Eastern Passage (28 page)

“But,” said Skipper Dolph hospitably, “we’s in no hurry, so come aboard, me sons, for a dram and a gam.”

We scrambled over
Maggie
’s splintered bulwarks to find ourselves aboard a ship out of another age. Every stick and timber on
her was at least twice as heavy as it needed to be, and whatever paint may once have adorned her had long since vanished, revealing naked wood worn to a silvery sheen.

We followed the skipper down a steep and narrow companion ladder leading from a Spartan wheelhouse into a dungeon of a cabin that he smilingly called the “doghouse.” Low-ceilinged, dark, and dank, it made Murray wrinkle his nose at the potent stench of ancient fish emanating from the gurgling bilges beneath our feet. Crowded into this malodorous little den, we sipped black rum out of chipped porcelain cups and listened, enthralled, as the two Billards yarned about life on their Rock and the seas surrounding it.

Angus eventually remarked upon the apparent lack of navigating gear and especially the absence of a compass. Skipper Dolph chuckled.

“’twas like this, Skipper Mowat. We stripped the blades from our screw [propeller] on a trip into the Gulf and never had the dollars for to buy another so I traded me old compass for one.”

Angus was incredulous.

“But, good
heavens
, Captain, how could you find your way without a compass?”

The skipper looked puzzled, and Josh answered for him.

“Well, you see, sorr, that old feller, he
knows
where every place is
at
. Don’t need no compass, no, nor no chart neither, to find his way about.”

The talk shifted to boat building, and Skipper Dolph described how he and his sons, with help from relatives and neighbours (the two terms are almost synonymous in a Newfoundland outport), had built the
Maggie
from timber felled “back in the country” and dragged out to salt water by horses and, when the snow lay really deep, by their black water dogs.

“Me maids [daughters] and me woman [wife] cut and sewed her canvas. Helped we to cork [caulk] her. And we named her for me eldest maid.

“Summertime me and some of me boys cruises round the Gulf picking up cargo wherever theys any to be had. Cabbage, coal, potatoes, salt herring, pigs and sheep – any old stuff as needs to go sommers else. One time we did it under sail but that’s gone out. Now we does it with two or three old make-and-break, one-lunger engines rigged so as to keep the vessel going no matter if one of they gives up.

“Early spring and late fall we takes a full fishing crew and four dories aboard and goes after cod on Burgeo Banks or St-Pierre Banks. That be some cold misery when a winter starm blows up, but we’s good for it and so is
Maggie
. Times we slips into St-Pierre dark of night so’s the revenue cutter don’t see hide nor hair of we, to buy or trade for rum or alky or black tobacco. Comes nigh to Christmas we might make a voyage to Halifax where goods is cheap and plenty, and bring home flour, butter, sugar, tea, and foolishnesses for the women and the young ones.

“After the Christmas jollying, we hauls
Maggie
up onto the land where the ice can’t chew her up, and goes ashore ourselves. Wintertime we fixes gear, builds a dory or two, goes furrin’ [trapping] into the country, kills a deer [caribou], has ourselves a time now and again – and makes babies. Them as is up to it,” he added with a grin at his son.

Skipper Dolph reminisced about how, during the years between the two wars, he had shipped aboard big schooners out of Newfoundland and Nova Scotia, sometimes dory fishing on the Grand Banks; sometimes freighting salt cod to the Caribbean islands and returning north with cargoes of salt, rum, and sugar; sometimes carrying “made fish” (dried, salted cod) right across the Western Ocean (the Atlantic) to markets in Spain, Portugal, and Italy.

I might have been in
Maggie Billard’s
cabin yet had not Harry Langley come stomping aboard late that afternoon to warn us the tide had turned. We hurried on deck, to find the water had already fallen so much that the spiny sculpins that gathered around an adjacent sewage discharge pipe had left for deeper water. By midnight
Bonnet
’s keel was firmly fixed in bottom mud, and two shipwrights in long rubber boots were at work on her shaft by lamplight.

When the tide rose again, she was, as Skipper Dolph put it, hale and hearty. But although ready to go back to sea, she was not yet free to do so. The wind had dropped, and in the dead calm that followed, the world vanished under a blanket of fog so thick the end of the wharf was invisible. Nothing was moving in the Gut, and I was about to go back to sleep when the rumble of powerful engines brought me skittering up on deck to find a great black something looming over us. Whatever it might be, it was large enough to crush
Scotch Bonnet
. I was about to shout a warning to Angus and Murray when a mighty engine roared in reverse and a steel bow slammed into the wharf not five feet from us.

The newcomer turned out to be one of the big new draggers, fish killers extraordinaire, that we had been hearing about. On the so-called cutting edge of modernity, they were equipped with the latest electronic marvels, enabling them to get about in any weather with the certainty of seeing-eye dogs and to find and follow schools of fish at almost any depths. Within a few days their enormous trawl would fill their holds with fifty to a hundred tons of cod, haddock, hake, redfish, and several other species.

This one hailed from Saint John, New Brunswick, and was owned by one of the burgeoning international fishing consortiums. Her skipper was of a different breed from Dolph Billard. When he came out onto the wing of his bridge to watch his ship being secured, I hailed him from the wharf, but he barely acknowledged my existence. There was no invitation to come aboard, and no hint of an apology for the reckless manner in which he had brought his big ship up to a fog-shrouded wharf crowded with vulnerable smaller vessels.

When I went below again, I found Angus struggling into his clothes.

“What’s all that foolishness up there?” he asked anxiously.

“Nothing to bother us. Visitor from some other planet. Noisy. And smelly. Not for real. Maybe when this fog goes he’ll be gone too. Figment of the imagination.…”

I climbed back into my bunk but could not sleep. For the first time since our voyage began, I felt ill at ease – as if
I
was an alien in a foreign land. I was being given a glimpse into a future I feared I would not like.

I was drifting off to sleep when the lugubrious coughing of make-and-break engines near at hand brought me back to consciousness. This time Angus went on deck to see what was happening. He returned ten minutes later, shaking his head.

“You may not want to believe this, Farley, but the
Maggie Billard
just pulled out. When I got to the head of the wharf the fog was so thick I could barely see the captain only twenty feet away as he popped out of his wheelhouse to wave goodbye.

“ ‘Come visit we when you’ve a mind,’ he shouted. ‘You and your woman and your young’uns. We’ll make a proper time of it!’ ”

Angus paused and whispered, “He must have the second sight to go out in muck like this!”

He must have had because, almost nine years later when I took him up on his invitation, he was as hale and hearty as ever, and the
Maggie Billard
was still afloat in her home port of La Poile.

Later Harry came aboard bearing gifts – a steaming pot roast from his mother and a bottle of Lemon Hart from himself. At my father’s request, he had also brought
Bonnet’s
bill from the shipyard. Including the cost of three long-distance calls Angus had made from the yard to Halifax and Ontario, the total came to $4.50. He also brought us a proposal. If we would stay for a while, he would pilot us on a voyage through Cape Breton’s interior maze of saltwater lakes that constitute one of the loveliest and most benign cruising grounds in the Western world.

Murray and I were dead keen to accept (anything to postpone venturing out into the vast unknown of the Atlantic) but my father had his speech to deliver in Halifax, and he was resolutely a man of his word.

When, later in the day, a westerly breeze blew the suffocating fog clear of Port Hawkesbury, the skipper gave the order to let go the lines and
Scotch Bonnet
sailed into the Gut and turned her bluff bows east toward the open sea. We had gone only as far as the mouth of Chedebucto Bay before the fog sprang its trap. A black wall of it rose up ahead, forcing us to tie up at a tiny wharf below the Chedebucto Lighthouse. We got our lines ashore just as the fog obliterated everything except the belly-shaking rumble of the defiant diaphones at the lighthouse.

The light keeper, a former lobster fisherman, came aboard. He was not able to sufficiently conceal his doubts about our seafaring abilities, and Angus was offended. So a few hours later, when the fog
seemed
to be thinning a bit, he ordered us back to sea. A bit of a breeze was making up, so we crowded on all sail and ran the bullgine at full throttle in hopes of rounding Cape Canso and reaching open ocean before the fog could smother us again. We almost succeeded. But the fog came back and then there was nothing for it but to steer due east, away from the hidden dangers of the land, and trust to the cold embrace of the North Atlantic.

A long ocean swell, probably coming all the way from Ireland, lifted
Bonnet
’s keel and made her skittish. Somewhere off to starboard, a whistle buoy gurgled like a hungry sea monster. The charts offered no comfort. They showed the Nova Scotian coast as a wicked maze of reefs, rocks, and shoals.

The fog grew thicker as night fell. The swells became heavier and even I began to feel wonky. Angus and I stood short watches: two hours on and two off. Being at the helm was a tense business because
we could see nothing. Once or twice the heart-stopping bellow of an invisible ship’s foghorn chilled us. We could only pray they were equipped with radar and so could see
us
since we had not a hope in hell of seeing them until too late.

Being immured in that fog was like being engulfed in a void of darkness. Only the vessel’s faintly luminescent wake and the flicker of the oil lamp on the binnacle remained visible. I lost all sense of direction.

Despite the heavy clothing we wore under our oilskins, it grew bitterly cold on deck. Our world, contained by the fog, seemed lifeless but when dawn lightened the murk a little, storm petrels appeared and danced buoyantly under
Bonnet
’s bow like faerie spirits.

A little later a breeze began to freshen out of the southwest, and we prayed it would disperse the fog. When it finally did just that, we thankfully reversed course and
Bonnet
surged westward back toward Nova Scotia, now a considerable but unknown distance from us. Just before noon, Murray spotted a buoy in the waste of water to the westward. Angus and I joined him as
Bonnet
slowly drew close enough for us to read the name emblazoned on it: COUNTRY HARBOUR.

The land behind this buoy was hidden from us by shore fog but at least we now knew where we were. We were chagrined to realize we had only “made good” about thirty miles of the direct distance between Cape Canso and Halifax. Dead reckoning suggested that, in our attempt to escape the fog by sailing east, we had been headed for Sable Island – that sinister place a hundred miles offshore which seamen call the Graveyard of the Atlantic.

Sea and wind continued making up as we beat southward parallel to the Nova Scotian coast, “reaching” from one offshore buoy to the next – buoys that were anchored as much as ten miles from land and up to fifteen miles distant from one another.

Gull-like shearwaters skimmed the surface of the sea, never quite touching the wave crests or the bottoms of the valleys in between.
Angus wryly suggested they were as totally
in
their element as we were
out
of ours. Murray shook his head dubiously.

“How do you know they ain’t just as lost as we are? If they’re so smart, why don’t they live someplace inland and give the crows a run for their money?”

A storm was approaching as evening closed in. Wind and seas continued to build until by midnight the waves were cresting at eight or ten feet, heaving
Bonnet
’s twelve-ton bulk about like an old sack. Fierce squalls and driving rain made it almost impossible to hold a course. Chilled and exhausted, Angus and I should have been lamenting our fate. He didn’t seem to be, and I certainly was not.

Dawn brought no diminution of the storm. As the new day wore on, everything below decks not wedged in or tied down came adrift and went soaring and smashing about. Murray wisely sought refuge in his bunk – and was twice tossed out of it. Things were better up above, although the decks were awash most of the time, and when Angus tried to ease
Bonnet
’s frantic motion by taking in the staysail, his crippled right arm failed him and he nearly went overboard – to be saved by the lifeline around his waist.

Although we yearned to be in some sheltered harbour, there was no prospect of finding one along that gale-lashed coast where every
rock and reef must have been breaking white. There really was no choice but to again turn seaward and try to ride out the storm with deep water under our keel. (We would later learn that a hurricane was spiralling northward, making the eastern shore of Nova Scotia virtually unapproachable even to large, full-powered ships.)