland’s skipper, Westbury. They had no hope of finding their ship and must have known it, but they had uncomplainingly set off in search of it anyway, with snow and darkness coming on. They had left the Newfoundland lightly dressed, for the plan was that they would be back on board before the sun went down. They were fifty-eight hours on the ice without fuel, food or shelter.

  I thought often of the men of the S.S. Newfoundland. I was haunted by the image of them turning compliantly about when Kean told them to, preferring to risk the blizzard than defy him, setting out on their doomed walk across the ice.

  I thought of the second mate, George Tuff, the leader of the ice party who, though he knew the storm would soon be at full force, did not dare to even ask Kean to let them come aboard, let alone demand it. But I thought mostly of old man Kean, who was too miserly to offer those men the safety of his ship and sent them off to find his son’s ship rather than have them sit on his, eating his provisions and using up his oil and coal.

  Aside from the above story, which we pieced together from the survivors, I wrote two stories, one about the living and working conditions of the sealers and the other about the last days of the few men whose names I knew. I could not write about the men I had seen on the ice. I tried to but could not.

  Neither of the stories was published. The incident was officially investigated and petitions were circulated calling for the arrest of Abram Kean, but little came of it. The seal hunt continued and Kean went on to become the first sealing captain to cull a million seals.

  Many people asked me about the S.S. Newfoundland, but the only person I spoke to about it was Fielding, who did not ask. My brothers and sisters asked. I knew my mother would have listened, but I could see she was praying that I would keep to myself whatever I had seen.

  So I told Fielding, one night in my boarding-house. Told her as much as I could bear to tell her or find words for.

  When I was finished, I shook my head, my mind reeling. “I don’t know,” I said.

  “I don’t know either,” Fielding said. “Things happen to you, or you see things, and you change. And soon you can’t remember how things were before you changed. That’s the strangest part, I think. You know things used to be different, but you can’t remember how. I don’t think it happens to everyone. Some people stay the same no matter what. Or maybe they just seem to. I don’t know.”

  For months after my return from the seal hunt, I had the feeling of having awoken from some unremembered dream. At night I lay awake as I had on the Newfoundland while the sealers slept through the ceaseless racket of the coal crank and the pelt chute. One night I had got up and removed from beside a sealer a pelt that had landed in his bunk. I had never touched a pelt before. The fat beneath the fur was inches thick, thicker and more unwieldy than the sod we ripped up from the field behind the house to plant a few potatoes. It was so heavy and so slippery I could barely move it. I had intended to throw it back in the chute but had to leave it on the floor. I remembered the feel of the pelt in my hands, my thumb on the fur, my fingers slick on the blubber underneath. My hands were bloodsoaked when I dropped the pelt; I wiped the palms flat on my thighs and on my shirt as I had seen the
sealers do.

  The dead of the Newfoundland were not even in the ground when the seal skinners, standing shoulder to shoulder along the waterfront, were skinning pelts on sloping tables at the foot of which lay tubs into which tumbled the hunks of blubber they hacked off with their knives. Once the sealskins were scraped clean, they would be sent to hide houses the world over, including a few in St. John’s. Someone somewhere would wear a sealskin hat made from a seal killed by a man from the S.S. Newfoundland.

  It was while I was watching the skinners that Grimes approached me. He was so well-dressed that I took him for a merchant until I saw the little wooden wheelbarrow beside him. It was piled with blue pocket-sized books. He raised his bowler hat in greeting. “George Grimes,” he said. “Member of the House of Assembly.” He reached into the wheelbarrow and handed me a book.

  “I am giving you this book,” he said, his tone formal, the words sounding rehearsed. “It is specially designed so that you can carry it with you anywhere you go. I want you to read it, and if, after doing so, you want to be a socialist, I want you to come see me at this address.” He handed me his card. Then he moved on and repeated his spiel to the person next in line.

  “Who corrupted the Senate? The capitalists. Who fixes congressmen? The capitalists. Who purchased the Illinois state legislature? The capitalists. Who bought the St. Louis aldermen? The capitalists.”

  So the Illinois state legislature and the St. Louis aldermen had been bought. I was outraged, though I could not have found either Illinois or St. Louis on a map. For years afterwards, whenever I heard the word capitalist, what came to mind was the St. Louis aldermen as I had pictured them when I was sixteen, a couple of dozen burgomasters sitting around in a circle, rubbing their hands together with glee at the prospect of being bought.