The Boat Who Wouldn't Float (19 page)

Théophile did not join us. He spent that entire night out in the open, in the wind, in driving walls of rain, repairing his beloved dory. That was the kind of man he was: Churchill and Rommel both.

 

16.
The game is played

O
NE OF THE THINGS
the Manuel brothers impressed upon me during our meeting in Miquelon was that St. Pierre harboured
R.C.M.P.
informers. These spies reported the departure of all suspicious vessels by shortwave radio to police cutters lurking outside French territorial waters. Because of this, most Newfoundland boats engaging in the game chose to make their runs to and from Miquelon but, for reasons which will appear, it was necessary for
Itchy
to make her departure from St. Pierre.

It was not easy to keep our intentions secret. Not only did most St. Pierrais seem to be privy to our plans from the outset, but a number of them tried to become personally involved.

One day at the dark of noon Jean, Martin, Frederico, François, and several other acquaintances made their surreptitious way across the Place, pausing to let a squad of gendarmes (who were practising a march-past) go by, before sneaking aboard our boat, unobserved except by about a third of the population of the town.

Each of them was carrying something. Frederico had a case of Lemon Hart 151 overproof rum, thinly disguised in newspapers. Martin had two demijohns of red wine wrapped in an old petticoat. Over his shoulder Jean carried a cotton sack through which the shapes of a dozen brandy bottles were plainly visible.

Mike, meeting them on deck, nearly had a fit. The mainsail had been hoisted in order to dry it out, and he had the presence of mind to let fly the halyards, bringing gaff and sail crashing down to conceal our visitors and their parcels under one lumpy, writhing mass of canvas.

These parcels were not an integral part of our cargo. They were gifts, which the donors hoped we would be obliging enough to deliver to friends of theirs in various Newfoundland outports.

Some necessary modifications to our vessel were carried out at an abandoned wharf on the far side of the harbour. With the help of Paulo and Théo, we built wooden troughs, twenty inches wide and twenty inches high, along each side of the cabin trunk. Each trough was fitted with cross-cleats, to hold our cargo in place, if we ran into rough weather. Strips of canvas lashed over the troughs were designed to protect the cargo from spray and rain.

The reason for storing the cargo on deck was, of course, so that it could be readily jettisoned if we were challenged by a police cutter. Here Paulo's genius came into play. He constructed a hinged system which would enable us, by means of a wooden lever, to tip each trough over its respective rail, so that we could rid ourselves of the whole of our cargo in a matter of seconds.

We were to take our departure from St. Pierre at 0400 hours, two hours before dawn, on the given day. Our course was to be almost due north until we were abeam of Miquelon, after which we would be in international waters where we could idle along secure from molestation until evening. At dusk, we were to move to the edge of Canadian territorial waters, three miles off Pass Island, which guards the eastern entrance to Hermitage Bay. Three or four skiffs from Selbys Cove would be waiting for us at this rendezvous, having spent the balance of the day jigging cod in the vicinity. In case we encountered fog, we were to locate the rendezvous by listening for the sound of a ten-gauge shotgun being fired at irregular intervals.

At dawn, on the day before our departure, Théo went off to sea for a day's fishing. He caught no fish. Instead he visited a friend at Soldier Bay, from whom he acquired fourteen bags of “insurance” for our cargo. Théo had previously cached the cargo itself—fourteen crates of it—in a cave near Cap Percé. Just after dark he stopped at this cave and recovered the cases, before proceeding with great caution back to St. Pierre. He had need of caution.
Oregon
was so grossly overloaded that if Théo had leaned over the side to spit he would probably have capsized her then and there.

It was, naturally, a foggy night. The certainty of fog was one of the few things we were able to rely upon. It was also raining a little, and conditions were sufficiently miserable that even the intrepid St. Pierrais preferred to stay at home, or in the warmth of the bars. The last visitor left the dock where we were lying shortly before midnight.

At 0300 hours Mike and Paulo and I were sitting in the cabin, nervously nipping, when there came a gentle bump alongside. We hustled on deck to meet a grinning and perspiring Théo. He had stopped his engine opposite the Hard (as any returning fisherman would normally have done), and then had rowed the heavily laden boat into the inner harbour to our berth.

There was more rowing still to do; but first we transshipped the cargo, stowing it in the troughs and battening it down under the canvas covers. Then we silently cast off our moorings and gave
Oregon
a tow rope. Mike and Paulo joined Théo in the dory to help him man the sweeps, leaving me to steer
Itchy
.

I will never know how
Théo
found his way across the harbour, out the entrance, and down the North Channel; but after an hour the tow-line slackened and
Itchy
drifted alongside
Oregon
. In a hoarse whisper Théo told us we were at the mouth of the North Channel and had nothing ahead of us but open sea. It was then 0400 hours and time for us to part, but somehow I did not feel like parting. I made the excuse that we had all better have a farewell drink. We would maybe
have had a second, had we not been transfixed by a booming voice coming out of the fog from a few feet away.

“How long you fellows going to fool around? You want to wait until the sun comes up?”

The voice belonged to our old friend, the Chief Pilot of St. Pierre. He had with him three or four cronies. They had come out to make sure that Théo's navigation was up to snuff and to be on hand to wish us luck.

Mike hoisted the sails. A southerly zephyr filled the unseen canvas and the vessel began to move.
Oregon
let slip our line and vanished. We were alone—almost. Out of the Stygian darkness came a final admonition from the Pilot.

“Don't forget, steer half a point to nor'ard of your course when you get clear of the Plate Rock. Big tide running out of Hermitage Bay will set you off to eastward.” So much for secrecy in St. Pierre.

We sailed for an hour in order to be reasonably sure we were out of earshot of the islands before starting the bullgine. Jean-Pierre had done a good job on her but he had failed to muffle her thunderous voice.

The voyage north past Miquelon was uneventful; in truth, it was tedious. We steered a compass course. Periodically we stopped the bullgine and hauled the patent log to check the distance run. after which we listened hard for several minutes. We heard nothing except once the mew of an unseen gull. Dawn came and the fog lightened, becoming opalescent grey instead of charcoal black. Our world was again a fog-bounded hemisphere, a hundred feet in radius, in which we did not really seem to move at all. Yet by ten o'clock we had logged thirty nautical miles, and were only twenty from our rendezvous.

We were by then in international waters where we had no reason to be apprehensive about a confrontation with the
R.C.M.P.
Being sticklers for the letter of the law themselves, they were not likely to attempt an act of piracy by boarding us “on the high seas.” However we were well aware they had radar—excellent military radar—with which they could detect and follow us miles away, while we could not hope to
detect them until they were alongside us.

We decided to stop the engine and lie-to until it was time to steam toward the rendezvous. But here a problem arose; one that I had not previously considered. Our navigation was entirely by dead reckoning; by compass course and distance logged. We had no other way of knowing where we were. Once stopped, we would begin to drift with the currents that run along Newfoundland's south coast, and we would have no way of telling how far, or in what direction we were drifting. When we again started the motor and got under way we would be proceeding from an unknown point, with no true idea of the distance or direction to our destination.

When I confided this difficulty to Mike he reacted in a manner that suggested he was not yet quite ready to take his papers as a master mariner.

“If it's only the drift you're worried about, Farley, why don't we just throw a chip of wood overboard and see which way it moves. Then we'll know which way
we're
drifting.”

That was one of the longest days I ever spent at sea. We sat there, somewhere in the Atlantic, from ten o'clock until nearly five o'clock. For a wonder the sea remained calm.
There was not even a swell to give the illusion of life in a dead world. We saw and heard no living thing. The silence became so oppressive that we brought the little transistor radio on deck, and listened with actual gratitude to whining imitation cowboy songs. Still, the time barely dripped away. Seconds became minutes and minutes hours. I felt a tearing impatience to get the engine started and to head for where I hoped Pass Island might still be found.

At a quarter to five I could stand it no longer. “Start her up,” I told Mike. “We'll go in slow. If we get there too early we can always stop and wait again.”

It was a fantastic relief to be under way, even though I was now by no means sure of the correct course to steer. We stopped the engine every half hour and stood on listening watch, in the hopes of hearing the powerful fog-horn on Pass Island. It did not prove powerful enough. We never heard it.

At 6:52 we stopped the engine for the fourth time. And at 6:52:01 we heard the hard rumble of big diesel engines close on our starboard bow!

Although we had schooled ourselves to endure just such a shock as this, our psychological preparations proved to be inadequate. The sound only lasted a few seconds and then was abruptly silenced, but neither of us was able to move a muscle for what seemed like an eternity. How long we held our immobility I cannot say, but just as we were both beginning to think we had been the victims of a trick of acoustics a God-almighty siren went off right in my ear.

It was the loudest and most hideous noise I have ever heard. It was a blaring agony of sound that all the cab drivers in New York, gathered together and sounding their horns in one manic rage, could never equal. It was appalling! It was also unmistakable—there was no room for doubt about its ownership.

Mike and I responded with a pure Pavlovian reflex. I flew to the port trough and Mike to the starboard one. We stripped the lashings off like so much tissue paper, flipped the locking lugs, and hauled back on the levers. Bags and crates
went overboard with a single colossal splash. We collided in the companionway as we both dived below to jettison through the portholes six bottles of more-or-less legitimate rum, plus two corkscrews and a bottle opener!

Our duty done, we sat and waited. For a good ten minutes there was not a sound of any kind, then there was the rumble of diesels starting up. The sound crept closer and died to a slow mutter.

“Hey,” asked a husky voice, “anybody on that boat?” Lying alongside, with her big bows towering high above us, was the
R.C.M.P.
Blue Iris
. Grouped around her machine-gun were half a dozen policemen, made up to look like sailors. They were smiling.

Their leader, captain, inspector, or whatever the
R.C.M.P.
call their skippers, was smiling widest of all.

“Thought you was the
Marie Céleste
,” he said cheerfully. “Don't you fellows know about fog-horns? You could have run us down if we hadn't been watching you on radar for the last few hours. Where ya going anyway?”

I have previously noted that Mike was possessed of an extraordinarily quick mind. He broke into fluent Spanish, waved his hands and arms wildly, rolled his eyes, and pointed to the outlandish name written large upon our bows, and to the garish Basque flag that hung despondently from the main truck.

Taking the cue, I added my bit.

“Es Baska sheep amigos, hasta la vista, adios, oui, oui, si, si, si!”