The Boat Who Wouldn't Float (15 page)

We passed a big rusty Portuguese freighter on her way out. Being full of the brotherhood of the sea we cheerfully saluted her with three feeble blasts on our hand fog-horn. After a short pause while her skipper tried to locate the source of the sound, for his vessel dwarfed us into insignificance, she responded with three mighty blasts. This was a proud moment-but it had repercussions.

The freighter had dropped the St. Pierre Pilot only a few minutes earlier, and the Pilot was on his way back to harbour in his big motor launch when he heard the whistle blast. He assumed that another vessel was preparing to enter and would require his services. As we swung around Ile aux Vainqueurs
to enter the North Channel, we met the pilot boat coming back out.

She was twice our size and going twice as fast. Paying no attention to us she went racing past and then, seeing nothing on the horizon except the departing Portuguese freighter, began to circle in a puzzled sort of way. Finally she turned about and came foaming toward
Happy Adventure
.

When she was a few yards off she slowed and the Pilot hailed us in French, which left me little the wiser because my knowledge of that language is fragmentary. Mike spoke fluent French. To the Pilot's polite query as to whether we had seen another inbound vessel, Mike replied that indeed we had.

“Where is she?” asked the Pilot.

“Gone down!” Mike replied, pointing an expressive thumb towards the deeps.

“Gone down? Mon Dieu! You mean she sank?”

“Oui,” said Mike affably. “But maybe submerged would be a better word. It was a submarine, Monsieur. A very big one. With a very big gun on the bow. It had a hammer and sickle painted in bright red on the conning tower.”

The Pilot's face paled noticeably. His eyes rolled as he anxiously searched the horizon. I think he must have been about to flee for his life when some faint, lurking suspicion seemed to be aroused within him. His face began to redden. He turned back to us and saw the smirk upon Mike's face.

“By God, I think you are one big liar! Bien! The submarine is gone, but
you
remain. You wish to enter St. Pierre, eh? Then you will take a pilot. Stand by for me to come aboard.”

This was the
only
part of the conversation Mike translated for me.

“Nothing doing,” I said. “You tell him we don't need any pilot, aren't going to take one, and certainly aren't going to pay for one.”

Mike passed this on, and the Pilot shrugged, grinned without mirth, jammed his engine into gear, and without more
ado began describing circles around
Happy Adventure
at high speed, putting up a huge wake, and passing so close under our bow and stern that I could see his jaw muscles working each time he went by.

The little schooner was shocked by this behaviour and she showed it. She pranced; she leapt; she shook herself; she skated skittishly from side to side as each new wave hit her. As for me, I did not have a clue as to the cause of this outrageous behaviour on the part of the Pilot, and I was much annoyed by it. I was also still under the influence of the Irish coffee, which is a notably belligerent drink.

It so happened that as part of our lifesaving gear we carried a flare pistol of wartime vintage. I jumped below and got the gun. At the next pass the Pilot made I fired a flare two feet above his cabin roof! He sheered off so violently that he heeled his port gunwales under water. He did not return but ran at full throttle toward the harbour entrance and disappeared behind the mole.

That was undoubtedly one of the most satisfying exploits of my entire nautical career but, it has to be admitted, it was not necessarily the wisest. When, half an hour later, we puttered through the gap between the moles and opened the harbour itself, the first thing we saw was a platoon of gendarmes marshalling on the government wharf.

Mike claimed to be of the opinion that they had been called out to give us an official welcome. But the effect of the Irish coffee was wearing off and I was plagued with doubts. So instead of steaming boldly in and putting our lines ashore I stayed a hundred yards off the dock, coyly circling, while the gendarmes, the douanes, the immigration men, and a growing number of other citizens urgently beckoned us to come ashore.

At this point Mike drew my attention to two harbour launches, a small tug boat, and the pilot boat, all of which were busily embarking gendarmes. It appeared that if we were not anxious to go to them, they were anxious to come to us. I turned tail and
Happy Adventure
fled out through the
gap. I do not feel that we fled with ignominy. Being so considerably outnumbered, I doubt if even Nelson would have been willing to stand his ground.

The aftermath of that imbroglio might have been unpleasant had not luck been with us. As we galumphed slowly down the channel we met a large, seagoing dory, inward bound. Her name,
Oregon
, was written large across her bows and I recognized both her and the skipper. He was Théophile Detcheverry, descendant of generations of Basque fishermen who have lived on the islands during the last three hundred years. Théo was a great, bull-voiced, vibrant man; a power on the islands and also, thank the Lord, a friend of mine from a previous visit to St. Pierre.

Théo recognized me too. His bellow of welcome was perfectly audible above the roar of both our engines. He ran Oregon alongside of us with such abandon that
Happy Adventure
still bears the scars.

“Farleee! By Christ! You come back to St. Pierre at last! C'est bon! C'est magnifique! And in your own bateau, you come…!”

“Oui, Théophile,” I said when I could get a word in edgewise. “I've come; but je ne pense pas that I'll be staying long. Regardez-vous astern!” With which I pointed to the pursuing flotilla rapidly closing in upon us.

At this point Mike took a hand. He explained the whole situation and when Théo got through laughing like a mad walrus he leapt aboard and instructed me to stop my engine. We were soon surrounded by the St. Pierre Home Defence Squadron and for a while all was pure pandemonium.

When things sorted themselves out we returned to the harbour with Théo at the tiller of
Happy Adventure
, with the rest of the fleet giving us a cheerful escort. It is a nice characteristic of the St. Pierrais that, although they are quick to flame, they are also quick to forgive.

They were very good about some other small matters to which I had forgotten to attend before we left Muddy Hole. For one thing, I had not obtained official clearance for my vessel to sail to foreign ports. Also, I had not bothered to have her registered and so I had no papers. No papers. No flag. No port of registration, and not even a name painted on her stern or bow. It was a wonder that Mike and I were not immediately jailed and our ship interned.

As soon as we moored, Théo came below accompanied by the Chef of the douane and one or two other uniformed officials. The Chef was a little sticky. He had a large hole in one of his teeth and he kept sucking at it in a pessimistic way while Théo insisted that, in our case, papers were not necessary. The Chef did not seem easy to convince. The four men argued long and hotly but to no avail until Théo had an inspiration. This is how he described it to us later.

“I told them, you see, that since your boat did not belong to any country it could be adopted. I reminded them that we were all of Basque ancestry, and that the Basques had once been the greatest seafaring people in the world but now, having been occupied by France and Spain, we did not have a single seagoing vessel sailing under our own flag. Why not, I asked them, adopt this good little boat? We will rechristen
her. We will give her the flag of the Seven Basque Provinces. Yes, and we will give her a port of registry and papers all in
Basque
! And then there
will
be one ship upon the ocean flying the flag of our ancient Motherland! What could they say?”

What they said, of course, was yes; and they said it so enthusiastically that
I
never had any say in the matter at all. Which is how it came to pass that
Happy Adventure
ceased to be a Newfoundland vessel and became the flagship of the Basque mercantile marine.

 

13.
With soul so pure

O
NE MORNING
before I am old and hoary I shall waken again to the sound of water slapping gently against the hull of a small vessel as she lies asleep beside the jetty in St. Pierre. I shall climb lazily out of my bunk, sniff the mingled smells of cod, coal smoke, and heather, then I shall amble across the wide Place bordering the harbour, to the Café” L'Escal.

Madame Ella Girardin will see me coming and my croissants and coffee will be waiting on the bar. And if Ella detects a certain weakness in my gait there will be a small glass of brandy beside the coffee cup.

Some of the quiet fellows sitting at the little table will give me a casual “bonjour.” Others may acknowledge my arrival with a greeting in Portuguese or Spanish. As I drink my breakfast I will listen to their comments on the state of the fishery and on the happenings in the world of ocean.

Morning is talking time, but eventually I shall go out on the cobbled streets that run uphill amongst the crowded narrow houses of the little town. If it is a sunny day I may go spearing lobsters at Ravenel Bay. Or I may hitch a ride in a dory with a friend of mine from lie aux Marins and go fifteen miles to sea to jig a cod or a haddock for tomorrow's lunch. Most likely, though, I'll amble down to the docks to have a gam with the sailors from one of the score or so of Portuguese, French, or Spanish draggers moored to the wharf.

In the afternoon I may make my way at a gentle pace up
the long, scrub-covered slopes behind the town and amble across the rough barrens, through blue lupins and strong-scented grass, to the high-domed crest of the rock ridge behind Cap au Diable. From there I'll look southeast over the neat reticule of the town; over the broad double harbour past Galantry Head to a far distant curl of foam bursting over the haunted reef that bears the name “Les Enfants Perdus,” and beyond that to the shores of Canada—of Newfoundland.

After a while the fog will begin rolling in, and it will be time to descend the hill and walk through ghostly streets until I come to La Joinville, at whose long bar Jean will pour me a noggin, “to get the fog out of your bones,” and tell me fantastic yarns of the great days of Le Whiskey when St. Pierre was the focal point of interest, and sometimes of guns as well, for the thirsting millions of a prohibition-smitten United States of America. Jean will tell me again how the rows of now gaunt and empty concrete warehouses along the waterfront were once stacked to their roof beams with hundreds of thousands of cases of whiskey, brandy, rum, and wines; and he will talk again of the elusive, hard-faced men who manned the swift and often nameless ships that came and went by night; sailing for dark rendezvous with black-painted motor boats off the coasts of the New England states.

I will do these things that I have done before; but there will be one thing I cannot do again. As evening draws down Théophile Detcheverry will not be there to welcome me into his rambling old house, and I will not be able to sit until the dawn hours watching the quick flow of passions on his saturnine and hawk-nosed face, while I listen to his great voice booming a mixture of good French and atrocious English, as he speaks of the islands he knew so well and loved so deeply. Théo is gone. But I will remember him, for it was he, more than any other man, who taught me to know the myth-shrouded little archipelago lying only twelve miles off the shores of Canada—the never-never land of St. Pierre and Miquelon.

Because the arrangements to make a Basque lady out of
Happy Adventure
would take several days, Théo suggested
we should have the vessel hauled on the marine railway at the shipyard. He was sure the local shipwrights would be able to find and stanch her leaks, and while she was high and dry we would have time to repaint her and generally make her beautiful for her christening.

I was pessimistic about the chances of anyone
ever
stopping her leaks, but the mere prospect of not having to pump her for a day or two was so engaging that I set off at once to visit the shipyard and make the necessary arrangements.

The yard was decrepit, sprawling, and unbelievably cluttered. On one of its two slipways a Newfoundland schooner, the
Sandy Point
, stood high and dry, while the other slip was occupied by a sea-worn Spanish dragger. The whole place smelled of a mixture of old wood, sun-heated iron, stockholm tar, engine oil, and black, reeking coal smoke, coming from a ramshackle building that housed a massive and antique steam engine and winch, by means of which the ships were hauled up on the slips.

At the cradle holding the dragger, three or four workmen were hammering in big wooden wedges to hold her securely in position for a launching which, evidently, was due to take place at any moment.

A rotund, red-faced young man with a monk's fringe in lieu of hair emerged briefly from the steaming engine house, shouted something to the men preparing the dragger, and dashed back into his hissing inferno. I walked toward his lair and as I stepped over one of the launching rails I almost fell over a dog.

She was asleep. She lay on her back, legs outspread, with no pretence at modesty, her head turned at a painful angle, so that her nose rested on a pillow of scrap iron. She was big and black with a white chest; and she was snoring loudly.

As my foot came down within an inch of her face she opened one yellow eye and gave me a long, cold stare; but she continued to snore. The back hairs on my neck crawled a little as I hurried away from this monster who seemed able to observe the world with a watchful eye while she slept.

I had not gone three paces when the whistle atop the
engine house let loose a fearful shriek. The blast immobilized me but it galvanized the dog into frenetic action. She gained her feet with one leap and began to run with a loose-limbed gallop that carried her across the yard and out of sight into the maze of streets beyond.

The whistle ceased and the rotund cherub emerged again from his hotbox, wiping his brow with his shirt. He saw me and beckoned. The gesture was imperious.

“Allo, anyway!” he said as I approached. “I am Paulo. You like Napoleon?”

Napoleon is not one of my favourite figures from the past, but since this was French territory and I was an alien I equivocated.

“Je him aime beaucoup. Mais je pense De Gaulle is better!” I said carefully.

A faint shadow of bewilderment hovered over Paulo's rosy brow for a moment, then was gone.

“Eh, bien!” he cried. “Then drink!”

With which he shoved a bottle at me. It was Napoleon brandy. It was warm, but it was good.

Between drinks (for Paulo was not one of your single-drink men) I broached the subject of hauling out
Happy Adventure
.

“Pas de difficulté”! We are enchanted. One hour after we launch this dragger, then we haul you out. But, Monsieur, why you do not have another drink?”

So I had another and then, because the effect of the encounter with the great black dog was still strong, I asked: “That chien, is it that she is yours? She acts like she is fou. crazy.”

Paulo bellowed, a great gust of Napoleon-spiced mirth. “Crazee? That dog? That Blanche? Oh non, my fran. She is, what you say, more smart than me! You wait, you watch.”

“Okay. Je watch. Mais why is it that you call her Blanche quand elle est noir as a lump de charbon?”

“Why not?” Paulo answered with some impatience. “How many people you know called Green, eh? Or Brown or Black?
What colour they are, eh? Anyhow, that dog, she has very pure soul. Sooo. Blanche, non?”

The logic seemed irrefutable. We sat together on a baulk of timber and waited. I assumed we were waiting for the men at the dragger cradle to signal they were ready for the launch. But when after a few minutes they shouted that all was in order. Paulo only beamed at them, waved the bottle, and went on sitting.

“Waitez vous to get up une gross tête de steam?” I asked.

“Non. non,” said Paulo. “We wait for Blanche.”

Then from around the town-side corner of the main shipyard building appeared a bevy of wonderfully assorted dogs. There were five of them, and they ranged from a huge, panting, lumbering, quasi-St. Bernard to a tiny, yapping, short-legged beast known in Newfoundland as a “crackie.” They came around the corner fast. Bringing up the tail of the procession was Blanche.

Paulo bounced to his feet and vanished into his inferno. He gave three short blasts on the whistle and the men at the dragger cradle jumped off. They had hardly cleared the cradle when dogs began scrambling aboard it. They showed little enthusiasm for what they were doing and one or two of them even made faint-hearted attempts to bolt back toward the town. It was useless. Like a black devil herding doomed souls into the nether pit, Blanche anticipated these attempts, and a snarl and a snap took the spirit of resistance out of the defectors.

The winch began to roar. The big drum began to turn and the cable to pay out. The cradle gave a jerk and began to slide down the slope toward the harbour. The dogs were silent except for the quasi-St. Bernard who closed his eyes and moaned hoarsely.

Soon all the dogs were afloat and milling aimlessly about in the froth. The cradle sank until only the tops of its arms were showing. The dragger started her engines and steamed out into the stream. The launch was over.

Well, it was not
quite
over. The harbour was now full of
floating objects. Many of these were hardwood wedges but five were the heads of swimming dogs. I now began to see a point and purpose in the strange scene I was witnessing.

Each dog swam to a wedge. Each dog, according to his or her size, ability, and strength, either grabbed hold of a wedge, or bunted one with its chest, and began laboriously dragging or pushing the heavy blocks toward shore.

Paulo emerged beside me, grinning widely.

“Not so crazee, eh? Blanche, she make all them damn dog work. lls ne l”aiment pas, you bet, but by God, what can they do? They work, or they have bite. That Blanche, she boss them good.”

Blanche was the last to regain the land. She shook herself, looked searchingly over the harbour to make sure there was nothing left to be retrieved and then, without so much as a glance at her assistants, walked sedately to her favourite sleeping-place and slumped into a relaxed position in the sun. Then, and only then, did the pack begin to slink away. They had been dismissed from duty.

I had a few questions to ask of Paulo. We adjourned to L'Escal and there he told me all.

Blanche, he explained, did not belong to him or, in fact, to any man. She hailed originally from the small outport of Grand Bruit, on the south shore of Newfoundland, a hundred miles west of St. Pierre.

Grand Bruit is famous for its black water dogs, which are not to be confused with either the kennel-bred Labrador or the giant Newfoundland breed. Both of these types were developed
from
the native water dog which seems to have evolved naturally in Newfoundland, or perhaps on St. Pierre, from a now vanished European species brought over by Basque fishermen hundreds of years ago. These dogs, whose aquatic prowess is truly phenomenal were, until recently, carried on almost every fishing vessel. They had a dual task: to act as lifesavers if a man fell overboard, and to retrieve codfish that escaped from the jigger as it was hauled to the surface.

For some years Blanche had gone fishing with her owner who was skipper of a little two-dory schooner out of Grand Bruit. Then one bitter February night this vessel went ashore on Galantry Head of St. Pierre. Her crew and dog made it safely to shore where they were cared for until the men could arrange a passage out.

The first passage that offered itself was aboard a big schooner belonging to Fortune Bay bound on a fishing voyage to the Grand Banks. Blanche's master left her in Paulo's care until he could return to claim her, but the schooner never returned to land. She went unreported, and no trace of her, or of her crew, was ever found.

Blanche made herself at home in the shipyard. Before her coming, the shipyard workers used to have to row about the harbour after a launching, in order to pick up the drifting wedges. But one morning Blanche decided to do the job for them. She did it so well that she went on the payroll of the yard.