Bay of Spirits: A Love Story

by Farley Mowat

  “Well, that’s about over now. The government is bent on closing out Richards Harbour. Everyone will be moved out and resettled somewhere else. If poor Simeon Pink is still alive, he’ll finally finish up in the asylum in St. John’s.”

  We had intended to sail west as far as Francois, but our plans changed when we heard that Hurricane Betsy was heading for the Sou’west Coast. I decided we had best run back to Bay Despair for shelter. Harold was somewhat contemptuous of my timidity.

  “You really are a mainlander, Farley. A proper Newfoundlander doesn’t run from bad weather–he revels in it.”

  “Good enough, Harold, but I’d rather be improper than fill a watery grave. Let go the lines.”

  We made a fast run eastward, putting in to Pushthrough as night fell. There we waited for Betsy to strike. She never did, but the threat she posed gave Harold a chance to get to know Pushthrough. And vice versa. Coming back from the lighthouse one morning we encountered a bevy of small boys. As they sidled past us, looking askance at our bearded faces, Harold lunged at them barking fiercely–“BOW-WOW-WOW.” Without hesitation they leapt over the edge of the path and went rolling down into the landwash below. They would not soon forget Harold.

  One of the adults we met was Skipper John Foote. A massively built man in his eighties, now reduced to skeletal proportions by cancer, John lived in a four-square little cottage overlooking the entrance to the bay. The bedroom where he spent most of his time was painted sky-blue and was fitted out like the cabin of a ship–except for flowered curtains on the window. Though too weak even to wash himself, he remained in full command of his faculties and was delighted to have visitors.

  A granddaughter, whose husband had been lost at sea only a year after their marriage, was sharing the cottage with Skipper John. She brought us tea and hot biscuits while John relived fragments of his life for us.

  Born in Little Goblin, he had spent his early years at Rams Passage–called Raymonds Passage on the charts–at the junction of Bay Despair’s two largest fiords, Bay the North and Bay the East. At that time Rams had been home to eight close-knit families; four more lived at nearby Victoria Harbour and three at Little Goblin. All considered themselves part of the same clan.

  John’s father had owned a small schooner of the kind known as a western boat.

  “Summer times us fished the offshore banks in her. Was nothing out there to bother we but a gale or two and foggy weather. Always fish aplenty. Jigging and trawling we filled the holds two or three times a week, then we’d carry the fish back to Rams for to split and gut afore the women salted it and laid it out on the flakes to dry.

  “Winters was the bestest times. Come October us’d shift to the head of Bay the North to winter in our tilts. Once the ice made thick enough all hands fished through it for herring and turbot as we put down in brine in barrels.”

  He told us that when the weather was “clement” men and older boys would range far into the interior “furring” and hunting caribou. As late as 1915 there were still wolves in Newfoundland, and John remembered being followed by a little family of three that may have been one of the last surviving packs on the island.

  “I knowed they was hungry but I was never feared. When I come to a cache of deer meat I had near to Indian Pond, I cut out a frozen brisket and left it for they. ’Twas turnabout, you understand, because one time my old dad was away back in the country and broke his foot and couldn’t hunt. When he come upon a fresh wolf kill with seven big wolves on it, he were so hungry he dragged himself right to the wolves and they parted for him and left him to it, and saved his life.”

  During the first decades of the twentieth century, winter used to come early to the Sou’west Coast. John told us that by mid-December the inner reaches of the bay would be frozen hard. Youngsters and many older folk would don homemade double-bladed skates. With racquets (snowshoes) slung on their backs in case they wanted to go inland, they were as mobile as the caribou. Accompanied by their water dogs hauling “slides,” Rams Passage people skated almost everywhere they chose to go in Bay Despair.

  “Ah, yiss, us was the real winter men. And what a time it were for visiting. I minds one Christmas a crowd of maids and lads from Rams and Goblin skated all the ways up to Mr. Morgan Roberts’s house at Head of the Bay. Took two days and nights because, you understand, we had to stop every place along the way to have a scoff and sing a song and have a dance. ’Twas the same going home. Except we would pick up a good many youngkers from the Head, and St. Alban’s, and Conne River who’d come back for to have a time with we at home.

  “Summers we could get about near as fast in sailing skiffs. They was only eighteen foot on the keel, open decked, but with four sails: a driver, mainsail, foresail, and jib. Me dear man, they could surely fly!

  “Free as the birds we was them times, and Bay Despair were a wunnerful fine place to live, sheltered from heavy weather, handy to the deep-water fishery. Enough ground for turnips and potatoes. Grass enough for sheep and a cow or two for every family. Most days from October to March there was caribou within sight. They al’ays followed the same passes, and they come in hundreds. Winter time we’d shoot what was wanted and haul some on our slides to Gaultois to trade at Newman’s, the Jersey merchant, for whatever ’twas we needed.

  “The hills all about was thick with chickens [ptarmigan] and rabbits to fill the pot, and ducks and turrs [guillemots] on the ponds and out on the bay. Yiss, and trouts and salmon! Bay the East river had the biggest kind of salmon run. ’Twere nothing for we to fill a skiff from one net strung at the river mouth with salmon ten, fifteen, twenty pounds weight. Sea trout and mud trout was thick enough in every little brook and pond so’s you could pretty near scoop up what was wanted with an old rubber boot.

  “If any man went hungry those times, ’twas because he wanted to.

  “Codfish? Me dear man, they was so plenty in Long Reach two fellows jiggin’ could fill a dory in an hour. Out along the coast they was plenty enough to fill the holds of every vessel in Newfoundland. I knows they’s gone down a good deal since, and I don’t say as they won’t go down a good deal farther yet, but when I were young you’d have thought they was no end.

  “’Course, we never had much money. The way the merchants rigged things, you never saw the cash. What odds. We had near everything we wanted. And they was al’ays some fellow slipping over to St. Peter’s for baccy and rum to keep the men jolly, and cassie wine and fancy cloth for the women. Ah, yiss, byes, we never suffered from the lack of what we needed, unless it were from lack of trying.”

  As with most settlers who spent a good part of their time in the country, Rams Passage people maintained good relations with the Mi’kmaqs. John mentioned this in passing and I asked him if he knew of any contact in times past with the Beothuks.

  He did not personally know of any, but had heard Peter Benoit, one of the Mi’kmaq elders, tell of finding remnants of a Beothuk birchbark wigwam around the turn of the century near Long Pond, thirty miles northwest of Head of the Bay. The crumbled tent had contained the skeletons of three adults and a child.

  “The bones of the young one was covered all over with the red ochre they used for to colour most everything they valued. It looked to Peter Benoit like the young one died first, and they’d done what they could for he afore they died theirselves.”

  Harold thought these might have been some of the last surviving Red Indians, fleeing the genocidal fishermen of northern Newfoundland.

  Listening to John’s stories led me to suppose his life had been lived mostly in virtual isolation from the world I knew. I was quite wrong about that.

  “Plenty of young fellows from Rams and most other places round the Bay made voyages across the water in schooners carrying salt fish. Afore I were thirty I’d been to England twice, Spain three times, the Azores once, and half a dozen times to the Caribee Sea. Then I bought a forty-ton schooner of me own and in the next thirty year fished and sailed her pretty well right around Newfoundland and to
Canada and the Boston States.

  “About the time Father were born, in 1856 that were, the telegraph come overland to the bottom of all the big bays along the coast on its way from St. John’s to Port aux Basques. They was a repeater station at Head of the Bay and another at Bay the North. The one at Bay the North was run by a chap named Thomey. His son was still the operator when I fished turbot there fifty year ago.

  “Once a week, winter or summer, a repairman walked the line between the stations, which was thirty or forty miles apart. They kept the wire in order and they carried the Sou’west Coast mail on their backs, passing it along from one station to the next. It could take a good few days for a letter to make the trip in or out. The operator at the station would tell us the news of the country and of the world too, when we come to visit he or to get mail. I supposes we knowed as much as we cared to about what was going on.

  “The first teacher on this coast were Jacob Sims, who come out from England to Mosquito on Newman’s steamer Greyhound in 1861. Jacob give over teaching pretty quick, got himself a maid, and now they’s near as many Sims on the coast as fish in the sea. They never was a school at Rams. Most of we learned reading and writing from the women. They took turns at it, between making fish, looking to the animals when the men was off fishing, picking berries, growing gardens, raising children, spinning wool, making clothes, and cooking for all hands.

  “They was no clergyman in the bay until after 1919; only, four times a year old Canon Bishop–that were his real name–sailed over from Hermitage to marry and baptize them as needed it. We al’ays had a deacon of our own could bury the dead, so we was well enough looked after.”

  Harold was curious about what medical aid had been available in the bay in those times. John laughed when asked about it.

  “For the most of it we cared for ourselves. They was only one doctor on the coast. He were stationed at Hermitage. If you was sick you could go to him. If you was dying, he might come to you. Mostly we doctored ourselves. The operator at Bay the North was a right good hand at doctoring, and the Indians knew a thing or two, but our women folk could cure a good part of our ailments.

  “That were a good thing ’cause getting the doctor from Hermitage was nigh as hard as finding pirate gold. One time when I were a boy, a woman at Rams got sick to death so two men set off in a skiff for Hermitage to fetch the doctor. When they got there they found he were carried off to Head of the Bay to look at a sick man there, so off they went behind him. They waited at Head of the Bay till he done what he could, then took him aboard their skiff and sailed for Rams. On the way they met a crowd from McCallum–that’s out on the coast past Pushthrough–come for the doctor too. They had to follow our boat to Rams and wait till the doctor was through afore they could carry him off to McCallum. He were nigh two weeks afore he saw Hermitage again. Come spring of that year he took passage to St. John’s and never was seen after in Bay Despair.”

  John’s stories made us want to visit his old home ourselves. September had brought clear, cool weather, so one still morning with the sea gleaming like oiled silk and the air soft and buttery, we started the engine and set off for Rams.

  Our course was north-by-east to Goblin Head, whose cliffs loomed like the ramparts of a titan’s fort, reducing Happy Adventure to the stature of a water bug. She was, however, still big enough to startle a pair of six-foot sharks of a kind known locally as squid hounds who were blissfully following one another at the surface, perhaps with amorous intent, until our cutwater sliced between them.

  This bold coast abounded with eagles–we counted more than forty in a few hours. The white heads and tails of the adults stood out like signal flags against the cliffs upon which they perched in little groups. As we came abeam of them, they would plunge from their roosts, sweep down over us for a look, then ride the updrafts back to their high perches.

  Barely rippling the still waters at quarter-speed, we eased into Goblin Bay. Cradled by eight-hundred-foot crags, it was a forbidding place. Except for two slits in its lowering northern shore, called Middle and Little Goblin, there was only one place–Pot Hole–where even a dory could have safely sheltered.

  We decided to see if Middle Goblin was any more hospitable and found it well protected by surrounding hills. It looked like a perfect harbour. Yet, according to Skipper John, it had never been settled. When I had asked why, he had been vague, except to say with a small smile, “Some thinks ’tis where they goblins lives.”

  Giving its two guardian islets a wide berth we entered Middle Goblin through a narrow passage between five-hundred-foot peaks. We did so cautiously for John had warned us of a one-fathom shoal in the channel. It turned out to be a submerged stone “bridge.” The water over it was so crystal clear we could see legions of very big scallops massed upon it looking, Harold thought, “like a defensive army of alien beings.”

  Once over this sunken rampart we found ourselves in a perfectly landlocked and spectacularly beautiful basin with a bald hill looming over it to the northward and wooded glens running out of its eastern and western ends. There was not a breath of wind inside this walled sanctuary and the silence as we anchored off the mouth of the eastern glen seemed oppressive. It was growing dark by then so we did not go ashore. Instead we feasted on a cod given us at Pushthrough then crawled into our bunks and slept.

  Not for long. Shortly before midnight a terrible gust exploded out of the eastern glen, spinning the vessel around her anchor and bringing me tumbling up on deck, where I was almost blinded by a rain squall. With the help of a flashlight I could see foam boiling on the shore rocks less than twenty feet under our stern. Harold scrambled out beside me. What to do? If we stayed where we were and the anchor dragged, we would drive ashore and almost certainly lose the ship. If we raised anchor and tried to run for it, where would we go in the nearly pitch-black night? We decided to stay put and, if the anchor dragged, start the engine and hope to claw off shore.

  Blow-me-down gusts battered us throughout the remainder of the night but by dawn an uncanny calm had returned to Middle Goblin. We could see some odd-looking stone structures on shore that looked as if they might have been man-made, but we did not linger to investigate. Though nothing was said about how we felt, I believe we were equally anxious to get out of Middle Goblin. Resisting any temptation to examine nearby Little Goblin, we headed for open water.

  Coasting farther north, we came at last to Rams Passage, a mile-long tickle separating Rams Island from the mainland. We anchored and went ashore in the dinghy for a look-about. As recently as 1952, eight houses had faced each other from both sides of the narrow tickle; now nothing remained of them except a few “shores”–supporting posts. Skipper John had described for us how one calm summer’s day the houses had been “launched off” and hauled south to take up residence in Pushthrough. Heeling to port or starboard like drunken sailors, and towed at a snail’s pace by motorboats, the two-storeyed houses must have constituted as strange an armada as ever sailed the Bay of Spirits.

  The next day brought a headwind booming out of Bay the East, which we had intended to explore. We decided instead to try Bay the North, which appeared relatively calm. Bay the North turned out to be a gargantuan rock-cut roughly half a mile wide, walled by towering cliffs. By noon Happy Adventure was gingerly poking her bowsprit into Second Brook Cove, a niche in the rock wall beside which we were able to anchor so close in we could almost step ashore and climb the cliff to search for a stone construct in the shape of a huge cross said to be laid out on the high plateau overlooking the cove. According to Michael John, the boulders of which the cross was composed were far too large and heavy to have been arranged by human hands. He also told me the Mi’kmaqs made annual pilgrimages to it in the belief it had miraculous healing powers.

  Harold was skeptical about its being a cross at all, believing it would turn out to be a random arrangement of erratics–boulders deposited by melting glaciers. We never found out because a north wind got up, threatening to blow Happy Adv
enture right out of Bay the North, and we had to skip back aboard and leave the cross in possession of its mystery.

  With the engine running full out, we made a very wet run to the head of Bay the North. The fiord changed its nature at its northern-most extremity. Beetle-browed cliffs were replaced by rounded hills covered with conifers. Low shores nurtured patches of level ground once cleared for pasture, now resplendent with rippling waves of hay–hay nobody would ever harvest and no cattle would ever graze. Of the telegraph station and the winter tilts that had once given a human aspect to this portal into Newfoundland’s interior, nothing visible now remained.

  Next morning we scudded out of Bay the North heading for Milltown, where I hoped to find letters from Claire. As we changed course for the run up Long Reach, we sailed through a covey of dories from Pushthrough whose two-man crews were jigging cod. They waved and shouted greetings. It must have been a long time since they had seen a schooner, even such a small one as ours, go driving up the bay under full sail.

  As we left them astern, I thought of Skipper John Foote’s last words to us.

  “’Twere in 1952 the government chased we out of Rams and closed her down. At the last of it I sailed me schooner over to Pushthrough. She lays in the tickle down by the wharf. No doubt you’ll see her there when you goes out.”

  We had seen her. The merest skeleton of a vessel, her planking mostly gone and her naked ribs curving out of the landwash like those of some long-dead whale.