The Boat Who Wouldn't Float (4 page)

When Enos and Obie Murphy (an amiable fisherman of gargantuan strength) started work on the boat the next
day, it became my chief task to keep them supplied with optimism. In order to do this, I had to establish a regular run between Muddy Hole and St. John's, the nearest place where optimism could be procured. I would start off for the city in the early morning, reach it late in the afternoon, have the jeep repaired, try to buy such vital articles for the boat as sails, pumps, etc. (more of this later), and I would pick up a gallon or two of optimism from the bootleggers, who sold a better and cheaper product than did the government-owned liquor stores. I would then drive all night, reaching Muddy Hole in time to prepare Enos and Obie for the day's work which lay ahead of them.

As time passed the navigation of the caribou track became less of an ordeal.
Passion Flower
gradually wore down the worst of the boulders and chewed up most of the stumps. By the time she made her final trip, the path had become enough like a road to prompt the residents of the Southern Shore to an act of gratitude. They petitioned the government to have the trail named “Passion Flower Passage.” The government might have done it too except that the Premier, Mr. Joey Smallwood, was afraid that once he had acknowledged the road's existence he would have to maintain it.

One reason I did not mind making these long voyages was that the alternative, helping Enos and Obie work on the boat, was too terrible to contemplate. I avoided contemplating it for several days, until Enos began fitting a false keel and two thousand pounds of iron ballast. An extra pair of hands was needed then and I had to supply them. To give the flavour of the working conditions I can do no better than refer to my notes made at the time.

The boat was lying in a tiny slip dominated by the fish plant. All the effluence, both human and animal, from this plant, which employed one hundred and forty-seven men, women and children, and which processed about 100,000 pounds of fish a day, was voided into our slip through a ten-inch sewage pipe that vomited at us at
irregular intervals. At low tide, the pallid guts of defunct codfish formed a slippery pattern all about the boat and festooned all her lines. The air, already pretty noxious, was further poisoned with gases from the meal plant. Such fish offal as was not poured into the water was reduced to stinking yellow powder that sifted down from heaven upon our bared heads, like the debris from a crematorium. So awful was the stink that four wooden barrels standing at the end of the stage, wherein Obie was wont to throw the livers of newly caught codfish, so they could rot and reduce to oil under the heat of the sun, gave off a rather pleasant fragrance by comparison. Our clothing, bodies, hair, became slimy with the effluvium of long-dead cod and, of course, every inch of the vessel was thickly coated with….

It was a situation where a man needed all the optimism he could get!

 

However not even all the optimism in Newfoundland could enable us to accomplish the impossible, and as the day of Jack's arrival drew nearer I was forced to admit to myself that the little ship was not going to be ready to sail on schedule.

By July tenth she still lacked spars, rigging, sails, a propeller, and a variety of other vital items. She also lacked sufficient pumps. Late on the evening of the tenth we finished paying her seams and painting her bottom and at high tide hauled her to the head of the wharf. She immediately proceeded to give evidence of what was to be her most salient characteristic. She leaked as no boat I have ever known, before or since,
could
leak.

The water did not seem to enter from any particular place, but to come in by some arcane process of osmosis through every pore. It was necessary to pump her every hour, on the hour, and in between the hours, just to keep abreast of the
inflow. There was no question of getting ahead of it since there were only three of us and we could only operate three pumps at a time.

The little schooner's apparent desire to commit hara-kiri did not bother Enos or Obie. From Enos I heard a phrase which was to echo like an eternal whisper in my ears throughout the next several years.

“Southern Shore boats all leaks a drop when they first lanches off,” Enos told me soothingly. “But once they's been afloat a day or two,
why they takes up
.”

Like most things Enos told me there was truth in this. Southern Shore boats
do
take up. They take up unbelievable quantities of salt water, and they take up most of a man's time just working at the pumps. The fantastic arm and shoulder musculature of Southern Shore fishermen is sufficient testimony to this.

 

4.
Farillon and Ferryland

T
HE HELLISH
days I spent in Muddy Hole and in St. John's might well have proved unendurable had it not been for the Morry family of Ferryland.

Ferryland lies not far from Muddy Hole but, unlike its sister outport, it remains habitable by reason of the fact that it does not have the dubious blessing of a fish plant.

My presence and purpose at Muddy Hole soon became known in Ferryland as indeed it was known along the whole Southern Shore. One day when she was bounding back from St. John's
Passion Flower
had a conniption fit, snorted horribly a few times, and took a fainting spell outside the white-painted picket fence enclosing a big old house on Ferryland's outskirts.

I went up to the house to ask for help and was met at the door by Howard Morry. Before I could open my mouth to speak he forestalled me.

“Come you in, Mister Mowat,” he boomed. “Come you in and have a cup of tay.”

Howard was then in his eightieth year but I took him to be a man of fifty. Tall, firmly joined, heavy set, with a rubicund and unlined face, he was the epitome of a farmer-fisherman from Drake's time. He was a widower living with his rangy and laconic son Bill, and his voluble daughter-in-
law Pat. Bill and Pat ran a small store and a small salt-fish-making industry. They had two charming children, a boy and a girl.

The Morrys seemed to know what I was undergoing at Muddy Hole and took it on themselves to provide an antidote. From that first meeting until I sailed away their home was mine. Pat fed me fantastic meals, bullied the hell out of me, and saw to it that I seldom went to bed sober. Bill made me a part of the ancient fishing pattern of the harbour, sending me out with the trap boat crews, showing me the arts and secrets of making salt fish, and subjecting me to his own fierce, unyielding belief in the importance of human continuity in all things. Young Peter Morry, age ten, took me on long, secret walks into the “country” over trails made by the Masterless Men and up to the high places like the Gaze, a long hillcrest from which, for centuries, women watched for the returning ships, or men stood guard to cry the alarm when pirate sails hove over the horizon.

However it was Howard Morry who truly took me into the heart and soul of Newfoundland and Newfoundlanders. Howard was one of those rare people whose feeling for the past amounted to an intense and loving intimacy. His great-great-grandfather had been the first Morry to reach the Southern Shore, and all the tales that had come down the long ladder of the generations had finished up in Howard's head—and in his heart.

During his middle years he suffered a severe accident and had to lie a-bed for twenty months. He used this time to transcribe every memory of Ferryland he had ever heard into thirty school scribblers. When he was well again, and back at sea and at his trade, he negligently tossed this priceless treasure into a corner where some children found it and used the books to make a bonfire. When Howard told me about this incident, I was appalled. He only chuckled. “ 'Twas of no account. I still have every word of it written in me head.”

Howard not only knew the story of Ferryland during his own family's time but he knew it, or felt it, as far back as history can go. That was a long way back since Ferryland is one of the places in Newfoundland where the patina of human occupation is thick enough to really soften the bony face of the old Rock.

The broad and well-protected harbour lying at the foot of low, swelling hills, fringed by a wide foreshore of grassy meadows, welcomed some of the earliest European visitors to North America. Basque whalers and cod fishers sheltered in Ferryland harbour well before the end of the fifteenth century. During the first decades of the sixteenth century Bretons and Normans had fishing stations along its beaches. It appears on an old French chart of 1537, as Farillon. Yet the French must have come late upon the scene for this name was not of their bestowal. Even then it was a corruption of an earlier name.

The French held Farillon as a permanent settlement until it was seized from them by English pirates about 1600. In
1621 Lord Baltimore chose it as the site of a grandiose plantation scheme he had proposed for Newfoundland. However, the Lord was hag-ridden. His wife could not stand Firiland, as it was then called, and two years later persuaded her master to shift south to what became the State of Maryland.

Over the succeeding centuries other overlords usurped nominal control of the place and sweated the inhabitants. But its people, of mixed French, West Country English, Jersey, and Irish stock went on about their business with the sea, paying very little heed to those who rode upon their shoulders. Tough, stubborn, infinitely enduring, they survived the black years of the Fishing Admirals when English kings bowed to the demands of powerful fishing interests in the Motherland and decreed that no one could settle in the new land; that it should be kept free of permanent inhabitants; and that it might be used only as a seasonal fishing station by the crews of English ships.

Nevertheless the people of Ferryland held to their home. They held to it through an interminable series of raids by French, New Englanders, Portuguese, and just plain Buccaneers. They held on with the tenaciousness of barnacles. Several times Ferryland had to fight for its life against full-scale naval and military attacks. It survived. It and its people
have
survived through more than four centuries. When I knew it in the early 1960's its nature was not greatly changed from what it must have been at its inception. Howard had innumerable tales to tell that illustrated the nature of the crucible that had formed his people. There was the story of the Masterless Men for example.

During the eighteenth century the English fishing fleet was largely manned by men who had been driven to sea by starvation, or who had been tricked by “recruiters” into making the long, hard voyage across the seas. Having reached Newfoundland many of these men refused to return home again. Treated like slaves by the local “planters” they reacted like Spartan slaves and fled from the little harbours into the desolate interior. Here they formed a society of their own;
one that endured for a hundred years. They became veritable outlaws in the romantic tradition of Robin Hood, living the forest life and robbing the rich to succour, not only themselves, but also the oppressed fishermen inhabitants of the coast.

The interior of the peninsula became the Country of the Masterless Men. Only the best-armed bands of King's men dared enter their domain. Secret trails ran everywhere, and the villages of the Masterless Men were hidden in a score of deep vales, one of which was within five miles of Ferryland under the loom of a massive hill known as the Butter Pot.

The Masterless Men were never conquered and never subdued; they gradually melded with the coastal settlers and their blood still runs in the veins of the people of the Southern Shore.

Howard Morry brought these men to life again, and others like them, as he took me on little trips along the coast to outports like Bear Cove, La Manche, Admiral's Cove, Cappahayden, Renews, Fermeuse, Aquaforte, Bauline, and other places with equally strange names. Yet Ferryland remained the heart of his love.

One afternoon he took me out to Bois Island which lies in the broad mouth of Ferryland harbour. Once it was well wooded, but that was in distant days. Now no trees grow on it and it is a place of fantasy.

Forgotten or ignored by official historians, familiar only to a handful of men like Howard, it is a great fortress. Around its almost sheer perimeter is an earthwork circumvallation. At least five heavy gun batteries still lie emplaced at intervals, the muzzles of the guns showing black and stark through a guanoed growth of mosses. Magazines, the ruins of dwelling houses, and even an ancient well can still be traced. According to Howard it was first fortified before 1600 by the French. By 1610 it had been taken by the English super-pirate Peter Easton and was gradually improved until it became an almost impregnable structure and the key to Ferryland's long survival.

In shoal water at the foot of a great crevice lay four corroding, twenty-pound, long guns of the seventeenth century, just as they had been left when an eighteenth-century privateer attempted to steal them from the temporarily abandoned fort. Nothing else appeared to have been disturbed since the fort last lived. Here were no guides, no gravel paths, no fanciful reconstructions. Here was the true reality of the past; dimmed only and not obliterated by the flickering centuries.

With the passing of men like Howard Morry (and they are all too few in any land) most of the rich and vital human past of Newfoundland will have gone beyond recall. And a way of life four centuries old will have vanished.

I count myself lucky I had a chance to taste that way of life—the way of the cod fisher. One morning at four o'clock Howard woke me from a down-filled bed, fed me a whopping breakfast, and took me through the darkness to the stage head where I was to join the four-man crew of a trap boat.

She was a big, broad-beamed skiff powered by a five-horsepower, “jump spark,” single-cylinder engine. It was calm and cold as we puttered out of the harbour accompanied in darkness by the muted reverberations from a score of other “one-lungers” pushing unseen boats toward the open sea.

Our crew had two cod traps to examine. Essentially
these traps are great boxes of netting as much as fifty feet on a side. They have a bottom but no top. Stretching out from a “door” on one side is a long, vertically hung leader-net to guide the slow moving cod into the trap. The whole affair is moored to the sea floor with huge wrought-iron anchors which are the last surviving artifacts of ancient and forgotten ships.

Our first trap was set in nine fathoms off Bois Island and we reached it just at dawn. While the rest of us leaned over the side of the skiff, staring into the dark waters, our skipper tested the trap with a jigger—a six-inch leaden fish equipped with two great hooks, hung on the end of a heavy line. He lowered the jigger into the trap and hauled sharply back. On the first try he hooked a fine fat cod and pulled it, shimmering, aboard.

“Good enough!” he said. “Let's haul her, byes.”

So haul we did. Closing the trap mouth and then manhandling the tremendous weight of twine and rope took the best efforts of the five of us and it was half an hour before the trap began to “bag,” with its floats upon the surface. As we passed armloads of tar-reeking, icy twine across the gunwales, the bag grew smaller and the water within it began to roil. We had a good haul. The trap held twenty or thirty quintals
^*1
of prime cod seething helplessly against the meshes.

One of our number, a young man just entering his twenties, was working alongside the skiff from a pitching dory. He was having a hard time holding his position because of a big swell running in from seaward. An unexpected heave on the twine threw him off balance, and his right arm slipped between the dory and the skiff just as they rolled together. The crack of breaking bones was clearly audible. He sat back heavily on the thwart of his dory and held his arm up for inspection. It was already streaming with blood. A wrist-watch, just purchased and much treasured, had been completely crushed and driven into the flesh.