Eastern Passage (26 page)
Authors: Farley Mowat
Toward evening
Bonnet
raised the improbable silhouette of Percé Rock, an immense, white limestone hulk with a mighty hole punched through it by the sea. The day was crisp and clear and the wind, from abaft now, drove us along so swiftly we were soon closing with the rock, whose splendour left us almost speechless, as Jacques Cartier is supposed to have been when in the year 1535 he stood on his poop deck gaping at this same spectacle, and could only express his amazement with the phrase
“Sacré bleu!”
We laid course for the narrow channel separating Percé from the rugged, sheer-walled, and towering island of Bonaventure. As we drew close, the whole of the narrow plateau on its top and the innumerable ledges on its nearly vertical sides became a black-and-white blur of tens of thousands of nesting gulls, gannets, and cormorants. The stench of their droppings was palpable and the sound of their cries echoing from the cliff faces was almost deafening.
Ahead of them
[Angus wrote]
lay a thirty-mile open-water crossing of the mouth of Chaleur Bay but they had the kind of wind only granted to the devout. What a sail it was! The seas grew high and came clambering after
Bonnet,
reaching up to swamp her from behind but she reacted to them happily and when one had passed under she would split the next one on her sharp Norwegian stern and never take a drop on deck. The log was giving her eight knots, a thing hardly to be believed, but it had to be because the fine old instrument, made a hundred years ago, was never known to falsify a fathom in its reckoning
.
Halfway across, the Old Man remembered that the bullgine’s exhaust pipe, which leads outside through a hole in her port buttock, was open. So he roused Farley and announced:
“We’re going to stuff the exhaust hole with rags to make sure the salt water doesn’t get to the engine head again.”
Farley looked resigned
.
“We?”
“Yes. But Murray and I will do the hard part. We’ll hold your feet.”
They put a line about his waist – just in case – and held him while he stood on his head in the Gulf of St. Lawrence and pushed and pounded one of Murray’s dish cloths into the hole. The hole is at the waterline, and the deck was high above. Farley was rather slow, and the Old Man scolded nervously. After each succeeding sea rolled by, Farley got a little air, then they could hear him swear. When at length they hauled him back aboard he was indignant. Salt water drained from his hair and beard and down his shirt and into his rubber boots
.
“I stuffed it up her,” he grumbled, “but it’s all a waste of time you know.”
“Why would that be?”
“Because you can’t start your damn old engine anyhow. The batteries are dead again. Didn’t you know?”
The Old Man changed the subject
.
When we began crossing Baie des Chaleurs, entailing several hours out of sight of land, we set a course on
Bonnet
’s binnacle compass. This instrument had been salvaged long ago from a sunken Great Lakes barley schooner and was somewhat unreliable – so when we raised land again we were not greatly surprised to find ourselves ten miles off course and dangerously close to the New Brunswick coast. We clawed off, but it had been a near thing. During the remainder of our voyage we had to put our trust in a boat compass – a little thing one could hold in the hand, Boy Scout style.
Now the wind dropped, leaving us to drift idly through a perfect forest of lobster-pot marker buoys. Murray suggested we haul a few pots for a change in diet but Angus sternly forbad it.
“That would be theft, if not piracy!” he announced, making no mention of his conviction that lobsters are carrion eaters, quite unfit for human consumption.
We drifted amongst the pots most of the day until, as dusk drew down, we decided to find a harbour for the night. We had no luck. All the little ports within our reach appeared to be barred by shoals that would not admit a vessel of our draft. Consequently we were forced to spend another night in limbo, somewhere in the approaches to the Northumberland Strait, which separates the province of Prince Edward Island from New Brunswick and Nova Scotia.
With barely enough breeze to give us steerage, Angus and I spent a wakeful night avoiding lobster buoys and the occasional darkened motorboat that probably belonged to fishermen bent on poaching some other fellow’s catch. When dawn broke we were fuming and fretting as we tried to identify something – anything – in a world now veiled by heavy mist. Finally, worn down by fifty-five continuous hours “at sea” we elected to steer directly for where we thought Prince Edward Island
ought
to be.
We were a bleary-eyed pair as the sky began to brighten. A light air sprang up to give us a push, chase away the mist, and dimly reveal off to port a shoreline that had to be some portion of Prince Edward Island’s sickle-shaped, hundred-mile southern coast. I was at the helm so I pushed the tiller over and
Bonnet
obediently swung shoreward. The mist continued to thin and Angus, who was staring ahead through my old army binoculars, suddenly shouted that he could see the shore –
and
a small steamer lying alongside a wharf there. If there was water enough for a steamer, there would be plenty for us, so we started the sheets and
Bonnet
fairly bounded toward the land.
Smiling happily, Angus passed me the binoculars. I strained to see what he had seen – and the steamer became a row of fishermen’s shacks and a ramshackle dock occupied by some lobster boats – which, I knew, drew only half as much water as we did.
We were sailing full tilt into shoal water.
I shrieked at Angus to take the helm and bring
Bonnet
about while I rushed to haul in the headsail sheets. As I did so, I glanced over the side and was horrified to see a cloud of bottom mud stirred up by
Bonnet
’s forefoot. Leaping to the bow, I heaved our hundred-pound anchor overboard. Fortunately it caught at once, and as I snubbed the chain to the winch-head,
Scotch Bonnet
stopped abruptly only scant feet from driving hard aground.
An audience of five or six fishermen on the wharf had been watching this manoeuvre with great interest. Now one of them called out, politely wanting to know why we hadn’t used the channel.
“Because goddamn it to hell it isn’t buoyed!”
I shouted furiously.
They forgave me. Two of them pushed off in a dory and, having helped haul up our anchor, towed us to where the unseen channel began and accompanied us to the rickety old wharf with the solicitude of a mother hen bringing home a vagrant chick.
Once we had been safely moored, they told us there
was
no real harbour at West Point, which was where we now were, and if the wind got up from any direction except north we would have to get out pretty smartly or likely be blown ashore.
Their
boats were all right here, they explained (a big smugly, I thought), because they could haul them up onto the land at the first sign of trouble.
They also told us we were the first sailing vessel to visit West Point in ages, and one of the few “strangers” ever to put in there. Their hospitality was overwhelming. All ten households adopted us but we became the special charge of Wendell Scott, who had been a lobster fisherman since he was eight years old. He had fished his own boat under sail for thirty years before deigning to install a
primitive gasoline engine. Burly and indomitable, Wendell and his perky wife, Daisy, made us welcome in their home, a four-room frame cottage close to the shore. They lived there comfortably on Wendell’s First War army pension, supplemented by his earnings as the community’s unofficial taxi man (he owned the only car for miles around).
The Old Man slept the night straight through never knowing that men stood watch on the dock, turn by turn, to awaken us in time should the wind get up from the wrong direction. It never did, but in the morning, Murray remembered something
.
“Where’s the boat?” he demanded
.
“What boat?”
“The steamboat you said you saw.”
“Oh,” the Old Man said gravely, “she isn’t here just now. She was second-sight, you know. She led us in.”
Murray snorted. “I don’t think there never was no steamer …
sir.”
Whereupon Farley roared, “Quiet, you farmer! You’ll grow up to be nothing but another bloody sceptic if you don’t watch out!”
Both Wendell and Daisy were blessed with inquiring minds. They read as many books and magazines as were available, and every summer they filled Wendell’s old car with camping gear to explore the world as far afield as New York, Cape Breton, and Quebec City. They had not yet gone to the far north but planned to do so as soon as Wendell finished building a boat capable of taking them there.
Meanwhile, they and their car were at our service. The day after our arrival, Wendell drove Murray and me to the village of O’Leary, five miles away, where the owner of the one-pump garage put our ancient batteries on charge, but could not sell us any new ones because he had none.
“Guess you got to go to Albert [Alberton],” he told us regretfully. “But while you’re there, bring back the parcel of parts that’s waiting for me and” – with a long wink at Wendell – “maybe something to wash ’em down with.”
Wendell used the trip to Albert – only twenty-five miles, but an hour’s drive because of the rambling nature and fearful quality of the red-dirt roads – as an excuse to give us a tour of the western portion of the island. Scenic it was not, being generally scrub-covered “barrens” with occasional rundown-looking strip farms mostly given over to weeds and potatoes.
“We get along pretty much on just three things,” Wendell told us. “Lobsters, potatoes, and moonshine. The last two kind of go together, if you get what I mean, and lobsters keeps us from starving.”
These fishermen-farmer-distillers built their own boats, round-bellied launches thirty or so feet long, open to the weather except for a small wheelhouse and cuddy up forward. They drew only two feet of water, an imperative in this region of sandbars and shallow harbours. Their engines were mostly old car motors locally adapted for marine use.
Usually two men, often a father and one of his sons, fished together.
We learned that a fisherman’s work began in winter, building the half-cylinder traps that are about three feet long and made of laths and netting. The finished trap was thoroughly tarred to keep the teredo worm from eating the woodwork.
The men began fishing for the season’s herring bait early each spring, hard labour, hauling and setting nets often in brutal weather. Vast numbers of herring were salted down in hogsheads (large barrels) and stored in fish shacks by the shore. When the season officially opened, the skipper and his helper loaded their boat and headed for their grounds, which might be from a hundred yards to several miles out. The best grounds were rocky shallows bordered by abrupt deeps,
though lobsters inhabited almost all parts of the strait. Each boat set from three hundred to a thousand traps in “bunches” of up to twenty, each bunch carefully buoyed (“booeed”) with a float that would remain visible regardless of the state of the tide. The vast expanses of water where the traps were set became jungles of buoys through which even a small boat threaded its way with difficulty.
With at least fifteen hundred dollars’ worth of gear on the bottom (a single trap was worth at least five dollars), the men and their women watched the weather uneasily since a heavy northwester could destroy most of a winter’s laboriously constructed gear.
Wendell took Murray and me to visit a little cannery at Alberton run by a very old gentleman with a rum-blossom nose and alcoholic breath. He showed us through his ancient plant with pride. Murray much admired the dexterity with which the packers – women and girls – tickled every morsel of meat out of the shells. Beaming with pride, the owner accompanied us step by step and was so pleased by our interest that he gave us six steaming-hot lobsters, which we ate while sitting on the running board of Wendell’s car.
As we stuffed ourselves, Wendell recalled having once caught a giant lobster weighing twenty-three pounds that, unable to enter the trap through the entrance provided, had torn a way in with its claws. One claw, emptied of its meat, held a gallon and a half of water. He also told us of a man who once caught six hundred dollars’ worth of lobster in a single day at the beginning of a singularly good season when “lobsters were as thick as lice on an old dog.” Now, he told us grimly, there was “a fisherman for every lobster.”
While in Alberton we met two young women from O’Leary who needed a ride home. They had just lost their few remaining, caries-ridden teeth to a travelling dentist who would eventually supply them with dentures. Their faces were as swollen as if pushed into a beehive and they were pretty glum, but they cheered up when Wendell not only offered them a ride but also promised to “find a little something
to ease the pain.” And soon after leaving town, he pulled up before a ramshackle farmhouse. He went inside and soon returned carrying a milk bottle full of a murky brown liquid. Some of this he poured into each of the toothless ladies, bringing grimaces and smiles to their sore faces. Wendell then offered Murray and me a swig. After one suspicious sniff, Murray refused, but I swallowed a mouthful of what was so nearly straight alcohol it would probably have burned in our Primus stove.
Wendell was a mine of information about the moonshine trade. He took us on a ten-mile detour over dusty red roads to show us a panel truck that, ten days earlier laden with moonshine, had been seized by the constabulary. It was now back in its owner’s hands
and
back in business.
“They’ll never nail that feller down!” Wendell said with satisfaction. “They dasn’t dare: he supplies the most of the hooch the politicians use to buy votes come election time!”
Angus had not gone with us on our exploration, claiming he had chores to do.