The Boat Who Wouldn't Float (2 page)

Screech is a drink peculiar to Newfoundland. In times gone by it was made by pouring boiling water into empty rum barrels to dissolve whatever rummish remains might have lingered there. Molasses and yeast were added to the black, resultant fluid and this mixture was allowed to ferment for a decent length of time before it was distilled. Sometimes it was aged for a few days in a jar containing a plug of nigger-twist chewing tobacco.

However the old ways have given way to the new, and Screech is now a different beast. It is the worst conceivable quality of Caribbean rum, bottled by the Newfoundland government under the Screech label, and sold to poor devils who have no great desire to continue living. It is not as powerful as it used to be but this defect can be, and often is, remedied by the addition of quantities of lemon extract. Screech is usually served mixed with boiling water. In its consequent near gaseous state the transfer of the alcohol to the bloodstream is instantaneous. Very little is wasted in the digestive tract.

This was my first experience with Screech and nobody had warned me. Harold sat back with an evil glitter in his eye and watched with delight as I tried to quench my thirst. At least I
think
he did. My memories of the balance of that evening are unclear.

At a much later date I was to be accused by Jack of having bought our boat while drunk, or of having bought her sight unseen, or both. The last part of the accusation is certainly not true. As I sat in the overwhelming heat of the kitchen with steam rising to maximum pressure inside my own boilers, the brothers Hallohan drew on the wizardry of their Irish ancestors and conjured up for me a picture of their little schooner using such vivid imagery that I saw her as clearly as if she had been in the kitchen with us. When I eventually threw my arms around Paddy's neck and thrust a bundle of bills into his shark-skin textured hand, I knew with sublime certainty that I had found the perfect vessel.

As we drove back to St. John's the next morning Harold rhapsodized about the simple-hearted, honest, God-fearing Irish fishermen of the Southern Shore.

“They'd give you their shirt as soon as look at you,” he said. “Generous? Migod, there's nobody in the whole world like them! You're some lucky they took to you.”

In a way I suppose Harold was right. Because if the Hallohans had not taken to me I might have remained in Ontario where I could conceivably have become a solid citizen. I bear the Hallohans no ill will, but I hope I never again get “took to” the way I was taken on that memorable night at Muddy Hole.

Two days later I returned to Muddy Hole to do a survey on my vessel and to get my first sober (in the sense of calm, appraising) look at her. Seen from a distance she was indeed a pretty little thing, despite her nauseous colour. A true schooner hull in miniature, she measured thirty-one feet on deck with a nine-foot beam and a four-foot draft. But she was rough! On close inspection she looked as though she had been flung together by a band of our paleolithic ancestors—able shipbuilders perhaps but equipped only with stone adzes.

Her appointments and accommodations left a great deal to be desired. She was flush-decked, with three narrow fishing wells in each of which one man could stand and jig for cod, and with two intervening fish holds in each of which the ghosts of a million long-dead cod tenaciously lingered.
Right up in her eyes was a cuddy two feet high, three feet wide, and three feet long, into which one very small man could squeeze if he did not mind assuming the foetal position. There was also an engine room; a dark hole in which lurked the enormous phallus of a single-cylinder, make-and-break (but mostly broke) gasoline engine.

Her rigging also left something to be desired. Her two masts had apparently been manufactured out of a couple of Harry Lauder's walking sticks. They were stayed with lengths of telephone wire and cod line. Her sails were patched like Joseph's coat and seemed to be of equivalent antiquity. Her bowsprit was hardly more than a mop handle tied in place with netting twine. It did not appear to me that the Hallohans had sailed her very much. I was to hear later that they had
never
sailed her and shared the general conviction of everyone in Muddy Hole that any attempt to do so would probably prove fatal.

She was not a clean little vessel. In truth, she stank. Her bilges had not been cleaned since the day she was built and they were encrusted with a glutinous layer of fish slime, fish blood, and fish gurry to a depth of several inches. This was not because of bad housekeeping. It was done “a-purpose” as the Muddy Holers told me
after
I had spent a solid week trying to clean her out.

“Ye see, Skipper,” one of them explained, “dese bummers now, dey be built o' green wood, and when dey dries, dey spreads. Devil a seam can ye keep tight wit' corkin (caulking). But dey seals dersel's, ye might say, wit' gurry and blood, and dat's what keeps dey tight.”

I have never since had reason to doubt his words.

 

Since the sum the Hallohans had demanded for their vessel was, oddly enough, exactly the sum I had to spend, and since this nameless boat (the Hallohans had never christened her, referring to her only as She, or sometimes as That Bitch) was not yet ready to go to Samoa around Cape Horn, I had to make a serious decision.

The question really was whether to walk away from her forever, telling Jack McClelland a suitable lie about having been waylaid by highwaymen in St. John's, or whether to try and brazen it out and somehow make a vessel out of a sow's ear. Because I am essentially a coward, and anyway Jack is onto my lies, I chose the latter course.

Upon asking the Hallohans where I could find a boat-builder who could make some necessary changes for me I was directed to Enarchos Coffin—the very man who had built the boat four years earlier. Enos, as he was called, was a lean, lank, dehydrated stick of a man. In his younger days he had been a master shipwright in Fortune Bay building vessels for the Grand Banks fishery, but when the Banking fleet faded into glory he was reduced to building small boats for local fishermen. The boats he built were beautifully designed; but a combination of poverty amongst his customers, a shortage of decent wood, failing vision, and old age, somewhat affected the quality of his workmanship. The Hallohan boat was the last one he had built and was to be the last he would ever build.

When I went to visit him, armed with an appropriate bottle, he was living in a large, ramshackle house in company with his seven unmarried daughters. Enos proved amiable and garrulous. The Southern Shore dialect is almost unintelligible to the ear of an outsider and when it is delivered at a machine-gun clip it becomes totally incomprehensible. For the first hour or two of our acquaintance I understood not a single word he addressed to me. However after the first burst of speed had run its course he slowed down a little and I was able to understand quite a lot.

He said he was delighted to hear I had bought the boat; but when he heard what I had paid for her, he was only able to cure his attack of apoplexy by drinking half the bottle of rum, neat.

“Lard livin' Jasus!” he screeched when he got his breath back. “An' I built her for they pirates fer two hunnert dollars!”

At which point I snatched the bottle from him and drank the other half of it, neat.

When we had recovered our breath I asked him if he would undertake repairs, modifications, and a general refit. He willingly agreed. We arranged that he would fit a false keel and outside ballast; a cabin trunk over the fish wells; bunks, tables, lockers, and other internal essentials; re-spar, re-rig her properly, and do a hundred other smaller but necessary jobs. Enos thought the work would take him about two months to complete.

 

I returned to St. John's and thence to Ontario in moderately good spirits. I did not worry about the boat being ready on time, since we did not plan on sailing her until mid-summer. Occasionally I wrote to Enos (he himself could neither read nor write) and one or other of his strapping daughters would reply with a scrawled postcard of which this one is typical:

Dear Mister Mote

Dad say yor boat come fine lots fish this month Gert got her baby

Nellie Coffin

During the waiting months Jack and I dreamed many a dream and made many a plan. We agreed that I should precede him to Newfoundland near the end of June taking with me a jeep-load of gear and equipment, and that I would have the few finishing touches to the boat completed so that she would be ready to sail when Jack arrived in mid-July. After that, well, we would see. Bermuda, the Azores, Rio de Janeiro—the world lay waiting!

 

2.
“Passion Flower” goes to sea

J
ACK MCCLELLAND
was not the only man who owned a surrogate ship in which he could perform deeds of derring-do when life became unbearable. His little launch
cum
motor torpedo boat on Lake Muskoka was matched by a vessel I had owned for ten long years. To uninitiated eyes she seemed none other than a singularly decrepit jeep station wagon; but in the reality of imagination she was the last of the square-riggers trading between London and Ceylon.

To add authenticity to her assumed character she carried oil-burning running-lights, green to starboard, red to port, on the sides of her wheelhouse. On her bows she mounted a wench (seaman's parlance for winch) with forty fathoms of cable. She had no figurehead but on bow and stern she carried her name, her port of registry, and her motto.

PASSION FLOWER
4th. Concession Of Albion Township
Do Or Die

Many is the time I have sailed her under a full press of canvas down the concession line to Highway 50, then south to pick up the trade winds, and so to the waterfront bars of Toronto. However she had never made a major voyage until
the June morning when she and I set out for Newfoundland.

She was as well-prepared for that epochal journey as I could make her. In her capacious hold she carried two Admiralty-pattern anchors (one of 165 pounds and one of 100 pounds). There were three cases of ship's biscuits packed in 1893. There were coils of cordage; bolts of sailcloth; cork life-preservers; a patent log; a compass with a ten-inch card and, as an auctioneer might have said, “other articles too numerous to mention”—which is, in fact, what the auctioneer had said on the April morning when I became his most avid customer.

Passion Flower
took her departure from the sand-hills at dawn. A light mist lay over the Albion highlands and a brisk following breeze was waking in the west. It was a marvellous day to begin a great voyage.

For an old vessel she made an amazing passage that first day. With the help of the following breeze, she ran 650 miles of her easting down, and that night I moored her in a green pasture by the side of the St. Lawrence River just east of Quebec City.

I wakened the next morning to the smell of frying bacon. The sun was already up as were the horses in whose pasture I had bivouacked. Off to the north the great silver river rolled towards the still-distant sea, and to the south the horses formed a silent semi-circle around
Passion Flower
, me, and a stranger to my ken.

He was a small wrinkle-faced, scraggly-bearded fellow of indeterminate age dressed in worn serge trousers, a frayed shirt and a canvas jacket. I sat up in my sleeping-bag and stared at him in some astonishment for he was busily engaged in cooking breakfast on
my
gasoline stove, using
my
frying pan,
my
eggs,
my
bacon, and
my
coffee. He saw me move and glanced up.

“Mornin' Sorr,” he said politely. “How do ye loik ye're haigs?”

Evidently I had acquired a new crew member during the night. However I had not the vaguest memory of having done so and if my mind was actually giving way I was not prepared to admit it.

“Morning,” I replied cautiously. “Sunny side up and lightly done. Coffee black.”

“Aye, aye, Sorr. Comin' up.”

The mystery solved itself as we were eating.

My new companion, whose name was Wilbur, explained that he was a Newfoundland seaman and that he had been on the road at dawn heading east toward St. John's when he encountered
Passion Flower
. A casual glance through her windows alerted him to the fact that she was a ship disguised as a jeep and so, with the true camaraderie of sailors everywhere, he had welcomed himself aboard.

Wilbur was an acquisition. He had been at sea nearly forty years—or so he said. As we ran eastward that morning along the banks of the mighty river he pointed to many passing ships and told me stories of their crews; stories which, did I dare repeat them in print, would make Henry Miller sound like a purveyor of Victorian nursery rhymes.

Wilbur was a natural raconteur and he never stopped
yarning as we crossed New Brunswick and entered Nova Scotia. By this time I had been ten hours at the wheel and I was weary. When Wilbur offered to take a trick, assuring me that there was not a vessel built he could not steer, I gladly handed over to him.

Gratefully I shut my eyes and slept. Ten minutes later
Passion Flower
brought up all standing with a crash that argued an end to the universe. Wilbur had taken us into a broadside collision with an enormous truck loaded down to her marks with pulpwood logs.

The damage to the two craft turned out to be negligible because
Passion Flower
's sturdy bow winch had struck an immense tractor tire hanging like a fender over the port side of the truck. The damage to my psyche, to Wilbur's pride, and to the temper of the large man who owned the truck, was not so slight; however this was Nova Scotia and we knew the cure. We sat down, the three of us, in the ditch at the roadside and drank a bottle of rum, after which we parted the best of friends. Both the truck driver and myself were content to accept Wilbur's explanation of what had happened. Ruefully he confessed that while he could steer any vessel that had ever carried sail he had never really learned how to run a motor boat!

I took the wheel.
Passion Flower
now steered in a rather peculiar manner, tracking half-sideways like a crab. Since neither Wilbur nor I possessed much engineering knowledge we did not realize this was because her rudder (landsmen would call it a tie rod or something equally esoteric) was badly buckled. After an hour or two I got used to it but other vehicles approaching us on the road did not. They seemed somewhat uncertain as to our intended course, and not a few of them hauled off the fairway onto the gravel verge to let us pass.

At dusk we found that our electric headlights had also been put out of action by the collision, but since our oil-burning running-lights were trimmed and filled we lit them and were able to proceed, though at reduced speed.

And here I must remark that Nova Scotians, once a famous seafaring race, seem to have lost some of their heritage. At any rate most of the vessels we encountered after dark seemed to understand nothing of the rules of the sea-road. As we bore down upon them, our port lantern flaming red and the starboard flaming green, they sheered off as if they were encountering the
Flying Dutchman
. Some of them were so vocally distressed that I concluded we should anchor for the night, and this we did in the little village of Pugwash.

Once nothing but a lobster-fishing community, Pugwash is now famous for its Thinkers Conferences to which great brains from all the world are welcomed by Cyrus Eaton, an American capitalist. I had heard about this man so I turned
Passion Flower
into the fairway leading to his estate. Mr. Eaton was not in residence, and despite some pretty broad hints from me, the secretary on duty showed no inclination to offer Wilbur and me the hospitality of the place. I lay this rebuff to the fact that I am no capitalist. Just being a thinker was evidently not enough.

We finally moored for the night in the front yard of a lobster fisherman named Angus Mackay, a charming man with a touch of Gaelic in his speech, who took us into his house where his wife fed us to repletion on fried mackerel. Angus also undertook to fix our headlights but the rudder proved beyond his competence.

The next day's voyage was uneventful. Before noon we made Port Hawkesbury on Cape Breton Island where we sought out an old seagoing friend of mine, Harry Langley, from whom we acquired not only fifty fathom of anchor chain (the weight of which made
Passion Flower
squat down until her afterdeck was only inches above the road) but also a case of salt-water soap.

This soap had arrived from overseas in 1887 aboard
H.M.S.
Centurion. Centurion
is now a rotting hulk lying at the bottom of Sydney harbour but her soap is of more lasting stuff than mere English oak and Swedish iron. Harry assured me I would find no more durable soap anywhere; and he was
right. A decade after acquiring that case I am still on the first bar and it may well be another ten years before it softens up to the point where it produces its first lather.

Late that evening we reached North Sydney on the northeast tip of Cape Breton, from which port a car ferry sails over the Cabot Strait to Newfoundland lying ninety miles away across some of the roughest water in the world.

 

Here I must interrupt the log of
Passion Flower
's voyage to intrude a few words about the great island which was to become so much a part of my life in the months and years ahead. I shall not attempt a new description of it, for one already exists; one which I doubt can be surpassed. I unblushingly plagiarize it. It is from a book called
This Rock Within
the
Sea
by John de Visser and Farley Mowat.

 

Newfoundland is of the sea. Poised like a mighty granite stopper over the bell-mouth of the Gulf of St. Lawrence, it turns its back upon the greater continent, barricading itself behind the three-hundred-mile-long mountain rampart which forms its hostile western coast. Its other coasts all face towards the open sea, and are so slashed and convoluted with bays, inlets, runs and fiords that they offer more than five thousand miles of shoreline to the sweep of the Atlantic. Everywhere the hidden reefs and rocks (which are called, with dreadful explicitness, “sunkers”) wait to rip the bellies of unwary vessels. Nevertheless these coasts are a true seaman's world, for the harbours and havens they offer are numberless
.

Until a few generations ago the coasts of the island were all that really mattered. The high, rolling plateau of the interior, darkly coniferous-wooded to the north but bone-bare to the south, remained an almost unknown hinterland. Newfoundland was then, and it remains, a true sea-province, perhaps akin to that other lost sea-province called Atlantis; but Newfoundland, instead of sinking into the green depths, was somehow blown adrift to fetch up against our shores, there to remain in unwill
ing exile, always straining back towards the east. Nor is this pure fantasy, for Newfoundland is the most easterly land in North America, jutting so far out into the Atlantic that its capital, St. John's, lies six hundred miles to the east of Halifax and almost twelve hundred miles east of New York
.

 

Mowat's prose may be a little overblown, but essentially his description stands.

The voyage across the Cabot Strait was
Passion Flower
's first encounter with salt water. Shortly before midnight I drove her aboard a huge, slab-sided, unseaworthy monstrosity called
William Carson
, which the Canadian government built to ply the Strait and so link Newfoundland to the rest of the nation. This thing (in truth she cannot be called a vessel) is about as kindly as an old goat with a sore udder; and just about as beautiful. In her swollen belly she carries several hundred cars and trucks, and on this particular evening she was filled to capacity. Each vehicle was secured to mooring rings welded to her decks; although “secured” is perhaps not the word that one should use.

We sailed at midnight. By 0200 hours the
Carson
was wallowing in a heavy beam sea and heaving her great flanks over under the weight of a fifty-mile-an-hour nor'west gale. Her human passengers clung to whatever supports they could find, or rolled about in their bunks moaning an obbligato to the high squeal of the wind. Down below in the vehicle hold all hell broke loose.

The so-called seaman who had made
Passion Flower
fast to the deck must have been a farm boy from Saskatoon, Saskatchewan. Otherwise he would have realized that while four lengths of quarter-inch wire may be enough to moor the insubstantial shell that is your standard North American car, such moorings would be as pack thread to a two-ton jeep, laden with about three tons of assorted ironmongery.

Passion Flower
came adrift. At first, so closely were the cars packed, she did not have much room to manoeuvre. But after half an hour she had managed to clear a little space for
herself. Each time the
Carson
dropped her heavy snout into a trough, my
Flower
took a run forward to bring up against the stern of a Pontiac owned by a
U.S.
Air Force captain stationed at Stephenville, Newfoundland. Each time the
Carson
lifted her bows and sagged heavily back on her fat buttocks,
Passion Flower
charged astern, and rammed her towing hook into the grill of a Cadillac belonging to one of the industrial entrepreneurs who were then beginning to make Newfoundland their happy hunting ground at the invitation of Premier Joey Smallwood.

Having somewhat foreshortened these two cars,
Passion Flower
developed enough elbow-room to snap
their
moorings, and then the three of them began charging back and forth together. The chain reaction that followed turned the lower vehicle deck into a shambles that may not have been matched since Claudius Tiberius arranged for three hundred elephants to be stampeded in the Coliseum by forty Nubian lions.