The Boat Who Wouldn't Float (8 page)

 

7.
Full speed astern

A
FTER SPENDING
a single night under Enos's roof, Jack insisted we shift aboard the boat. He was reluctant to give reasons but the presence of seven nubile young women seemed to unnerve him. His back was still a dubious quantity. In any event, we took up housekeeping aboard our own little vessel.

When I originally gave Enos instructions for converting the boat into a cruising yacht he appeared to understand me well enough, but when he began doing the work my wishes came into conflict with centuries of tradition—tradition which dictated that the space occupied by people on any vessel must be reduced to the irreducible minimum, leaving as much room as possible for fish, engines, and other really vital things. Tradition also dictated that the accommodations must be as uncomfortable as possible, presumably to ensure that the crew had small alternative to remaining on deck working their fishing gear, even in the midst of a winter gale.

Enos's attempts to carry out my instructions, in opposition to his own deep-rooted instincts, led to a compromise that was no happy one. He began by building the immense cabin trunk, which I have already referred to as looking like an upside-down coffin, over the fish wells; but although he made it as high as a barn on the sides, he did not camber the
roof, with the result that there was only five feet of headroom down below. It was necessary to walk about in the cabin with one's knees well bent or else with one's head laid over upon a shoulder. Tall men could not walk at all. They had to crawl.

The cabin was of ample length but Enos had found a way to fix that too. He partitioned off the after-third to house the great green monster that was our engine. There was no doubt about it—the engine had the best accommodation on the ship.

In what small space remained Enos roughed in the accommodation for human beings, and the verb is fully descriptive. He built two bunks right up in the eyes of the vessel, hard against the chain locker, and he built them to traditional specifications: sixteen inches wide at the head, twelve inches wide at the foot, and sixty-six inches long. He somehow also managed to tip the bunks so that the occupant's feet were six inches higher than his head. As a final touch, he made the side-boards (which are intended to keep you in place when the vessel grows lively) out of unplaned black spruce, than which there is no more splintery material known to man.

All in all, the design was diabolically efficient, for it guaranteed that any man who could stay in those bunks longer than twenty minutes at a time had to be close to dissolution.

In Enos's view, living space on a fishing vessel ought to consist only of a place to sleep and a place to cook. He therefore turned the small remaining space in the cabin into a galley. He provided a place for a stove, and enough lockers wherein to stow hardtack, salt pork, flour, and turnips for
at least forty men on a voyage to Tierra del Fuego and back again—non-stop.

Lockers (cupboards to landlubbers) were the one thing the cabin did not lack. In days to come, members of the crew who had suffered as much mortification in the bunks as the flesh could endure sometimes crawled into the lockers, shoving aside their contents, in order to get a little rest.

When I first saw what Enos had done I ordered him to tear everything out and start again. This soured him and a sour Enos was an intractable Enos. He told me it would take not less than two months to change things around and so, perforce, I had to let the matter drop. However I did prevail upon him to add a saloon table. Although it was very small it pre-empted most of the remaining floor space.

This was the home Jack and I moved into. It was not yet painted. It was filled with oddments of gear, pieces of wood, coils of rope, and a stench that drew its potency equally from the bilges and from the fish-plant soup in which we floated. Home was unprepossessing but it was at least free of ebullient and uninhibited women—and it was very conveniently located in relation to Enos's fish store.

During the first ten days we lived aboard we did not suffer much discomfort from the bunks because we seldom had a chance to use them. We worked by day, and we worked by night. We ate when there was nothing better to do and though I consider myself a competent cook my culinary productions were not up to much during this period.

I cooked on a gasoline stove and the staple food was cod. This was not a matter of choice. It resulted from a desperate attempt on our part to prevent the ship from reverting to her original role and filling up to the hatches with codfish. The fishermen in Muddy Hole were, one and all, hospitable and generous men. Every morning when they returned from hauling their cod traps each of the boats would come alongside and her skipper would present us with a fine, fat cod for dinner.

Because the harbour was the most public place in Muddy
Hole and our boat was almost never free of visitors, we could not dispose of the surplus fish over the side. Had it been reported that we had thrown away one single fish, every inhabitant in the settlement would have been hurt to the quick, and we would have become virtual pariahs.

So we ate cod in unbelievable quantities. We ate it boiled, fried, poached, and once, when Jack undertook to cook dinner, raw. Nevertheless, we could not begin to keep up with the supply until Obie took pity on us and converted our surplus into salt-pickled cod which we stored in a huge barrel in his store.

 

By the last week in July the vessel was beginning to look vaguely shipshape. She was rigged with gear that was heavy enough to meet the needs of a vessel three times her size. Her sails, cut from fourteen-gauge canvas, were bent; and I may say they were not easy to bend, since they were made of a material with the stiffness and weight of galvanized iron. The propeller had been shipped during a hideous episode which saw Jack and Enos and me wading knee deep in slime throughout most of one interminable day. The bare places on her upperworks and decks had received at least one coat of paint—variegated paint, because we had to use the odds and ends we could find at the bottom of paint cans scrounged from fishermen's stores. Water and gas tanks had been installed and the water tank had been filled by Jack. The source of water was a spring half a mile away on the hillside which dripped a quart of water an hour. It took Jack two days to fill the tank.

Most of the essential equipment was aboard and had found a place in which to live, at least temporarily. There remained only one area of real uncertainty—the engine. Since she looms all too large in what follows I shall give a detailed introduction to her. She was a seven-horsepower, single-cylinder, make-and-break, gasoline-fuelled monster, built in the 1920's from an original design conceived somewhere near the end of
the last century. She was massive beyond belief, and intractable beyond bearing. In order to start her it was first necessary to open a priming cock on the cylinder head and introduce half a cup of raw gasoline. Then you had to spin her flywheel which was as big as the wheel of a freight car and weighed about the same.

There was no clutch and no gear box. When, and if, the engine started, the boat immediately began to move. She did not necessarily move forward. It is an idiosyncrasy of the make-and-breaks that when they start they may choose to turn over either to left or to right (which is to say either forward or astern), and there is no way known to man of predicting which direction it is going to be.

Once started, the direction can be reversed only by snatching off the spark-wire and letting the engine almost die. On its next-to-final kick it will usually backfire and in the process reverse itself, at which instant one must push the spark-wire back in place and hope that the beast will continue turning over. It seldom does. At least it seldom did for Jack and me. To properly dominate a make-and-break engine one must have grown up with it from childhood.

According to mythology the virtue of these engines lies in the fact that they are simple and reliable. Although this myth is widely believed I am able to report that it is completely untrue. These engines are, in fact, vindictive, debased, black-minded ladies of no virtue and any non-Newfoundlander who goes shipmates with one is either a fool or a masochist, and is likely both.

We ran our first engine test on a Sunday morning and, for a wonder, the sun was shining in Muddy Hole and the fog had retreated out to sea. It was therefore an auspicious morning, but the auspices proved misleading. Enos and Obie were on hand to demonstrate the engine to us, but although both of them had lived with make-and-breaks all their lives it took them an hour to get the beast going. When she did start it was with a bellowing roar that reminded us we had been unable to find a muffler for her. She started in reverse, but
this was of no moment since we had moored the schooner to the stage with enough lines to hold the
Queen Mary
. The big blade turned and stirred up the bottom muck, so that great gaseous bubbles began to burst under her counter, testifying to unknown horrors of corruption in the depths below.

Jack and I did not observe much of this first-hand. We were too busy leaping for our lives. The moment she started, the green monster went berserk. With each stroke of her huge piston she leapt a good four inches off the wooden bedding plates, and then came down again with a jolt that shook our little ship from keel to masthead. At each jolt, the open-topped carburetor flung a spray of gasoline over the battery box and over the hot exhaust pipe.

Since it seemed obvious that the vessel was going to explode Jack and I flung ourselves on deck, gained the stage head and ran for our lives. We did not halt until we were safely behind the shelter of Enos's house. However when a few minutes later the bellow of the engine ceased and there had been no colossal bang, we cautiously returned to the harbour. We found Enos and Obie unconcernedly awaiting us. They explained what had taken place.

When he originally built the boat Enos bedded the engine with iron bolts and during her years with the Hallohans these had rusted out. The Hallohans had not attempted to replace them, but had devised a system of two-by-four wooden shores, which they had braced all over the engine room and which served to hold the monster in its place. During the refit Enos removed these shores without stopping to consider what, if any, purpose they served. He now knew, as did we all.

Replacing the bolts was a tedious task. The vessel had to be dried out again at low tide and holes drilled right through her bottom, into which we fitted big bronze keeper bolts taken from the boiler of a wrecked coasting steamer. Enos was of the opinion that
these
would hold, and in this instance he was right.

When next we ran the bullgine (this is the nicest of the names we devised for her), she stayed put in her place, and
that was a blessing, although it did not solve all our problems. Foremost of these was the fact that neither Jack nor I could get her to start. We did not have the knack, neither did we have the muscle. Since I had become the self-appointed skipper of the vessel I used my prerogatives to appoint Jack to the position of chief engineer and turned my mind to other things.

I must pay him homage. Throughout most of one day he wrestled with the beast under the tutelage of Obie. Toward evening, exhausted and filthy, wordless with fury but still indomitable, he finally got her to go. She immediately backfired, kicked into reverse all on her own, spun the flywheel the wrong way around, and caught Jack on the elbow with the starting handle, propelling him full length into the main cabin.

His was something of a Pyrrhic victory since his back went out and his elbow swelled up so he could not even feed himself properly, let alone raise a glass with his right hand. Furthermore it was a victory in a single battle only and on every subsequent occasion when he had to start the engine the victory had to be won anew.

 

The Hallohans' failure to name the boat was their own business. We had no intention of girdling the world in a nameless ship. Off and on we thought about the matter and we almost decided she should be called
Black Joke
.