The Boat Who Wouldn't Float (10 page)

As we entered the black gut which we hoped was the harbour entrance, I did not need Jack's warning shout to tell me that our time had about run out. The bullgine had begun to cough and splutter. The water level had reached her carburetor and, tough as she was, she could not remain alive for long on a mixture of gasoline and salt sea water.

Within Trepassey harbour all was inky black. No lights could be seen on the invisible shore. I steered blindly ahead, knowing that sooner or later we must strike the land. Then the engine coughed, stopped, picked up again, coughed, and stopped for good. Silently, in that black night, the little ship ghosted forward.

Jack came tumbling out on deck for there was no point in remaining below while the vessel foundered. He had, and I remember this with great clarity, a flashlight in his mouth and a bottle of rum in each hand….

…At that moment
Happy Adventure's
forefoot hit something. She jarred a little, made a strange sucking sound, and the motion went out of her.

“I t'inks,” said Enos as he nimbly relieved Jack of one of the bottles, “I t'inks we's runned ashore!”

 

Jack believes
Happy Adventure
has a special kind of homing instinct. He may be right. Certainly she is never happier than when she is lying snuggled up against a working fish-plant. Perhaps she identifies fish plants with the natal womb, which is not so strange when one remembers she was built in a fish-plant yard and that she spent the many months of her refit as a semi-permanent fixture in the fish-plant slip at Muddy Hole.

In any event when she limped into Trepassey she unerringly found her way straight to her spiritual home. Even before we began playing flashlights on our surroundings we knew this was so. The old familiar stench rose all around us like a dank miasma.

The flashlights revealed that we had run ashore on a gently shelving beach immediately alongside a massively constructed wharf. Further investigation had to be delayed because the tide was falling and the schooner was in danger of keeling over on her bilge. Jack made a jump and managed to scale the face of the wharf. He caught the lines I threw him and we rigged a spider web of ropes from our two masts to the wharf timbers to hold the vessel upright when all the water had drained away from under her.

When she seemed secure I joined Jack on the dock and cautiously we went exploring. The fog was so thick that our lights were nearly useless and we practically bumped into the first human being we encountered. He was the night watchman for Industrial Seafood Packers, a huge concern to whose dock we were moored. After we had convinced the watchman that we did not have a cargo of fish to unload, but were only mariners in distress, he came aboard.

He seemed genuinely incredulous to find we did not have a radar set. How, he asked, had we found our way into the harbour? How had we missed striking the several draggers anchored in the fairway? And how, in hell's own name (his words), had we found the plant and managed to come along
side the wharf without hitting the L-shaped end where the cod-oil factory stood in lonely grandeur?

Since we could not answer these questions we evaded them, leaving him with the suspicion, which spread rapidly around Trepassey, that we were possessed by an occult power. Witches and warlocks have not yet vanished from the outport scene in Newfoundland.

The watchman was a generous man and he told us we could stay at the wharf as long as we wished. He felt, however, that we might be happier if we moored a hundred feet farther to seaward.

“ 'Tis the poipe, ye know; the poipe what carries off the gurry from the plant. Ye've moored hard alongside o' she.”

Happy Adventure
had come home with a vengeance and, for all I know, it may have
been
vengeance at that.

 

That was a singularly dreadful night.

We had to begin repairing the leak immediately, while the tide was low. We soon found that Enos's diagnosis had been correct. The outside stuffing box, or gland, had come adrift when both retaining lag screws parted, allowing the box to slip down the shaft until it rested against the propeller.

In order to repair it we had to borrow a big drill from the helpful watchman, drill out the remains of the old lag screws, fair off the dead wood where the shaft had chewed it up, and then screw the gland back into place. Perhaps this does not sound like much of a task, but let me try to paint the scene.

To reach the gland we had to wade knee-deep in black, stinking muck, a composite product consisting of aboriginal slime fortified over the decades by decaying contributions from the fish plant. We worked in darkness except for the light from two poor flashlights which could produce only a dim orange glow in the shroud of bitterly cold fog that enveloped us. We kept dropping things, and the recovery of a wrench or a bolt from the sucking slime brought to mind Hercules at his task in the Augean stables.

By three o'clock the job was done and just in time because
the tide was rising. We waited impatiently for it to float the boat so we could haul her out along the wharf, away from the ominous presence of the “poipe.” Half an hour before the plant began operations, the tide was full.

It was not full enough.
Happy Adventure
did not float.

We had run her ashore “on the last of springs,” which is to say, on the highest tide of the month. Enos, who knew all about such things, pointed out to us it would be nearly twenty-eight days before the tide was as high again.

Enos also said he felt it was time for him to leave. He said he did not want to be a bother to us and, considering the cramped accommodation on our little vessel and the fact that we would be making a prolonged visit in Trepassey, he thought it would be better if he went away as soon as the fog thinned. He said he would sacrifice his own comfort and stay with friends ashore until he could find transportation back to Muddy Hole.

I did not attempt to dissuade him but Jack was displeased because, as an old Navy man, he took a dim view of people jumping ship. However after breakfast Jack found he was able to accept Enos's departure with equanimity.

I cooked that breakfast. It was a hearty one for we were all half-starved. I cut up and fried about three pounds of side bacon. It was fat bacon; it was tough bacon; and it had a rind on it a quarter of an inch thick.

Jack and Enos sat at the saloon table while I served them. What with the layers of muck that coated our clothing, and what with the stench from the fishy flats outside, the atmosphere was not salubrious. However for once Jack was too tired, too hungry, and too depressed to care about his mealtime surroundings. Grimly he went to work on his bacon while I turned back to the stove to cook my own rashers. Suddenly I heard Jack make a despairing, strangled sound. I spun around.

Jack sat rigid on the bench, his eyes staring glassily from a face that had lost its usual ruddy colour and had become grotesquely mottled. He was staring at Enos.

All unaware of the scrutiny Enos was busy eating his bacon. It had proved too tough for him to deal with while his badly fitting dentures remained in his mouth, so he had removed both plates. He now held them firmly in the angle between thumb and forefinger of his left hand, and he was making them snap open and shut with a dexterity that argued long practice. With his right hand he was passing a strip of bacon between the two sets of grinders. When this remarkable operation had macerated the strip of bacon sufficiently he threw back his head, poised the bacon over his mouth, and gummed it down.

Jack struggled to his feet, pushed his way past me, and vanished out the companion hatch. Before he returned, an hour or so later, Enos had packed his gear and gone ashore. I cannot in all conscience say that either of us was deeply pained to sign him off.

 

9.
T'place where t' fog is made

T
REPASSEY
clings forlornly to the southeastern tip of Newfoundland. It is a windswept, desolate little village whose grey wooden houses straggle dismally around the edge of a broad harbour. Behind them the treeless hills roll upward to the interior barrens of the Avalon Peninsula. However these bleak surroundings are seldom seen. Trepassey is, as they say in other parts of Newfoundland, “t'place where t'fog is made.”

I believe it.
Happy Adventure
lay in Trepassey for almost a week, and during that time we never knew if the sun still shone somewhere, or if it had been extinguished by some cosmic cataclysm. We lived in a world of shadows and uncertain outlines where nothing seemed quite real—nothing, that is, except the fish plant.
It
was indubitably real.

It was a busier plant than its sister at Muddy Hole. Despite its drab and gloomy character, Trepassey has been a haven for Grand Banks fishermen through more than four hundred
years. It too has known the fishing fleets of the early Basques, of Spaniards, of Portuguese, of the French, and finally of the English. It was still very busy when we were there. All day long and far into each night the muffled thump of engines from unseen vessels in the fog told us of the comings and goings of a motley fleet of long-liners, draggers, and small craft, which had gathered here from outports hundreds of miles away to take their share of the summer run of cod.

Nothing about our stay at Trepassey provides memories upon which I care to dwell, but the day of Enos's departure was so horrible that even my notes written at the time fail to deal adequately with it.

Enos departs at 7
A.M.
, the last I hear of him is a grand final expectoration on deck. I hope it is only tobacco juice and spit, not bacon. Jack can't stand much more…. At 8
A.M.
the sewage tank at the plant got up its first full head of steam and let her rip. The discharge shot ten feet out of the pipe and did not quite clear
H.A.
'S deck. Most of it hit the mainmast and was deflected into the cockpit. Discharge continues about once every hour. Like Big Bertha at the siege of Paris, but Paris never could have stood up to this barrage…. Out of rum. Last bottle seems to have disappeared…. Tide fell and rose again, one foot short of refloating us…. Jack offered to sell
H.A.
“as is, where is,” to local fisherman for fifty dollars. Was refused…. Manager fish plant came along at noon, asked us to move. Said we are interfering with flow from sewage pipe. Jack made highly personal suggestion to manager where he could put sewer pipe. Was refused…. Discover no rum available closer than St. John's. Jack beginning to talk longingly of life of book publisher in Toronto…. Small boy aboard at 4:30 offers Jack a rusty tin can full of cod's tongues for ten cents. Was refused…. Stink in cabin so atrocious Jack opened portlight over his bunk, forgetting next discharge from pipe was due. Failed to get portlight closed in time….

It was a hideous day but the climax came that evening. Just after supper, for which neither of us had any stomach, Jack decided to light the gasoline lantern. This lantern was a piece of equipment we seldom used, preferring to depend on the dim light from two small oil lamps which, we felt, were less likely to ignite the ever-present raw gasoline floating in our bilge. However this night we needed the big lantern, not only because its garish flare might brighten the general gloom, but also because it would provide much-needed heat which, to some small extent, might dispel the stinking damp that filled the cabin, and that had turned our sleeping-bags and clothing into clammy corpse shrouds.

For safety's sake Jack normally took the lantern on deck or ashore before lighting it, but this evening he was not normal. He may even, although he denies it, have had some hope in his subconscious mind that the thing
would
explode
and put us out of our misery. Whatever the case, he chose to light it on the saloon table, and when he opened the valve to prime the generator, he opened it too far and left it open too long. When he touched a match to the mantle a three-foot flame leapt into instant life.

Whatever desire for self-immolation may have lurked in the back of Jack's mind, it was no match for his instinct for self-preservation. Thrusting a long wooden spoon (with which I had mixed our codfish stew) under the lantern's handle, he leapt for the companionway, scrambled through it, and disappeared into the night waving his flaming torch and shouting, “Fire!” at the top of his lungs.

There were a great many boats and vessels moored to the wharf that night, including three big, new side-draggers that boasted all sorts of modern equipment, including Foamite fire-control systems. Acting on the assumption that it would be quicker to take the fire to the extinguisher than to wait for the extinguisher to come to him, Jack made straight for these draggers. His path took him between several rows of forty-five gallon drums, painted red, and filled with gasoline for the use of the smaller fishing boats. His urgent bellowing and the great flare of light that accompanied him alerted all the crews of the moored boats, and by the time he neared the draggers he had a large, attentive, and terrified audience.

What the final outcome
might
have been is anybody's guess. I like to dwell on the possibility that Jack might have succeeded in boarding one of the draggers bearing his burning offering and there been received with such a blizzard of CO
²
foam that he would have been buried alive.

The reality was not quite so dramatic. Before reaching the first dragger Jack discovered that the wooden spoon had caught fire and was burning briskly. He knew he was not going to make it. Reacting with the split-second reflexes for which he is justly famed, he swerved to the dockside and flung spoon and lantern into the cold sea. There was a brief final flare as the last of the gasoline burned on the surface before darkness closed down upon us all.

By the time Jack fumbled his way back to
Happy Adventure
(he had been half-blinded by the glare), I had lit the cabin lamps. We said nothing to each other; we just sat in silence until, half an hour later, heavy boots clumped on our deck and a gruff voice asked permission to come below.

Permission being granted four very large, very muscular, fishing skippers crammed their way into the cabin.

They said they had heard we were having trouble refloating our boat. They said they would deem it an honour (those were not exactly the words they used) to give us a helping hand. They said their crews were already rigging wire warps from our bows to the main winch of the biggest dragger. Would we, they asked, come on deck and be ready
to move our vessel to a much better mooring at an unoccupied government wharf on the other side of the harbour, as soon as they had hauled her off the mud?

I thanked them but pointed out that I would never be able to find the wharf in darkness and in fog and so would prefer to moor alongside one of their draggers for the night.

They said they understood how I felt, but two of them would be delighted to pilot us across the harbour. No, they would not come aboard
Happy Adventure
in order to do this; they would pilot us from a motor boat bearing a large light and keeping well out of our way.

The kindliness of Newfoundland fishermen has to be experienced to be appreciated.

When morning dawned we found ourselves free men again. We were lying at a very long wharf built by the government in the wrong part of the harbour which is where the Newfoundland government normally builds such wharves. There was nobody else at this wharf and no houses anywhere near it. We had it all to ourselves and through the next three days kept it all to ourselves despite the arrival, because of a storm warning, of great numbers of vessels. They so crowded the fish-plant wharf that there was not room for them all and many had to anchor in the stream. Jack had the feeling we were being treated as pariahs until on the evening of the third day we were joined in exile by the
Jeannie Barnes
.

She was a slab-sided steel monstrosity, fifty or sixty feet long. She had something of the look of a seagoing power yacht but this was negated by her incredible state of dishabille. She seemed to have just escaped from the Sargasso Sea after having rusted there for many decades. Nevertheless we were delighted to have company and we hurried to take her lines. Her skipper and owner, a raffish, bearded, and slouching chap with very few teeth left in his head, but with an ingratiating smile, thanked us kindly and invited us aboard to meet the rest of the crew: his twelve-year-old, red-headed son and a nondescript, mumbling fellow who was cook, deckhand, and engineer.

The
Barnes
was not a member of the fishing fraternity. Her skipper-owner eked out a living carrying small freight consignments here and there about the coast, showing movies to outport villagers, selling patent medicines, and in general picking up a dollar anywhere and anyhow he could. Over a cup of dreadful coffee he asked us what we were doing on the wrong side of the harbour.

“How come they kicked
you
off the plant wharf, eh? Well you don't have to tell me unless you wants. They're a nasty bunch over there. They won't hardly part with a drop of gasoline on tick. Won't give a feller no credit at all. I told 'em last time I filled up there I'd pay 'em when I got the money, and one of these years I may.”

Having indignantly denied that we had been kicked off (a denial which the skipper took with obvious scepticism), we invited him to come aboard our vessel. We had a new problem and we had hopes he might help us solve it.

As was so often the case aboard
Happy Adventure
it was an engine problem. The bullgine had learned how to heat herself up until she got so hot that when we tried to stop her we could not do it. Disconnecting the battery did no good because the igniter, having become incandescent, would continue to fire the gasoline charges anyway. The only way we could stop her was to turn off the gasoline tap at the main tank, and it then took up to five minutes for her to consume the gasoline remaining in her huge carburetor before she would finally give up the ghost.

She revealed this distressing new trait the day before the
Jeannie Barnes
arrived, when we made a voyage across the harbour to the wharf of a small merchant who sold fuel, food, and sundries to fishermen. His dock was crowded with small boats and so, for safety's sake, I ordered Jack to stop the engine while we were still some distance, off. The engine refused to stop and we ploughed ahead at full speed. I managed to heel her over in a sharp turn, doing no more damage to the moored boats than to skin the paint off a trap skiff. Shaken to the quick, I headed the vessel back toward the cen
tre of the harbour—whereupon the engine stopped. Naturally it would not start again.

We dropped anchor and there we lay for three hours, the cynosure of all eyes, while we waited for the engine to cool. When we eventually got it going again we crawled fearfully back to our isolation berth, not having enough courage to make another pass at the merchant's wharf.