The Boat Who Wouldn't Float (20 page)

For a moment the policemen looked thoroughly bewildered then, concluding with true Anglo-Saxon arrogance that we could not understand
their
language, they broke into talk amongst themselves.

“Holy Jehoshaphat, will you listen to them Frogs!” one of them said.

“Sure scared the ass clean off them, anyway,” another added.

“Yeah. Made them dump their load so quick I bet they never had time to think. What a sick bunch they're going to
be when they find out they was six miles off Pass Island and three outside the legal limit!”

Up to this point I had not harboured any personal ill will toward these men. But at this revelation I got mad. Abandoning my Spanish role, I unleashed all the vitriol at my command:

“Why, you red-coated tomato-livered pisspots!” I began. “You….” But there may be youngsters listening.

The policemen blanched visibly. Then the leader found his voice.

“You cut that out!” he yelled. “You just watch your lip, buddy! We're on to your salt-bag tricks. If you think your chums hanging about in them boats over there,” and here he pointed fiercely off to starboard, “are going to get a drop of that stuff you dumped, you better think again. We're staying right here until it all comes up and we'll sink every bloody case. All right, Jones! Back her off. Let's get clear of this stinkbox!”

The
Blue Iris
's mighty engines thundered and she went astern, vanishing almost instantly into the foggy murk.

As soon as she was out of sight Mike turned to me and I to him—and we grinned at each other like a pair of idiots.

No, we had not gone out of our minds. The truth was we had a lot to grin about. In the first place we now knew approximately where we were, and where the Manuels were awaiting us. And in the second place, but, wait a minute….

We started the bullgine and steered cautiously to the eastward for an hour. When we again stopped and listened we had not long to wait before hearing the dull boom of a heavy shot-gun. Fifteen minutes later we saw the shadow of a boat. It was the Manuel brothers' big trap skiff. It, and three more like it, were anchored on the Pass Island Banks. All four skiffs hauled their grapnels and clustered close about us.

Almon was the first aboard, and as I shook his big, hard paw, his bright blue gaze took in our empty decks. He did not need to be told what had happened.

“Hard luck, skipper!” he said, and chuckled.

“They caught us fair and square, the bastards,” I replied
bravely. “About six miles to the sou'west of here. We had to dump the works. And they intend to stay right there until the stuff comes up.”

By this time half a dozen other burly fishermen had swarmed aboard. They heard my sorrowful tale and they could not contain their feelings. They began to giggle, to guffaw, to whack each other on the back with man-killing blows.

“It's not
that
bloody funny,” I said, when I could get a word in edgewise. “We overdid things a bit and dumped our own stock over too.”

“Me son. me darlin' man,” said Hondas when he could speak through the tears of laughter streaming down his cheeks, “dat's what
I
calls makin' a good try onto it! But don't you worry none. You lads'll not go dry this night!”

Nor did we. Abandoning our sunken cargo to the tenacious lads on the
Blue Iris
we got under way. Piloted by Almon, we motored down into Hermitage Bay. Three hours later
Itchy
lay snugly at anchor in Selbys Cove and Mike and I were enjoying the hospitality of the little village. It proved to be as “wet” as Hondas had prophesied it would be. We went from house to house, and at each we had to tell our tale again, and at each we were solaced with alky and hot water.

About two o'clock in the morning, by which time the party had engulfed the entire village, a young man came running into Hondas Manuel's house, his face alight with excitement.

“They're a-coming in!” he cried. “I hears them, byes!”

En masse, the villagers made for the community stage at the foot of the little cove. Mike and I were swept along with them. The muted mutter of engines was strong in the dark night. A light glimmered briefly in the fog and then, one by one, the three big trap skiffs we had met earlier on the Pass Island Banks appeared out of the black mist and ran alongside the stage.

They were log-loaded. Between them they must have held at least forty cases plus a dozen kegs.

The cargo that was lovingly unloaded from the skiffs was
the real stuff; whereas the cargo we had carried from St. Pierre consisted of fourteen wooden cases—filled with rocks—ballasted with fourteen salt bags—filled with sand. Our role, as determined for us by the Hondas brothers, had been that of a stalking horse charged with deflecting and preoccupying the hounds of the law, and so leaving the skiffs that had waited for us off Pass Island free to make their unobstructed ways to Miquelon and back again, untroubled by interference from
Blue Iris
.

As Hondas remarked to us, after thanking us on behalf of all the thirsty folk of Hermitage Bay:

“They's more an one way to skin a cod…or cod a Mountie; and we'se the byes what knows 'em all!”

 

17.
Westward No!

W
E DID NOT
linger in Selbys Cove—departing well before noon—and giving Pass Island Banks a wide berth. We saw nothing of
Blue Iris
. Presumably she was still hovering over the sunken kegs, like a broody hen guarding a batch of infertile eggs.

Itchy
's performance on this voyage had been exemplary. She had done everything we asked of her and had produced no unsettling surprises. Of course she still leaked, but we had grown accustomed to this, and the hourly pumping routine had become so automatic we could almost do it in our sleep. At long last she seemed ready to set out on a major voyage, but it was too late. Mike had outrun his time and, having established as many branch libraries on the Newfoundland coast as the circumstances allowed, had reluctantly to take his departure and return to St. John's.

I spent another week in St. Pierre, toying with the idea of shipping Paul or Théo as mate for a voyage to the Caribbean, but the hurricane season had begun, and when the next bad blow sank two large fishing vessels on the St. Pierre Bank, I was persuaded that the Grand Voyage should be deferred until another year.

Having resolved to leave
Itchy
in St. Pierre for the winter, I enlisted Théo, Paulo, and Martin to look after her, suppos
ing that three godfathers would be three times as good as one. I instructed them to have her hauled on the slip and safely stored ashore until it was time to launch her in the spring. Then I returned to the mainland and to a winter of routine, buoyed up by dreams of the coming summer.

This time Jack McClelland could not share my dreams. Rumours about
Itchy
's antics had reached the ears of his business associates and members of his family, none of whom considered him expendable.

“If I could afford to quadruple my insurance coverage,” Jack explained sadly, “I imagine there'd be very little objection to my sailing with you. But there's no way I can afford the premiums my agent wants. He says they'd be cheaper if I were going to make a lunar voyage in a Yankee rocket.”

I was not too disappointed. Much as I admired Jack, I had developed an ever greater admiration for the young lady
who had been, for a brief period, a member of my crew at St. Pierre. My discovery that Claire would be available, aye, and ready, to make a cruise with me during the coming summer did much to alleviate my distress at Jack's defection.

I had no word about
Itchy
during the winter but this did not disturb me because none of my St. Pierre friends was much at letter writing. However in May I received a vaguely worded cablegram from Martin. The gist of it was that there had been a small accident and
Itchy
had “pierced herself,” but was “not much hurted” and, I gathered, could easily be repaired. I guessed there had been a minor mishap during the launching. Feeling full confidence in my three friends I cabled a reply ordering repairs to be made forthwith and, oh depths of foolishness, informing Martin that the schooner was well-insured.

In mid-June I headed east. A groaning old Dakota aircraft deposited me, with a belly-shaking jolt, on the cow pasture at St. Pierre.

To my surprise (for I had cabled advance notice of my coming) none of my friends was on hand to greet me. When I set out to find them it was like trying to locate a grain of uranium without a Geiger counter. Everyone I talked to seemed singularly evasive; even somewhat anxious to get away from my company. Much puzzled, I sought out the incomparable Ella Girardin at L'Escal and from her received the first hints that all was not well with my little ship. She told me enough to send me streaking for the shipyard.

My poor little vessel was still high on the slip. She looked like an antediluvian monster that had just been fished out of the La Brea tar pits. She was enslimed from the tops of her masts to the bottom of her keel with foul black muck that stank like a sewage farm. Her decks seemed inches thick in the stuff and her cabin was more like the inside of a septic tank than a home for people. Most shocking of all was the condition of her stern. A good six feet of it seemed to have been chewed off, leaving her looking as pathetic as a duck that has backed into a high-speed fan.

I was standing, dazed, below her ruptured stern when one of the dockyard workers passed by. He did not stop, but after nodding his head at the-mutilated and encrusted vessel he took his nose meaningfully between thumb and forefinger. At that gesture I saw red. I went looking for Paul,
or
Théo, or Martin, with the purposefulness of a Malay villager running amok.

I did not find Théo—he was believed to be in Miquelon. I did not find Martin—he was supposed to be camping somewhere on Langlade. I did not find Paulo—he was reputed to have shipped aboard a freighter for the West Indies. However, after three days of fury and frustration, I
did
find enough wisps and fragments of the story to be able to piece them together into a coherent whole.

What had happened was, in a sense, my own fault. In asking three men to take charge of
Itchy
I had revealed a monumental ignorance of the Gallic temperament. Each felt that he alone should have been put in full command and the result was that none of the three did anything. The schooner was left to spend the winter at anchor in the harbour, unloved and unregarded, while my three friends waged war amongst themselves. Nobody won that war—but
Itchy
and I assuredly lost it.

Somehow she survived the fall and winter gales. Then, in early March, the arctic pack-ice beset the islands. A few days later a westerly gale drove the ice solidly into the harbour. The pressure broke the hold of
Itchy
's anchors and she was driven, stern first, against the projecting timbers of an abandoned wharf. One of the timbers pierced her counter and she went down in three fathoms of filth; for the inner harbour at St. Pierre is nothing more nor less than a sewage basin for the whole community.

Martin, Théo, and Paulo were distraught but spent their energies in useless recriminations against each other.
Itchy
stayed on the bottom, sinking deeper and deeper into the slime, until the receipt in St. Pierre of my cable containing the magic word “insured.”

St. John's, Newfoundland, does not hold a monopoly on mercantile piracy. St. Pierre, much as I love the place, has its own breed of brigands, and when word got around that
Itchy
was insured, they went into action. A group of them refloated the vessel (using oil drums that were lashed alongside her and then pumped full of air) and took possession of her as a right of salvage. They had her hauled on the slip, nominally for repairs, but when they discovered she only needed cleaning out and the replacement of one plank in her counter, they arranged to increase the repair costs by the simple expedient of tearing off six feet of her stern with crowbars.

The “repairs” were not undertaken immediately, as I had ordered, because the shipyard had enough work to do and it was felt it would be more thrifty to save
Itchy
for a slack period. She was still being saved when I arrived.

I am not particularly proud of my behaviour during the several weeks that followed, but then I am not particularly proud of the way the St. Pierrais behaved either. We fought. We fought bitterly, continuously, cunningly, and sometimes viciously. It took six weeks for me to get the. boat ready for sea again. It was a black period of obstruction, misery, and near madness as I wrestled with brigandage and venality?” harbour muck and shipyard sloth.

I can only recall two bright moments. One was when, in a state of blind fury, I forced my way into the office of the governor of the islands and had the pleasure of calling His Excellency an s.o.b. (he refrained from having me arrested, as he might reasonably have done, contenting himself with having me frog-marched out the door). The other bright moment was when the pirates presented me with their bills for salvage and repairs and I not only refused to sign them on behalf of the insurance company, but publicly recommended (with appropriate gestures) that they use the bills to relieve a temporary shortage of absorbent paper which was then plaguing the islands.

This dark interlude came to an end in the last week of July when Claire arrived. Suddenly the sun shone (quite literally: there had been almost constant fog since my arrival).
Itchy
was moderately clean again (although we kept finding deposits of St. Pierre, sewage in hidden corners for the next several months); she had been fitted with a new and reliable diesel engine, replacing the horrible bullgine; her bunks had been enlarged, and she was at least as tight as she had ever been. Claire's presence dissolved the bitterness in my soul and I sought out my erstwhile St. Pierre friends and made my peace with them.

Martin, Théo, and Paul (who had not really gone to the West Indies) were so relieved at the rapprochement that they threw a party for us. It was a good party, and when Claire and I set out to return to
Itchy—
launched now, and lying alongside Paulo's boat again—we were in a gay mood.

I have not previously mentioned that
Itchy
lacked toilet facilities. The truth is that I had never thought about installing them because, until Claire's coming, they would have been redundant. The bob chains forward, and the bumpkin aft, provided adequate comfort in an open-air environment. For men.

Having boarded the ship I went below to light the lamps, leaving Claire the privacy of the dark and slippery decks. Soon I heard a mammoth splash and rushed on deck with a
flashlight to find her small, white face bobbing in the black, oily waters alongside. She was not alone. A few feet away my flashlight beam picked up the grinning gape of a cat that had died hard, and died a long, long time ago. Fortunately Claire had sense enough to keep her mouth shut. Had she swallowed any of the water of the inner harbour it is possible my story would have ended on a tragic note.

Rescuing her was something of a task because, as she pointed out when she was finally dragged, dripping and furious, on to the deck, “Nobody can swim with their slacks down around their ankles!” In truth, she must have found it a harrowing experience, but when she had been taken up to Paulo's, hot-bathed, fortified with brandy, and given clean clothes, her good nature reasserted itself, In fact, I was so pleased with her that I redesigned the forepeak of the schooner so that there would be room for a small convenience, “Ladies, for the use of.”

Although the general situation in St. Pierre had now become comparatively pleasant, there was one sore spot left and it grew steadily worse until it threatened to erupt into serious trouble. The local pirates were demanding immediate payment in full, and were adamantly opposed to a negotiated settlement. I, on the other hand, was equally determined not to authorize payment of a single sou until they modified their demands. Things came to a head when an
avocat
appeared on board to tell me that unless I paid up, and at once, he would slap a blanket on the schooner. This is a nautical phrase, which means the arrest of a boat and her delivery into the hands of a bailiff.

My reaction can be imagined. I had already lost almost two months' sailing time because of the machinations of the St. Pierrais, and I was double-damned if I was going to lose so much as another day. Nor was I going to pay what amounted to an exorbitant ransom for
Itchy's
freedom. I devised a counter-ploy.

Under the pretext of testing the new engine I announced my intention of making a short run down the North Channel.
To allay suspicions (the pirates were a deeply suspicious lot who kept
Itchy
under close scrutiny), I did not apply at the customs-house for a clearance. I
did
invite several island friends to come along for a joy ride; their presence being calculated to guarantee that I was not about to make a break for far horizons.

Only one St. Pierrais was privy to my real intentions—not that I couldn't trust the discretion of my other friends (I couldn't), but because I did not need their witting help. The man whose co-operation I required (and to protect the guilty he shall remain nameless), was under sufficient obligation to me to warrant my trust.