Bay of Spirits: A Love Story

by Farley Mowat

  That was the climax of a dreadful day. At 0800 this morning some barrels of diesel fuel stowed ’tween decks broke loose. One drum smashed itself open against a bulkhead and forty-five gallons of diesel oil ran down into the air circulation fans. Within minutes they had shoved the fumes all through the ship. The stink was especially bad in Tourist, where the situation was absolutely hellish.

  I went below to try to help the doctor and could only stand it for a few minutes at a time. I thought one young woman, reportedly seven months pregnant, was surely going to die, but some of the crew hauled and slid her on a mattress up to an empty cabin on A-Deck where a port could be opened to let in some fresh air.

  The stench down below and the awful motion of the ship convinced some passengers this was the end. They crawled and scrambled up to A-Deck, where a ship’s officer endeavoured to turn them back, until the doctor intervened, insisting they be allowed into First Class, where the stench was less terrible and the ship’s motion less extreme.

  That’s how things stand. I’m going to pack up the typewriter and put it under the mattress before I lose it. The gale is still blowing like billy-oh; but the forecast calls for it to abate after midnight. With luck we’ll be under the shelter of the land by morning. Then it’ll be Liverpool, and the end of the voyage.

  The end of one voyage…but, soon, the beginning of another: yours and mine together. We’ll make it the most splendid one in all recorded history. By God we will!

  Searching for an Anchorage

  Claire joined me in mid-January of 1962, and we began our lives together in a frigid stone shepherd’s cottage on the Dorset coast. As the weather warmed toward spring, we drove north to John o’ Groats at the uttermost extremity of the Scottish mainland to spend a month in Caithness, land of my paternal forebears.

  When spring came, we felt ready to return to Canada and face the music so I booked passage to Montreal on the SS Laurentia. We drove to Glasgow to board the ship but when we presented ourselves at the offices of the Donaldson Line to collect our tickets, the manager stared long and hard at our passports then sternly informed us we could not share a cabin because we had no proof we were married.

  He refused to accept my assurance that we were wedded Inuit-style, by mutual consent, so I demanded our money back. This was a prospect he found more repugnant than abetting an illegal relationship, so he reluctantly handed over the tickets.

  The Laurentia was a war-built, steam-turbine-driven freighter converted to carry general cargo and passengers. Considering my crossing in the Newfoundland, I really should have known better than to take Claire aboard a packet, even one a lot bigger, newer, and more powerful than the Newfoundland, but I counted on the tempestuous winter season on the North Atlantic being over.

  It wasn’t.

  In mid-Atlantic we encountered a Force 9 gale whose mighty seas made Laurentia roll like a log in a millrace. This storm lasted three long nights and days. After it ended and Claire had recovered her sang-froid and her appetite, she slyly suggested I must be what Newfoundlanders call a jinker–a jinx aboard ship.

  Maybe so. Laurentia landed us at Montreal after a spectacular arrival involving a collision with a visiting French destroyer–a mishap that slammed our vessel against a concrete dock with such force as to snap off one of her massive propeller blades. Claire made no overt comment, but I knew what she was thinking.

  Except for the contretemps with the Donaldson Line, living in sin had not posed much of a problem in Britain, where people seemed remarkably permissive about unsanctified relationships. We anticipated less tolerance in Canada, where it was still virtually impossible to even get a divorce without an act of Parliament and where two people living together without benefit of marriage were pretty generally regarded as being outside the social pale.

  We went first to Port Hope to apprise my mother, Helen, of the state of our affairs, for although Angus knew about it he had not told her. Helen gave us her heartfelt blessing, after which we drove on to Toronto to see Claire’s family. None of them disapproved (openly, at any rate) of what we were doing. To the contrary, Claire’s mother, forthright Winnie Wheeler, was so delighted she mixed a bucket of orange blossoms–gin and orange juice–with which all hands could celebrate our union.

  The question of where we would live was temporarily solved by my parents, who offered us the family cottage not far from Brighton on the shore of Lake Ontario. Indian Summer, as it was called, was a thin-walled cabin consisting principally of one room that served as kitchen, dining room, and bedroom. Furnished with shabby castoffs, it lacked plumbing though it did have a good well a few hundred feet away in one direction and a somewhat rickety outhouse the same distance in another direction. It was hardly much of an improvement over the mouldy shepherd’s cottage that had been our first home together, yet Claire was delighted with it. We reclaimed her little Morris Minor from her parents’ garage, drove it to Indian Summer, and settled in for a few wonderful weeks.

  Since we were well in advance of the annual invasion of summer residents we had the lakeshore and the greening southern Ontario countryside mostly to ourselves. We did not work too hard. Uninhibitedly amorous displays by spring birds, frogs, snakes, skunks, and rabbits outside our windows provided a constant challenge. Nor did we spend a lot of time worrying about our future, or even planning what we would do next. We were agreed that as soon as I finished the young people’s book I was working on, we would reclaim Happy Adventure, then, if we were lucky, find a more permanent place for ourselves in Newfoundland or somewhere in the Atlantic provinces.

  In early June Claire and I set off eastward in the Morris. In order to make room for all our gear we folded back the convertible top and piled the rear seat so high with boxes and bags that the little car was like a cartoon donkey, overburdened to the point where little of it was to be seen except legs, a head, and a tail.

  Our progress was pleasantly slow. We took three days to reach Nova Scotia, where we spent two days exploring the Celtic eccentricities of Cape Breton Island. One of the oddities we encountered was a tourist cabin consisting of two bedrooms separated by (and sharing) one bathroom. In order to give the occupant some privacy, a contraption made of rope, bicycle tubes, and pulleys had been rigged in such a way that when one bathroom door was opened, the other would be pulled shut and would remain so until the first door was closed again–whereupon the second door would swing open to welcome a new occupant. This arrangement allowed the owner to rent each bedroom separately while claiming that each had its own bathroom. It was a vivid demonstration of the ingenuity that so distinguishes Cape Bretoners.

  Next day we made the five-hour ferry crossing of Cabot Strait to Port aux Basques, where the newly built Trans-Canada Highway across Newfoundland theoretically began. Knowing that the TCH was still more of a dream (a nightmare, actually) than a reality, we bought tickets on the antique, narrow-gauge, trans-island railway known sardonically as the Bullet. Claire and I had an upper and lower berth in the sleeping car while the Morris made the journey lashed to a flatcar.

  Our transit of Newfoundland took thirty-six hours, which was considered a swift passage for the Bullet. In winter it sometimes took three days and nights and sometimes had required as long as a week. While crossing the high interior, progress was sometimes so plodding that passengers were able to jump off the lead car and pick a can of berries before climbing aboard the last car as it came abreast of them. Or so we were told. We were also told the salutary story of the young woman from Port aux Basques en route to St. John’s who, as the Bullet neared Gambo two-thirds of the way across, accosted the conductor demanding to know when they would reach their destination because she was perilously near her time.

  The conductor, a regal and intimidating figure in a gold-braided blue uniform, reproached her.

  “Maid, you was some foolish to git aboard the Bullet and you in the family way.”

  To which she replied, “Ah, sorr, but I weren’t in the family way when I got aboard.” />
  The Bullet’s leisurely pace gave us time and opportunity to absorb something of the feel of the vast wilderness interior of the island and to be regaled and entertained by our fellow travellers, a marvellously uninhibited and amiable lot. Every male seemed to have a good supply of rum with which he was insistently generous. Bottles were freely passed up, down, and across the aisles and if the conductor happened to be passing, he would be invited to wet his whistle too. Some passengers had fiddles or accordions and all hands tended to join lustily in singing the narrative songs and old sea shanties indigenous to Newfoundland. It was not hard to imagine how a female passenger might indeed find herself in the family way before the conclusion of such a journey.

  The Bullet finally crawled across the narrow isthmus connecting the Avalon Peninsula with the rest of the island, passing close by two outports whose names especially caught Claire’s fancy–Pinch Gut and Famish Gut–before coming to a final halt in St. John’s. Reclaiming the Morris, we drove to Beachy Cove on the shore of Conception Bay, where Harold Horwood had a little house that he invited us to share for as long as we wished.

  Harold’s generosity was not without drawbacks. He had quit his job with the St. John’s Evening Telegram to become a freelance writer but was also in the process of becoming chief guru for the island’s restless youth, whose counterparts on the mainland would become known as flower children. Flower children was hardly an adequate description for Harold’s variety. His small bungalow was overrun day and night by hordes of youngsters, some of whom were the offspring of dysfunctional neighbouring shanty dwellers with Irish names. Others were older and tougher versions of the same from the seedier districts of St. John’s. They were an interesting lot but their comings and goings were not conducive to sustained literary endeavour on our part.

  We delayed at Beachy Cove partly because we were looking for a possible replacement for Happy Adventure–something a little more comfortable and considerably more seaworthy. Harold suggested a vessel that had once been his–the Fort Amadjuak, a power schooner built many years earlier for use in the Canadian eastern Arctic. He had owned and sailed her for a time on the Labrador. After he sold her, she fell on hard times, and by the time Claire and I saw her, at Bay Bulls just to the south of St. John’s, she was hauling capelin to a fertilizer plant.

  Although Harold did not actually pressure me into buying her, the upshot was that I forked out five hundred dollars, and what remained of the Fort Amadjuak became mine. I arranged for her to be berthed at St. John’s until Claire and I had found a home port for ourselves, to which we could bring her for refitting.

  In mid-July we set out to rejoin Happy Adventure. This entailed making a two-hundred-mile bounce (“drive” is not a suitable description) to Fortune, during which Claire became intimately and painfully familiar with thank-you-ma’ams (as Newfoundlanders pithily describe potholes in their roads).

  A few hours after arriving in Fortune, we boarded the Bar Haven for the trip to Milltown. She was crowded to the gills with passengers ranging from a gaggle of teenaged girls returning from a Salvation Army camp, to a horse named Herbert who was being sent to haul logs at Head of the Bay.

  Claire and I enjoyed a splendid little holiday aboard while Captain Charlie Brown, a remarkably well-read man with a perverse sense of humour, nursed Bar Haven in and out of the score of outports along the way. One stormy night off Point Rosie we stood on the bridge and apprehensively watched the skipper do his work. It was too rough for him to dock the ship, so cargo was discharged into two wildly pitching dories bouncing around like beach balls in the heavy sea. The freight being dropped into the boats consisted almost exclusively of cases of soft drinks, cartons of cornflakes, toilet paper, and chocolate bars.

  Charlie Brown shook his head sadly.

  “Only Newfoundlanders’d be daft enough to risk their lives–and my ship–to put junk like that ashore. If ’twas cakes and ale, like the poet fellow said, it might be worth the doing. But this!” he snorted. “Ah well, what odds. We does it anyhow.”

  In due course, the Bar Haven eased alongside the Milltown wharf and we could see our little schooner high and dry on shore, looking pathetically forlorn and neglected. Having been abandoned for months, she was in sorry shape. Her black hull paint was cracked and mottled and her copper bottom paint conspicuous by its absence. Her interior dripped moisture and stank of mildew, long-departed fish, and the slime of St. Pierre harbour.

  Aided by three local boys who nurtured their own dreams of going to sea, we set to work scrubbing and repainting her and attaching two three-hundred-pound bars of iron to the keel to help stiffen her in heavy weather. Then, as a spring tide flooded the landwash, we launched her off and moved aboard.

  Having no fixed plans, we thought to spend a few weeks cruising the fiords of Bay Despair, then visit Hermitage, and possibly make a run back to St. Pierre. After that we would begin a serious search for a more or less permanent anchorage for the vessel and for ourselves.

  Shortly after we moved aboard, a motorboat arrived from the tiny outport of Cape la Hune, fifty miles to the westward of Bay Despair. In place its normal cargo of nets and fishes, it bore a wedding party consisting of bride-and groom-to-be, three bridesmaids, and four groomsmen. They were seeking a minister to perform the wedding ceremony. Cold and wet, for they had spent many hours bucking a rising sea, they tied up alongside us. As we warmed them with tea and rum, they described how they had gone first to Pushthrough, only to find that the local vicar was away on holiday. Undaunted, they had continued on to Hermitage hoping to find the only other clergyman on this section of the coast. When told he was visiting Head of the Bay, they had followed him to Milltown.

  Claire helped the wet and wind-whipped bride rearrange her finery, then we loaded the lot of them onto the back of a lumber truck whose owner volunteered to carry them to the church, where the hurriedly summoned minister joined them. The ceremony over, they piled back into their boat and set off for distant Cape la Hune.

  The truck driver came aboard Happy Adventure for a chat. He told us this was the first time any of these young people had been in a motor vehicle, for La Hune had no roads. He explained that the couple was determined to tie the knot that day because the groom had to leave Cape la Hune next morning to spend six or seven months aboard a Nova Scotian dragger, and his sixteen-year-old bride-to-be was already four months pregnant. “Didn’t want the babe born with a broken arm trying to hang on ’til after the wedding,” the truck driver said without so much as a smile.

  Before leaving Head of the Bay, we made a short shakedown cruise to Conne River to visit Michael and Emilia John again. When they saw Happy Adventure entering the river mouth, Michael hurried to the shore to take us home for tea and talk.

  Having read that around 1764 the French had brought a party of Mi’kmaq Indians from Nova Scotia to Newfoundland to help consolidate French control of the southern coast, I wanted to hear more about the history of his people.

  Michael told us his forebears had been put ashore at Long Harbour near the head of Fortune Bay. They had not settled there, however. Settlement was not their style. Instead, they had established a traditional nomadic pattern, penetrating deep into the forests in winter to hunt caribou (later to trap furs for their French patrons), and in summer returning to the coasts for fish and other sea foods. Early in the nineteenth century, they had picked the Beothuks’ Bay of Spirits to be the heartland of their new country and Conne River as their main pathway to and from the interior.

  In 1900, the year Michael turned fourteen, the Bay of Spirits Mi’kmaq clan, comprising forty or fifty families, had become less nomadic. In winter they inhabited more or less permanent log cabins in and around Hackleberry Lake deep in the interior. In spring they travelled south to live in birchbark wigwams at Head of the Bay and the mouth of Conne River, where they were visited every midsummer by a priest from St. Pierre who came to reaffirm their allegiance to Roman Catholicism.

  Michael told us that, in his y
outh, people travelling in the country before freeze-up or after break-up used small canoes framed with willow withes and covered with caribou hides sewn together with sinews. However, while at their summer homes they would build large birchbark canoes in which they went fearlessly to sea, travelling east to St. Pierre and west to the vicinity of Port aux Basques, from where they sometimes crossed Cabot Strait to visit their ancestral clans in Cape Breton Island.

  I asked Michael how these seafarers managed to navigate so far from land and in the fogs endemic to these waters. He said his people imitated the Beothuks, who used to carry bundles of spruce boughs in their canoes. In thick weather, or when far from land, they would throw branches overboard and steer a course by looking backward so as to always keep two or three in line astern, thereby ensuring that they steered a course straight ahead.

  Michael himself had never seen a Beothuk but gave us a vivid description of a meeting between these now-vanished people and his father and grandfather. His father had been about ten when the two Mi’kmaqs encountered a party of Beothuks on the west branch of the Long Harbour River. The Beothuk group included one old man, two or three younger ones (one of them very fat), two or three women, and several children. The two groups were only about a hundred yards apart when they first saw each other, and Michael’s grandfather immediately cocked his old muzzle-loader and ordered his son to take cover. The Beothuks seemed equally apprehensive. They had been roasting deer meat on sticks over an open fire but now they hurriedly began breaking camp.

  Michael remembered minute details of what his father had told him.

  “They had two bark canoes, made high in the middle, not like ours. Bows and arrows, but no guns. Had piles of deer hides and many bark baskets. They left all them things and even their wigwam and canoes and hurried off into the woods, only taking what they could grab quick and looking back a lot. I believe they was as scared of Granddad and my dad as they two was of them. After they was gone Granddad looked at all their things, but never took nothing. Said them people would come back for them. After that it was quite a time before any of our people went near Long Harbour.”