by Farley Mowat
We steamed northward on a lovely summer morning past low, sloping cliffs that were still wooded to the storm-tide line. Twenty miles offshore to the east the Grey Islands loomed out of a calm sea like a pair of monstrous battleships. They had until recently been inhabited by a few fishing families, as almost every little crack and cranny along the entire five-thousand-mile coast of Newfoundland had at one time harboured its cluster of human beings for whom fishing had been not just a livelihood but an entire way of life.
Our first port of call was Hilliers Harbour, now occupied only in summer by families from Halls Bay, Green Bay, and the town of Springdale, 125 miles south. Most of the men worked during the winters in lumber camps in the interior of the island but come spring they migrated north, seemingly driven like birds to follow the patterns established by their ancestors.
In June seven or eight “crowds” (extended families) would set out from Notre Dame Bay in a flotilla of eighteen-foot open skiffs driven by make-and-break engines, laden to the gunwales with women, children, old folk, dogs, fishing gear–and high hopes and expectations for a bumper catch. This grand excursion was mostly coast-wise, entailing only one open-water run of eight to ten hours’ duration if the weather was good, but at least twice as long if a storm blew up.
These modern water gypsies bore the surnames of people who had been making the voyage for a hundred years. One of the men at Hilliers Harbour would tell me: “Me poor old father, and his father, made the voyage every year with a leg-o’-mutton sail and hauling on sweeps, and never give it a thought. These times, when ’tis all ingines, ’tis hard to know how the old fellows done it. Some was lost, of course, but all hands looked to it as the finest holiday of the year.”
The Hilliers Harbour men fished with cod traps, hand trawls, and jiggers–the nylon gill net not having yet arrived upon the scene. Theirs was a salt-bulk fishery in which gutted and headed cod were preserved wet in heavy brine. Periodically the smack would pick up the salt-bulk and carry it to Englee.
Our appearance was the signal for every human and dog to come crowding onto the fragile stage head that served as a wharf. As we slid gingerly alongside, men and boys swarmed aboard to help unload twenty-six hogsheads of salt. While this heavy work was underway, I went ashore to look around and to chat with the children, women, and old folk. They were an outgoing, friendly, and particularly good-looking lot, and I was struck by how many of them were blond and blue-eyed.
As the unloading proceeded, a heavily laden skiff came in from hauling one of the traps. Among the catch was an absolute giant of a cod. It was as long as I was tall, and I have a photograph of the two of us to prove it. Weighing perhaps a hundred pounds, it must have been one of the last of the great codfish that were once so abundant in Newfoundland waters.
Although exposed to northeasterly weather, Hilliers Harbour was a beautiful place. It had a carefree, almost festive air about it. Everyone lived in tilts made of spruce poles and tarpaper, roofed with old canvas sails. When there were no fish to be cut and salted, women and youngsters meandered into the country to pick berries, gather firewood, and catch salmon and trout in the many brooks. At night when the work was done, or during heavy weather, people gathered in one of the larger tilts lit by kerosene lanterns to listen to battery radios, or to sing, tell stories, play cards, and have a scoff.
I asked a group of older girls if they wouldn’t rather be in Springdale.
“Yiss, sorr. Sometime I does,” one sixteen-year-old replied. “I misses the cars and the stores, but sometimes when we sits around a shore fire of an evening, I don’t mind living here ’cause it’s like we was just one family. They don’t have that no more in Springdale. Nor Cornerbrook. Nor St. John’s neither.”
Wandering among the scattered tilts I came upon a cage made of driftwood and old fish netting, containing half a dozen young but almost fully fledged herring gulls. I thought they might be pets, but it was not so. Taken as nestlings, they were being fattened on a diet of cod livers, to become the centrepieces of celebratory birthday scoffs.
“Some good eating, me son!” Skipper Alf told me. Well, why not? Pâté de foie gras is an epicurean delight.
Living for several months of the year this far from sources of manufactured goods, the summer people of Hilliers Harbour did as their ancestors had once done. They made what they needed. Because the terrain was so rough, there were no wheels in Hilliers Harbour. Hand barrows made of saplings or driftwood served instead. There were no iron trap anchors to be had so the men made killocks–wooden anchors weighted with stones–of a pattern virtually identical to some recently dug from peat bogs in Denmark and carbon dated to about 2500 BC. Almost anything people required that could be made of wood was made of wood, and nobody I spoke to counted this a difficulty or a hardship. I suspect that one of the more powerful attractions bringing people back to this place year after year was the prideful knowledge that not only could they survive in what was virtually a state of nature, but they could also contrive a good life for themselves from what came to hand.
Although the people pressed us to stay overnight, Skipper Alf prudently decided to push on while the good weather held. At his invitation I took the wheel, steering a course close under a forbiddingly cliffy coast toward the outthrust Conche Peninsula fifteen miles to the northward. The boys sprawled on deck in the warm sunshine while Alf went into the forecastle, lit the old Shipmate stove, and cooked up a big cod from Hilliers Harbour that had been two days in salt pickle. Lightly boiled then drenched in smoking-hot salt-pork fat, it was delicious.
The Conche Peninsula was a stunning composition of layered red sandstone slabs pierced every few hundred yards by huge sea caves, some of them big enough to have swallowed a full-rigged ship. Its sheer, eastern face ranged from flame red through glittering gold to molten orange and was made even more impressive by the presence of a cathedral of an iceberg grounded in thirty fathoms off the cape.
We delivered salt to the several families at Conche, Crouse, and finally Croque–all summer stations like Hilliers. Nobody in them seemed to know what the place names meant or who had bestowed them. I thought they might be corruptions of the Basque language, for the Basques had fished this coast before the French.
At dusk we cleared for home with one of the lads at the wheel while Skipper Alf and I repaired to the forepeak for a noggin of my rum and a feed of his dried capelin toasted on the hot stove top. Afterwards all four of us crowded into the small wheelhouse where the skipper played his accordion. We sang Newfoundland songs and old sea shanties while our wake spread astern like phosphorescent milk spilled from the rising moon.
I took the wheel for the last two hours of that calm and lovely night. It had been a voyage into the living past, for the summer fishery would soon be gone, and with its passing the memories of a truly ancient way of life would disappear.
Extricating ourselves from Englee was no easier than getting to it. The smack wasn’t available and a big run of cod was keeping the fishermen and their boats occupied. Eventually I persuaded a patriarch to unlimber his retired trap boat and take us to the foot of Bide Arm, where we had left our chariot.
The Vauxhall may have been relieved to see us again. At any rate she carried us at a sprightly pace back up and over the Long Range. But as we descended into a black fog on the gulf side, she seemed to lose heart–and blew two tires in quick succession.
We eased our way northward from Plum Point through a string of tiny hamlets, including Bird Cove, Blue Cove, Seal Cove, Black Duck Cove, Deadmans Cove, and Bear Cove, to Flower’s Cove, from where, on some days, it was possible to take a ferry of sorts across the Strait of Belle Isle to Labrador.
Not on this day. The strait had vanished under a pall of fog rolling in over the coast road. In consequence we saw almost nothing of the few people scattered like flotsam along the shore–people who made their livings partly by fishing the fierce waters of the strait and partly by “furring” in the mountainous interior. We did see quite a lot of th
e scraggy little horses that provided most of the land transport. In summertime, when they were not much needed, these creatures were given the freedom to come and go as they pleased. On this day it seemed to please a lot of them to materialize out of the fog directly into our path.
For twenty miles beyond Eddies Cove, the road was little more than a trail bulldozed along an ancient beach composed of water-rounded stones mixed with the bones of thousands of great whales that had been butchered in the strait by fifteenth-century Basques and on into the twentieth century by Norwegian whalers. Uncountable carcasses stripped of their blubber had driven ashore on the northwest coast of the Petit Nord to form a boneyard of awesome dimensions.
At Lower Cove we turned away from this cemetery of giants and headed for St. Anthony, the only town on the Petit Nord. I hoped to travel from it by boat to the remote community of L’Anse aux Meadows (Lancy Meadows to its inhabitants), where the excavation of a recognizable Viking settlement was underway.
St. Anthony had celebrated the completion of the overland umbilicus connecting it to the outer world by erecting Loon Lodge, the first and only motel on the entire peninsula. We thought to find a room in it, but this was not to be. The spanking-new structure was already filled–not with transients but with citizens of St. Anthony, who had never before been able to enjoy the dubious pleasures of staying at a motel.
We found an alternative at Mrs. Decker’s Boarding House. Although her house was full of travelling salesmen recently arrived by car and truck, eager to exploit a virgin market for aluminum cookware, “New York” women’s fashions, and encyclopaedias, Mrs. Decker, a robust and motherly woman, kindly offered us her daughter’s bedroom. This turned out to be a boudoir draped in pastel fabrics, garnished with garish dolls, and crowded with gifts for a mother-to-be, including a bassinet. We gratefully accepted, for Claire was coming down with a bad cold and needed to get her head down.
Leaving her to settle in, I went to see the manager of the local fish plant, seeking some way to get to Lancy Meadows. He offered me passage down the coast as far as Quirpon aboard the plant’s fish collector, the hundred-ton schooner Gull Pond, departing early next morning.
I boarded the Gull Pond just after dawn. Built in Nova Scotia nearly forty years earlier, she was still in moderately good shape though stripped of all her sail and dependent on a diesel engine. Skippered for the past twenty years by Captain Hedley Hillier, her crew had been reduced from fifteen or twenty fishermen to the skipper’s two teenaged sons.
Our first port of call was St. Lunaire, two hours’ steaming to the northward where–with much ado–we landed a truck we had been carrying as deck cargo. This, the first motor vehicle to reach the little outport, had nowhere to go except back and forth along a rocky path to Griquet (pronounced Cricket), a scant three miles away.
Griquet was the skipper’s home port and he had planned to spend the night there, sending me on to Quirpon by motorboat. However, his weather sense told him a nor’easter was in the offing so he decided to take me on in the Gull Pond.
Wind and waves gave us a rough passage to Quirpon Island at the northern tip of the Petit Nord. The island thrusts into the flank of the North Atlantic the way the weapon called arpoi by its ancient Basque inventors, arpon by their Spanish imitators, quirpon by the French, and harpoon by the English had thrust into the flesh of the great whales that once frequented these waters.
Cocking an eye at the grey spume streaming in over Quirpon Island, Skipper Hillier recommended I stay at the nearby village until the weather was fit for a boat to take me on to Lancy Meadows. But, afraid a nor’easter might pin me down in Quirpon for several days, I was determined to travel on at once if I could find the means. Eventually I persuaded the owner of a trap boat to attempt the ten-mile run to Lancy Meadows.
Just off Noddy Head our engine failed. By the time its owner managed to get it going again, we were almost in the surf. This decided him to set me ashore in uninhabited Hay Cove and beat a retreat to Quirpon. By now it was blowing like the devil, and a hard, cold rain was pelting down. I slogged across bleak and sodden barrens for several miles to an outthrust point upon which clung a forlorn little cluster of houses that proved to be Lancy Meadows. Not far beyond it some tents and fragile-looking plywood sheds streamed with rain and rattled in the rising wind. These sheltered the Norwegian adventurer Helge Ingstad and his crew of archaeologists, who were excavating what Ingstad claimed was the camp where the Greenlander Leif Erikson and his companions had spent the winter of 995–996.
Ingstad and the crew were sheltering from the storm in a crowded wall tent. Squeezing through a flapping canvas door, I introduced myself as a fellow seeker after early Norwegian venturers to North America. This roused no comradely enthusiasm from the Scandinavians. In truth, they were about as welcoming as if I had identified myself as one of the abominable skraelings who, the sagas tell us, made the New World too hot even for belligerent Vikings.
In retrospect I do not blame them. If Lancy Meadows did indeed turn out to be Leif Erikson’s Vinland, their niche in history would be assured. And Ingstad had suffered his share of rebuffs in a lifelong pursuit of this goal. These included a failed attempt to annex east Greenland to the Norwegian Crown and some dubious enterprises with the German occupiers of Norway during the Second World War. As he and I talked (or, rather, as I talked and he grunted occasional, reluctant replies), it became painfully apparent I was trespassing on his turf, both literally and figuratively, and that the sooner I departed the happier he would be.
Night was falling and I was wet, cold, and hungry. When no offer of hospitality was forthcoming, I went back out into the gathering storm to see what I could find for myself. What I found was George Decker of Lancy Meadows, the man who had originally led Ingstad to the grassy mounds and hummocks that local people had thought might be an old Indian burying ground.
George and his family welcomed me in proper Newfoundland style. They shared a steaming pot of turrs with me, dried my wet clothing beside the kitchen stove, and provided a feather bed to sleep in. They also told me a good deal about what had been taking place at the archaeological site. Since many of them were, or had been, employed at the excavation, they knew more about it than Ingstad perhaps realized.
The gist of what they had to tell me, combined with my own researches, would persuade me that L’Anse aux Meadows was indeed the site of a failed Norwegian attempt to establish a foothold in Newfoundland. However, the expedition was not Leif Erikson’s but was most probably that of the Icelandic Norseman Thorfinn Karlsefni.
I examined the site next day, then, with little more I could accomplish on this visit, asked George Decker to find me a boat for the trip back to Quirpon. He offered to take me in his own trap skiff but before we could depart a large motor yacht entered the harbour and anchored off. A stoutish man wearing a gilt-encrusted captain’s cap came ashore in a launch and introduced himself as Chesley Dawes from St. John’s, owner of the gleaming Hemmer Jane. He seemed pleased to meet me.
“Heard in St. John’s you were interested in the Vikings. Well, so am I.”
He told me his construction company had a government contract to erect protective buildings over Ingstad’s excavations and that he was here to inspect the work.
“My men has done some digging of their own, you know–putting in foundations and such like stuff. They’ve found some right peculiar things. Things you might like to know about. I’ll be through here in a couple of hours so why don’t you come aboard and I’ll run you back to St. Anthony if that’s what you’ve a mind to.”
So it was that I concluded this, my first visit to Lancy Meadows, in Hemmer Jane’s teak-panelled saloon drinking cocktails mixed by Ches Dawes’s charming female companion while he elaborated on the wiliness of Norwegians in general, and of Helge Ingstad in particular. It was a far cry from the wheelhouse of the Gull Pond.
Back at Mrs. Decker’s Boarding House, I found Claire much improved and ready to hit the road again so we spent th
e next several days working our way southward, trying to equate the saga descriptions of Karlsefni’s voyage with the west coast of the Petit Nord.
This took us into a score of coves and harbours where we met many fishermen, housewives, children, dogs, and inquisitive horses. Eventually we concluded that St. Paul’s Inlet, only a few miles to the south of Seacow Head, was most likely Hop–the harbour where Karlsefni had tried to plant the first European settlement of which we have any certain record in North America.
Summer was drawing on, and since we wanted to spend some of it sailing Happy Adventure in Bay Despair, we pressed the Vauxhall hard. On August 8 she delivered us to Cornerbrook, where we bade her a fond farewell and made our apologies for ever having doubted her staunch English heart.
Two days later we nosed into Burgeo aboard the coastal steamer Taverner.
Back to the Bay
We had worked hard all spring on Happy Adventure. She had been in poor shape–the result of three years of inadequate attention culminating in a winter of being shoved about by wind and ice while moored at the head of the reach. We had had to scrape her to the wood, inside and out, and repaint her, black above the waterline and copper below; dark red decks and cabin trunk; cream and white inside the cabin. All the rigging had been overhauled and much of it renewed.
Some of this had been completed before we left on the trip to L’Anse aux Meadows. Immediately upon our return, we frantically undertook the rest. Because the weather was uncooperative–gales, rain, and fog–we moved aboard to take advantage of every fleeting opportunity to complete the work and be ready to set sail at once if the weather turned fair.