The Boat Who Wouldn't Float

by Farley Mowat

  At seven o’clock he arrived at Muddy Hole. The fish plant had just let out, and scores of girls in white aprons and rubber boots, and dozens of men in overalls and rubber boots were pouring out of the stinking building in which they had done their day’s servitude. They were stopped in their tracks by the tremendous blare of a tri-tone horn.

  At first they thought some strange vessel must be entering the harbour; then one of the girls saw the glint of the setting sun upon a mass of polished chrome poised on the lip of the rocky slope above the settlement.

  This was a visitation the likes of which none of the inhabitants of Muddy Hole had ever seen before. As they stared, transfixed, the flame-coloured monster on the crest eased forward over the lip of the descent. That galvanized them into action. A hundred arms began to wave as hoarse voices were raised in a great shout.

  Jack, at the wheel of the red beast, was delighted.

  He thought the people were welcoming him to Muddy Hole. He also thought he was still on the ill-defined track which led down the boulder scree to the shore of the cove.

  He was wrong on both counts. There was no road, and the inhabitants were trying vehemently to warn him of this fact.

  “My son!” one of the observers of the scene told me afterwards. “It were a wunnerful sight to see!”

  And here I had better explain that in Newfoundland the word “wonderful” still means what it used to mean in older times: full of wonder, full of awe.

  The car negotiated the first few yards without incident, then the slope abruptly steepened and although Jack, suspecting by now that all was not well, tramped on the brakes, it was too late. Down came the red behemoth, careless of the boulders in its path and heedless of a number of split-stick fences, leaping and bounding with the abandon of a hippopotamus driven mad by hashish. Things flew out of it. Two thirty-gallon, galvanized tin tanks intended for the boat (one for water and one for fuel) that had been insecurely reposing in the back seat, rose up and described glittering parabolas in the evening air. The trunk flew open, and Jack’s modest assortment of seagoing gear, five suitcases and some smaller oddments, abandoned ship.

  Suddenly it was all over. The car stood still, its shiny face buried in the end wall of a sheep shed. For a long minute none of the watchers moved. Before they could run to the rescue Jack stepped out of the small dust cloud that hung over the battered shed.

  As might be expected of a man who, as commander of a motor torpedo boat, once attempted to make a new entrance into St. John’s harbour through a four-hundred foot granite cliff, he had lost nothing of his cool. Blithely he made his way down the remainder of the slope. He was as nonchalant as if he were about to board a luxury cruiser moored to the carpeted docks of the Royal Yacht Club at Cowes.

  Enos nervously stepped forward to meet him. He was completely befuddled by the spectacular nature of Jack’s arrival. Instead of guiding Jack to his house, pouring him a drink, and holding him there until I returned, Enos obediently responded to Jack’s imperious demand that he be taken to the boat at once.

  Enos conducted the jaunty and resplendent visitor directly to the stage. Jack took three steps out on the oil-soaked poles, stepped on a putrid piece of cod liver, and his feet went out from under him. Appalled, Enos and three or four other men leapt at him, rather than to him, and in their awkward attempts to help him up—they shoved him overboard.

  Although years have fled since then, Jack still refuses to talk about this episode. He claims he cannot remember it at all. I suspect his mental blackout resulted from the ministrations he received that evening from Enos and Enos’s seven husky daughters. The strain of spending several hours in an overheated kitchen, being force-fed by a clutch of Valkyries while clad only in a corset and inadequately swathed in a blanket; and while attempting to establish human contact with eight people who seemed to speak no known language, is explanation enough.

  Obie and I arrived back at Muddy Hole at midnight. Fortunately Jack was asleep by then. It was with a heavy heart and dubious hopes of the morrow that I crawled into my sleeping-bag.

  I was awakened early. Jack stood by my bed wearing a blanket and an anxious look.

  “Hi,” he said. Then, tautly, “Where in hell’s the bathroom?”

  Now it is to be borne in mind that Jack is the product of a very good private school, an old Toronto family, and a life of comfort if not of luxury. He is not one of your rough-and-ready pioneering types. He likes his conveniences. He is used to them and he is unhappy without them.

  Muddy Hole homes, however, do not boast many conveniences. There are no indoor toilets and there are no outdoor toilets. Ladies keep porcelain pots under their beds but men do not. This seems unfair and, indeed, downright cruel, until one is inducted into the mystery of male behaviour in an outport.

  On my first visit to Newfoundland it took me several days to resolve this mystery, and I suffered accordingly. However having become a member of the fraternity I was able to spare Jack the agonies of having to find out for himself.

  “Hello there. Have a good sleep? Yes? Well, you go on down to the stage; you know, the wharf thing made of sticks. And there’s a little shack on the shoreward end of it. It’s called the fish store and every fisherman has one. You go inside and you’ll find a hole just beside the splitting table, where they dump the cod gurry into the water. And, oh yes, better take some paper with you.”

  Jack’s face was a mirror of the struggle taking place within him. I was touched by the pleading look in his eyes, but it was necessary to be firm.

  “Look,” I said gently, “you don’t have any choice. Not unless you want to try sneaking into the girls’ room to borrow the pot.” (All seven daughters slept in one room in two beds.) Jack flinched. “And as for the great-out-of-doors, forget it. You’ll find yourself entertaining five or six little boys and as many dogs, all of whom will spring full-blown from nowhere as soon as you think you’re alone.”

  Jack moaned a little, gave me a bleak look and headed out the door. He was gone a long time and in his absence the girls got up and lit the fire. By the time he returned they were preparing breakfast.

  I felt sorry for Jack, truly sorry. I well remembered my own first visit to a fish store when, perched precariously between wind and water, and surrounded by pungent tubs of codfish soaking in brine, I had injudiciously looked down to behold a consortium of flatfish, sculpins, crabs, and eels staring hopefully upward at me out of the shallows.

  Traumatic as the experience must have been, Jack managed to rise above it. But he nearly collapsed when the smell of breakfast struck him. He is a gourmet and a delicate eater. Furthermore he has a weak stomach.

  He clutched my arm so hard it hurt and whispered hoarsely in my ear.

  “What in God’s name is that?”

  “That,” I explained cheerfully, “is Newfoundland’s national dish. A special treat for visitors. It’s called fish-and-brewis.”

  “Never mind the name. What’s in it?”

  “Well, basically it’s a mixture. You take hard bread or ship’s biscuits and soak them all night to make them soft and to get rid of the weevils. And you take some shore-dried salt fish and soak it all night, ‘watering it’ is the term. Then you boil the fish and the hard bread and when it’s all nice and mushy you pour a cup of spitting hot sowbelly fat over it, and then….”

  I never finished my explanation. Jack was already on his way back to visit the sculpins and the eels.

  Later that morning when, with the aid of the jeep and several tough but tiny horses, we had extricated the Buick and towed it back to the top of the hill, I felt compelled by some latent trace of honesty to tell Jack the truth about our situation. I explained that even with the best of luck we could not hope to get the boat fit for sea in less than two weeks. I told him that, even then, sailing her would be a most uncertain venture.

  “If you want to call it off, Jack, I’d never blame you. Not after what you’ve been through and, I’d better say it, what you’ll have to
put up with until we go to sea. You say the word and we’ll leave the damned boat lying where she is and head back to St. John’s. There’s a freighter service running to the Caribbean once a week and the next boat sails tomorrow. We can be aboard her tonight.”

  Jack was silent for a moment. He looked out across the harbour, past the stages and the fish stores, past the brooding barrier headlands to the grey void of the waiting fog and the dark sea-then to his eternal credit he replied:

  “Not a chance! I expect I’ll have the worst case of constipation known to medical science. My back is never going to recover from what happened last night. Probably we’ll drown when we put out in that fantastic pile of junk you’ve bought. But, Farley, we are going to sail her out of here if we both have to die for it. Now, let’s get down to work.”

  6. A pounce of pirates

  JACK PROCEEDED to take charge. He concluded that our major problem was lack of organization and the first thing he did was hold a conference in Enos’s kitchen. This was attended by Obie, Enos, myself, and an unidentified passerby who said nothing but who spat little geysers of tobacco juice that sizzled on the hot stove top.

  In his best board-room manner Jack explained that we had been wasting too much time. The almost daily trips to St. John’s were not necessary, he said. Instead, we would make up a detailed list of every item of gear and equipment needed to complete the boat, then he and I would go to the city and in one day of intensive shopping would obtain everything we required.

  Upon our return, the four of us, working to a carefully scheduled list of priorities, would pitch in and complete the vessel in a hurry.

  “Well, gentlemen, do you agree?” He looked brightly at us for approval.

  I looked at Enos, who looked at Obie, who looked at his rubber boots. Nobody said anything. It would have been unkind to have attempted to dampen such innocent enthusiasm.

  Jack and I drove to St. John’s the next day with the battered Buick in tow behind Passion Flower. When we reached the city we parted, each with his own list, agreeing to meet again at six o’clock at a waterfront bar. Jack took the jeep but I, who had had quite enough experience with the incredible traffic tangles in St. John’s, preferred to walk.

  I arrived at the bar a little before six. Jack appeared a few minutes later and I hardly recognized him. His blond, usually impeccable hair was a tangled mop. His eyes glared bloodily. There was a spasmodic twitch to his left cheek muscles and his breath was coming and going in sharp, hard whistles.

  It required three double rums before he was able to describe his day and then he only told me the highlights. He told of entering shop after shop, most of them empty of customers but full of salesclerks, and of seeing every clerk immediately vanish as if he were the carrier of bubonic plague.

  “That’s because,” I explained sympathetically, “in St. John’s it’s considered socially demeaning for a clerk to wait on a customer. It isn’t done if it can possibly be avoided.”

  Jack nodded grimly. “That was the least of it. I finally cornered a clerk in a hardware store just as he was making a break for the cellar. I backed him up against a rack of pitchforks and asked him, politely mind you, for five pounds of two-inch nails. And, my God, Farley, you know what he said?” Jack’s voice rose to an almost falsetto register. “He said if I would care to leave my order they would try to fill it and I could pick it up next week!”

  “You were lucky.” I replied soothingly. “Usually they just tell you they don’t have what you want, or they may have it next year, or the year after that, or the….”

  “But that’s not all,” Jack interrupted, the twitch in his cheek growing more pronounced. “After searching for two bloody hours I finally found a liquor store and there was actually someone at the counter and I asked him for a case of rum. You know what he did? He made me fill in an application for a special permit and then he sent me to the head office of the Board of Liquor Control to get the permit. It took me an hour to find the place and when I got there everyone was gone for lunch, even though it was half past three. I waited until half past four and finally some scruffy little character came along and told me the goddamn place only processed permits on Wednesdays!”

  “That’s it, Jack. You see, in St. John’s all the store and office people need a lot of rest. It’s because they work so hard. But there’s another problem too. The merchants have so much money they don’t want any more. Haven’t got any use for it. It’s an encumbrance to them. You can see how they must feel when a fellow like you comes along and shoves a pile of money at them. Unless they can think fast they might have to take it. Anyway, what did you manage to get?”

  Jack ground his teeth, thrust his hand into his jacket pocket, fished out a piece of paper and flung it on the table.

  It was a parking ticket.

  As for me, I had enjoyed a reasonably successful day. Out of the eighty-odd items on my list I had been able to purchase six. They were in a bag at my feet. Six bottles of rum. I had found a bootlegger who was not yet rich, and who didn’t mind demeaning himself by dealing with the public. There were not many businessmen like him in St. John’s.

  Because most of what we needed for the boat was not to be had in St. John’s or could not be pried loose from the merchants, we learned to do what outport Newfoundlanders have done for centuries-we improvised. Enos was a master at this. When we needed chain plates for our rigging he got some scrap iron out of an ancient steamship wreck and cold hammered the rusty metal on a rock until he produced four very serviceable sets of plates. Smaller items of hardware he improvised from whatever might be found in the innumerable greasy boxes that cluttered every fisherman’s store, and in which, over the generations, every piece of scrap that had ever come to hand had been carefully put by against the hour of future need.

  Occasionally we had to go further afield. The cavernous coffin Enos had built over the deck of the schooner was intended as a cabin trunk, but it lacked any means of letting in the light, so that the cabin itself was as dark as the inside of a molasses barrel. After a long search I did find a ship-chandler in St. John’s who grudgingly admitted he could supply portlights-at seventy-five dollars each—if I was prepared to wait six months until they could be ordered from England. Since I was not so prepared Obie came to the rescue.

  Obie had relatives far down the Southern Shore on the Cape Pine Peninsula. Cape Pine is a bleak, forbidding thumb of rock jutting out into the steamer lanes. It is rimmed with reefs and walled against the sea by sheer granite cliffs. It boasts two settlements, two tiny clusters of humanity that somehow cling to the rock walls. How the people make a living seems, at first glance, to be a mystery, for they have no harbours, and it is seldom they can launch their open boats off the tiny beaches because of the tremendous seas that rack those coasts. But the people of St. Shotts and St. Shores (originally St. Jacques and St. Georges) do very nicely. They have gainful employment although they don’t talk about it much to strangers. In fact strangers to their coves are not only unwelcome, but may be in some personal jeopardy.

  The fact is that the people of St. Shotts and St. Shores have been professional wreckers for generations past. During less constrained times they practised the wrecker’s art as a full-time occupation. A vast number of ships fell on their coasts, owing to a lamentable failure on the part of their captains to realize that the light they were steering by was not Cape Race (twenty miles to the eastward) but an excellent imitation thereof.

  “In death there is life,” as a priest upon that shore used to intone as he stood on the cliffs, directing his parishioners in the salvage of cargo from some ship which had foundered with the loss of all hands on the wicked inshore reefs.

  Nowadays, of course, the glorious free enterprise practice of using false lights has been curtailed. Nevertheless there are still vessels that make their own fatal errors and end up against the Cape Pine cliffs. Such vessels and their cargo belong, by law, to the underwriters who have insured them, but the people of St. Shotts an
d St. Shores do not subscribe to this particular law, nor I suspect, to any others either.

  Obie and I drove down there in Passion Flower and we would never have reached the place in a lesser vessel for there was no road at all most of the way. Our arrival created a sensation. Not only did people peer at us from behind the curtains of every house, but so did the round black eyes of a number of swile guns—long-barrelled, smooth-bore guns intended for killing seals but adaptable to any number of uses.

  Obie got out first, was identified, and immediately we were surrounded by masses of hulking great fellows who spoke a language that baffled me completely, even though by then I had developed some skill in dealing with Newfoundland dialects.

  However language is not always important. When we off-loaded several bottles of rum we found we were speaking a universal tongue. We stayed the night at St. Shotts, with a brief excursion to St. Shores, and it was all a dream; a magical transportation back through time to a rougher and wilder age. At one point an old woman showed me a small mahogany case crammed with gold coins, some of them of early Spanish vintage. I was told that almost everybody in the two settlements had a similar cache hidden somewhere on the rocky barrens—insurance against the day when modern navigation aids finally deprive these people of their traditional means of making an honest living.

  When we headed home the next morning Passion Flower was deeply laden. We had eight portlights, one of which was twenty inches in diameter and, with its bronze setting, must have weighed close to a hundred pounds. We also had enough bronze and brass deck and cabin fittings to meet all our needs.

  There are those who speak of the St. Shotts people as pirates. Maybe they are. However if it comes to a choice between the pirates of St. Shotts and the pirates of St. John’s I know my choice.