The Colony of Unrequited Dreams (20 page)

The voyage of Columbus is one of the grandest events in history.… The life of the Genoese sailor is, and always will be, the grandest romance of history.… Alas! for the glory of our island, for the praise of our discoverer, there are no portraits.… No golden haze of romance surrounds our earliest annals. The story of the discovery of Newfoundland and North America, as told by the Cabots, is as dull as the log of a dredge-boat.

—D.W. P
ROWSE
,
A History of Newfoundland

Fielding’s Condensed
      
History of Newfoundland

Chapter Seven:
TREWORGIE’S REIGN OF TERROR

The Commonwealth Government sends John Treworgie, who has no stake, financial or otherwise, in the fishery, to govern Newfoundland. Thus begins what becomes known among the merchants as Treworgie’s Reign of Terror, which lasts from 1653–1660, throughout which time the settlers are allotted better fishing grounds and are exempted from “unfair” punishment by the admirals. Thankfully, with the restoration of the monarchy also comes the restoration of law and order.

Some historians have suggested that Treworgie may have been more gullible than tyrannical, that he may have been taken in by the glibness of the settlers, with whom the rough-spoken merchants could not compete.

If so, with what welcome must the honest eloquence of the merchant Sir Josiah Child have been received at court. So eloquent is Child that the king’s ministers swear they would pay just to hear him speak. Child, however, insists that so much do they honour him by listening it is he who should pay them, which he does, one at a
time, eschewing ostentation by doing it behind a curtain or in some antechamber.

Child addresses several charges that have been made by the settlers against the merchants and their fishing admirals. (The fishing admirals were those captains who arrived first in each harbour, over which they afterwards, under order of the king, ruled as judge and jury when disputes arose.)

1. The fishing admirals, on the instructions of the merchants, discourage settlement in Newfoundland so as to keep the fishery all to themselves. To this end, they abuse their judicial powers, showing bias against the settlers, whom they are ten times more likely to punish than their own fishermen. As no court records are kept, the only proof of this so-called bias is the number of letters of complaint that are sent by the settlers back to England. But what does this “prove,” Child says, except that unlike the settlers, the merchants are taking their punishment like men.

2. It is unfair that the settlers are forbidden to fish until the merchant fleet arrives from England, even then being allowed to fish only those grounds the merchants could not be bothered with. But is it not true, Child counters, that the king himself, eager that everyone have an equal chance of making money from the fishery, has long since decreed that the question of who fished where will be settled by a race across the Atlantic every spring. If anyone is being unfair, therefore, it is the settlers, who instead of taking part in the race, simply wait all winter at the finish line — hence their disqualification.

Not that the settlers, Child argues, are above cheating. Despite their disqualification, many of them, claiming that to endure a winter in Newfoundland is a greater feat than to sail a ship across the ocean, go ahead and fish anyway. True, they always pull their nets up before the merchant fleet arrives, but whenever it is found that a fewer than
usual number of settlers have died throughout the winter, the admirals deduce what they have been up to and punish them accordingly.

Equally transparent, Child says, is their ploy of fasting the last few weeks before the fleet arrives, to shed what he calls fish fat from their bodies. Settlers are punished according to how long they have fasted, which is calculated from their degree of emaciation. The closer to death a settler appears to be, the more severely he is flogged.

“Yet,” Child says, “try to imagine the admiral as he carries out the sentence, weeping tears of frustration, knowing that no matter how hard he applies the lash, he cannot replace the fish the settler has consumed.”

“Enough,” King Charles says. “Enough, honest Josiah. I cannot stand to hear any more about what people once possessed of English virtues have been reduced to by life in Newfoundland.” The king is convinced that the only way to stop the exploitation of the merchants by the settlers is to depopulate the island.

The Newfoundland Hotel

F
IELDING’S JOURNAL
, O
CTOBER
23, 1920

Dear Smallwood:

I am below decks in the supposedly “dry” lounge, which contains a large number of people who are very obviously drunk. I am drunk, too, though not obviously so. A band you can hear all over the boat is playing Newfoundland music. I am familiar with most of the songs they’re playing, songs about fishermen, sealers, loggers, but I know little more about the lives of such people than I know about the lives of Eskimos. It seems a pity there are no songs for people like me. You would probably think it very unsocialist of me, but to pass the time I have been making up titles of white-collar folk-songs: “Journalist’s Jig,” “Lawyer’s Lament,” “Concerning an Architect Named Joe,” “The Chartered Accountant from Harbour Le Cou,” “The Banker’s Song,” “The Real Estate Reel,” “Come All Ye Civil Servants.”

I remember my uncle Patrick singing, upon request at Christmas time, “The Ryans and the Pittmans,” sitting in his
chair with his head thrown back, his face flushed from drinking, his eyes closed as though he could smell the salt spray, as though he were revelling in voyages past, despite the fact that, so terrified was he of the water, he could not be coaxed into going once around the pond in his row-boat at the cottage
.

“The Ryans and the Pittmans” is sung to the tune of “Farewell and Adieu to You, Spanish Ladies,” and everyone joins in the chorus: “We’ll rant and we’ll roar like true Newfoundlanders,/We’ll rant and we’ll roar on deck and below.”

I remember a photograph from our family album. Once, on a moderately rough crossing of the gulf from St. John’s in 1898, almost everyone on the ship had been seasick, including my father and mother, who were heading to Boston for the funeral of some relative of my mother’s. The only thing Newfoundlanders did on deck and below that day was throw up. The stewards went around wearing and distributing little paper masks designed to keep the contagion of
mal de mer
from spreading. Even in the throes of seasickness, my father, realizing how funny it would seem in retrospect, had the photographer on board take their picture: my parents, masked, queasy-eyed, sitting side by side, staring abjectly at the camera. On the back of the photograph, my father had written: “Summer, 1898. Here we are on the plague-ship
Robert Bond.”

Summer, 1898. My mother may have been pregnant with me at the time, though if she was it doesn’t show. It would depend on when in the summer the photograph was taken. You can see, though she wears that little paper mask, that she is smiling. You can see it in her eyes. Smiling through seasickness and possibly the queasiness of pregnancy
.

When I told my father where I was going, he said nothing. He knows I am not going there because of her. He does not know I am going there because of you. He will miss me, though he did not say so. Now that I am gone, the house will have him to itself. I told him he should sell it, but he shook his head and
smiled. “Goodbye,” he said. “Goodbye, my D. D.” His little nickname for me. It means “my darling daughter.”

A
T MY FIRST SIGHT
ever of land that was not Newfoundland, I felt a sudden surge of loneliness. On the entire continent that had just come into view, I did not know a single soul, and it was not much consolation that I carried in my trunk letters of reference from dozens of people in St. John’s. A continent of strangers. For the longest time, we seemed to be getting no nearer to land, and I had the feeling that if I were to go to the other end of the boat, Newfoundland would still be visible.

When we docked at North Sydney, I walked off the ship, trying not to look too obviously like what I was: someone for the first time setting foot on foreign soil. I moved with a kind of purposeful nonchalance, as if I had disembarked thus many times. All around me, passengers were being met by friends and relatives.

I stood on the dock until the noise and clamour of arrival had died down. It was six o’clock in the morning, three hours before my train for Halifax was due to leave; the sun was barely up. I was in a place I had never been before, there was no one there I knew. I put down my trunk and, cupping my mouth with my hands, shouted “Hello” as loud as I could. Up on the road, someone who sounded as though he thought I must be off my head, shouted back, in a kind of mock echo, “Helloooo.”

I noticed after the train began to make its way across Cape Breton that every little thing looked different. I had expected differences, of course, but it had never occurred to me that absolutely nothing would be the same, that to some degree, the landscape would differ in every detail from the one back home. I had seen other places in movies, in photographs, but it was not the same.

I exhausted myself trying to take it all in, noting every little variation and departure from how things were supposed to be. My notion of home and everything in it as ideal, archetypal, was being overthrown. It was as though the definitions of all the words in my vocabulary were expanding at once.

Cape Breton was much like Newfoundland, yet everything seemed slightly off. Light, colours, surface textures, dimensions — objects like telegraph poles, fence posts, mail boxes, which you would think would be the same everywhere, were bigger or smaller or wider by a hair than they were back home. That I was able to detect such subtle differences made me realize how circumscribed my life had been, how little of the world I had seen.

Suffering a temporary loss of nerve, I lingered for a while in Halifax. I got a job at the
Halifax Herald
, but it was not much of a step up from the
Telegram
, if any at all, nor was Halifax much bigger than St. John’s, so I did not think I could learn much there that would prepare me for Boston or New York. I wrote to Fielding, who did not write back. Restless, I began smoking more than I ever had before, even drinking a little more, risking arrest in Halifax, sneaking back to my room with a couple of bottles of beer in my jacket pockets.

I left Halifax after several months, taking the train to Yarmouth and then the overnight ferry to Boston, once again crossing a great divide by boat at night. Boston, like Halifax, was something of a disappointment, and after two months there, living in a boarding-house on Allston Street off Scollay Square with almost no furnishings except my map and working for the
Herald-Traveler
, I made up my mind that I was as ready for New York as I would ever be.

As the train went south along the Hudson River, I realized that I was travelling through the setting of many of the books I had read. I was not just city-bound, but world-bound, it seemed, where the books I read were published, where the papers I read
were written. A relative of my father’s had once written him from New York: “Dear Charlie: There are more people in my apartment building than there are in my home town!” That optimistic exclamation point. The marvels of New York.

Doubts that would never be wholly laid to rest started up in me on that journey south through the Boston states. I passed a land border for the first time in my life, the one between Massachusetts and Connecticut, an arbitrary border on either side of which the landscape was identical, as I had no doubt it was on either side of the border between New Brunswick and Maine, Canada and America. Perhaps we Newfoundlanders had been fooled by our geography into thinking we could be a country, perhaps we believed that by nothing short of achieving nationhood could we live up to the land itself, the sheer size of it. It seemed so nation-like in its discreteness, an island set apart from the main like the island-nations our ancestors left behind. Perhaps it was not patriotism that drove us on, so much as a kind of guilt-ridden sense of obligation. Yet no sooner had these thoughts occurred to me than I felt guilty for thinking them and chased them from my mind, telling myself I was only looking for an excuse to justify my leaving home, about which I was also feeling guilty.