The Colony of Unrequited Dreams (13 page)

“Tell your father I said hello,” said Sharpe.

“I’ll run right out and tell him now,” said Fielding, to another burst of laughter. She was facing me, back to them, and her expression belied her tone of voice, which was that of banter between rival professionals. She looked at me and smiled.

Fielding’s Condensed
      
History of Newfoundland

Chapter Five:

KIRKE

Calvert is succeeded at Ferryland by David Kirke.

Kirke spends most of the year 1627 expelling the French from Canada. Having captured all their possessions in that country, he returns victorious to England, where Charles I congratulates him on a job well done, then tells him that under the terms of a treaty he has just signed, every inch of Canada that Kirke took from the French has been returned to them.

Enraged, livid, Kirke wonders if the king has given any thought to how the widows of the men who died liberating Canada will take this news. He even considers saying so out loud someday.

Kirke is humiliated at court and Charles feels sorry for him, so much so that he waits only six years before knighting him for his services, which unfortunately has the effect of bringing upon Kirke even more humiliation. Eventually, the presence of Kirke at court makes Charles feel foolish, so he grants him a charter to the entire island of Newfoundland.

In 1638, Kirke moves with his family to Newfoundland and settles at Ferryland. Within a year, he alienates the planters by forbidding them, on the king’s orders, to erect any structure within six miles of the shore, then placates them and solves the problem of piracy by declaring that a fort is not a structure. Soon, everyone is building forts.

Civil war breaks out in England, diverting attention away from Newfoundland for about a decade, during which Kirke, anticipating that a return to government by monarchy is imminent in England, allies with Prince Rupert, cousin of the king, and transforms Ferryland into a royalist stronghold, at the same time amassing great sums of money by forcing the Cromwell-supporting migratory fishermen to pay him taxes and by seizing all the best fishing grounds for himself.

He has taverns built and spends his nights in them, mocking Cromwell. Once again, however, the king disappoints him by getting himself executed and Kirke is soon recalled to England, where he is such a figure of fun that Cromwell spares his life.

The Docks

I
BEGGED MY WAY
off the court beat after a few months. I convinced the publisher of the
Telegram
, who each year purchased several berths on the S.S.
Newfoundland
and sold them to sealers in exchange for a percentage of their share, to let me have a berth so that I could write about what life was like on board a sealing ship. My publisher worked out an arrangement with the
Newfoundland
’s captain, Westbury Kean, whereby I would file stories every day using the ship’s telegrapher. Kean, saying he had no intention of being held responsible for anything that might happen to a boy who had never been off dry land in his life, said that I would not be allowed to go out on the ice but could watch the hunt from on board through binoculars. And he would read each day’s story and convey it in person to the telegrapher to make sure nothing was published that reflected badly on him or his crew.

My family came out to see me off and to witness the annual blessing of the sealing fleet by clergy of all denominations. Miss Garrigus was the only woman among them. As the clergy, their voices magnified by megaphones, prayed God to safeguard the officers and crew of the fleet and to reward them for their labour with a
bountiful harvest, I stood, imitating the crew, in the rigging of the S.S.
Newfoundland
, though not as high up as most of them were. There must have been ten thousand people gathered down below, jammed to the water’s edge to see the fleet, which filled the harbour. Even with the vessels moored nose in, there was not enough room at dockside for all of them, so the rest had to anchor in mid-harbour, facing every which way. The pilot boats scooted about trying to organize the fleet’s departure.

When the blessing concluded, the crowd cheered, and from where we stood we waved our hats. The first of the sealing fleet followed the pilot boats. I watched from the rigging of the
Newfoundland
as the crowd ran
en masse
along the apron to join another crowd already gathered on the heights of Signal Hill, where they would watch the fleet make its way towards the ice floes of the northeast coast. As each sealing vessel cleared the Narrows, the noon-day gun on Signal Hill was fired, a blast that echoed back and forth between the north and south side of the city. And also, each of the ships, as it cleared the Narrows, unfurled its expansive sails and was suddenly transformed to white. There came up to me from below, mixed with the old smell of the bilge-water harbour, the new smell of diesel oil from the engines of the biggest steamships. Oil and coal and sail together could barely move these boats now when they were empty of everything but men and boys. They would come back weighted down to the gunnels, inching along with their cargoes of seal pelts and whitecoats.

At an order from Captain Kean to hoist the sails, I climbed down from the rigging. The men of the
Newfoundland
pitched in, straining on the ropes, in some cases jumping and hanging in midair to make a sail unfurl. A light cold rain was falling but there was not much wind. Still, as the sails caught the breeze, the massive boom came swinging round and the men ducked expertly beneath it as a sealer who shouted “Low on deck” pulled me down beside him just in time. I looked up. The great soot-begrimed expanse of canvas flapped loudly overhead, black smoke billowed backwards
from the stack below midship and the
Newfoundland
picked up speed as it bore down on the ice outside the Narrows.

The crew was divided into four groups, watches they were called. I was assigned, at my request, to the fourth watch, which I was told rose at four in the morning. I fancied that the daily routine of this watch would most nearly resemble my own. Each watch was assigned a master, who supervised the men on and off the ship.

There were fathers and sons, brothers, in-laws, friends, little factions with distinctive accents, in some cases distinctively incomprehensible ones, who talked exclusively among themselves. There were a few “youngsters,” young men my age on their first voyage to the ice, eager to prove they could keep up with the older men and incredulous with scorn when they heard of my confinement to the ship.

I had been worried how I would be received among the sealers. Most of them did not begrudge me having it “easy,” as it seemed to them I did. On the contrary, one of the older men said quite sincerely that it was a credit to me that I had made something of myself. Most regarded me with a kind of shy awe when they heard what I was doing. They could not read or write and had never met someone whom they perceived to be the epitome of reading and writing, a newspaper man.

“What did ya write about us today, now?” they asked me the first few days, as we made our way through the ice to the whelping grounds. I would read them what I wrote.

“Sher if yer not goin’ over de side of ’er,” a young fellow from Catalina said, “ ’ow ’re ya gonna know what goes on out on dee ice?” They all laughed when I took out from beneath my pillow my binoculars and scanned the sleeping quarters as I planned to scan the ice each day.

The sealers wore thick-soled leather boots, many of which bore the name of Smallwood. These boots were studded with sharp spikes called sparables. They dressed in thick woollen underwear
and trousers and put on as many tattered shirts and guernseys as they could, but no overcoats, for they would have been too much of an encumbrance. Each of them had a set of oil clothes but never wore them or even took them when they left the ship unless it looked like it might rain or snow. They tracked out to the whelping grounds with their gaffs held horizontally like staffs in case the ice gave way beneath their feet.

From as high up in the rigging as I dared to go, I watched them work, swinging their sharp-pointed gaffs like pickaxes, killing the seals and swiftly pelting them with knives that gleamed like razors in the sun. Beginning a few hundred feet from the ship and extending as far as I could see, the ice was red with blood. They dragged piles of pelts back along the same route each time, so that a single trail of gore led like a road from the blood field to the ship. Most of the carcasses were left behind and only the pelts, the fat-lined fur, brought back to the ship. An ice-field after a day’s cull was littered for miles with carcasses, which the next day were set upon by a flock of seagulls and other birds that followed us throughout the voyage.

Everywhere there were patches of open water, massive pools of green slush that the sealers crossed, “copied,” by jumping without hesitation from one floating ice pan to the next, often having to snag a pan with a gaff to pull it closer to them. The few that fell in and were hauled out hurried back to the ship, their clothing frozen stiff by the time they arrived.

My watch, which hit the ice at five in the morning, did not come back to the ship until eight at night. I was not used to a workday near that long, and so I was incredulous when I found out that they had several more hours of work to do on board before they were through.

They gathered fresh ice for drinking water, covered the pelts, shifted coal from the hold to the bunkers near the engine room, disposed of the ash from the coal already burnt, tipped great cauldrons of it over the side.

At about eleven, they were at last allowed to eat, which they did as swiftly as possible, for there was by this time barely four hours before their watch began again. They cooked seal meat over a barrel that, with its top cut off, formed a kind of spit. The only part of their meal I could not bring myself to eat was “lop scouse,” half oatmeal gruel, half seal stew, which they dipped into with rock-hard cakes of “tack” bread, washing the whole vile mixture down with tea.

The last thing before bed, they filled the ship’s lanterns with seal oil, the smoke from which smelled faintly fish-like and burned my eyes so badly that I lay face down in my pillow, coming up to breathe only when I had to.

They crawled into their makeshift wooden bunks and most of them were instantly asleep, which was a blessing, for unlike me they seemed not to notice that our sleeping quarters hung so heavy with coal dust it was barely possible to breathe. The floors, their bunks, their clothing, which they did not waste sleeping time by changing out of, were smeared with blood, fat, soot, ashes, coal dust.

While the fourth watch slept, the other watches worked. There was never a time when the ship was idle. The hatch by which the coal was raised up from the hold passed within a few feet of the bunks, which were therefore exposed to the open sky and whatever might be falling from it. By way of another hatch, which also went straight past our bunks but on the other side, seal pelts were dropped down to the second hold, some falling off the chute and straight into the bunks of the sealers, who were so deep in sleep they did not stir and often woke up in the morning covered with the bloody pelts.

All night long as I lay in my bunk, coal went up and pelts came down, the coal winch grinding loudly, the seal pelts spattering gore everywhere as they went sliding down the chute.

I went three full nights without a wink of sleep and finally decided that I would sleep during the afternoon, when all the watches overlapped, when the fourth watch was most likely to be out of
range of my binoculars and when the sleeping quarters were empty and the coal crank and the pelt chute in least use.

At night, I lay awake on my bunk, as did some of the sealers who, in spite of their exhaustion or perhaps because of it, could not get to sleep. I think some of them resisted sleep just to experience the luxury of idleness, of doing nothing but lying on their bunks while others worked. They lay with their hands behind their heads as, in the darkness, they puffed reflectively on cigarettes or pipes. They cocked their heads in acknowledgment when they saw me looking at them, but that was all. Despite all the noise, talking was forbidden after midnight.

Sometimes the men were on the ice until well into the night, as long as there were enough seals to keep all the watches busy at once. I remember the eerie sight of the sealers setting out across the ice bearing lanterns and torches. On each spotlit patch of ice, one sealer, crouching, held a torch that illuminated a seal over which another sealer stood with gaff upraised.

When enough seals had been killed to sustain them, bonfires were built with carcasses doused with seal oil until the air was filled with the smell of roasting seal meat, on which the men covertly feasted while they worked. It was an elemental, soul-disturbing sight, yet I longed to somehow be a part of it, to feel something other than the planks of the S.S.
Newfoundland
beneath my feet. But Captain Kean was adamant that if I set foot on the ice, I would no longer have the use of his telegrapher.