by Farley Mowat
The engine stalled, and there we were, utterly motionless, part of a silent tableau which seemed frozen into timeless immobility. It was as if some giant, unseen hand had reached out to stay us in our passing. Actually, though, it was the umbilical cord.
Our permanent mooring was designed to hold a large steamer during hurricane weather. A thousand-pound block of cement sunk in the bottom ooze was connected to the mooring buoy by a massive chain. Attached to the buoy was a bridle made of three-inch-diameter nylon rope. Now, I had forgotten that nylon floats—and had steamed right over the floating bridle. The propeller had picked it up and wound it tightly around the shaft.
Sim Spencer, my closest Burgeo friend, got into his dory and rowed out to us. Together we hung over the dory’s gunwale and stared down at the serpentine mess of black-and-yellow rope wound around the shaft. Sim shook his head.
“We’ll have to unshackle the buoy and haul the vessel back out on the slip to clear her, Skipper,” he said sadly.
Half an hour earlier I would have thought those were the sweetest words I had ever heard. Not now. It may have been shame, rage, or perhaps something more profound; something that even the most timid sailor may occasionally be privileged to feel: the realization that no real seafaring man ever really masters his fear—he only learns to live with it.
“I’ll be goddamned if I will!” I cried and, stripping off my clothes, I took my sheath knife in my teeth and plunged overboard.
This may not sound like much, but to the Burgeo people it was an electrifying act. They do not swim. There is little point in their learning the art because the sea thereabouts seldom grows as warm as thirty-eight degrees, and a man can only endure exposure to such a water temperature for a few minutes. When the watchers saw me plunge, stark naked, into those chill depths they believed I was gone for good.
I nearly was. The shock was so great I immediately lost my breath. I surfaced and was hauled back into the dory by a really anxious Sim who implored me not to try again.
Being already numb, the shock of my second plunge was not so severe, and I got down to the propeller and had begun to saw at the thick rope when Albert joined me. He nosed me aside and began to worry the rope with his teeth. I surfaced and was again hauled aboard the dory. I was ready to give up, but Claire leaned over Happy Adventure’s stern and in her hand was a glass full of rum.
“If you’re determined to commit suicide,” she said gently, “you might as well die happy.”
I went down three more times before the rope was severed. Albert went down at least twice as often and whether the credit should go to him or to me remains a moot question. He is a modest dog and seldom makes claims on his own behalf.
Happy Adventure was now free—and drifting rapidly down on Messers Island, a scant fifty yards away. Not stopping to dress I sprang to the engine, started it, and rammed it into reverse. Nothing happened. We continued to drift down upon the rocks. Bounding forward like a naked ape I let go the main anchor. The vessel brought up, swung, and came to rest with her stern so close to the rocks that Albert, who was still fooling about in the water, climbed a boulder and jumped aboard. He may have thought the whole manoeuvre was for his benefit.
This was finally too much for the stolidity of the audience. Among them all, I suppose, they had witnessed ten thousand vessel departures—but they had never witnessed one like this. Everyone who could reach a boat piled into one and in a few minutes the harbour was alive with dories, skiffs, and trap boats. They clustered around Happy Adventure like burying beetles around a putative corpse.
Several men explained to me, all at once, what the matter was. The shock of the sudden stop had jerked the propeller shaft out of the sleeve that connected it to the engine. The vessel (this was the unanimous opinion) would now have to go on the slip to be repaired.
But they reckoned without the spirit which, however briefly, still possessed me. Clad only in my underwear shorts (and I would not have been clad in those had not Claire insisted) I jumped into Sim’s dory, grabbed an oar, thrust it between the sternpost and the propeller, and began to lever with all my strength.
The oar snapped, and I savagely grabbed another. The clustered boats began to back away and there was an uneasy silence. The blade of the second oar split and pieces came floating to the surface. Uncle Bert Hahn, in the nearest dory, must have sensed what was going to happen next. He made a frantic attempt to back clear, but I leaned over Sim’s gunwale and snatched an oar right out of his hand. It was a good oar, one that he had made himself, and while Sim held his dory in position I slowly levered the shaft forward and into its sleeve again.
It took me only a few more minutes to tighten the set screws on the sleeve, restart the engine, and test the gears. This time the propeller turned as it should.
“Get up the goddamned anchor!” I shrilled at my crew. Almost before it had broken clear of the bottom I shoved the throttle full ahead, executed a turn that made Happy Adventure spin like a giddy girl, and we went rumbling off toward the harbour entrance, scattering little boats before us like herring.
I did not look back. When a man has made a really monumental asp of himself, he should never, never look back.
19. The alien shore
ALTHOUGH the sky was clear, there was a strong west wind and before we emerged from the shelter of the Burgeo Islands we were having a hard buck. Wind and sea grew steadily worse and Happy Adventure began to leak. She was soon taking twenty gallons an hour and was evidently determined to keep it all because the pumps plugged up, having again become choked with sludge that was being washed around in the bilges by the little vessel’s athletic leaps and bounds. While Claire steered, I struggled with the pumps but I could not keep them clear.
It began to look as if Happy Adventure had won again. However, an alternative to turning tail and fleeing ignominiously back to Burgeo still remained. Close in under the shore cliffs a maze of reefs and sunkers formed an inside passage that offered some protection from the seas, while at the same time threatening to skewer any vessel that dared to enter the dubious shelter of its breakers.
Had I not made such a mess of our departure, I might have taken the sensible course and returned to Burgeo, but this was more than I could face; better the sunkers and the reefs. I headed in for the lee of land.
Neither Claire nor Albert were sufficiently experienced to be aware of the risks to which I was exposing them as we began to pick our way through the labyrinth of foaming water and naked rock. While Albert contentedly sniffed the land smells, Claire waxed poetic.
“My,” she said admiringly, “how lovely those breakers are, sending the spray over the rocks just like bridal veils.” That was a woman’s point of view. To me the great gouts of foaming spray towering all around us looked more like winding sheets.
Now Happy Adventure played her trump card. The engine began to race and the vessel stopped answering her helm. When I scrambled below I found that the propeller shaft had slipped out of its sleeve again. Only a quarter of an inch of shaft still protruded through the stuffing box into the boat. This was just enough to allow me to get a precarious hold on it with a monkey wrench and slowly twist it inboard until I could reconnect it. By the time I got back on deck we were drifting onto a particularly pretty sunker, all covered with bridal veils.
As we zigzagged in the precarious lee of the reefs I was able to clear the pump intakes but by the time we came abeam of Grand Bruit, the first settlement west of Burgeo, I had had enough. We headed in.
I was in a depressed and gloomy state of mind for I was thinking bleakly of the morrow, and of all the other morrows that stretched westward toward Montreal. Claire and Albert, on the other hand, were full of gaiety. Grand Bruit is a tiny place, but spectacularly lovely. Furthermore, its handful of inhabitants are the most hospitable people in all of Newfoundland. Half of them were on hand to take our lines, and the other half soon appeared bearing gifts ranging from a fresh-caught salmon to a jar of partridge-berry jam. Claire was entra
nced.
Albert was too. This was his natal place, and almost the last place in the world where his ancient race still survived. He celebrated his return by leaping out on the dock and being rude to five of his brothers and sisters (some may have been his uncles and aunts), thus precipitating a dogfight that was terminated only when a half dozen men armed with shovels whacked and pushed the whole howling, squalling mass into the harbour—from which the dogs emerged as friends and comrades, all enmity forgotten.
Although I had secretly concluded that this was where the voyage to Expo was going to end, I told nobody of my decision. I wanted time to prepare my crew for the news that they would be spending the next several years in Grand Bruit. I devoted most of that night to aligning and tightening the shaft sleeve and repacking the stuffing box which had been responsible for much of the leakage. When I finally climbed into my bunk the pre-dawn sky had become overcast, the wind had swung southerly, and I knew that summer (both days of it) on the Sou’west Coast was, thank God, at an end. It was going to blow like the devil in the morning and the fog would be impenetrable. I slept easy in the knowledge that the ordeal was over, that there was no way this ill-starred voyage was going to continue any farther.
I can offer no reasonable explanation for what actually happened the next day. The inexplicable facts are these: when I woke at nine o’clock it was to find a clear, cloudless day, not a breath of wind, perfect visibility, and a sea as calm as an average lily pond. And Happy Adventure was not leaking. At first I did not believe any of it, but when conditions had not changed by noon I had to accept the unpalatable conclusion that there was nothing, short of my sabotaging the boat or engine, that was going to enable me to abandon the voyage. Although I was convinced that I was being made the victim of a terrible trick, I was helpless to do anything about it. With most of the population of Grand Bruit gathered on the wharf to wish us Godspeed (and patently wondering what was delaying our departure), I was forced against the pull of every fibre of my being to go to sea once more.
What followed was one of the worst days of my life. The fantastic weather conditions (a day like this comes once in a decade on the Sou’west Coast) continued hour after hour. Nothing went wrong with the engine. The leaks did not reappear. We steamed along a sunlit, smiling coast over a glinting, mirror sea. And all the time I knew something had to happen and I had to be ready for it. I was so keyed-up by the certainty that we were being fattened like lambs for a sudden slaughter that I snapped at Claire, cursed my poor little boat, snarled at Albert, and was generally obnoxious.
Years later when I described that day to a friend in St. John’s, he advanced a rather singular explanation.
“Farley,” he said, “I don’t think you had any idea how anxious Joey Smallwood was to get you off his island. And if The Only Living Father can successfully bamboozle half a million people for twenty years, he must have access to powers we can’t even envision.”
Late that night we steamed into Port aux Basques harbour after a completely uneventful cruise that would have been child’s play for three men in a tub. We had arrived at our point of ultimate departure from the island of Newfoundland.
The ease with which we reached Port aux Basques did not make me overconfident about the future. On the contrary, I became more and more convinced that Happy Adventure was only biding her time, trying to put me off guard. I could not believe that after all those years of successfully thwarting my design to take her west she was now going to submit so tamely.
The Cabot Strait separating Newfoundland and Nova Scotia is ninety miles wide. It is notorious for the bad weather it breeds, and for the heavy currents which combine with an ever-present swell to build up a wicked sea. I knew Claire and Albert were not yet up to such a challenge so I had arranged for Capt. John Parker, Master Mariner in sail and steam, and at that time Chief Pilot for North Sydney, to join me in Port aux Basques. John arrived from North Sydney on the big ferry, William Carson, early the next morning. I took Claire and Albert down to the Carson and put them in the charge of her skipper, big, affable Capt. Charlie Brown.
Charlie gave them his own comfortable quarters, then took all of us to the bridge to hear the latest weather report. It was not good. It called for strong sou’east winds, bad visibility, thunder squalls and heavy rain.
“Hmm,” said Charlie. “Going to be an uncomfortable crossing on the Carson. Course, it won’t bother you fellows, snug in harbour here. It should blow out in a couple of days, then you can make a dart across.”
At noon the whistle blew to signal the big ship’s departure. John and I said our good-byes and went ashore. As we made our way back to the harbour John horrified me by saying:
“Well, I guess we’d better get under way about two o’clock this afternoon. That’ll mean we’ll raise Cape Breton in daylight tomorrow morning.”
“Good God! John! You have to be kidding! Didn’t you hear the weather, and what Charlie said?”
John, who is small of stature, lean, and taut as whipcord, and apparently afraid of nothing on this earth, shrugged and replied:
“Oh, that. Well, Farley, if you wait for good weather in the Strait you’ll wait a lifetime. We’d better take what’s going and make the best of it.”
Who was I to argue with a man who had been skipper of a three-masted schooner, sailing to South America, at a time when I was still paddling a canoe upon the sylvan waters of Ontario streams?
We went aboard and John looked over Happy Adventure. He seemed satisfied with her—except for one thing. “Where’s your radar reflector?”
I admitted to not having one of those triangular metal devices which give off a strong reflection, enabling radar-equipped ships to pick you up on their scopes and steer clear of you.
“We better get one,” John said. “Most of the seaway traffic is using the Strait right now. Lots of big ships. We’ll be crossing right through them, in thick weather.”
I was only too willing, but in all of Port aux Basques there was not such an animal to be had for love or money. In the end we lashed a ten-gallon pail in the port shrouds. It looked a little odd, but John seemed to think it would do the trick.
We put out on schedule at 1400 hours, and I did not like the look of things at all. A big, oily swell—the sure precursor of a blow—was rolling in from sou’east. The sky was overcast and ominously murky. If someone had written STORM in thousand-foot letters across the rolling clouds, the omens could not have been any clearer. I glanced at John, but he was calm and relaxed, sucking on his pipe as he held the tiller, and no doubt cogitating about the contents of a book he was writing about schooner days. As unobtrusively as possible I went below to the engine room.
We punched out to sea and the mountains of the Long Range grew dim and disappeared from view astern. The swell grew worse until Happy Adventure was pitching like a demented thing. The leaks saw their chance and opened up—and once again the guck in the bilge began to put the pumps out of action.
By ten o’clock it was pitch dark. The wind was rising, as predicted, and the combination of wind-lop and heavy swell produced a motion that was indescribable. I hope John will forgive me, but I can only do justice to that motion by reporting that when John went below to try and get a nap, he was immediately sick. He was violently sick—and he had been going to sea, both man and boy, for thirty years! The only reason I did not follow his example was that I was too terrified.
By this time we had given up trying to make a course for Sydney. We came around on the other tack and tried to run to the westward toward the lonely island of St. Paul, behind whose rocky cliffs we hoped we might find a lee if the storm grew worse.
The storm grew worse. The six-thousand-ton ferry, Leif Eriksson, passed close to starboard of us, inbound for Port aux Basques, and we began to realize what we were up against by the way she was pitching into it, heaving great broken seas clean over her massive bows.
By midnight we had very little idea where we were. We were shipping it green right over
the whole boat so that chart work was impossible. Our oil navigation lights had blown out and we could not get forward to relight them. We were a tiny black vessel on a black sea in a black night, invisible to the human eye, and we had to put all our trust in that ten-gallon pail lashed in the shrouds. The trust was not misplaced. Although we never saw her, the Patrick Morris, a rail ferry, picked us up on radar from ten miles away. Unable to make out who we were, or what the devil we were doing, her skipper took no chances, and swung his big ship away off course to give us plenty of sea room. Presumably other vessels did the same, for we saw no sign of any living thing until the dawn.
Dawn was an interminable time in coming. The wind rose to gusts of fifty miles an hour. The jib halyard parted, leaving us under foresail alone. The exhaust pipe snapped off from the skin fitting that led it through the hull, not only filling the engine room with fumes, but allowing the Cabot Strait to spew into the boat through a two-inch diameter hole whenever we rolled the starboard rail down. As a result of this mishap we had to come over to the port tack and stay there, hoping we would not run square into the towering, nine-hundred-foot headland of Cape North.
We had given up all hope of finding St. Paul, and were simply trying to stay alive somewhere in mid-Strait and ride out the storm as best we could. The confused sea grew so heavy that it washed the name boards off the schooner’s bows, and we were being swept from end to end. The leaks grew steadily worse, and kept me pumping forty minutes of every hour using the hand pump, while the engine-driven pump ran continuously. Luckily, most of the guck seemed to have gone overboard and the pump suctions remained fairly free.
At daybreak, in heavy rain and thunder squalls, the wind shifted to west-southwest and we raised the loom of distant land. This had to be the highlands of Cape North, so we decided to run in under the cliffs and make for the little harbour of Dingwall, or perhaps Ingonish. But as we crawled closer to the land we could see immense breakers roaring white in the mouths of both harbours, effectively barring all possibility of entry.