Bay of Spirits: A Love Story

by Farley Mowat

  This seems to have been the last occasion when Conne River Mi’kmaqs encountered living Beothuks. The last to be seen alive by European settlers in Newfoundland seems to have been a woman known as Shawnandithit who was captured in the Northern Bays and taken to St. John’s, where in 1829 she died of tuberculosis. The little group seen by Michael’s father and grandfather must have been among the last Beothuks alive upon this earth.

  We returned to Milltown to pick up mail. While we were there, a handsome power skiff crewed by a middle-aged couple from Stone Valley, a little settlement on the outer coast not far east of Pushthrough, arrived for a load of lumber. Cecil and Clara Dominie, who “had heard tell of us,” came aboard to invite us to visit them at home and at another place, within the bay, called Raymonds Point, which they frequented in summer. We decided to make Raymonds Point our next destination.

  By the time we let go our lines on the following day, it was already duckish (dusk) and Short Reach was hazed in purple mist. We ghosted through it like disembodied spirits until, just off the entrance to Roti Bay, we met a familiar motorboat towing a raft of logs.

  Well met by chance! It was the Hill brothers in their Cape Islander. As we came alongside them, Sandy passed us a bucket of cod tongues and sounds (swim bladders, from under the cod’s backbone) for our supper. We arranged to rendezvous for the night in Roti Bay after Sandy and Kent had delivered their logs to the sawmill at Milltown. Next morning we sailed with them down Long Reach to their fishing station at Barasway de Cerf, a cove of singular loveliness so well protected by sunkers that only the initiated could hope to pilot a vessel into it.

  Happy Adventure went nowhere next day because I was afraid to take her out of the Barasway on my own and the Hills had gone off to haul their nets in Long Reach. When they returned in late afternoon and began gutting their catch, Claire and I rowed over and hung about waiting, like gulls, for a handout.

  Their catch included a number of brilliantly hued redfish, a deep-water species that instead of laying eggs gives birth to living young. Sandy slit one of these open to reveal thirty or forty tiny reproductions of the parent. The bulk of the catch consisted of immense cod, some weighing twenty or thirty pounds. These were mostly female and stuffed with roe–hundreds of thousands of eggs in each fish. Kent told us the cod and redfish had come into the bay to spawn in the deeps of Long Reach, as their kind had doubtless been doing since time immemorial. Now, however, they were encountering gill nets for the first time and the resultant slaughter was so great that the Hills, who were under no illusions about what they were doing, predicted that the fishery could not last.

  “Nylon nets be terrible fish killers,” Sandy said, shaking his head. “I don’t say as they won’t clean out the inshore fishery same way the draggers is cleaning out the Banks.”

  Next morning the Hills headed for Gaultois with a ton of gutted cod aboard. The plant would pay them two and a half cents a pound, less ten cents from every dollar, which was the interest levied on the cost of two nets supplied on credit. Taking into account the time spent going to and from the plant, I estimated that between them the brothers were earning about $8.50 a day, out of which they had to pay for their gear and fuel and the maintenance of their boat.

  We rowed away from Hills’ Floating Fish Market, as Claire called it, with one pail half-full of cod roe and another overflowing with fillets of redfish and grey sole. Claire parboiled the roe-filled ovaries then lightly fried them in bacon fat. She poached the fillets in canned tomatoes, adding a soupçon of condensed milk and some scruncheons–bits of pork skin sautéed a golden brown–to the sauce.

  When all was ready, the Hill brothers joined us for supper and stayed to sit for Claire while she sketched their portraits.

  “If ever you goes away from the bay again, skipper,” Kent said as the brothers got back into their dory, “see you leaves the maid behind. Us’ll take the finest kind of care of she.”

  We spent some time exploring the neighbourhood on foot and in our little dinghy. One morning we rowed to the head of a hidden arm of the barasway that culminated in a freshwater stream beside which stood two log shanties with an old dory pulled up on shore in front of them. This was the summer residence of Leo Wilcox, a lean, tough little man of indeterminate age who greeted us by waving an axe (which he just happened to have in his hand) in our direction. No menace intended. Leo was part Mi’kmaq and part white countryman–a widower who welcomed visitors, though he rarely saw any. But he was not lonely for he had with him three small and gloriously dirty grandsons who clearly were enjoying the time of their lives.

  On this day all hands were busy unsnarling a tangle of ancient trawl lines and baiting the rusty hooks with fresh squid–an unexpected gift of the morning when a school of the creatures had jetted into the stream on a rising tide and stranded themselves in its shallows when the tide fell. The boys had collected about a hundred of them, which Leo intended to transmute into codfish.

  That evening after setting the trawls in Long Reach, he came aboard Happy Adventure for a noggin and to tell us tales of how he had tramped and trapped the interior as far as Gander Lake, eighty or ninety miles to the northeast of Conne River.

  In the early spring of 1946, Leo lingered a little too long on his trapline near Meelpaeg Lake deep in the interior. Normally he would have come out on snowshoes before the spring thaw began, hauling his winter catch behind him on a slide. This time he had delayed in order to make a last attempt to trap a silver fox that had eluded him all winter. By the time he gave up on that an early thaw had begun making cross-country travel very difficult. Almost out of ammunition and “store-bought” grub, he dared not linger until the thaw was over and he could make himself a country canoe to travel out in, so he cached his fur and set off to walk back to Conne River.

  Day after day the thaw grew more intense until melting snow slowed his progress to a virtual crawl. The rivers started to break up, and lake ice began giving way beneath him so that he had to cross some lakes by crawling on his belly through pools of slush, sometimes swimming through melt ponds. Other lakes had to be bypassed, and detours around them sometimes took him a day’s march out of his way.

  By the tenth day Leo had nothing left to eat, yet did not dare halt long enough to make a hunt. Although wet through much of the time, he refrained from building fires big enough to dry himself, fearing he would not be able to summon the willpower to leave their comfort.

  On the twelfth day he reached the Salmon River and found it in full spate. There was no possibility of surviving an attempt to swim it, yet somehow he had to cross. Recalling that, downstream near the river mouth, there had once been a cableway to enable telegraph patrolmen to overleap the torrent, Leo set off to see if it still existed.

  He found it a day later. It consisted of a single rusty cable strung between two tall poles planted on opposite sides of the river. Normally the poles would have been standing on dry land. Now, however, the Salmon was in full flood and a hundred-foot-wide turmoil of white water and ice floes swirled inshore of each pole.

  The cable had originally been equipped with a breeches buoy–a kind of suspended chair by means of which a man could haul himself across–but this had long since disappeared. There being nothing else for it, Leo waded into the frigid water, struggling desperately to keep his footing, and managed to reach the nearest pole. He climbed it by means of some slippery footholds axed out long ago…lashed himself to the cable with the leather tumpline from his pack…then slid down the curve in the wire to mid-river, where the cable sloped up toward the farther pole.

  Hanging just above the surface of the cataract, he hauled himself hand over hand up the wire, which, rusted and frayed, tore off his gloves and ripped the flesh from palms and fingers. Reaching the second pole, he slid down it and thrashed his way through the torrent to shore.

  Two days later he walked into the Conne River settlement. Three weeks after that, when the spring thaw had ended, he went back into the country by canoe and retr
ieved his fur.

  “Pretty good catch, too,” Leo remembered with a grin. “When I come out that second time I could buy the woman a washing machine drove by a gasoline engine. She were some pleasured!”

  Stone Valley

  Easing Happy Adventure out of Barasway de Cerf, we ghosted south and west with just a breath of a breeze to Cape Mark, where the Hills were hauling their nets. Naturally we went alongside and naturally they gave us a fine big cod already skinned and ready for the pot. They also issued an imperative invitation–almost an order–to visit them in Hermitage.

  “The women’ll cook a scoff of patridge and moose meat,” Sandy offered. To which Kent added, “And they’ll be a drop of white stuff to make the fiddles jump.”

  We could not have refused, but first we wanted to see Raymonds Point. Long Reach’s resident school of harbour porpoises escorted us for several miles to a high ridge terminating in a low point upon which stood a white-painted building too large to be a house. Jutting out from the point was the ruin of a once-substantial wharf, now reduced to dangerous-looking wreckage. Gingerly we came alongside and threw our lines to a nimble, middle-aged man who shyly introduced himself.

  “Phil Dominie. Welcome to Raymonds Point.”

  When I asked after Cecil Dominie, Phil explained that his cousin Cecil was still at Stone Valley and not expected for a week or two. “Told we you might be along and said for you to make yerselves at home.”

  This turned out to be one of the most seductive places we encountered in all of Newfoundland. About fifty acres of the point had long ago been cleared and was now a luxuriant meadow. In the centre stood a little conical hill about a hundred feet high commanding an unparalleled view of almost the whole of Long Reach’s sinuous coasts and rugged surrounding hills. This meadow was aglow with both native flowers and domestics that had gone wild. There was even a blue spruce copse that looked as if it might have been transplanted from some English country estate.

  The white building, once a herring factory, was still in good condition as was a one-room frame school. But of the houses that had once sheltered the people of Raymonds Point, not one remained. The only evidence that they had ever existed was scattered and abandoned belongings: a sofa bleeding horsehair stuffing; several cast-iron stoves; a rusty tin trunk containing mouldy clothing; bits and pieces of spinning wheels; handmade wooden chairs; and a wheelbarrow with a broken wheel. Upon its abandonment in 1952, the residents of Raymonds Point had either cut their houses into sections small enough to be loaded aboard boats or had floated them off whole and towed them away.

  Nevertheless the Point had stayed vigorously alive, populated by birds, rabbits, voles, and a family of foxes. There were also two small tilts, or cabins, belonging to people who once had lived here all year round and still returned in summertime.

  First settled in 1850 by an English fisherman named Charles Strickland, the place was almost surrounded by the fecund waters of Long Reach and superbly situated for the making of salt cod and pickled herring. Strickland, his associates, and their descendants had specialized in herring, some of which they salted and dried, but most of which they packed in brine-filled barrels and carried to the Caribbean in schooners they built themselves, exchanging their fish for rum, salt, and a little cash.

  Phil Dominie had been born at Raymonds Point. Like all the rest, his family had kept milch cows and sheep; had made their own butter and cheese; and had sheared, carded, and spun wool enough to provide most of the family’s clothing with enough over to pay for a few such extravagances as an Edison gramophone.

  The Point was one of the few places in Newfoundland where community whaling had been carried on. This had begun as an accidental enterprise when Phil’s grandfather and a great-uncle, jigging for cod off Fox Island, “went afoul” of a twenty-foot minke whale that swam under their dory and became entangled in their anchor line. The whale towed the dory for miles down Long Reach while the two men repeatedly stabbed it with a boat hook. When the animal eventually bled to death, they towed the corpse back to the Point and “cut it in.” Then they tried the oil out of the blubber, poured the oil into herring barrels, and sold it to some Norwegian whalers who were then appearing along the coasts of Newfoundland.

  After that the Point men regularly hunted smaller whales (mainly minkes and Brydes), using harpoons they hammered out on their own forge. For a time it was a sustaining “fishery.” However, by the time Phil’s father died whales were all but gone from the bay and even from the coastal waters, having been nearly exterminated by the Norwegian whalers.

  During Phil Dominie’s lifetime, the herring had followed the same path. Only a few years before our visit they had still been so abundant that, as he recalled, “when the rale big schools come into Long Reach to spawn, they was so many that the ile come off they made the Reach shine like a rainbow.” During the 1950s these teeming multitudes were assailed by a fleet of modern seiners: hundred-ton vessels, many of which had come all the way (via the Panama Canal) from British Columbia after having almost completely destroyed their own herring stocks there. They did the same along the coasts of Atlantic Canada, delivering tens of thousands of tons of herring to industrial rendering plants, which turned them into fishmeal for livestock feed.

  Deprived of the sea creatures that had provided a major portion of their sustenance, the Point people found it increasingly difficult to sustain themselves. They also faced mounting pressure from the Smallwood government to abandon their “uneconomical and backward outport” and move to “growth centres” far from the sea, where they could, in Smallwood’s words, “help transform Newfoundland into a modern, industrialized country.”

  The pressure on the people of Raymonds Point grew ever more intense. The government-subsidized coast steamer service was withdrawn. The regional doctor (employed by the province) became a rare and reluctant visitor. The school was closed because the Department of Education claimed it could not find a teacher for it.

  These were nails in a coffin. There was also a carrot. As with many other recalcitrant outports, the people of Raymonds Point were offered a cash subsidy if they agreed to move–but only if all of them agreed to go. This pitted the families who were prepared to leave against those determined to remain. The resultant rancour mortally wounded the essential unity that sustained all outport settlements. In the end, Raymonds Point “went under.”

  The government’s victory turned out to be pyrrhic. Although the Point itself was abandoned, most of its residents resolutely refused to go inland to one of the so-called growth centres. Instead, they went the other way–moving closer to the sea. They shifted lock, stock, and (literally) barrel to a deep cove on the outer coast of the bay, where they joined fates and fortunes with the dozen families of Little Bay Harbour, people who were so implacably opposed to the resettlement program that, Phil Dominie told us, they renamed their outport Stone Valley to proclaim their immovability.

  Phil, his wife, Meg, and two sons in their early teens had been among those who moved to Stone Valley. Yet they still belonged to Raymonds Point and returned to it every summer. Their tilt was a rough, tarpaper-covered shack only large enough for all of them because they were seldom all in it at one time. Cooking was mostly done on an ancient cast-iron stove set up outside the door. Phil and his oldest son, Ralph, spent most of their time on the reach fishing cod, which they carried to the plant at Gaultois in their powered dory. They retained some of the catch, however, and the entire family took part in the familiar ritual of making salt fish.

  “The plant don’t pay hardly nothing for fresh fish,” Phil told us, “so we salts a good bit like the old folks used to, some for winter eating and some for to sell.”

  In their spare time the Dominies picked berries (the Point was lush with strawberries and raspberries) which Meg preserved, went trouting in the brooks and ponds, gathered mussels and winkles, and dug clams. The boys went hunting armed with a rusty old .22 and brought back ducks and rabbits.

  The Dominies’ s
ummer life seemed so idyllic we had no difficulty sympathizing with their yearning to return permanently to the Point. Meg told us it had been the closing of the school that had finally “drove we out of it.” One day, accompanied by the boys and their black water dog, we went to look at the abandoned school. The blackboard was still in place and it bore a number of farewell messages, mostly sad, but some angry.

  “THEY KILT THE SCHOOL BUT CANT KILL WE,” said one. These carefully printed words were heavily underlined with red chalk.

  The boys also took us to visit the graveyard on the hill in the centre of the Point. Standing among the wooden markers we could look up and down the entire reach, blue-hazed in the evening light. Jack, the younger son, pointed out other, now abandoned, settlements: Fox Island, Snooks Cove, May Cove, Patrick Harbour, Jack Daws Cove, Harbour la Gallais, Hatchers Cove. Nothing visible to us now remained of any of them.

  As we made our way back to our vessel Claire picked a small bouquet, which she placed on our little galley table. There were tears in her eyes as she poached cod fillets for our supper–tears that did not come from cooking.

  One rainy day we sheltered in the Dominies’ dimly lit tilt listening to Phil talk about his life while Meg made pots of tea and baked biscuit bread for all of us.

  Phil’s story was essentially that of most outport fishermen: a struggle to endure, not against the sea and the land but against the rapacity of merchants, large and small, upon whom the settlers depended for what they could not find or make for themselves; such things as flour, sugar, molasses, tea, fishing gear, guns and ammunition, oilskin coats and rubber boots.