I wish to thank Peter Davison
and Angus Mowat,
who have helped me with this book
more than I can say.
We dance round in a ring and suppose,
But the Secret sits in the middle and knows.
ROBERT FROST
Remote from universal nature, and living by complicated artifice, man in civilization surveys the creature through the glass of his knowledge and sees thereby a feather magnified and the whole image in distortion. We patronize them for their incompleteness, for their tragic fate of having taken form so far below ourselves. And therein we err, and greatly err. For the animal shall not be measured by man. In a world older and more complete than ours they move finished and complete, gifted with extensions of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear. They are not brethren, they are not underlings; they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendour and travail of the earth.
HENRY BESTON
Contents
Dedication
Epigraphs
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20
To Make Amends
About the Author
Copyright
1
A TORMENT OF SOOTY CLOUD scudded out of the mountainous barrens of southeastern Newfoundland. Harried by a furious nor’easter, eddies of sand-sharp snow beat against the town of Port aux Basques; an unlovely cluster of wooden buildings sprawled across a bed of cold rock and colder muskeg. White frost-smoke swirled up from the waters of the harbour to marry the cloud wrack and go streaming out across Cabot Strait toward the looming cliffs of Cape Breton and the mainland of North America.
January deals harshly with Newfoundland. It had just dealt harshly with me and my wife, Claire, and the hundred or so other passengers who had endured the crossing of the Cabot Strait to Port aux Basques aboard the slab-sided, floating barn of a car ferry, William Carson. The passage from North Sydney, in Nova Scotia, normally takes six hours. This time the storm had extended it to twelve, and the Carson, savaged by that surging sweep of wind and water, had meanly revenged herself on passengers and cargo. A ten-ton bulldozer, lashed to the deck with half-inch cables, had been pitched right through the steel bulwarks into the green depths. Grey-faced and desolate, most of the passengers lay helplessly asprawl in cabins reeking with the stench of vomit.
When the Carson eventually wallowed into Port aux Basques harbour and managed to get her lines ashore, there was a grateful if unsteady exodus down her gangplank. Most of the debarking passengers clambered aboard the antiquated coaches of a narrow-gauge railway which dawdled its way for six hundred miles to St. John’s, the island capital, on the eastern coast. However, for a score of men, women and children (Claire and I among them) Port aux Basques was not the end of the ordeal by sea. Our destinations were a scattering of sea-girt fishing villages—outports, they are called—thinly spread along the hundreds of miles of bold, bald headlands and canyoned fjords of the island’s Sou’west Coast. There was only one way to reach any of these places—the weekly coastal steamer.
She was waiting for us: small, dowdy, dirty; in sharp contrast to the sham grandeur of the Carson. But, unprepossessing as she looked, the SS Burgeo was wise in the ways of the unforgiving world of water. She was a proper seaboat, not a floating motel. Day in, day out for more than twenty years, she had shuttled east and west along that iron shore, furnishing the physical link between the outports. She also provided the principal contact with the outside world for some forty fishing villages which clung between wind and water to one of the least hospitable coasts on earth.
By 1967 more than half the outports originally served by the Burgeo had been abandoned—“closed out,” as their forcibly uprooted inhabitants described it. These age-old settlements had become victims of the cult of Progress even as the Burgeo herself was soon enough to become such a victim. In 1969 she was condemned, although still as sound as ever, and sold for scrap—an unwanted anachronism from an age now past and rejected. Left lying at a wharf in St. John’s, she was stripped by souvenir hunters, and the coldness of a dead ship spread through her. But she was not quite dead. One dark winter’s night, just before the cutting torches could start eating into her good Scots iron, she committed herself to her own element. So quietly that not even the watchman knew what she was about, she settled to the bottom of the harbour, there to become a monumental embarrassment to the authorities and a remembered heroine to the many thousands of outport people who had known and loved her during the long years of her service.
However, in mid-January of 1967 the Burgeo was still very much alive. Her master, Captain Ro Penney, welcomed us aboard as we scrambled up the gangplank through a burst of driven sleet.
A small, neat, precise man, Skipper Ro was shy of women. He flushed and ducked his head as Claire came aboard.
“Well, me dear, you’re back again,” he muttered, apparently addressing his own feet. “Nip in out of the wet now. ’Tis dirty weather... dirty weather...”
He turned more familiarly to me.
“Come on the bridge, Skipper Mowat. We’d best get underway afore this nor’easter busts its guts!”
During the years Claire and I had known the Sou’west Coast we had made at least a dozen voyages with Skipper Ro. We met him first in the gloomy fjords of Bay Despair in 1961 on a day when I brought my own leaky little schooner alongside the Burgeo looking for help in repairing my ancient engine. Not only did I get the assistance of the chief engineer, Captain Ro himself came aboard my little vessel, having first asked formal permission to do so. He paid me a high compliment by addressing me as “Skipper,” and he never failed to use the title whenever we met again.
I wish I could still do him equal honour, for, like the Burgeo, Captain Ro is also gone. During a heavy gale—it was more nearly a hurricane—in Cabot Strait in the spring of 1970, he took the 10,000-ton train ferry Patrick Morris out of North Sydney in response to a distress call from a herring seiner. The seiner foundered before the Morris could reach her, and while Skipper Ro was trying to recover the body of one of the drowned fishermen, a forty-foot sea stove in the ferry’s stern loading door swamped her, and the big ship began to go down. Captain Ro ordered the crew to the boats but three of the engine room crowd could not be found, and Ro Penney refused to leave without them. He was a quiet man, and steadfast to the end.
Skipper Ro tugged at the whistle lanyard and the Burgeo’s throaty voice rang deep and melancholy over the spume-whipped harbour. The lines came in and we backed out into the stream. Once clear of the fairway buoy, the little ship bent to the gale and headed east, holding close in against the looming, snow-hazed land to find what lee there was.
I went below to the old-fashioned dining saloon with its Victorian, leaded glass windows, worn linen tablecloths, and battered but gleaming silverware. Most of the passengers were gathered there, having a mug-up of tea and bread and butter, and yarning companionably, for on the Sou’west Coast everyone knows everyone else, or is at least known to everyone else. Claire was sitting between the owner of a small dragger and his dumpy, jovial wife. I joined them. The nor’easter screamed in the top-hamper and the old reciprocating steam engine thumped its steady, heavy heartbeat underfoot as we listened to the gossip of the coast.
Had we heard that the government was going to close out the settlement of Grey River? The dragger owner snorted into his cup of tea. “Hah! By the Lard Jasus, they fellers in St. John’s is goin’ to find they needs a full cargo o’ dynamite to shift Grey River. Aye
, and I don’t say as even that’ll shift they people!”
Fish landings had been down. “Entirely too starmy all the fall months. Shore fishermen can’t hardly git out at all. Even us fellers onto the draggers, we has to spend the best part of our sea time battened down or runnin’ for shelter.”
But there were compensations. “Niver did see such a toime for caribou. I tell ye, me son, they’s thicker’n flies on a fish flake, and coming right down to the landwash to pick away at the kelp. Oh, yiss, bye, they’s lots o’ country meat on the go!”
He smacked his lips and winked at his wife, who promptly took up the tale.
“They got the new school open to Ramea, me dears. Yiss, an Lucy Fenelly, belongs to Mosquito Harbour, got a new baby, and her man away working on the mainland these past ten months! And that young student preacher, come just afore you folks went off, he only stayed long enough to christen the child and then he fair flew off the coast. I don’t say ’twas his fault entirely. Lucy’s got thirteen youngsters now, and they’s none of ’em looks no more like her man than I does meself.”
Over the third cup of tea, the dragger skipper, as an act of politeness, asked where we had been.
“Europe,” I told him, and added with something of the self-conscious pride of a world traveller, “and Russia. Moscow first, and then right through Siberia as far as the Pacific and the Arctic Coast.”
“Roosia, eh? Yiss... well now, you’ll be some glad to be getting home to Burgeo... Me dear man, they’s some glut of herring on the coast this winter. Nothin’s been seen the like of it for fifty year.”
Burgeo, our destination and the place from which the little steamer took her name, was the largest settlement on the coast, and, through the preceding five years, it had been our home. Now, after six months of kaleidoscopic experiences and exhausting travel, we were yearning for this homecoming with its promise of surcease from the grinding irritations of technological civilizations.
Burgeo lies ninety miles to the east of Port aux Basques on a shore of such formidable aspect that it remains little known except to the scattering of fishermen and seamen who are its human inhabitants. The Sou’west Coast faces a vast sweep of waters rolling all the way up from the South Atlantic. It is a rare day when this oceanic plain lies quiet. Throughout most of the year onshore gales drive their thundering seas against granite cliffs which rise inland to a high, barren plateau, the home of the caribou and arctic hares, the ptarmigan... and not much else.
Lying offshore from the fjord-riven cliffs are clusters of low islands, many of them sea-swept; and seeded among these, like dragon’s teeth, lie innumerable underwater reefs and rocks which the coast dwellers call—with chilling simplicity—“sunkers.” The number of ships they have wrecked is legion, and even in these days of electronic navigational magic, they remain a thing of terror on black and stormswept nights, or when the corpse blanket of fog smothers land and sea alike.
The Burgeo Islands comprise one such cluster. They were “discovered” by Western man in 1520 by a Portuguese explorer, Joaz Alvarez Fagundez. He called the archipelago Ilhas Dos Onze Mill Vierges in tribute to St. Ursula of Cologne, who, in the 14th century, with a naiveté which must be unique in human annals, led 11,000 virgins against the heathens in the Holy Land. Fagundez may have had a sardonic sense of humour, for if those windswept, rocky islands, surrounded by foaming reefs, were not precisely virginal, they most assuredly were barren.
But the seas around the islands were anything but barren. They teemed with life. Seals, whales, even walrus, lived in multitudes in the plankton-rich waters along the abrupt coasts and over the off-lying banks. As for fish! Salmon, cod, halibut, haddock, sole and a dozen other species were so abundant that men standing on shore could spear them by the boatload. Although a hellish place in bad weather, the Sou’west Coast had good harbours, and brave men who would take a harvest from the sea could do so here if they dared the risks.
From Fagundez’s time, and doubtless long before, Europeans had dared. By the beginning of the 16th century Basque whalers were on the coast, harpooning leviathan off shore and hauling the giant corpses to the land, where the blubber could be rendered into oil. Traces of their tryworks still remain. The French were not long after them. They built summer cod-fishing stations and, over the years, runaways (deserters from the fishing vessels) hid in the more remote coves and sea-gulches. Here they lived a life almost as primitive as that of the Mic Mac Indians from Nova Scotia who replaced Newfoundland’s aboriginal Beothuks when these were hunted to extinction by the encroaching Europeans. The French bred with the Mic Macs, and when a trickle of English and Irish runaways, fleeing the slave ship conditions of the English fishing fleets which came annually to eastern and northeastern Newfoundland, also began to drift along the coast, they were in turn absorbed by the earlier arrivals, and a new breed of men was born.
They were hard and self-sufficient people, as they had need to be in order to survive at all. Because they were outlaws, they dared form no large communities. Dispersal in small groups was also necessary because they possessed only oared boats, in which they could not venture far from home; and too many fishermen working in one place meant crowded grounds.
They clung, limpet-like, to this rock-walled rim of ocean, one or two families together, wherever they could find a toehold for their cabins and shelter for their boats. By the late nineteenth century there were over eighty such clusters of humanity along the Sou’west Coast. Each consisted of from half a dozen to a score of square, two-storey frame houses hugging the foreshore of some stony little hole in the wall where coveys of lean dories and fat-bellied trap skills floated at their collars like resting seabirds.
Clinging to the landwash, often at the very foot of a towering cliff, these sparse encrustations of human life were separated one from the other by many miles of unquiet waters, yet united by the sea which was the people’s livelihood... by the sea which was their highway... by the sea which was their mistress and their master... the giver, and the taker away.
Inland, the treeless granite hills rolled starkly naked, but in some of the river gorges there were stands of spruce and larch, and the outport people fled to these protected places during the white months of winter, living in log “tilts” until spring sent them back to the calling sea once more.
It was a rock-hard land, and an ice-cold sea, and together they winnowed the human seed through generations of adversity until the survivors themselves partook of the primal strength of rock and ocean.
Life is easier now, but they are still a breed apart. As late as 1950 they knew little and cared less about the new breed of technological men who had come to dominate the planet. They continued to live in their own time and their own way; and their rhythm was the rhythm of the natural world.
When, in 1957, I first visited the Sou’west Coast, men and boys were still fishing in open, seventeen-foot dories in winter weather of such severity that their mittens often froze to the oars. Some had larger boats driven by antique single-cylinder engines, but these were still open to the sea and sky. Almost all the fishermen brought their cod home to their own spruce-pole wharves, called “stages,” and split them in their own fish sheds, or “stores.” Women and girls still spread the split and salted fish to dry on spidery wooden scaffolds known as “flakes.” Salt cod was still the main product of the coast, as it had been for better than three hundred years.
They were truly people out of time, but it was not that alone which drew me to them. Being a people to whom adversity was natural, they had retained a remarkable capacity for tolerance of other human beings, together with qualities of generosity toward one another and toward strangers in their midst which surpassed anything I had ever known before except, perhaps, among the Eskimos. They were the best of people, and I promised myself that one day I would come and live among them and escape from the increasingly mechanistic mainland world with its March Hare pr
eoccupation with witless production for mindless consumption; its disruptive infatuation with change for its own sake; its idiot deification of the bitch goddess, Progress.
In 1961 I did return, blundering along that fearsome coast in my decrepit little schooner; staying afloat and alive not due to the grace of God, but due to the grace of the outport men who, with a subtlety which enabled me to save face, saw to it that I did not pay the usual price demanded by a harsh environment of fools and amateurs.
The following summer Claire and I coasted westward out of Bay Despair and, by summer’s end, neither of us felt any real wish to return to mainland Canada. We began to consider the possibility of roosting for the winter in some small community along the Sou’west Coast, but by late August we had made no decision and were still aimlessly drifting westward.
We were approaching Burgeo, but had no intention of putting in there, for we had heard that the construction of a modern fish-packing plant had radically changed the outport nature of that place. Instead our course was set for the tiny village of Grand Bruit some miles farther west. However, as we came abeam of Boar Island, which marks the entrance to the intricate maze of runs and tickles between the Burgeo Islands, our engine failed. The runs seemed too hazardous to attempt under sail alone so we reluctantly put in to Burgeo for repairs. By the time the schooner was again fit for sea, the weather had turned foul and we were harbour-bound.
Burgeo, or at any rate the eastern part of it where we lay moored, was not a thing of beauty. The fish plant dominated the scene. The roar of its diesel generators deafened us, and the stench of the place was an abomination under God. Nevertheless, most of the people we met seemed relatively uncontaminated by the arrival in their midst of the Industrial Age, and they were friendly and helpful. One morning we casually mentioned to one of them that we were thinking of wintering somewhere on the Atlantic seaboard, and almost instantly found ourselves being whisked off to the western end of the attenuated settlement to a little, semi-isolated community called Messers Cove. Even at first glance Messers seemed like everything an outport should be, and nothing it should not be. It consisted of fourteen families of inshore fishermen whose gaily painted houses lined the shores of a snug little harbour. Perched on a great granite boulder was a small, half-completed, white wooden bungalow whose windows looked south over the islands and beyond to the endless sweep of open ocean.