Creation (2 page)

He does not mind. He does not like fanfare. He ducks into the little mariners’ church at dockside, bows his head and prays. He recognizes, for an instant, that he is apprehensive, and then lets himself sink into the words of prayer he has known since before he could even say them.

On deck of the schooner
Gulnare
, he greets Lieutenant Augustus Bowen and Dr. Kelly, the navy surgeon he has requested for the voyage, because many accidents can befall a complement of thirty-four men chopping trees, dropping lead and scouting in wild water. He inspects the men and is not terribly pleased. This year it was harder than usual to ship them. Sailors are always in debt, and their creditors will not let them go until they pay. He was forced to give them a month’s wages in advance. They got drunk and barely boarded on time. He and Kelly together inspect the chronometers, theodolite, sextants and sounding machine, and find all in order; he has already done this a dozen times.

He goes below into his cabin to enter the departure in the log. Neatly, he writes: “June 4, 1833. Departed Quebec seven hours, south east wind clear skies.”

PAST THE ÎLE D’ORLÈANS.
Past the Île-aux-Cordes.

He avoids the south channel and the lesser-known channel on the north side, and takes the middle, which was his own discovery.

Past the mouth of the Saguenay, where the water is half brine, half fresh, and hovers at the freezing point.

He can taste the salt in the air. The schooner leaps to the wind and it is like his own body. The cramped hours at the desk in the snow-bound garrison fall away. The smoky dinner tables and the forced conversations about the price of timber fall away, and the ladies with their fans fade out.

He feels the change coming over him as the river widens, and they face the immense force of the ocean. He is a man like the moon, with one side visible and the other hidden. Now, as always at this time of year, he enters the bright side of his year and the other half of himself. Every day is longer; the light continuing past twenty hours, twenty-one and twenty-two.

“
He avoids the south channel and the
lesser-known channel on the north side, and takes
the middle, which was his own discovery
.”

It is a stormy passage as they move toward the warmer but foggy waters of the Gulf, past Rimouski where he began this chart-making four years ago, and over the lip of the Gaspé. It is a relief to reach the little, low-lying Mingans: here, Bayfield permits himself an afternoon of dalliance.

The sea is calm and the sun is brilliant. These little islands, not far off the coast of the north shore of the Gulf, are of a peculiar limestone quite separate from that of the mainland. The shores have been pounded, worn to a fantasy of shapes. They are a little Egypt with their soft stone figures standing like bottles and whistling as the air moves through and around them. Standing trees that have died and dried in the sea wind rattle like white china. Even in rigor mortis, nothing has broken them.

THE IMMENSITY AND THE SHEER STRANGENESS
of this place never fails to astonish him. The way it can become, suddenly, one mass of rock and water and sky, one colour, and one deadly hazard to sailing. The opposite mood can strike: sun exploding out of cloud, water turning to turquoise and lichen to flame.

And this is only the beginning.

From here he goes north and east, farther yet from home, to more desolate shores, colder and deeper. He goes to one of the last places on earth to fall under man’s measurement, where only the whales, the birds and the codfish abound. He is the messenger of the future.

The
Gulnare
heads up the coast. The men cannot sleep, it is so rough. “We have no room to hang in cots or hammocks and therefore tossed about in standing bedplaces,” he writes in his
Surveying Journals
.

THE
RIPLEY
ROUNDS THE SOUTHEAST COAST
of Nova Scotia in a fresh northeast wind. She sails past Lower Argyle, a poor and inhospitable
place, Audubon writes in his journal. Twenty miles offshore are Mud and Seal islands. They anchor and go ashore. Mud Island has spruce trees, purple iris, yellow silverweed and clotted mossy hummocks where gulls’ eggs and chicks are tucked everywhere you would want to step.

From here they sail east to the Strait of Canso “in a horrid sea,” he writes. On June 11, the weather clears and they sail through the strait with twenty other vessels, all fishing boats bound for Labrador. They pass Indians in a bark canoe. They pass Cape Porcupine, a high, round hill, and proceed northward up the western coast of Cape Breton. They land on Jestico Island and wander aimlessly for hours among swallowtail butterflies, picking wild strawberries. They are so tiny, so irresistibly sweet and pungent that it is impossible to build up even a handful. They pick and eat, pick and eat, with fingers stained red. They hate to tear themselves away but they do, as the wind sets fair for crossing the Gulf.

Flight

MAGDALEN ISLANDS,
JUNE 11, 1833

H
e has never seen this particular tern before. It is delicate, quicksilver, with lovely red feet and a sharp, curved red beak. It dives headlong, scoops up little fish from the sea, and then soars, playing the air as a fiddler plays his strings.

Earthbound, he walks the shore on a clean sand beach while others of his party climb to the top of the cliffs to see what lies ahead of them on the horizon to the north and west. The sand is sleek, the water falling over itself in clear, transparent folds at his feet. A piping plover runs and flies before him, chirping in mellow notes. The unfamiliar terns dip and soar overhead. There are dozens and dozens of them.

He wants to possess one.

He asks the boy to load the gun with mustard seed. When the boy hands the gun to him he takes aim and shoots into the diving, soaring congregation. Birds come whirling down, like seedpods out of a maple tree. He walks into the water, picks up a few and slings them into the leather bag over his shoulder. He is sorry to see the birds stilled, to see their flashing wings droop and carmine beaks slacken. They are never so beautiful, after. He notices that as a bird catches the bullet and begins to plummet, those near it also collapse. Like kites whose strings have snapped, these sympathetic others drop through the air as if stricken, coming alive only at the last possible second to rise up and away as the corpse of their fellow splashes into the water.

He ponders the sympathetic way the uninjured birds fell with the ones who were hit.

He has never seen this behaviour before. He wonders: are the mimic terns just playing? Are they so confused by the shot they think themselves hit as well? Or are they hoping to distract the predator? They might feel a creature loyalty to the fallen, much as one would expect to see in humans. It is not impossible. He has seen birds behave in ways he would be flattered to think of as human.

But perhaps it is merely the spring season tying them so fiercely to their chosen mate.

He tries an experiment. He shoots another tern and allows it to lie dead on the water. He retreats and watches as a another, whom he takes to be its mate, lands beside it, and begins to caress it.

Does the bird imagine its mate is still alive? Or does he hope that his attentions will bring her back to life? It is an interesting question. He will mention it in his notes tonight.

He walks on as the uninjured terns escape along the beach. The frigid breeze off the water chills him and he beats himself about the ribs with his cold hands.

To fly.

To ride the air.

To be without heaviness, to have air in the middle of one’s bones. To turn and roll and dive in the sky.

To see from above.

H
E PAINTS THE ARCTIC TERN
head down as it plunges. Like a white letter, a hieroglyph on blue sky. The crimson beak open, the crimson feet spread on either side of the split tail. Head down, as he saw it both diving and dying. Or feigning death, pretending to slip from its element, as if air itself had opened a passage downward.

He paints the bird that way. At first there was a background, perhaps the brooding plateau of Labrador in the distance. Sometime later, whether on this journey or after, he cuts the bird out of its background and pastes it on a painting of sky. That is how the bird seems, as if it were pasted on air. As if it has come from some other world altogether and only paused here before returning.

A
NAME

The Bird Rocks bear from each other NNW 1/2 W and SSE 1/2 E and are 700 fathoms apart. Sunken rocks leave only a boat passage between them. The south eastern-most is the largest and highest, though scarcely 200 fathoms long, and not more than 140 feet above the sea. The other is divided into two precipitous mounds joined together by a low ledge. The lesser of these mounds resembles a tower … The two rocks are of coarse red sandstone, or conglomerate, in strata dipping very slightly to the South West and are constantly diminishing in size from the action of the sea. They present perpendicular cliffs on every side; yet it is possible to ascend them, with great difficulty, in one or two places, but there is no landing upon them excepting in the calmest sea.

—
Sailing Directions for the Gulf and River of St. Lawrence
, Henry Wolsey Bayfield, Captain, Royal Navy