The Boat Who Wouldn't Float (23 page)

DONT BE AN ASS YOU ARE A SILLY BASTARD

but which reached me as:

DONT BE AN ASP YOU ARE A FRILLY BUSTARD

 

This wire gave me much food for thought, as I tried to puzzle out what difference it would make to Jack if I became a poisonous Egyptian reptile instead of remaining an Arabian game-bird.

When Jack found he could not change my mind, he made a heroic gesture. On the next steamer I received a crate from him which contained:

4 inflatable life vests complete with shark-repellent packs;

1 emergency shortwave radio of the Mae West type without any power tube;

1 case of distress rockets;

1 inflatable rubber lifeboat, certified by the British Board of Trade to carry twenty-five people
.

 

This shipment was accompanied by a letter informing me that Jack intended to protect his investment in the boat, and in me, by personally accompanying
Happy Adventure
through the more dangerous stretches between Burgeo and Montreal.

The mere idea of this filled me with horror. The odds against our survival were, God knows, already about as heavy as they could be. Claire and Albert shared my concern, and both of them made it clear that the moment Jack stepped aboard was going to be the moment they stepped ashore.

By the time we moved aboard
Happy Adventure
on August first, my confidence in the whole venture had been severely eroded. What, two months earlier, had appeared to be the prospect of a pleasant voyage to Expo now loomed as an ordeal from which it seemed unlikely that any of us would emerge unscathed. My one remaining hope was that the weather, which had been atrocious since late May, would
stay that way until October, giving me at least a semi-legitimate excuse for remaining snugly moored in Messers Cove until the whole idiotic scheme had been forgotten. The weather on the Sou'west Coast being what it was, I felt reasonably safe in publicly announcing that we would sail on the first fair-weather day.

Wednesday, August second, dawned fair. For the first time in three weeks there was no fog, although the edge of the bank that lives perpetually on the Sou'west Coast still lurked a few miles away. At 0700 hours, when I apprehensively stuck my head out the companion hatch (hoping against hope to find it a foul day) there were no fewer than fifty people of all ages lining the hills around Messers Cove.

South Coast Newfoundlanders are generally undemonstrative. The audience that almost circled the harbour was a quiet one, and patient. Nevertheless I was acutely aware of them. I could sense that they were waiting for something. Claire joined me in the companionway and after a brief look about her, she said:

“Well, I suppose we have to go. We don't want to disappoint the audience.”

I said: “Yes. Well. I suppose we had. But first I think I'd better check the engine bedding bolts again…and I have to lay out my chart courses…and I'd better take Albert ashore for a run because it may be a long time before he gets another chance…and….”

I did all these things, and many more, but it was no good. The wind did not change. The fog did not roll back to cloak my blue funk in a comforting anonymity. The patient watchers on the shore did not go off about their business.

At 1400 hours I took a surreptitious drink from the bottle I kept handy in the engine room, poured a dollop over the side (breathing a heartfelt prayer at the same time) and tried to start the engine. The damned thing started like a shot. No further scope for evasive manoeuvres remained to me.

“All right!” I cried in a ringing falsetto voice to my crew. “Stand by…let go the moorings!”

Claire trundled forward, slipped the heavy bridle off the niggerheads and flung it overboard. I pushed in the gear lever. The engine thundered and the big propeller kicked a gush of water under the stern.
Happy Adventure
was under way.

The people on shore got to their feet and some of the younger ones began waving. Frank Harvey stood on the end of his stage with a conch horn and blew a lugubrious salute. For thirty seconds I felt the exhilaration that comes to every sailor, no matter how timid he may be, when he finally severs the umbilical cord that binds him to the land.

Then there was a hell of a jolt! It pitched Albert clean over the bows into the water. It nearly broke both my shins against the cockpit combing. It flung Claire against the mainmast. And it brought
Happy Adventure
to a dead stop.

The engine stalled, and there we were, utterly motionless, part of a silent tableau which seemed frozen into timeless immobility. It was as if some giant, unseen hand had reached out to stay us in our passing. Actually, though, it was the umbilical cord.

Our permanent mooring was designed to hold a large steamer during hurricane weather. A thousand-pound block of cement sunk in the bottom ooze was connected to the mooring buoy by a massive chain. Attached to the buoy was a bridle made of three-inch-diameter nylon rope. Now, I had forgotten that nylon floats—and had steamed right over the floating bridle. The propeller had picked it up and wound it tightly around the shaft.

Sim Spencer, my closest Burgeo friend, got into his dory and rowed out to us. Together we hung over the dory's gunwale and stared down at the serpentine mess of black-and-yellow rope wound around the shaft. Sim shook his head.

“We'll have to unshackle the buoy and haul the vessel back out on the slip to clear her, Skipper,” he said sadly.

Half an hour earlier I would have thought those were the sweetest words I had ever heard. Not now. It may have been shame, rage, or perhaps something more profound; something that even the most timid sailor may occasionally
be privileged to feel: the realization that no real seafaring man ever really masters his fear—he only learns to live with it.

“I'll be goddamned if I will!” I cried and, stripping off my clothes, I took my sheath knife in my teeth and plunged overboard.

This may not sound like much, but to the Burgeo people it was an electrifying act. They do not swim. There is little point in their learning the art because the sea thereabouts seldom grows as warm as thirty-eight degrees, and a man can only endure exposure to such a water temperature for a few minutes. When the watchers saw me plunge, stark naked, into those chill depths they believed I was gone for good.

I nearly was. The shock was so great I immediately lost my breath. I surfaced and was hauled back into the dory by a really anxious Sim who implored me not to try again.

Being already numb, the shock of my second plunge was not so severe, and I got down to the propeller and had begun to saw at the thick rope when Albert joined me. He nosed me aside and began to worry the rope with his teeth. I surfaced and was again hauled aboard the dory. I was ready to give up, but Claire leaned over
Happy Adventure
's stern and in her hand was a glass full of rum.

“If you're determined to commit suicide,” she said gently, “you might as well die happy.”

I went down three more times before the rope was severed. Albert went down at least twice as often and whether the credit should go to him or to me remains a moot question. He is a modest dog and seldom makes claims on his own behalf.

Happy Adventure
was now free—and drifting rapidly down on Messers Island, a scant fifty yards away. Not stopping to dress I sprang to the engine, started it, and rammed it into reverse. Nothing happened. We continued to drift down upon the rocks. Bounding forward like a naked ape I let go the main anchor. The vessel brought up, swung, and came to rest with her stern so close to the rocks that Albert,
who was still fooling about in the water, climbed a boulder and jumped aboard. He may have thought the whole manoeuvre was for his benefit.

This was finally too much for the stolidity of the audience. Among them all, I suppose, they had witnessed ten thousand vessel departures—but they had never witnessed one like this. Everyone who could reach a boat piled into one and in a few minutes the harbour was alive with dories, skiffs, and trap boats. They clustered around
Happy Adventure
like burying beetles around a putative corpse.

Several men explained to me, all at once, what the matter was. The shock of the sudden stop had jerked the propeller shaft out of the sleeve that connected it to the engine. The vessel (this was the unanimous opinion) would now
have
to go on the slip to be repaired.

But they reckoned without the spirit which, however briefly, still possessed me. Clad only in my underwear shorts (and I would not have been clad in those had not Claire insisted) I jumped into Sim's dory, grabbed an oar, thrust it between the sternpost and the propeller, and began to lever with all my strength.

The oar snapped, and I savagely grabbed another. The clustered boats began to back away and there was an uneasy silence. The blade of the second oar split and pieces came floating to the surface. Uncle Bert Hahn, in the nearest dory, must have sensed what was going to happen next. He made a frantic attempt to back clear, but I leaned over Sim's gunwale and snatched an oar right out of his hand. It was a good oar, one that he had made himself, and while Sim held his dory in position I slowly levered the shaft forward and into its sleeve again.

It took me only a few more minutes to tighten the set screws on the sleeve, restart the engine, and test the gears. This time the propeller turned as it should.

“Get up the goddamned anchor!” I shrilled at my crew. Almost before it had broken clear of the bottom I shoved the throttle full ahead, executed a turn that made
Happy Adven
ture
spin like a giddy girl, and we went rumbling off toward the harbour entrance, scattering little boats before us like herring.

I did not look back. When a man has made a really monumental asp of himself, he should never, never look back.

 

19.
The alien shore

A
LTHOUGH
the sky was clear, there was a strong west wind and before we emerged from the shelter of the Burgeo Islands we were having a hard buck. Wind and sea grew steadily worse and
Happy Adventure
began to leak. She was soon taking twenty gallons an hour and was evidently determined to keep it all because the pumps plugged up, having again become choked with sludge that was being washed around in the bilges by the little vessel's athletic leaps and bounds. While Claire steered, I struggled with the pumps but I could not keep them clear.

It began to look as if
Happy Adventure
had won again. However, an alternative to turning tail and fleeing ignominiously back to Burgeo still remained. Close in under the shore cliffs a maze of reefs and sunkers formed an inside passage that offered some protection from the seas, while at the same time threatening to skewer any vessel that dared to enter the dubious shelter of its breakers.

Had I not made such a mess of our departure, I might have taken the sensible course and returned to Burgeo, but
this was more than I could face; better the sunkers and the reefs. I headed in for the lee of land.

Neither Claire nor Albert were sufficiently experienced to be aware of the risks to which I was exposing them as we began to pick our way through the labyrinth of foaming water and naked rock. While Albert contentedly sniffed the land smells, Claire waxed poetic.

“My,” she said admiringly, “how lovely those breakers are, sending the spray over the rocks just like bridal veils.” That was a woman's point of view. To me the great gouts of foaming spray towering all around us looked more like winding sheets.

Now
Happy Adventure
played her trump card. The engine began to race and the vessel stopped answering her helm. When I scrambled below I found that the propeller shaft had slipped out of its sleeve again. Only a quarter of an inch of shaft still protruded through the stuffing box into the boat. This was just enough to allow me to get a precarious hold on it with a monkey wrench and slowly twist it inboard until I could reconnect it. By the time I got back on deck we were drifting onto a particularly pretty sunker, all covered with bridal veils.

As we zigzagged in the precarious lee of the reefs I was able to clear the pump intakes but by the time we came abeam of Grand Bruit, the first settlement west of Burgeo, I had had enough. We headed in.

I was in a depressed and gloomy state of mind for I was thinking bleakly of the morrow, and of all the other morrows that stretched westward toward Montreal. Claire and Albert, on the other hand, were full of gaiety. Grand Bruit is a tiny place, but spectacularly lovely. Furthermore, its handful of inhabitants are the most hospitable people in all of Newfoundland. Half of them were on hand to take our lines, and the other half soon appeared bearing gifts ranging from a fresh-caught salmon to a jar of partridge-berry jam. Claire was entranced.

Albert was too. This was his natal place, and almost the
last place in the world where his ancient race still survived. He celebrated his return by leaping out on the dock and being rude to five of his brothers and sisters (some may have been his uncles and aunts), thus precipitating a dogfight that was terminated only when a half dozen men armed with shovels whacked and pushed the whole howling, squalling mass into the harbour—from which the dogs emerged as friends and comrades, all enmity forgotten.

Although I had secretly concluded that this was where the voyage to Expo was going to end, I told nobody of my decision. I wanted time to prepare my crew for the news that they would be spending the next several years in Grand Bruit. I devoted most of that night to aligning and tightening the shaft sleeve and repacking the stuffing box which had been responsible for much of the leakage. When I finally climbed into my bunk the pre-dawn sky had become overcast, the wind had swung southerly, and I knew that summer (both days of it) on the Sou'west Coast was, thank God, at an end. It was going to blow like the devil in the morning and the fog would be impenetrable. I slept easy in the knowledge that the ordeal was over, that there was no way this ill-starred voyage was going to continue any farther.

I can offer no reasonable explanation for what actually happened the next day. The inexplicable facts are these: when I woke at nine o'clock it was to find a clear, cloudless day, not a breath of wind, perfect visibility, and a sea as calm as an average lily pond. And
Happy Adventure
was not leaking. At first I did not believe any of it, but when conditions had not changed by noon I had to accept the unpalatable conclusion that there was nothing, short of my sabotaging the boat or engine, that was going to enable me to abandon the voyage. Although I was convinced that I was being made the victim of a terrible trick, I was helpless to do anything about it. With most of the population of Grand Bruit gathered on the wharf to wish us Godspeed (and patently wondering what was delaying our departure), I was forced against the pull of every fibre of my being to go to sea once more.

What followed was one of the worst days of my life. The fantastic weather conditions (a day like this comes once in a decade on the Sou'west Coast) continued hour after hour. Nothing went wrong with the engine. The leaks did not reappear. We steamed along a sunlit, smiling coast over a glinting, mirror sea. And all the time I knew something
had
to happen and I had to be ready for it. I was so keyed-up by the certainty that we were being fattened like lambs for a sudden slaughter that I snapped at Claire, cursed my poor little boat, snarled at Albert, and was generally obnoxious.

Years later when I described that day to a friend in St. John's, he advanced a rather singular explanation.

“Farley,” he said, “I don't think you had any idea how anxious Joey Smallwood was to get you off his island. And if The Only Living Father can successfully bamboozle half a million people for twenty years, he must have access to powers we can't even envision.”

Late that night we steamed into Port aux Basques harbour after a completely uneventful cruise that would have been child's play for three men in a tub. We had arrived at our point of ultimate departure from the island of Newfoundland.

 

The ease with which we reached Port aux Basques did not make me overconfident about the future. On the contrary, I became more and more convinced that
Happy Adventure
was only biding her time, trying to put me off guard. I could not believe that after all those years of successfully thwarting my design to take her west she was now going to submit so tamely.

The Cabot Strait separating Newfoundland and Nova Scotia is ninety miles wide. It is notorious for the bad weather it breeds, and for the heavy currents which combine with an ever-present swell to build up a wicked sea. I knew Claire and Albert were not yet up to such a challenge so I had arranged for Capt. John Parker, Master Mariner in sail and
steam, and at that time Chief Pilot for North Sydney, to join me in Port aux Basques. John arrived from North Sydney on the big ferry,
William Carson
, early the next morning. I took Claire and Albert down to the
Carson
and put them in the charge of her skipper, big, affable Capt. Charlie Brown.

Charlie gave them his own comfortable quarters, then took all of us to the bridge to hear the latest weather report. It was not good. It called for strong sou'east winds, bad visibility, thunder squalls and heavy rain.

“Hmm,” said Charlie. “Going to be an uncomfortable crossing on the
Carson
. Course, it won't bother you fellows, snug in harbour here. It should blow out in a couple of days, then you can make a dart across.”

At noon the whistle blew to signal the big ship's departure. John and I said our good-byes and went ashore. As we made our way back to the harbour John horrified me by saying:

“Well, I guess we'd better get under way about two o'clock this afternoon. That'll mean we'll raise Cape Breton in daylight tomorrow morning.”

“Good God! John! You have to be kidding! Didn't you hear the weather, and what Charlie said?”

John, who is small of stature, lean, and taut as whipcord, and apparently afraid of nothing on this earth, shrugged and replied:

“Oh, that. Well, Farley, if you wait for good weather in
the Strait you'll wait a lifetime. We'd better take what's going and make the best of it.”

Who was I to argue with a man who had been skipper of a three-masted schooner, sailing to South America, at a time when I was still paddling a canoe upon the sylvan waters of Ontario streams?

We went aboard and John looked over
Happy Adventure
. He seemed satisfied with her—except for one thing. “Where's your radar reflector?”

I admitted to not having one of those triangular metal devices which give off a strong reflection, enabling radar-equipped ships to pick you up on their scopes and steer clear of you.

“We better get one,” John said. “Most of the seaway traffic is using the Strait right now. Lots of big ships. We'll be crossing right through them, in thick weather.”

I was only too willing, but in all of Port aux Basques there was not such an animal to be had for love or money. In the end we lashed a ten-gallon pail in the port shrouds. It looked a little odd, but John seemed to think it would do the trick.

We put out on schedule at 1400 hours, and I did not like the look of things at all. A big, oily swell—the sure precursor of a blow—was rolling in from sou'east. The sky was overcast and ominously murky. If someone had written STORM in thousand-foot letters across the rolling clouds, the omens could not have been any clearer. I glanced at John, but he was calm and relaxed, sucking on his pipe as he held the tiller, and no doubt cogitating about the contents of a book he was writing about schooner days. As unobtrusively as possible I went below to the engine room.

We punched out to sea and the mountains of the Long Range grew dim and disappeared from view astern. The swell grew worse until
Happy Adventure
was pitching like a demented thing. The leaks saw their chance and opened up—and once again the guck in the bilge began to put the pumps out of action.

By ten o'clock it was pitch dark. The wind was rising, as predicted, and the combination of wind-lop and heavy swell produced a motion that was indescribable. I hope John will forgive me, but I can only do justice to that motion by reporting that when John went below to try and get a nap, he was immediately sick. He was violently sick—and he had been going to sea, both man and boy, for thirty years! The only reason I did not follow his example was that I was too terrified.

By this time we had given up trying to make a course for Sydney. We came around on the other tack and tried to run to the westward toward the lonely island of St. Paul, behind whose rocky cliffs we hoped we might find a lee if the storm grew worse.

The storm grew worse. The six-thousand-ton ferry,
Leif Eriksson
, passed close to starboard of us, inbound for Port aux Basques, and we began to realize what we were up against by the way
she
was pitching into it, heaving great broken seas clean over her massive bows.