The Big Why (23 page)

Because of the storm we decided to lie to in Harbour Grace. Twenty-five thousand Newfoundlanders, Prowse said, migrate to Labrador each spring. Some, the livyers, stay all year. They live the winter in shacks on flour, tea, and molasses.

All hands aboard the
Industry
, he said, are Christian. Except you and the sailmaker.

I go to church, I said.

Yes, and he smiled.

Is it that obvious I’m not religious.

Let’s say an independent mind stands out.

The ninety crew aboard the
Industry
were permanent. They caught green fish. The fish were laid in salt in the holds of the boat. Sometimes a salt banker would come by and more salt purchased. If the fishing was good.

Belowdecks we checked out the quarters. Most of the hold was salt. On top of the salt was bedding and luggage. We found Niner Harris and his parents, Mag and Mose. They were stationers and late in the season. They were to join Mag’s brother in Turnavik. They shared a bunk on top of the salt — their faces just inches from the beams and planking of the deck above them. A piece of sailcloth divided them from the next bunk. They cooked and washed on deck but slept and changed down here.

Mose Harris, joking, We came aboard to get away from you, Kent.

We passed a coper selling tobacco and alcohol to the fishermen. Illegal, Prowse said, but done openly and freely. The rum and gin then sold in shebeens onshore.

Aboard at night the dark was devoted to stars.

Prowse, looking up: Made in vain.

Me: I wonder about that — is it all in vain.

I’m speaking of the Milky Way, he said. They call it the maiden vein.

We slept at anchor along the Labrador coast. Anchorage was marked by a naked man on the shore. In the evenings the officers fished for salmon near the mouth of a river. We had salmon for lunch. The king of fish, Prowse said.

We stopped into Cartwright for the day, and he invited me to court. You might find these cases sad but interesting.

I took a seat in back so I could leave if I got bored. A man was brought before the judge and admitted he was a ship’s captain. He was in charge of a vessel outside Lloyd’s security. The claim by him was that his ship had foundered and was wrecked on the rocks off Blanc Sablon. Insurance was received, the ship sold. It was sold back to him.

This is all true, your Honour, and legal.

The charge, Prowse read, is that you intentionally wrecked the ship.

It had been a bad season with no fish, your Honour.

Yes, but your crew says you forced them to ram the ship onto a shoal.

I hardly rammed it, sir. A bit of misfortune. She was put up on a low-tide sunker.

You claimed the ship was beyond repair.

He shrugged.

You claimed she was played out, got your money to compensate for a poor season. You bought her back and salvaged her.

That’s about how it’s done, sir.

Prowse’s head in his big hands. Crew claims you bought the vessel for a dollar.

I tendered the only bid, your Honour.

I bet you did. You had her careened, and then sailed home in her.

That is correct, your Honour.

Prowse fined the captain seventy dollars. He seized the ship and gave it to Lloyd’s. Not for a moment did the captain think he had done something wrong.

The next case was against an entire southcoast community. There had been a true shipwreck the winter before. A salt banker had been trapped in a galloping surf and crushed on a reef. The crew in the frozen sea, hanging to the bowsprit. They wrapped themselves in canvas. They held on to chopped-down masts. And while they drowned and perished of hypothermia, a small gang from the town had rowed out in a chain of dories and stripped the banker of plates and silver and manila rope and tobacco. They had gathered spoons and money and a mantel clock while the salt dissolved around them. They had pushed survivors aside for the booty. This was the charge against fourteen residents of the town. There had been one survivor, and this was his testimony. The man was helped into the stand, for he had lost both his hands and one leg. He said they had been at sea for months. Had sailed from Cadiz and meant to land in St John’s with a load of salt. There was smallpox on board, and beriberi. There was scurvy, he said, typhus, lice, nervous exhaustion, and venereal disease. There was blood poisoning and influenza. There was hypothermia, he said, and frostbite and gangrene. Then this storm. Our rudder, he said, holding up one handless wrist, was sheered off, and a makeshift one cut away. We didnt put up a stitch of canvas. We were pushed north, away from St John’s. We saw the birds of Funk and then the island, but we couldnt hold the island, so Captain told us to better crack on sail. We hove west like that for a day. Captain figured it was an emergency, so we lowered the colours and turned them upside down. That’s what they saw.

Prowse: Did you see them?

We got in close to a rough shop.

Please explain.

We fell victim to a canal effect, your Honour. A change in pressure, it pushes your vessel towards the land. So we got sucked up onto these here rocks. That’s when I saw them coming out in small boats. We was hoping yet to free ourselves. The masts were cut down, both to raise the level of the deck and to offer the crew something if we had to abandon ship. We tossed over the salt too, to lighten her. Hoping she’d come off the rocks. But her jawbones were broke, so we covered her with a sail to see if the water could be stopped from reaching the engines. I climbed into the shrouds and saw it all as they come out in their boats. We thought they come to help us.

The shrouds.

What gives the mast lateral support. The men, your Honour, were clinging to the chopped-down masts. Some were rolling under and losing their grip. All they had to do was throw a line made into a loop. A man in water will reach with his weakest hand and can often not hold on to a rope.

You saw the death of one mate.

Yes, before they were through with him they stripped him of his clothing. They appeared pleased with his death.

They knew the man.

He was from there. One often hates the mate.

You stayed above in the rigging.

I had bread and salt pork in a handkerchief. When I saw what they done to the mate, well, I stayed up there. The ship was doomed.

Youve been after having three operations to amputate hands and one leg.

My genitalia just recently was removed. Your Honour, my hands rotted off during the seventeen weeks I spent here. The man in charge would not agree to ferry me to St John’s. They was hoping I’d perish. I was put into a cold hut downwind from town.

After the people left the ship, what did you do.

I went down aboard her and made a raft of some planks. I put my feet in a box meant for ship’s papers. I found a hen basket with four hens dead in it. I paddled to a fellow shipwreck, who was in a broken boat. We found a barrel of cider. We were to use a hoop off the cider barrel to repair the boat. But neither of us had the strength to turn the boat over. We had to paddle ashore up to the chest in water. He perished then. I kept on. Seventeen weeks, sir, without proper treatment.

A woman came up to testify. She was gaunt and open around the eyes. She looked insane and starved and determined and sorry but vexed with a dilemma. You could tell she knew starvation well, and she was intimidated by the formality of court. I thought she too must be a survivor, but she was one of the fourteen on trial.

Is the charge before you accurate, Judge Prowse asked.

She replied, bitterly: Why did they have to go up on the rocks. And tempt us like that?

The way she said it. There was nothing more to be said.

The judge sought me out and stood me a drink.

I have a confession, he said.

He’d heard all about me. American painter in the hinterland. He joked about the romance of it. I love experts, he said. Regardless of the field. Except experts in poverty.

He shook his head. They are that poor, he said, that they are lured by the misfortunes of others. And imagine being that man, perched in a mast, having climbed as far as he is able. He looks down at the world.

I dont know how you do it.

Sometimes, in my line, there is levity too.

He’d just done a trial in St Anthony. There was a stabbing. On the stand a witness who described the murder. Kept addressing Prowse as
me old trout. Bailiff cautioned him, said, Call him your Honour. Then Prowse asked if there was anything else the witness wished to say. There was nothing left on the books. But the witness said, No, your Honour me old trout, except perhaps what I heard the man say after stabbing Vince.

What was that.

After he stabbed Vince, the man he was terrified. He said, What’s I gonna do.

Pause.

That’s it. That’s all the accused said?

Yes, your Honour me old trout.

Okay.

Except for what Vince said back to him. Vince, he said, holding in his guts, he says, What’s you gonna do? What’s
I
gonna do?

Judge Prowse and I slugged back our drinks.

I told him about my charge in Brigus. He smiled. Oh, I know all about that one, he said. That’s how I heard about you. Got your file right here.

He had been assigned the case.

Back on board that night I heard Mose Harris say: I plan to spend most of this summer drunk. When youre married the best thing you can ask for is a fight.

We left Prowse in Cartwright and continued on to Turnavik. On our way we fell into a pack of drift ice. The ice was not stationary. The ice had a destination. Our floater tried to find a path through it. It pushed pans of ice away. But looking at the icefield ahead you felt the pattern was not random. You could feel an intention. The ice was inanimate, yet it had purpose. By nightfall the ice had knitted firmly together and grown thicker. It was not a purpose that was on a human scale of geography or time. The ice had taken us prisoner and was leading the floater to some ice-logical rendezvous.

I thought this was summer.

Mose Harris: It’s awful weather all right.

He said we could be stuck like this for a day or a week. The captain asked if some of us wouldnt mind going overboard and chopping at the ice. I was happy to. We used poles to push away the ice pans. The floater moved ahead half a boat length and we marched up to the next set of pans. We did this for three hours, and when we looked at the shore we saw we hadnt made any progress. The ice had drifted south as we were pushing north.

The ice grew coarse and bunched around the floater. It broke and clawed in giant fingernails. The ice contained greens and browns and blacks. The floater listed to starboard. The ice buckled and crunched around the hull.

Jesus, Mose said. I never seen anything like it for the season.

There was a raft of ice on the starboard side. A white wall pressed against the engines. The ship lacked the beams and sheathing for ice work. The captain was calm, just making sure his lifeboats were in order. There seemed to be a shared humour about the fluke of it all. Mose said, about the ice, I have seen a dog’s jaws carry a duck egg for miles and then crush it in a second.

A column of ice from a mile off bore through the ice pans as if looking for something to eat. It was heading directly for us. The engine sounded like a tired heart.

Time to scuttle her.

The crew unloaded tons of food, loose wood, dogs, tents, crates of ammunition, petrol, coal, alcohol, rigging, sails, kitchen supplies. We got to free her out, Mose Harris said. He had been on one boat like this when they chopped the masts down. To make the boat less top-heavy. He said it felt like they were chopping into the skull of the ship.

I could not believe I had spent a day in court listening to this very kind of ordeal. It made me anxious for looters, though we could not see land. I was happy that we could not, but then worried about how we’d get home. We had drifted many miles into ice-clogged sea. Which was worse.

The crew stepped off the ship and winched over the nested dories. A sail was spread across a gunwale. Men on the ice and men on board held the sides of the sail. We lifted one of the dogs and let it slide down. Nine dogs this way. The dogs were delighted.

The ice became bony and indifferent. If you scraped away the top layer of white snow crust, all the ice was black. It was an odd find, like parting an animal’s white coat to see a dark pigment.

The weather grew bad.

We built a wall of snow and sat leeward. Mose Harris gave me some advice. Keep ahold of a gaff stick. If you wake up this night and find yourself on an ice pan, floating away, you’ll have something to burn. Make shavings off your stick. Better yet if you get a seal. Cut strips of fat and drip on the shavings.

As if I’m going to discover a seal.

If one comes handy, hit him with your gaff, hit him with the service end and make sure he dont sink. Watch out for the sun, he’ll scald the eyes out of your head, and dont be fooled by the blue drop. You’ll see houses and ships on it. If it snows you won’t hear a ship’s whistle if youre windward.