You know I’m very fortunate to have you as a correspondent. The letters flow along so. Do you know the word “swent”? Well that’s a Newfie way of saying extra smooth, extra delightful. Once a man showed me his baby son, his first boy, the one he’d hoped for for years and years. The baby lay on his stomach, bare nekkid, kicking his feet, and was obviously the greatest thing in his dad’s world. The father ran his hand over the little boy’s head, down his back to his heels, and he said to me, “Swent, oh so swent.” I don’t know where the word came from or what it should be, but the look on the man’s face gave it all the meaning any word on the breath of a man could have. So your letters are swent. They flow, and things come in from the edges toward the centre, like a huge gentle whirlpool that goes dreamily round and round on a calm, warm summer day.
What do I know about whirlpools? I grew up among them, short fierce ones that split away from the eddy formed by the last of the ebb like tide in the inlet, and joined the faster flow into the inlet. Most were too small to be of much danger, though they could give you a feeling of their power when they grabbed the keel of your boat and shook it, and you suddenly knew that they, not you, were in control for the moment. It didn’t last long, but there is always an underlying feeling of panic when you cannot influence the direction you want to go. They’d soon pass and hurry along. On a calm day, there would be a huge dimple in the water, perhaps ten feet across, with steep black glass sides and right at the bottom a collection of flotsam, bits of sticks, sea weed, and perhaps jellyfish.
That sort went by our dock all day long and around the point, not easy to see on windy days, but perfect to watch on a calm quiet Sunday when you were warned that the Sunday clothes must be preserved. I’d lie on the wharf and watch them pass between the big ballast cribs and drop a few bits and pieces in the centre just to help out. Lying on the dock wasn’t so good for Sunday clothes either.
But we had the big fellows too. We were never allowed near them till we had reached the age of some sort of reason. By then we’d heard so many yarns of boats, whales, and men that had been sucked down and never seen again, that we approached with great caution. They formed in the Backway, where there is a big island almost directly across the inlet. The tide comes in from the Atlantic and hits the island, where it splits—one arm going west and usually behaving itself very well, the other arm goes east and is in conflict with the enormous amount of water that is still trying to get back to the ocean from the last tide. The Backway is wide and deep and fifty miles long, so there is quite a conflict. The outgoing water and the inflow don’t really mix. They race past one another going in their opposite directions. Large deep whirlpools form at the place where the two waters slide past one another.
No one goes near between half tide up and half down. They can be fifty feet or more across and their steep sides ten feet deep. But as the outgoing water loses its force and the incoming flow is about spent, huge lazy whirlpools form, much larger but not violent, maybe only a couple feet deep at the centre. Then you can safely steer your little sailboat along the rim till you feel it take hold. You go in a huge slow circle around the circumference, gradually working your way down toward the flotsam in the centre, and all the while travelling along the shore as the whirlpools doesn’t remain in one place. You get lower and lower, and soon you are looking up at the water which doesn’t seem to move at all and maybe wondering what would happen to you if those sides decided to tumble in. The bottom of the pool comes up like a fountain and you catch a quick elevator back to sea level. It is only possible at certain stages of the tides and only on calm days. But if you are lucky you can get a couple of roundabouts in an afternoon. It’s so slow, but the strength of the water is magnificent.
You know, rapids and falls, rivers, brooks, almost any running water roars, chuckles or makes its own particular sound. Whirlpools are silent, even the little quick ones. That water just goes around and around and makes no sound. You go sweeping around with it and all you hear is the flutter of your sails as they lose the wind. Well, on your first ride around, you hear your own breath as you draw it in, but that’s only the first time. They used to say that when the pool reaches half across from Back Point to the Island, that it’s safe to go. Maybe it’s a bit like taking a ride on a huge kindly old whale. Not Jonah’s style though.
Doris Saunders from Them Days magazine is here. One evening we took her to Cotters’ as his parents had spent a lot of time on Labrador. George has an old photo album that one of his aunts made up of pictures she inherited from her folks and Cotter’s folks. Many of them were taken on a pinhole camera that old Cotter made himself. Most of them are really good and go well back into the 1800s. Some company made slides of the whole album for George and he has loaned the slides to Doris to take back to Labrador. There will be a lot of interested people. One good shot was of a little sailing ship called the Milda, built by my great-grandfather and named after his wife. Some of the native pictures are priceless as it shows the Eskimos and Naskapis as they were nearly a hundred years ago, maybe more.
The Milda was gone when I came along but HBC at Rigolet had the Thistle, built by my grandfather. He built several schooners, the Rose, the Shamrock and the Sharon. In a time when people named ships after relatives with names like Hannah and Harriet, he refused to follow the mode and picked names that he thought fitted his ships.
The Thistle was a spirited little ship. She did things on her own. Once, on a lovely calm Sunday, she swept around her anchors. I guess the current helped her. She picked them up in her chains and when the water rose, she started off out the inlet with no one aboard. My dad and most of the men were away with another schooner, and there was only the old cooper, James Dickers, and a couple of boys left on the post. My mother saw the Thistle go, and she went and told James, but since he was a cooper and took little interest in the motorboats etc., she had little hope that James and the boys could do much.
James was always surprising people with what he knew and what he could do, and my mother was amazed when he called the two boys, went aboard one of the motorboats with an ancient two-cycle Palmer engine, actually the first gasoline engine that ever came to Rigolet. He started it, chased the Thistle, hauled in her anchors, towed her back and anchored her again. When my dad came back, he couldn’t believe that James, who was quite elderly and who never seemed to even notice what went on outside his cooperage, actually knew how to run an engine. But James made light of it. He’d seen from the wharf what was done and just filed it away for future reference.
When the Thistle was very old and beyond repair, orders came that she’d have to be broken up. My dad didn’t want to do it and my mother was quite emotional about it. The Thistle solved it in her own way. Doctor Paddon, the Grenfell doctor, had a load of hay sent in to go to the mission farm at North West River. All the ships going in the inlet were fully loaded and the season was well advanced. Paddon hired the Thistle, loaded her and started to tow her to North West River, about ninety miles further in the inlet. They got to St. John’s Island, a good harbour when a storm broke. They anchored the Thistle and moved Yale, the towboat, into a cove to wait out the storm.
Thistle, somehow, shook both stocks out of her anchors. The fact that they were very old may have had a bearing, and she sailed herself in and out among a maze of shoals and reefs and into Peace Cove where she went ashore on a lovely sand beach and leaned over on her bilge. When they found her most of the hay was still dry, but she never came out of Peace Cove. My dad said if that was where she wanted to be it was up to her. And there she remained, all alone in her comfortable harbour. After a while her masts fell down when her standing rigging decayed, and her top works were damaged by ice and exposure. Then, one spring, an extra high tide and some help from moving ice pushed her into deep water where I expect she still is.
There is a place on Labrador called Run by Guess. The story is that one stormy night in spring, a fishing schooner was caught in a terrible storm, and with visibility reduced to zero in snow, and no way of telling where they were as there were no charts of the area, the skipper gave his wheelman a course, which he picked haphazard, and told him to steer it. After a while the wind dropped, the waves were much quieter and they found soundings, but still couldn’t see a thing. So they took sail off and anchored. They were there a day or so in thick fog and calm water when the wind shifted and the fog lifted. To their amazement they were in a completely landlocked harbour, and had to put a small boat overside and row around to find the way they had gotten in there, and it took a while. So the place was called Run by Guess ever after.
So when Thistle had a similar experience, no one gave it much thought. However, one dark night coming down the inlet with a gale behind her, the crew lost contact with the land and got everything ready to leave her when she struck, as she would have to, not having enough sea room to wear around, and nowhere in particular to go if they could. So when one bare rock after another showed up and she missed them by inches, they took to the boats and Thistle went on her own. They got ashore and found by daylight that they were on Pelter Island.
When the storm died out, they started for Rigolet in their small boats, but when they got out where they could see down the bay, there was Thistle tacking back toward them. Her sails were all every which way but she was unhurt, and after a bit of a chase they managed to board her and sailed her home. Old Uncle Jesse Flowers, who was cook, said they’d have been a lot more comfortable if they’d trusted Thistle to know where she was going. Tall tale? Well I was pretty small, but I remember them talking about it, and when I grew up I never could figure out how a ship could ever make all those twists and turns on her own, but Thistle did it then and later when she made her final run.
Then again of course, it’s a matter of history that Fort Chesterfield drifted out of Churchill harbour in a storm and out into Hudson’s Bay. Given up for lost, she was found two years later, unhurt in a safe little harbour way in among the Belcher Islands. Taken out and put into service again from Moose Factory, she sailed for a number of years until finally she was stranded in a huge storm near Fort Severn, sorry, York Factory. She went in on a very high tide caused by the violent wind. Again she wasn’t hurt, but was so far from deep water and in an area of the deepest mud you ever saw that there was no way to get her out. The first time I went to York Factory, there she was among fairly well-grown trees sitting bolt upright on the sand.
And how about Neptune, a three-masted bark, built in Aban, Scotland. She was sold to Newfoundland and one fall drifted across the Atlantic and back to Aban. There an engine was put in her and she came back to Newfoundland, only to drift away again unmanned back to Aban. The first time she had a crew on board. They were longshore navigators, and lost out of sight of land. There is a book called Forty-eight Days Adrift that records their experiences. The second trip she was not manned, but she was brought back from Aban to Fortune, Newfoundland. The last time she went away on her own she was again unmanned and no one ever heard of her again.
Then there was the famous case of Marie Celeste, found at sea with sail set, fire in the galley stove, the captain’s wife’s sewing things on the cabin table, everything in order, and no sign of the crew or the one boat that was missing. They could only have been gone a very short time when she was found, but no trace of them has ever been seen. So who would question the things Thistle did on her own? Good thing cars don’t have souls like sailing ships. Just think if your car took off on its own someday.
So what’s new? Well the big thing is the award of an Order of Canada to my friend and long time co-worker, W.E. (Buster) Brown. Remember I put in a nomination for him in March ’85, and have spent the time in between getting people to write to Ottawa to second my nomination. It took a long time, but a week ago he got a letter to tell him he’d been selected. He’s been depressed, as he knows his faculties are not what they were, and he’s been lonely over there in Burnaby. He has his younger sister with him. She’s in her seventies and very active, but none of his old workmates are close by. There are some in Victoria, but they seem to be happy and comfortable there. There are quite a lot of them and they see one another, while Buster is alone across the water.
He phoned his son when he got the letter, and I guess Ross told him that I had nominated him, so he phoned me. He was like a youngster, even though he is eighty-seven. He’ll be going to Ottawa in April to receive his decoration from the Governor General. I’m hoping he can stop here coming back, and I have approached the Company about a dinner for him. His friends could arrange it but it would make him so happy to have the HBC put it on. So far they seem to be pleased to consider it. It will depend on his health at the time, but Ross, who is a doctor, feels that it will be quite possible and will be good for him.
W.E. is an old Arctic hand. At first he was a Mountie, actually one of the first to be sent to Ottawa from training in Regina for the original musical ride. He did a lot of exploration in the Keewatin, both while in the RCMP and later for the HBC. He experimented with short wave radio in the Arctic and it was on his suggestion that Ralph Parsons, the last fur trade commissioner of HBC, hired George Horner, a radio engineer, to develop what became one of the most unique communications systems on earth, more than two hundred radio stations at HBC posts that brought two-way communication to the northern part of Canada. It was in fact, the only system until the Dew Line and the introduction of microwave. W.E. certainly earned his Order of Canada. That makes a lot of people beside me very happy as so many politicians and friends of the same get the order every year and many others deserve it more.
Buster is the first real HBC fur trader to get the order. You know, I’m quite pleased with myself, not only in a very deserving man getting his due, but I had a small part in making it happen. Beside that, what else?
You are going to laugh when I tell you that a young friend of ours told me the strangest stories today. I’d always wondered why one of my friends and her family moved out of their nice place in a lovely suburb, and went to a new place where there is mud and no trees and everything is bare and raw. Because, honest, they wanted a place where no one had ever lived before on ground where there had never been a house.
Glad you asked why…Because after seven years in their other house, which was only three years old when they bought it, they had to get out because of visitations. Nope, not the Avon lady, not the vacuum salesman, not any of the hundred other pests that come to the door. Because of the kind that you don’t see, that set a rocking chair moving, that moves dished around in the kitchen, that put a hand on the dog’s back, so that you can see the hair flatten, and that push the dog flat on the floor while he looks with eyes that say, “What the heck’s happening to me?” People that open doors and close them, that cause floors to squeak, that step on the rug till their tracks are visible but no one stands in them. People that dance in the bedrooms at night. They don’t talk or laugh or make any sound except when they move dishes or things around. People that the dog avoids in the hall as though he could see or feel them coming. In short, people who aren’t there.
She and her husband are both chartered accountants, both, till now, not likely people to pay attention to ghost stuff, very solid dependable people who have worked hard for their degrees and who have excellent jobs and prospects. She said to me today, “You are laughing at me.” I said half of me was and half wasn’t, because it’s a well known fact in HBC that an old fur trader who spent years at Arctic Bay alone went back there after he died here in Winnipeg. We heard stories coming out how Jimmy would be heard in the post dwelling, muttering and putting things where he always kept them, opening doors and cupboards, leafing through books, all sorts of things. Reaction was, “Was this about the time they got their yearly supply of rum?”
But one of our pilots, Art Atkinson, stayed there overnight and said “no more” for him. He accidentally put his sleeping bag on the sofa where Jimmy used to sit and listen to the BBC every night. Art was tumbled out on the floor and had to put up with Jimmy muttering and bumping around all night.
Now Art was a different kettle of fish. So the divisional manager, the son of a bishop and a very straight-laced man, went up, spent a couple of nights in the house, came back and sent a complete new house in. Left the other place as it was, furniture and everything just as Jimmy kept it. No one bothers the staff in the new house. Now, while I’ve not been there since Jimmy died, I have talked to both Art and P.A.C. Nichols, and others. The clincher, though, is the fact that a hard-boiled outfit like HBC sent in a new house. Sure it could have been mass hysteria, but at least once since then they have invited some person passing through to spend the night and he reported badly disturbed sleep.
Now you are laughing. I would like to, but at this moment I just don’t know. Maybe I’ve told you about a great heavy door in an old Moravian mission house on Labrador that opens. Never a sound, but it does open, and it isn’t that it doesn’t catch properly. The lock is a massive iron thing with a great bolt that falls into a deep socket.28 The house is huge. It used to shelter the whole mission and their families in separate apartments. I have been alone in that house, carefully closing the door when I went to bed, and just in case, putting a heavy chair against it. I didn’t hear a sound but in the morning the door was open and the chair moved. In this case, there are old Moravian journals that go back to the early 1800s and they mention this wayward door. It never closes on its own, only opens. Go ahead, laugh, but it’s true. I saw Bill Cobb last fall. He lived in that house in 1931 or 1932 and he told me about the weird door.
Later:
Was supposed to take Muriel to a funeral today. I don’t mind going to funerals to pay my last respects, but I hate that ghastly reception afterward. I didn’t know the fellow who died. He was one of the people on a tour to Churchill that Muriel and my sister went on last summer. Shelagh wasn’t working and she offered to go so I stayed at home. Did grocery shopping, and spent a lot of time reading a photocopy of a book written by an Anglican minister on Labrador, the exact same one who put cold water on my head when I was a day or so old.
As far as I know there was no great disturbance at my personal christening, but did I ever tell you about our goat, Reck (from reckless), who hated dogs and who broke up my youngest brother’s ceremony by chasing a poodle up the hall of our house where everyone was gathered for the event. Reck had been set upon by two dogs the year we were in Fogo, on my dad’s furlough. He was a couple of years old, and had formed an attachment to my mother I think, for she was the one who took care of him at the time. We’d brought him back to Rigolet.
The Company house we lived in was a large building, with a long central hall with a door at each end. During the service, the poodle went to the open back door and barked when he saw the goat. When Reck started to attack, the poodle turned and raced up the hall and out the front door, followed by the goat. The congregation was split down the middle, my brother and I after him.
We found the little dog on top of the wire chicken run and the goat rampaging below. A hundred-and-fifty-pound goat is not easy to handle, but fortunately one of Reck’s habits was an addiction to tobacco, and a large handful of fine cut got him to the stable. It was harder to get the dog down from the centre of the wire roof.
My dad used to say he was never sure if my brother should be legally called Halden Earl, or “Oh my God.” I must have told you about Reck. I’ve told everybody who would listen. If not, remind me, unless of course you aren’t particularly enthused about goat stories. Lots of people aren’t. I think, much as I like dogs, that if I had a choice of an animal to evolve from, I’d pick a goat.
When I was a youngster, sheep and goats, sometimes pigs even, were allowed to wander around the roads and crop whatever they could find. Many fences were made of round pickets, which, when they dried, tended to crack and loosen the nails so that an animal could get its head through, and by a bit of extra work get its body through. This, of course, was to the detriment of the garden or meadow inside, because if you remember, sheep in particular are good at following the leader. If you don’t believe me, just see how neatly they jump over a fence or go through a gate some sleepless night when you are counting sheep.
Well people used to put little triangular yokes around goats and sheep’s necks so that they couldn’t get a nose or a head through the fences. It worked on sheep. They’d give it a bang or so then go on. Not so goats. They would try every possible combination of body and head movement, and in many cases, succeed.
Sheep will get into a garden and, like a crazy lawn mower, chop off everything in sight. What they don’t eat they trample. A goat will only take things he likes. In a row of carrots he’ll pick out the nice juicy ones, here and there. He’ll have a good feed if he isn’t caught and most likely leave by the way he got in, with a map in his head for future reference. A sheep or a chicken for that matter seldom knows how he got in, and if caught he’ll try to butt his way out the hardest possible path.
People in some parts of Newfoundland used to use goats as draft animals. They had dinky little carts and could haul a fair load. Willie Warren used to tell me about a goat he had. He’d take it into the woods, load the cart with split firewood and send the goat home alone while he got the next load ready. His wife and kids would unload the wood, give the goat a slice of bread and molasses and send him back. He’d trot back and forth all day as long as he got that “lassy bread.” No bread, he’d back the cart into a corner and put his head down. He had big horns. Nothing could get him to move except his earned and expected ration. The labourer is worthy of his hire.
There were goats everywhere when I was young. You could watch them for hours. They were all different, independent, brave, resourceful, and if you treated them right, good friends. If a goat likes you, you can get the milk. If she doesn’t, save yourself the bother, you won’t get a drop. Mrs. John Walbourne had two shaggy nannies. Coming home from school, I’d see them standing by the stable door waiting to be let in and, always on their backs, several very contented looking chickens also waiting for supper. You guessed! I like goats.
The big news came all of a sudden, yesterday. Friday evening just about closing time, it was announced that HBC Northern Stores had been sold to Mutual Trust and a group of HBC management. Guess it won’t make prime time news in the South Pacific but it sure got phones ringing around town. There are so many things involved: pensions, discounts, even our little monthly meetings. So we’ve arranged to go down next Tuesday Feb. 3, and Mr. Tiller will answer any questions that may come up. Nothing will happen for presently employed personnel, the usual day-to-day routine will not be changed. The HBC name will be used for the next two years. It’s after that time that things might change and people want to know now.
My chief reaction is a very great sadness, because this is the final end of the old fur trade that’s been in existence since 1670. It hasn’t been a real fur trade for many years of course, but in two years, Moose Factory, Norway House and a host of others won’t be HBC posts any longer. The chain will be broken; the HBC flag won’t fly any more.
At one time, a stranger or visitor arriving at the posts would look for the HBC flag. If he were missionary, policeman, game warden, yes, even competitor, he’d be given a place to stay. Many the fur buyer stayed at my dad’s house. Very few ever bought much fur, not that they wouldn’t. It was just that the trappers knew my dad would give every penny the fur was worth so there wasn’t much fur left to be bought. He actually got a kick out of seeing some hotshot buyer try to get his hands on the fur. I won’t say he didn’t, at times, see to it that these fellows got a parcel or two that on closer inspection, didn’t measure up.
Once I remember a trapper29 who badly needed the money, came in with a choice silver fox when the price was a thousand dollars or more, before the fox ranches. Looking at the skin, my dad discovered that the ears were tainted. The fox had been buried in snow and so preserved, but the ears had projected above the snow and it was a bad case of fur slip. My dad told the trapper that the damage would discount the pelt quality, and advised him to hang on to the skin till one of the travelling fur buyers came by.
One did, quite soon, and as usual he came to our house. At supper he spent a lot of his time telling my dad that HBC traders were too conservative, scared to risk exceeding their tariff. He said, “I can buy any HBC man under the table.”
So my dad sent a note to the trapper, told him to bring his fox to the house and ask for the travelling buyer. When the trapper came, my dad pretended to be surprised and demanded a chance to value the skin.
The usual method when two buyers were on hand, was for each to write his bid on a slip of paper. My dad handed John his slip with his original price. John took it and smiled. The travelling man saw the smile and put his bid at quite a bit over the best possible price. John said, “Your fox, sir,” and took a bank draft for over a thousand dollars. The buyer was very happy. He razzed my dad all night about buying fur from under his nose, in his own house even.
The next morning he came out of his room for breakfast with the rest of us. My dad took the fellow’s plate and put it on the floor under the table. At first the buyer didn’t get it, then he almost panicked. He ran back into his room, was gone a while and came out smiling. He said, “You almost got me scared.”
My dad said, “Take a look at the ears.” The poor fellow almost expired. He wanted to know what caused my dad to look especially at the ears, and my dad said, “Nearly three hundred years experience.”
The fellow was a good sport. He ducked under the table. Later though, another hot-shotter arrived and the buyer got him in a poor light and sold him the fox. I wonder how many travelling buyers owned that fox briefly until someone was caught at the end.
John’s thousand dollars really came in handy, as he had recently lost one of his hands and at the time was having a hard time making out in a country where two good hands are none too many at times. He made it though, and I lived to see him become one of the best trappers in the area and captain of a schooner. You’d guess we called him Captain Hook. He was a carpenter, boat builder, salmon fisherman. He could climb a mast, row a boat, set traps, do anything the rest of us could do except, as he said, scratch his remaining elbow, or simplest of all, he really couldn’t wash his hand. He could shave, do anything else, but working with paint, tar, grease or the like, he’d have to get his daughter to scrub his hand with a big scrub brush. He had many a quick laugh over his thousand dollar fox. He used the proceeds to buy a boat so that his sons could fish for salmon while he worked with HBC.
Away back in the thirties when the depression was at its worst, I had just started working for HBC. The London office sent a crew of nuts out to show us how to do things. They were called the Development Department. They invented new traps and harpoons for the natives, whose own gear had evolved over the centuries. They made huge iron things that were supposed to soften seal leather better than the human teeth. Only thing was they were so heavy the people had no way of moving them around. They decided that the Eskimos, a meat-eating people, should have milk. So the store manager had to get up early every morning to mix powdered milk and deliver it to every igloo he could reach.
You guessed! They wouldn’t drink it, and anyway, in winter, it was frozen solid by the time the post manager got to igloo three. They built small frame cottages at Hebron to give the natives a place to live. These were completely nomadic people at the time. There is no fuel near Hebron, so the agreeable natives accepted the cottages.
In winter, they built igloos nearby to live in as they were so much warmer. In summer, they pitched tents as they were so much cooler, and in the little cottages they kept their spare gear, meat, fish and such like, nicely out of the way of the dogs and weather.
Anyway, one of these fellows was an efficiency expert, guess they all were. He came to Rigolet where we were packing salt salmon for export to Holland. John was always in the thick of the salmon packing, or anything else for that matter. He supervised the washing and particularly the salting which is very important.
Mr. Binney30 watched awhile, then took my dad aside. By this time, father, who was no shrinking violet, was almost trembling with frustration at the way these people were interfering with the post work. Mr. Binney told him that it wasn’t efficient to have a one-armed man do the salting. The way it was usually done was to have a man take a fish from the culler and place it in the tierce, a large barrel. He had to turn the fish just so, so that it would conform to the shape of the barrel. While he reached for the next fish, the salter, John, would sprinkle the exact amount of salt on the fish in the barrel and so on. The salt was brought from the store in a wheelbarrow in small lots because both sun and rain could deteriorate it. Binney pointed out that a one-handed man would tire earlier than a man who could switch over, and, big point, how could a one-armed man go for more salt with a wheelbarrow?
I’ve heard my dad tell the story many times. At the moment, the crew was finishing up for the day. He controlled an impulse to chuck Binney into a barrel and have John salt him, but he said in effect, “Fair’s fair. Tomorrow morning, you follow John and do everything he does. If by night you can prove there is inefficiency, then we’ll talk about changing things.”
We went to work at six o’clock. Binney was more the nine o’clock type, but my dad had him out at quarter to six with the first bell, and out following John at six sharp.
John’s first job was to top up all the barrels previously packed with brine, as the fish absorb a lot of liquid during the first days. He used two heavy wooden buckets. Brine would corrode metal in days. So with one bucket on the stump of his arm, another on his hand and a big funnel tied to his overalls with a string, he started off, followed by Binney, similarly laden. At least Binney was, like the usual Englishman of higher status, a good sport, but he just couldn’t handle those two huge buckets with a big funnel clanking along between his feet.
By seven o’clock and breakfast, he had handled maybe a couple of barrels or so, was liberally spattered with 80 percent of the brine, which was turning his clothes white and burning his hands. Half an hour for breakfast, then back with John. Somehow the poor man struggled along till the pickling, as we called it, was done. By then a load of salmon was at the dock.
He was given a great oilskin apron and a soft brush. Each salmon had to be carefully washed, front and back, better tell you. They were split when caught all the way down the back, not the belly as with most other fish. They lie flatter in the barrel that way. Some are pretty large, twenty to thirty pounds. You hold them by the tail over a sloping board over a tank of water and make sure they are absolutely clean. The least speck of blood or foreign matter and the culler will slap them back to you. It is traditional that the culler never says why. You just wash it again and hope it passes.
John took pity on Binney after an hour or so. He was probably as kind-hearted a man as ever lived. He had grown up working hard. He had trained his sons to work hard, and he was visibly concerned that this strapping fellow made such heavy weather over the easier jobs. So he put him to try packing. But Binney’s wrists couldn’t take the strain of twisting the fish. He took so long that the irate culler quit passing salmon to him and just piled them at his feet. It all came to a head when his first tierce was taken to the cooper, old James Dickers, who was a perfectionist plus. He took one look at the unsightly hump in the barrel and roared a plain refusal to put a head in that tierce until the salmon was properly packed.
So Binney tried salting, not bad at first. John directed him, but salt is heavy, the fish come thick and fast. There are only a few seconds to sprinkle salt before the packer is ready to slam another big fish down. Binney’s arm tired. He used two hands, they tired, and he was again being barked at by the culler, who had fish piling up, and the cooper who was standing idle waiting for the next barrel.
He had one hope, I guess, that the salt in the wheel barrow would run out and at last he would have his big moment when one of the two-handed people would have to break off and go for more salt.
Wrong again. While he was struggling to keep up with the packer, John slipped a rope sling over his arm, or the stump, picked up the barrow with the sling and one hand, trundled it into the salt store, used a shovel to load it by grasping it well down the handle, and was back with more salt while there still was lots on the barrow Binney was trying so hard to empty.
That got him. He threw down the big wooden scoop, said something about “you chaps aren’t even human,” and tottered up to the office where my dad was working with a grim eye on events on the wharf. It was very early in the day of course. When poor Binney arrived, the old man said, “It’s not time for lunch.” We never got coffee or any sort of morning break in those days.
Binney said, “I know,” then went into a long apology for being so unutterably stupid as to think he could keep up with those tireless machines for even a moment. My dad sad, “Now, since you’re an expert, how about efficiency?”
Binney had to admit that someone might be able to follow John around, but definitely not he. Binney was around for a while and my dad would see John high on a ladder painting the eave on one of the tall old buildings, or in the rigging of the schooner doing some job, or using a heavy broad axe to square a timber, all with one hand and possibly a bit of rope. He’d say to Binney, “Care to give it a try?” The expression, “no way” hadn’t been invented then, but Binney had his own very correct English to explain that he wasn’t about to be that sort of a damn fool all over again. To him, the most appalling thing was that these fellows cheerfully rolled out before six a.m., worked a full hour before breakfast, were back in half an hour to work steadily till noon. All people worked that way, not only the HBC.
Binney came from a wealthy English family, used to what I guess you’d call gracious living. The depression didn’t bother them. He thought living conditions on the Nascopie were primitive, with linen on the tables and a steward to serve him. He talked about the crossing from England on such a ship as if it were an ordeal. Later he was given a ride, if you could call it that, on an Eskimo boat from Port Burwell to Fort Chimo. There was no galley, no toilet. He shared the hold with twenty women and kids, uncounted dogs, and six or eight walrus and seal carcasses. Poor man. He told my dad about it in the fall when he came back. My dad said, “Bad as following John?” and Binney answered, “There is nothing on earth that ever will be as bad as that trip.”
The development department didn’t really develop. Ralph Parsons, a tough Newfoundlander and Arctic man, became fur trade commissioner. He threw out all the crazy ideas and set about steering the fur trade through the terrible depression. He did it, and because the fur trade survived, the rest of the Company did also.
I heard that Binney and his group went to Africa to show the natives there how to do their thing. But for years, the natives in the Eastern Arctic used to laugh about the time the Company tried to turn them all into babies by trying to make them drink milk.
John Blake, Will the culler, and James the cooper were lucky. The old ways didn’t change much in their time. They had a distrust of power tools, liking the feel of a block or jointer plane. They liked to saw with a properly set and sharpened saw. They accepted modest progress such as gasoline engines to drive motorboats or to saw lumber and fire wood. They didn’t see the final end of sail or dog teams, of salmon and cod fishing.
Things I never think about come up in the pages of Them Days. The name of a ship will start a train of memory you’d not believe. Poking into an old book the other day the name of one of Grenfell’s ships struck me. “WOP.” Nasty word now. In those days it meant “Worker of Pleasure” and indicated the young people from British and American universities who came to the coast at their own expense and worked for Dr. Grenfell for free.
The WOPs did any sort of work: cutting and hauling fire wood, digging wells or graves, painting, caring for cattle, all with the greatest will and good humour. As Rev. Burry said, to read down the list was like reading the social register. One of the Vanderbilts came year after year under an assumed name. Semi-royalty wasn’t unknown.
When I saw the name WOP, I remembered mostly the ugly little steamship. Old as the hills she was, of wood. People said it was only the paint that held her together. She had a regular captain and engineer, but the crew was all WOPs. They hauled freight from station to station, and they had a ball every hour of the day. No one ever figured out why Grenfell didn’t lose a half dozen every year. It must prove that a special providence looks after fools and sailors. Those boys were a combination of both I suppose. In a way more fools than sailors. They’d do things that we, more cautious, would never dream of. They got into many a scrape but always seemed to survive. One thing was that when a Grenfell boat was around, everyone looked out for them and sort of shepherded them along.
I made one trip on WOP. My dad loaned me to the engineer to help tear down and rebuild an ancient steam generator. There were about ten of those students aboard. They worked hard, but in their spare time, they engaged in some horrible pranks. Once we were anchored in a calm little harbour. They tied one of their number hand and foot and heaved him overside to see if he could free himself as he said he could. The engineer and I were the only others on board. One student armed with a knife was standing by in case the fellow under water wasn’t able to free himself, but the water was deep and the bottom black so there wasn’t much visibility.
They waited awhile but there was no sign of the man and believe me I was some worried. There was one fellow with a little more sense than the others who had agreed with the engineer that, at least, they should put a line on the poor fellow before chucking him overside. Well at last the man with the knife went down and soon was back in panic. Couldn’t find him. We grabbed the flag line and gave the end to the more sensible fellow. WOP had been swinging at her anchor and the bound fellow could be anywhere but his would-be saviour dived and swam away from the ship and by pure luck he got the man. We got a tug on the rope and hauled him up, the rope around one ankle. He was just about gone but there were several medical students there. They got busy and revived him, but he was in his bunk a couple of days, and very groggy when he did get out.
The skipper, who’d been ashore, was livid when he came back. Someone had told him. He gave the poor old engineer a rough time, but how could he stop a crowd of great big kids who thought they were just having fun? The doctor who was ultimately responsible for the safety of the Wops heard about it. He’d just gone through an incident where his own two older sons had just about strangled his younger son in some stupid prank involving a rope around his neck. He was wild. The engineer and I stayed quietly in the engine room while he raged around topside. It was soon forgotten. Them days the Americans were all hyped up about “natural high spirits.” My dad and others had different words for it.
A week later, when I’d gone back to Rigolet, they had a shooting contest, trying to put out a match held by someone else. I never heard how many matches got put out but it ended when one fellow lost the top joint of his thumb. The head of the mission happened to arrive. He himself had once dived overboard from a ship in mid-Atlantic after a tennis ball, but the local people and his own staff were fed up. So he loaded the WOPs on his yacht, and took them and their silly activities home to the States. They were all wealthy and I suppose later became professional men and captains of industry. They were all older than I was, but in the week or so I spent aboard WOP I figured that one thing money can’t buy is brain.
Those days seem far away now. One of the things that gave stability to us was of course the HBC. It had been in Rigolet long, long before anyone could remember.31 To me it was security in days when jobs were not to be had. I’d have liked to go to sea, on a Company ship of course, but fully qualified masters were glad to get jobs as second and third mates. What chance for a new kid? So Mr. Parsons told me that the Company would hire me. I never had to go out and hunt for a job. All my life the Company was there. During the war, when I was in the army, I always knew that once the unpleasantness was over, I’d be going back to Labrador or the Eastern Arctic.
Even now, when I’m retired, no longer an active part of the Company, I feel a great sense of loss that my department, the old fur trade, will disappear as a historical unit in two years. The retail stores will remain, there will still be an HBC, but the retail are latecomers. It’s the fur trade that goes back to 1670; it’s the fur trade that I was born into; the fur trade that occupied my working life. I was in fur trade transportation at the last, but I have bought fur, I trapped fur (don’t tell Greenpeace), I managed a fur trade post, several of them in fact. I went hungry and cold for the fur trade and I lived in some less than comfortable places, but I was never unhappy, and never once did I gave any thought to other employment.
I grew up and lived under the old flag with the Union Jack in the corner and the white HBC on the fly. In those days, the Company was proud of its English origin. We were all royalists, and it was comforting to have the Jack on our flag. One thing, the people who will still manage the new company are all HBC men, fur trade men, most with long service to the NSD.32 They will carry on in the old tradition. One of the things that was stressed at the meeting the pensioners had with Mr. Filler yesterday was the fact that there will be little or no change in the appearance of the stores or in the management.
Over time, of course, there will be the inevitable changes that have been going on for over three hundred years, but the bones of the Company lie in the fur trade in the small isolated communities. We have been assured that the Company’s dedication to the North and the native people will remain. The incubus that was Toronto has been removed; the NSD is here, as it used to be: in the North, Toronto and its foolish expansion ideas, its huge debt, its poor policies, no longer burdens the fur trade. Already there is talk of a revived fur trade. In later years, Toronto sold off the fur auction houses in Montreal, New York and London. Mr. Filler said yesterday that we handle 25 percent of all the fur sold in Canada through our stores in the North. He said in time we may set up our own auction house. That got a cheer from all present. Perhaps the sores will heal. The loss of the name, the end of a history, can never be forgotten, but there will be stores in the North, there will be people, fur traders there too. We can’t go back to my time, but we will be there. In time, there will be a group as loyal to the new company as we were to ours. I hope they will feel the same security and sense of belonging that we did.
But as though it were yesterday I can see in my mind, the tidy post at Rigolet. Everything there was HBC. The white buildings with their red roofs, the inlet in front, the thickly wooded green hills framing it all, and the tall white flag staff in the shape of a ship’s mast and top mast with the HBC flag at the peak. I can never forget that. That place, those people, were the essence of HBC. They are gone and they can never be replaced.33
In April 1987, the chain will break. The post will become part of a new company, and perhaps on that day, very quietly, my heart will break. The grass will grow, the sun will shine and the streams will flow. Nothing outwardly will have changed. The break with the past will be silent, and we of the old days will be the only ones to feel it.
Away back, so many years I don’t really want to count them, there was a book in a travelling library, written in the early 1900s I guess, about a girl named Anne. It wasn’t much, but in those days a book was reading material and there wasn’t that much available. I won’t inflict Anne on you. You’ll have guessed that she eventually proved herself to be the missing heiress, got back into the manor with full honours, and of course got her man. But in that book there were letters from a school friend who was lucky. When Anne was slaving in a laundry, the friend was travelling in exotic countries with Mom and Dad.
She wrote Anne about being on an island in the midst of a hurricane, and my mind said to me, “Would anyone write letters during a hurricane?” Well after all those years, I find that at least one person will, and that her letters are away above Anne’s friend in interest and description. Fantastic is the word. Now all we’ve got to is find out which huge fortune you are the heiress of, and we are in the way of proving that 1900 novels had something.
Your letter is so absorbing that I read it first, then Muriel read it, while dinner waited cold in the kitchen and Fitz went into a sulk waiting for his ration of Tender Vittles. Kathy came and she read it. I’ve read it several times, each time I’m more firmly convinced that here is a person who can paint, who can teach, who can climb volcanoes, do all manner of unusual things, and write. Boy can she write. You are with the people, you see things and talk about things that we are completely unaware of. We have our puffs of wind here, not enough to take my hat off usually, but you are where roofs come off, people are hurt, property is destroyed, gardens that feed people are torn up.
I’ve had some experience with wind in the Arctic but there is a difference. We went in there knowing how it could blow. One of my first posts was at Hebron. The German missionaries built the house I lived in, built it to withstand gales of heavy brick and huge timbers. The roof was like an old fashioned tent. It came close to the ground and acted like a great knife to split the wind. We were always safe, though smaller and lighter buildings were blown away, but while we could feel the wind it couldn’t get to us. Perhaps we couldn’t get outside but we had everything we needed inside.
Travelling, we used snow houses, built where we knew the wind could only cover them with drifts and we’d still be safe. We never saw what you describe. We had no trees to blow down. If a person went out on foot any distance, he carried a snow knife and if caught, he either built a house or dug himself in. Either way he survived. Those who didn’t usually forgot some rule or panicked. But one hears of the Cruel Arctic and the Golden South Seas Paradise. You have had an experience that none of us in the Arctic could ever have had. Sort of changes my way of thinking about different parts of the earth.
Once when I was in Wolstenholme, which had the reputation of being one of the windiest places in the Arctic, there was quite a large native camp near the post. Probably five snow houses, not really a great town, but you’d not get enough people in five hundred miles to fill a small apartment building. Anyway, it was stormy and we had rigged ropes from building to building so that we could find our way around in the drift.
An old lady had a fox skin she wanted to trade for tea and tobacco and she left the snow house to come over to the post to do her trading. Somehow she missed the ropes and got out on the harbour where the wind was pretty fierce. She was blown along like a bundle of tumbleweed and finally ended up near a small iceberg that had been frozen in. She had a snow knife and built herself a shelter, and there she sat for two days and nights, she and her fox. The people were all relatives, and those in one snow house thought she was in the other. The storm got really bad and no one ventured out. When it was all over she was missed, so the search was on. Then someone saw her coming in across the ice.
She’d been warm and comfortable enough but no tea, nothing to smoke, and she was cranky. Took a good few mugs of strong tea in my kitchen and a plug of black tobacco to restore her good nature. Then she traded her fox and went off to her family. Once she got there, she had a tale to tell and it was hilarious. Ever after, she brought a big dog along so she could follow him home, and if worst came to worst, she’d have him to help keep her warm if she had to dig in again.
She liked to visit, and by a strange chance she nearly always came when I was cooking a meal. She couldn’t tell time so it had to be by chance, wouldn’t it? Anyway, she wasn’t used to heat, (you don’t really get much in a snow palace) and when I got the big coal burning kitchen range going, there would be quite some heat all over the house. The old lady would sit on the floor near the door and drip with perspiration but she’d hang on till I got a share of the meal for her. She’d eat in a hurry and drink a couple cups of tea and escape, but she always came back. She liked my cooking.
Once I asked her how old she was, she used up all her fingers then took lumps of coal out and lined them up on the floor, each one for a year, she nearly got out of the kitchen into the little office before she was through. How she figured I’ll never know but I got her age at something over sixty. She looked a hundred and one. Even at that age her eyes were fabulous. She could sew watertight seams in kayaks and boots stitches so small you could hardly see them. She could take a stained greasy white fox skin and bring it back shimmering white and soft. Quite an old lady she was.
28 I have been to the Moravian mission house where this happened. The locks are truly immense.
29 John Blake
30 George Binney was in the Company’s employ 1926–1931, hired as personal assistant to Charles V. Sales, Governor of the Company. He was involved in the selection and preliminary training of apprentices for the Company’s fur trade posts. In 1931, he brought out The Eskimo Book of Knowledge (London: Hudson’s Bay Company); he was knighted by HM George V for services in World War II.
31 Louis Fornel claimed Rigolet for the French in 1743. Marcoux built a French post at Rigolet in 1788. In 1836, The Hudson’s Bay Company established a post to oppose David R. Stewart at Rigolet and in 1837 bought out Stewart.
32 The Hudson Bay Company’s Northern Stores Department.
33 On January 26, 2006, The Hudson’s Bay Company was sold to Jerry Zucker of South Carolina, a longtime minority HBC shareholder.