The Boat Who Wouldn't Float

by Farley Mowat

  “The hell!” he said. “Head her north. We’ll run right up Burin Inlet. We’ll hold tight up against the western shore and steer by the loom of the land.”

  And that is what we did. Fired with an exhilaration that might have been recklessness, or may have just been the fine feeling of already having done the impossible, we ran up Burin Inlet for almost two miles. We never saw a thing. We ran solely by the loom of the black fog on our port bow. When we had run far enough to feel we were as safe as we could ever hope to be we stopped the engine.

  Happy Adventure drifted through the grey soup on calm, still waters. Somewhere a dog barked. Somewhere a church bell was ringing. Jack swung the lead over the bows and got four fathoms with a mud bottom. The anchor went over and the chain ran out with a clear, strong song.

  After a while we descended into our little cabin and went to sleep.

  11. The boys of Burin

  I WOKE about noon; woke suddenly and filled with unease. I had been dreaming I was in command of the Queen Mary trying to make Burin harbour. All the windows on her bridge were painted black, I was wearing dark glasses, and it was a pitch black, foggy night, and….

  I woke, and the cabin was streaming with sunlight. Happy Adventure was tugging at her anchor, and a slop was banging against her bows, giving her life and motion. The wind was wheening through her rigging and a halyard was snapping sharply against the mast.

  I got sleepily out of my bunk, went aft and pumped for an hour then, duty done, crawled up on deck.

  It was a stupendous day, brilliant and vibrant. The gale was snorting high around the surrounding hills, whipping torn clouds across an azure sky, but down in the long gleaming arm of the inlet there was no more than a fresh breeze. Of fog there was never a trace. Of life and people, there was evidence in plenty.

  We were anchored on the edge of a fleet of trap skiffs, swamps (small rowboats), seagoing dories, and two small coastal schooners. One big skiff was swinging at her moorings only twenty yards astern of us. A quarter of a mile to the eastward lay a little village of brightly painted houses, neat flakes and stages, and a tidy wooden church. Sitting in the white sunlight on the end of a small dock were five or six children patiently fishing for sculpins. A frieze of gaily dressed men and women moved along the shore road between their houses and the church. And there was no fish plant anywhere in sight.

  Jack joined me, red-eyed, dirty-faced, and tousle-headed (I do not know how I looked since we had no mirror on board), and together we welcomed our first visitor. He was an elderly man wearing his Sunday best and slowly rowing a dory toward us. When he came alongside he turned his head to take in the whole of our little vessel.

  “Marnin’, Skipper,” he said finally. “Come in through the fog?”

  I admitted that we had.

  “Well now,” he said and spat neatly into the water. “Come in through the fog, eh? Been up the inlet many times afore?”

  I said we had never been in Burin Inlet before. And then he gave us our accolade.

  “Don’t know as I ever seed a thicker nor a blacker fog. Don’t know as I’d a cared to bring a vessel in through it meself.”

  We acknowledged this high compliment by inviting him to come aboard but he refused. Instead he invited us to come ashore, assuring us that his Woman would be proud to give us Sunday dinner. When we tried to decline on the grounds that we were filthy dirty and had no clean clothing he would have none of it. Telling us he would be back in an hour’s time he rowed away without a backward glance.

  Such was our welcome to Burin Inlet and it was the beginning of one of the warmest and most enjoyable human associations I can recall. The people of Burin Inlet do not have many peers in this cold world of ours.

  Unhappily, Jack could not remain to enjoy their hospitality. There was a telephone at Burin Cove and, foolishly, he used it to call Toronto. Instantly a flood of pressing business problems was unleashed through the slender wire and Jack, indomitable in the face of natural challenge, wilted under it. For him the voyage was over, temporarily, at least. The following morning he climbed aboard an ancient car for the long run back to St. John’s over the almost non-existent Burin Peninsula Highway. Much depressed and considerably unmanned by thoughts of his departure, I wanted to go with him, but he would have none of that.

  “You damn well stay aboard,” he told me in his naval tone of voice. “I’ll talk Mike Donovan into coming down to join you. Poor fellow, he won’t know any better. And then the two of you take the boat to St. Pierre. You can leave her there if you want to, but she goes to St. Pierre where I can rejoin her sometime later on. You hear?”

  I heard and reluctantly agreed. I felt somewhat guilty. The voyage had hardly turned out to be the pleasure cruise Jack had anticipated. Nevertheless it had not been a total loss. When I rowed back aboard after saying goodbye I found he had left something behind. Hanging in the eyes of the ship, like a modern version of a baronial coat-of-mail, was Jack’s steel and elastic corset. Whatever damage Happy Adventure had inflicted on his spirit, she had at least made him forget about his aching back.

  The days that followed were unbelievably peaceful and pleasant. I acquired a following of boys, almost all of them with the surname Moulton, and these were, in the vernacular, “right smart lads.” Whenever I undertook a task, whether it was painting decks, reaving new rigging, or repacking the shaft housing, they were on hand to help. It frequently turned out they knew more about the work than I did, and not infrequently they turned me into a loafer with nothing to do but watch while they did my work.

  When I encountered problems which neither the boys nor I could handle the men of the inlet came to the rescue. One of them made a three-hour trip in his dory to find a welder and a welding outfit to repair the exhaust pipe. Another noticed I had no hawse pipe and that the anchor chain was cutting a deep groove in the rail. This man, also a Moulton, excavated a hawse pipe from someone’s store, brought it to the ship, and installed it with consummate workmanship—without even being asked.

  On my second day in Burin Cove the gale grew worse and swung around on shore, so that Happy Adventure was in some danger of dragging her anchor. Whereupon two men rowed out, came shyly aboard, and volunteered to help me take the vessel across the inlet to the better protection afforded by Spoon Cove. That evening, after we had moved her, a ten-year-old boy rowed right across the inlet through a heavy chop to bring me my laundry which his mother had, out of the kindness of her heart, done for me at Burin Cove.

  When she left Muddy Hole. Happy Adventure was in a disgraceful state of dirt, incomplete painting, and general dishabille. Her arduous voyage had not improved her appearance, but after a few days in Spoon Cove she began to look more like a ship. She glistened with fresh paint. Her cabin, scrubbed and polished, looked clean and ceased to smell like an abandoned abattoir.

  Even the bullgine was painted, after first submitting to the cunning ministrations of old Uncle John Moulton, who knew more about make-and-break engines than their designer ever did. Uncle John made her go; and he sweet-talked her so she would go for me and go when she was asked.

  I grew fat in Spoon Cove. Every family there seemed anxious that I should have at least one meal with them, and when I grew bloated and invented excuses to stay aboard at mealtime, it did me little good. A timid knock on the cabin trunk would announce the arrival of a teen-age girl bearing a napkin-covered dish of hot fish-and-brewis, fresh baked cod, stewed bake-apples (the Newfoundland name for cloud-berries), or a repast equally delectable.

  In the evenings the men would come aboard and yarn. Two or three of them would sit in the little cabin and talk, slowly, with long pauses, about their lives and their futures. They had lived good lives. Successful fishermen, they had built substantial houses, which their wives kept immaculate; houses fitted with running water, bathrooms, and other modern conveniences. They owned large, elaborate, fish stores with big net lofts over them; good sturdy stages, and fine seagoing boats which they built themselves from ti
mber cut during the long winter months back “in the country.”

  However there was an undercurrent of bewilderment and even fear in their voices. The policies of the new (post-Confederation) Newfoundland government, directed toward an unsuccessful attempt to convert the sea-girt island to a mainland-type industrial economy, were spelling the death of the fisheries which had sustained the Islanders through five centuries. It was becoming increasingly difficult to make a living from the sea. Grown men still stuck to it, but for the youngsters, including the lads who had adopted me, there was now no future except emigration to the mainland of Canada.

  One of the men remembered how, shortly after the then-and-forever Premier, Joseph Smallwood, came to power, he told the people of the Island to burn their stages, haul out their boats, and throw away their gear because, “you will never have to go fishing again. There will be jobs ashore for every one of you!”

  “Ten year gone by since then,” the fisherman mused, his face dark and intent in the dim light of my oil lamp. “Ten year, and the jobs he promised was all made of air and foam. ’Twas a good thing for we, we never heeded what he said, else we’d have been in the same boat with t’ousands of outport fellers that has to live upon the dole.

  “We’uns in Burin Inlet, we kept our boats and our gear and we still catches fish as good as ever we did. But we gets no price for fish these days.”

  “Aye,” added one of his companions. “The fish is still there in plenty, byes. If Joey had spent all the millions he wasted on rubber plants and candy factories helpin’ we fellers build deepsea vessels like the Norwegians has, we’d be well found today.”

  “Jobs!” said a third man bitterly. “The only jobs he’s found for we, is diggin’ our own graves!”

  It was disturbing to listen to these men and to see them being brought to defeat and to despair. Nevertheless the outport life was not yet dead in Spoon Cove. During my days there I tasted what, to me, seemed an almost idyllic existence and I savoured every moment of it.

  There was the day we barked Happy Adventure’s canvas.

  Barking is an ancient process whereby nets are soaked in a boiling-hot mixture of sea water, cod-liver oil, tar, and a natural resin. Barking stops the nets from rotting when under water and prevents mildew when they are stored ashore; it was often used in the past on schooner sails as well as on the nets. When properly done, barking dyes the canvas a rich red-brown, and a man can leave his sails untended through weeks of rain and fog and never have them harmed.

  A few days before I arrived at Spoon Cove the fishermen had gathered together for a communal barking of their nets and the barking kettle, an immense iron cauldron holding well over a hundred gallons, was still full of the malodorous barking mixture called “cutch.” I was invited to make use of it, and two fourteen-year-olds, Alan and Gerald Moulton, volunteered to organize the job for me.

  The next dawn I was awakened by a peculiarly pungent smell wafting into the cabin. When I came on deck the landwash was obscured under a pall of black smoke. The boys were busy on shore. They had lit a great fire under the barking pot and were feeding it with masses of “condemned” tarred netting. A few hundred feet above them on the slope two red-faced and indignant ladies were screeching at the boys. This was laundry day and their lines of clothing were rapidly turning a sooty grey. The boys paid not the slightest heed, and the ladies (Newfoundland ladies always know when they are beaten) took in their laundry and vanished indoors to await a more propitious hour.

  While the cutch heated up, a platoon of boys scrambled over the vessel unbending her sails. These were then carried to a vast flake, used in other times for drying fish, where they were spread out under the hot summer sun.

  Then the fun began. Six boys armed with buckets commuted back and forth between the great pot and the flake. Pails of scalding cutch were poured on the canvas and the liquid was vigorously scrubbed in with birch brooms. Within an hour everything in sight had turned dark red. The boys looked like the reincarnation of a tribe of Beothuk Indians—the aboriginal inhabitants of Newfoundland. The very sea itself along the land-wash turned a rusty brown. I sat apart in idleness and watched with awe as the boys scampered about in clouds of steam, yelling like banshees and working like red devils.

  It was a very hot day and by the time they had emptied the pot the boys were ready for a break. One of them rather shyly asked if I would like to join them for a swim. I liked—so they led me off up the slope behind the harbour to their favourite pond. It was a long hike through stunted spruce groves, over bare rock outcrops, and up stony draws to the very crest of the highest hill. The pond was shallow and warmed by the sun to a comfortable temperature. We all stripped off and splashed about for a while until Alan and one of the other lads produced willow rods from a hiding place in the grass and started fishing. I thought this must be wishful thinking on their part for a less fishy place I have seldom seen. However they immediately began hauling in good sized speckled trout. “Mud trout” they called them. By whatever name, they tasted sweet enough when I sat down to a mess of them for my supper late that night.

  I had almost decided I would be content to spend the rest of the summer, if not the rest of my life, in Spoon Cove when Mike Donovan arrived, brimming with energy and with enthusiasm. The idyll was at an end. Once more I had to face the prospect of continuing my voyage upon the grey, implacable seas.

  I faced it with some reservations. Chief amongst these was Mike. He was hardly what one would call a seasoned mariner. To the best of his own recollection he had only been upon the waters three times in his life. The later voyages consisted of ocean crossings in troopships during the war. The first took place when, at the age of six, he ventured out on a pond in a Toronto park on a makeshift raft. He fell off, but was rescued by a mounted policeman who rode his horse full gallop into the pond to snatch Mike from an early grave. Apart from these occasions his experience with the sea and with boats was nil. This did not bother Mike, who was the world’s greatest optimist, but it tended to disturb me a trifle.

  Mike had driven down to Spoon Cove from St. John’s in a Volkswagen. He now proceeded to remove from it two of the largest suitcases I have ever seen. How he had crammed them into his little car I cannot guess. One of them would have filled Happy Adventure’s cabin to the exclusion of any human beings. Gaily he flung these on the deck and flung himself after them. Mike was a natural born flinger; long, lean, lanky, and exuberant.

  “What in hell are you doing with those suitcases? What’s in them?” I asked, appalled.

  “Library supplies. You think I’m Director of Libraries for nothing? I swung this trip by telling the Minister of Education I was going to establish a branch library system on the sou’west coast of Newfoundland. You wouldn’t want to make a liar out of me, would you now?”

  “No,” I said, “I wouldn’t want to do that, Mike. So just consider you’ve established your first branch library right here, in Tom Moulton’s fish store. Now get those goddamn trunks off my deck before you sink the boat!”

  Amiability was one of Mike’s strong points. Whistling cheerfully, he carted the suitcases into the fish store and stowed them behind a pile of salt cod. He returned aboard and folded himself into the cabin but not before he had produced four bottles of Big Dipper rum. Library supplies in Newfoundland obviously run to better things than paste and date-due slips.

  I considered it would be wise to give Mike a crash course in seamanship before departing from Burin. And this turned out to be one of the best entertainments ever staged in Spoon Cove.

  Before the course was well advanced it had drawn an audience of many small boys and girls, a dozen elderly gentlemen, and a motley crowd of fishermen. They lined the stages on both sides of us, and watched in silence as I took Mike all around the vessel, pointing out and naming everything of importance. He followed alertly, nodding his head and repeating the names after me. Since he had studied several languages and could speak at least three of them fluently he had no trouble
memorizing names. I then ran him through such standard procedures as making sail, lowering sail, handling the sheets, letting go the anchor, putting the fenders overside. He was very good at it.

  The audience, which had not previously suspected there was a man alive who knew as little about a boat as did Mike, began to take to him. Finally I ordered him to go aft, unship the dory from its cradle and launch it overboard.

  He performed this task almost flawlessly. Almost. He erred only in looping the dory painter around his wrist before shoving the little boat over the schooner’s side.

  The dory’s momentum shot her away from the vessel-and Mike went too, on the end of the painter. He came to the surface somewhat wild-eyed, for the water was bitter cold, and staring about as if in search of a policeman riding a horse. Alas, there was not one such in all of Burin. So he paddled to the dory, caught it, threw an arm and a leg over its side-and turned the little boat completely upside down on top of himself.

  We could hear him underneath it, where he was clinging to a thwart. He was bellowing what I am afraid may have been Irish oaths but they were so muffled we could not really make them out. He was also kicking energetically with his feet and this had the effect of slowly propelling the upturned boat out into the harbour. It looked like some huge sea-tortoise, shorn of its head, although it did not sound like one.

  One of the boys had by this time recovered sufficient control of himself to climb into a swamp and go in pursuit. He was unable to get Mike out from under so he towed the dory back to shore. In due time Mike’s feet encountered the bottom. He ducked down and at last emerged shivering and blue into the light of day.

  It would not have been surprising if he had given up the voyage there and then, climbed into his little car, and scuttled off for home. Not Mike. As he waded up on the shore he put on his broadest smile and his broadest Irish accent: