Eastern Passage (27 page)
Authors: Farley Mowat
The Old Man was working at a borrowed tin washtub on the grassy plot in front of the Scott cottage, looking out to a sweep of reddish sand where children played, oh so quietly. They were not slow exactly, and certainly not subdued or listless. They had a poise that matched that of their elders, but they could fling themselves into the shallows with abandon and when they did the spray was bright in the sunlight and glowed for an instant with a red reflection from the underwater sands
.
Out at the end of the pier
Scotch Bonnet
lay at rest, and Ronnie was at his self-appointed tasks. Ronnie had made himself ships-keeper. He was a lean, grave boy of twelve, silent, thoughtful, and strong as a good rope. The Old Man watched in some awe as Ronnie, on his hands and knees, scrubbed down the decks and white-work
.
Then Daisy Scott came out of her kitchen with two more steaming pails. She looked at the water in the tub and said, “You’d better change it now.”
The Old Man did as he was told, and they fell into quiet talk. The kind that requires no effort to maintain; an easy and random exchange between neighbours. It drifted into talk of books, which came naturally because reading played a large part in people’s lives at West Point, especially in winter time. This was a thing not in the least surprising. The Old Man had known for years that someone who lives with books will find talk about them everywhere, often far from pavement
.
When the water in the tub grew cold the Old Man emptied it, removed the tub to the woodshed, refilled it, and gave himself a thorough lathering with yellow soap
.
Then Wendell and the Old Man’s crew came back after exploring as much of Prince Edward Island as could be done in a day. Murray looked like a boy who has fallen in love – a rapt expression on his face, and he was mumbling to himself
.
“Twenty-pound lobsters!” he kept saying. “Six hundred dollars a day! Boy, I’m staying right here! No more farming in them burnt-out Albion Hills for me! Lobster fishing, that’s the life!”
Wendell shook his head. “You’d starve to death once all that puppy fat was used up.”
“But you said yourself …”
“I know I did. I said one man brought in six hundred dollars’ worth … once. And that was a long time ago, before every spud farmer that could turn the switch of a gas engine got into the game. No, boy, you’d best stick to your little farm up in the hills wherever.”
Yes, but there is another side to it. Later on the Old Man read Farley’s journal for this day and it said:
“The houses are small and simple, set in red fields. It was clear the land was poor, but perhaps because of that the people had not yet lost
the need and the desire to work closely with one another on even terms. The people we met in stores, garages, and on the dusty streets of the little villages seemed to accept each other and us strangers as easily as if we were all relatives from the same family. They were not effusive, but they were sincerely interested in us and our problems and anxious to help solve them for us. I think maybe this whole damn island is one big neighbourhood.”
I suspect we all felt we would be glad to spend a year or so at West Point, but it could not be. Not only was our mooring exposed to every onshore wind but the tides in the strait rise and fall in ways no one can predict. We were told low tides sometimes
stayed
low for as long as twenty hours and could go low enough to dry out the wharf completely. Having no wish to see
Bonnet
stranded high and dry, we were becoming increasingly uneasy. Our unease increased as we heard horrendous new accounts of the causeway being built in the Canso Gut, now only about 150 miles away.
The Old Man was quite convinced by now that if
Scotch Bonnet
entered the remaining gap she would most likely stick there in the middle and then be spewed back out again like a thrown-up fish some cormorant has brought back to feed its young. So he decided they had better get along while the getting was good
.
Scotch Bonnet
sailed at dawn and the Old Man never touched land on the red Island again. And will always regret that this was so
.
We laid course for Cap-Egmont, in Northumberland Strait, while almost the entire population of West Point stood on the dock waving farewell.
There was no wind, and after an hour the bullgine quit, leaving us to drift amongst schools of medusae (jellyfish) hanging just below the surface in wavering patterns like something in a science fiction
fantasy. Murray watched them, fascinated, while Angus and I slaved over the engine, but without success. For the rest of that day and most of the night, we idled in a virtual calm until at 2:00 a.m. we got the engine working again – just as a fresh breeze came up.
Sailing again, we passed through a covey of small boats netting the mackerel that were pursuing schools of small herring, some of which, in their attempts to escape, went soaring into the air like flying fish. While I was on watch, several fishermen playfully motored across our bows, in effect challenging us for the right of way, but I was too tired to play games so I held my course until
they
gave way, grinning broadly at me as they passed. Later we were overtaken and passed by a little coasting steamer, a very old ship, very dignified and Victorian in appearance. Her duty, we later learned, took her to most of the little ports of P.E.I., then out to the Magdalen Islands and on to Cape Breton. I could think of no happier prospect than ambling around in her on one of her runs.
By early afternoon we were well down the strait, closing on Pictou Island, and the wind was rising. It was a dead muzzler so we spent four hours beating back and forth against wind and tide, making almost no headway until the tide changed, bringing with it a swelling sea that soon had
Bonnet
pitching about like a shuttlecock. A pomarine jaeger – an arctic gull that acts like a hawk and is very rare in these parts – came by for a look as we set course to round Cape George. Wind and sea rose inexorably and, as darkness thickened, so did the massive bulk of the cape, the northern extremity of mainland Nova Scotia. By then Angus and I were standing watch an hour on and an hour off, too tired to take longer tricks at the wheel. At 1:00 a.m. we finally rounded the cape and raised the feeble light of Ballantynes Cove, so packed with fish boats that there was no room for us and we had to moor along the face of the breakwater. The fishermen must have been surprised to see our big black hull when they came down to their boats at dawn, but they were kindly
souls and kept their motors barely turning over until well clear of the harbour so as not to waken us.
We rose late, in this lovely little cove nestled under the forbidding mass of Cape George. A few farms clung to steeply sloping shores, and grey, weather-beaten fish shacks encrusted the foreshore. On the beach a few hundred feet from us was the rusted boiler of a tug driven ashore by a gale and, not far from it, the bones of a small freighter that had tried and failed to find shelter here from a hurricane. Despite these dark omens, we were delighted with the place. Angus sauntered off the dock, to return bearing gifts – three fresh mackerel for me to cook for breakfast. He was accompanied by a bevy of local men, one of whom, the manager of the co-op store, put his car to work ferrying cans of gasoline out to us and then refused payment for the use of the vehicle
or
the gas.
Later in the day I chatted with a pair of fishermen who had just returned to the Cove after spending six hours hand-lining for hake and cod off Cape George. They repeated the lament we would hear many times from inshore fishermen of the difficulty of selling their catches for enough money to provide a decent living because of the enormous quantities of fish caught offshore that were being dumped on the market by an ever-growing fleet of big draggers.
Our pleasant interlude at Ballantynes Cove came to an abrupt end when a fisherman peering over the edge of the breakwater quietly drew Angus’s attention to our propeller shaft and its underwater housing. The stern bearing had come adrift, allowing the shaft to bounce back and forth in a way that would eventually bend the shaft and damage the engine or open a leak that could sink the vessel.
Repairs were urgently needed, but only a shipyard equipped with a marine railway could haul
Bonnet
out to be repaired. There was such a yard at Port Hawkesbury, halfway through the Strait of Canso and only fifteen miles from us, but the dreaded Canso Causeway lay between us and the yard – its opening now reduced to a couple of
hundred feet, through which the unfettered power of the North Atlantic poured in a thundering tidal race. No vessel could buck such a torrent, but the Cove fishermen thought that,
if
we were very lucky and very careful, we
might
make it through at the turn of a tide.
We had a conference. Murray suggested we tie
Bonnet
to some safe wharf and proceed to Halifax by train. I thought we might try to make our way around the top of Cape Breton Island, but without a reliable engine this detour could take days and Angus had no time to spare. So, there being nothing else for it, we decided to attempt the Gut.
We took our departure soon after first light next day, under sail. However, as we met the sweep of the open gulf the weather closed down, bringing rain and southeasterly wind squalls right on
Bonnet
’s nose. This gave us no choice but to use the engine.
Very
tentatively we started it up, and slowly, slowly
Bonnet
limped eastward. We entered Canso Strait four hours later just as a rising tide began flowing through it against us.
We had hoped to find a fisherman or some such water-farer here from whom we could get local knowledge and advice, but wind, rain, and fog seemed to have swept the strait clear of human life. Then, with fearsome suddenness, the ragged black mass of the causeway loomed dead ahead. Built like a gigantic battlement from hundreds of thousands of tons of stone blasted from a nearby mountain, it was pierced only by a gap that looked narrower than a two-lane highway, through which the incoming tide was already flowing like a mighty river.
At the sight of it, Angus reflexively hauled the tiller hard over, making
Bonnet
pivot like a deer encountering a panther in its path. We were circling, wondering what was to be done when a Norwegian freighter emerged from the mists behind us, running straight for the gap at full speed. As we watched in horror, she plunged into it with no more than a couple of dozen yards’ clearance on either side. Though she must have been making ten knots, the current slowed
her to half that. We watched with mounting apprehension as fountains of white water burst over her bows and washed across her fore-deck. Then – miraculously, it seemed – she was through and steaming triumphantly eastward.
I glanced at Murray. I don’t know about
my
expression, but his was piteous.
“We’
re not going into
that
, are we?” he pleaded.
I glanced at Angus, who drew himself up and became a Canadian Captain Bligh.
“We’ve missed the turn of the tide. It’s flooding now and it’ll get stronger by the minute. In half an hour, we won’t have the chance of a snowball in hell of getting through! Mate! Give the bullgine everything it’s got. Stand by all hands!”
The current was now sluicing through the gap like “shit through a goose,” as Murray later put it. But providentially an eddy had formed on our side and somehow we were able to claw up into it, almost scraping the rocks to port until we were within a few hundred feet of the curling lip of the overflow. Against all odds the bullgine continued to haul us ahead, inch by laborious inch, until unbelievably we were through! But not finished. We expected at every instant that the shaft bearing would go adrift, but somehow it held as we crept into the shelter of Port Hawkesbury’s harbour.
A long, lean fellow standing at the end of Langley’s Shipyard wharf waved imperiously at us. Jut-jawed and rakishly handsome Harry Langley, son of the yard’s owner, took our lines, made us fast, and leapt aboard with a mock salute and a greeting that carried a sting in its tail.
“You fellows should be ten fathoms under! What the devil possessed you to try pushing your old barge through the causeway against a rising tide? Don’t you give a damn … or don’t you know any better? Ah, well. You’re
main
landers, aren’t you?”
He had been observing the causeway as we approached it.
“I figured you must’ve thought you were on a Sunday School picnic. I guess you know different now. Well, you’ve made it somehow, what can we do for you?”
My father’s pride was so ruffled he stomped down below, leaving me to deal with things. After I explained our difficulties, Harry leaned perilously over
Bonnet
’s stern, took a long look, then straightened, grinned, and said,
“Not to worry. We can fix that. And there’s no need to haul your vessel up on our slipway – that’d be expensive. As you maybe noticed, there’s a lovely big tide in the Gut. So just run your tub’s nose onto the land alongside the government wharf over there, and when the tide goes out tonight she’ll be high and dry on the bottom and our shipwrights will have that shaft bearing fixed in a jiffy.”
Meekly we did as we were told, and
Bonnet
was soon securely moored at the government wharf, with additional lines strung from the crosstrees to the far side of the wharf to hold her upright after the tide had fallen.
While we were waiting, a rough-and-ready working schooner about three times
Bonnet
’s size puttered down the Gut from the eastward and came alongside the wharf ahead of us. The name painted in uncertain script on her bows and stern read
Maggie Billard
. Her crew consisted of the skipper – a beak-nosed, bouncy little man of about seventy who introduced himself as Dolph (Adolphus) Billard – and his son Josh, who seemed about Murray’s age.
Skipper Dolph told us they “belonged” to (and had just come from) La Poile, an outport on Newfoundland’s southwest coast, and were bound for the Island for a cargo of potatoes, which they would bring back to the Rock and peddle to the scattered outports.