3. The sea-green bride

ALTHOUGH I am very fond of Newfoundland, St. John’s is not one of my favourite cities. There is nothing wrong with the physical nature of the place; it is old, pleasantly decrepit, sprawling on steep slopes overlooking a marvellous harbour. Nor do I have any antipathy toward the majority of its people, particularly those who work the vessels at the waterfront, or who, in defiance of the fact that this is a capital city, continue to live and fish as true outporters in a community of straggling houses stuck to the cliffs along the Narrows—the entrance to the harbour.

My dislike of St. John’s stems from the fact that it is a parasite. Through at least three centuries it has been a leech squatting behind its high rock portals, sucking the life-blood of the outport people in order to engorge itself. In the early 1960’s it still had more millionaires per capita than any other city in North America, including Dallas, Texas. These fortunes were made by remorselessly bleeding the outport fishermen who, until Newfoundland joined Canadian Confederation in 1949, were exploited by the St. John’s merchants in a mediaeval fashion. The merchants, whose great warehouses and counting-houses lined Water Street, were called, in helpless bitterness, the “Water Street Pirates.” They were the targets for a passive but enduring hatred which they countered by developing a bleak contempt for the people. Totally oriented toward England, they spoke with English accents, sent their children to England to be educated, and were Newfoundlanders in name alone.

The peculiar aroma they gave to the city lingers on and is compounded by a stench of corruption which, while it may not be unique, takes second place to none. Politics in Newfoundland have always been of the Banana Republic—or, to be more accurate, of the Codfish Republic-variety. Dictatorship has been only thinly disguised under the shabby cloak of threadbare democracy. Some of the most unsavoury figures in North American history have wielded power in St. John’s and there is, as yet, no indication that some day the old pattern may be broken.

I did not linger in the city but set out on the Caribou Path along the Southern Shore that very evening. Wheezing and shaking as with palsy, but still game, Passion Flower slowly worked her way south through the long night. At dawn she surmounted the last hill behind Muddy Hole and coasted down the rubble slope toward the village. I let her pick her own way among the boulders and gave my attention to the scene below.

The little harbour, a mere slit in the crooked coastal cliffs, lay quiescent in the pearl-blue light of early morning. Thirty or forty open boats slumbered at their moorings like a raft of sleeping eiders. A ramshackle filigree of fish flakes (racks for drying fish), wharves, stages, and fish stores patterned the shores of the cove in grey and silver. Two-score square, flat-roofed houses painted in garish colours clambered up the slope from the landwash. Directly below me sprawled the fish plant, a drift of oily smoke rising from its stark, iron chimney.

It was a somnolent, gentle scene and of a piece with the rest of the thirteen hundred Newfoundland outports which in those days still clung, as they had clung for centuries, to the convoluted coast of the great island. I took in the scene with a pleasure that slowly changed to anxiety.

Something was missing—and that something was my dream ship. She should have been lying in the harbour below me, bobbing gently at her moorings, alert and lovely, and waiting like a bride for her lover to come. The lover had come—was here, was now—but of the sea-bride there was not a trace.

Passion Flower butted her way through the last rocky barricade on the goat track leading down to the fish plant, hiccuped once or twice and quietly expired. When I tried to start her again she only whined piteously. I climbed out and was confronted by a very small boy who seemed to spring like one of the Little People out of the rock-strewn slope. He was a towhead, with rubber boots several sizes too large, a runny nose, and a shy smile. I asked him where I could find Uncle Enos Coffin (in the outports men over fifty are almost invariably called uncle by their juniors), and he pointed up the hill to a large house painted in wide horizontal stripes of puce, canary yellow, and Pompeian red.

I must digress a moment to remark that until Confederation few outport Newfoundlanders could afford to buy paint. They made their own out of ochre earth mixed with cod-liver oil and sea water. When dry (and that might take a year), it looked like old blood. It was hardly an exciting hue, and over the centuries the outport people became colour starved. Soon after the island became part of Canada it was inundated by carpetbaggers from the mainland, amongst whom were a number of paint salesmen. It was also inundated with cash money as a result of the federal baby bonus and old-age pension plans. Much of this money was promptly exchanged for paint. Drunk with colour, many outporters were not content to paint their houses red, or grass green, or boudoir pink—they painted them varicoloured with horizontal, vertical, and even diagonal stripes. Viewed from several miles to seaward on a foggy day the effects were visually pleasing. Viewed from close at hand on a sunny day the effect was one to make strong men quail.

“Thank you,” I said. “Now, would you know where the schooner is that used to belong to the Hallohans?”

The boy’s face lit up. He turned and shuffled off between two decayed warehouses and I followed. We emerged at the base of a spindly and unbelievably rickety stage (as fishermen’s wharves are called) made of peeled spruce poles.

Lying alongside it was a boat.

The tide was out and she lay on her side, half in the water and half out of it, amidst a rich collection of broken bottles, rotting kelp, dead fish, and nameless slimy objects. I picked my way out along the cod-oil soaked sticks of the stage and stood beside my dream ship.

Her hull had not been touched since I had seen her last and the remains of her green paint hung in scrofulous tatters from her naked planking. Her belly, bare of the last trace of copper paint and smeared with bunker oil, gleamed greasily. Her decks were a patchwork of gaping holes, open seams, rough pieces of new plank, and long black rivulets of tar, where someone had been doing some perfunctory caulking. Her mainmast was broken off ten feet above the deck and her foremast, unstayed, swayed at a weird angle importuning the unheeding skies.

The most appalling thing about her was an enormous unpainted box-like structure that appeared to have been roughly grafted to her decks. It was huge, stretching from the steering-well forward to the foot of the foremast. It looked like a gigantic sarcophagus. It was as if the little ship, feeling herself to be dying of some incurable and loathsome disease, had taken her own coffin on her back and gone crawling off to the graveyard, but had not quite been able to make it and had died where she now lay.

The sight of her left me speechless, but it had the opposite effect on my snuffy-nosed little guide. He spoke for the first time.

“Lard Jasus, Sorr!” he said. “Don’t she be a wunnerful quare sight?”

 

I did not immediately seek out Enos because, although I am a peaceable man, there was murder in my heart. Instead I climbed back into Passion Flower, and, as I am wont to do when faced with difficult situations, I opened a bottle.

My major preoccupation at that moment was with Jack McClelland. Jack was due to arrive in Muddy Hole in two weeks to begin our cruise. Jack is one of the Golden People who have but little understanding of the frailties of ordinary mortals. He is A Man Who Gets Things Done, and he expects those with whom he deals to be equally efficient. He does not supplicate the Fates, he gives them orders. He gives everybody orders, and he had given me mine.

“On July fifteenth, at 0730 hours, we will sail from Newfoundland for the nearest palm-fringed islet, where we will spend the summer giving ourselves over to the pleasures of a hedonistic existence. Is that clearly understood?”

Such were his parting words to me. I was reasonably sure he would not be content to spend the summer in Muddy Hole.

After my first suck at the bottle I still thought I might stave in Enos Coffin’s skull, plead insanity, and get myself committed to the St. John’s Mental where Wilbur and I could keep each other company until Jack forgot about me. After two more sucks, I determined to get Passion Flower under way and steam off to a place I know about on the Yukon-Alaska border, where there is a lot of archaeological work to be done on the antiquity of early man in North America. However Passion Flower absolutely refused to start, so I took another suck or two and concluded that I would stay where I was for the nonce and seek a more direct route to oblivion.

Enos Coffin’s seven hearty daughters found me there when they came galumphing along to start the morning shift at the fish plant. They were good, understanding girls. One of them rested my head in her ample lap while another went off to find Enos. Later the group of them escorted me, which is to say they carried me, up to their house where they put me contentedly to bed.

I wakened late that evening in no good humour. But Enos’s daughters were so hospitable and lavished so much attention on me (including an immense feed of fried cod’s tongues and cod’s cheeks), that I did not speak as harshly to Enos as he deserved. To my complaint that he had betrayed me, he replied in tones of injured innocence:

“Why didn’t ye tell I ye was in such a hurry for the boat? If I’d a know’d I’d a had her done up mont’s ago. But don’t you be worryin’ none, me darlin’ man. I’ll get right aholt of Obie Murphy an the two of we’ll have her shipshape afore the week is out. And oh, Skipper, ye don’t happen to have anudder bottle wid ye, do ye? I finds me stomach something turrible those days!”

Since, as it happened, I was also finding my stomach “something turrible,” I located another bottle and before the night ended I too was full of optimism.

Now if there is one salient quality native to outport Newfoundlanders, it is optimism. They really need it. Without it, they would long ago have had to turn their island back to the gulls and the seals. With it they accomplish miracles. Given sufficient optimism they are the ablest, most enduring and the most joyful people on this earth.

When Enos and Obie Murphy (an amiable fisherman of gargantuan strength) started work on the boat the next day, it became my chief task to keep them supplied with optimism. In order to do this, I had to establish a regular run between Muddy Hole and St. John’s, the nearest place where optimism could be procured. I would start off for the city in the early morning, reach it late in the afternoon, have the jeep repaired, try to buy such vital articles for the boat as sails, pumps, etc. (more of this later), and I would pick up a gallon or two of optimism from the bootleggers, who sold a better and cheaper product than did the government-owned liquor stores. I would then drive all night, reaching Muddy Hole in time to prepare Enos and Obie for the day’s work which lay ahead of them.

As time passed the navigation of the caribou track became less of an ordeal. Passion Flower gradually wore down the worst of the boulders and chewed up most of the stumps. By the time she made her final trip, the path had become enough like a road to prompt the residents of the Southern Shore to an act of gratitude. They petitioned the government to have the trail named “Passion Flower Passage.” The government might have done it too except that the Premier, Mr. Joey Smallwood, was afraid that once he had acknowledged the road’s existence he would have to maintain it.

One reason I did not mind making these long voyages was that the alternative, helping Enos and Obie work on the boat, was too terrible to contemplate. I avoided contemplating it for several days, until Enos began fitting a false keel and two thousand pounds of iron ballast. An extra pair of hands was needed then and I had to supply them. To give the flavour of the working conditions I can do no better than refer to my notes made at the time.

The boat was lying in a tiny slip dominated by the fish plant. All the effluence, both human and animal, from this plant, which employed one hundred and forty-seven men, women and children, and which processed about 100,000 pounds of fish a day, was voided into our slip through a ten-inch sewage pipe that vomited at us at irregular intervals. At low tide, the pallid guts of defunct codfish formed a slippery pattern all about the boat and festooned all her lines. The air, already pretty noxious, was further poisoned with gases from the meal plant. Such fish offal as was not poured into the water was reduced to stinking yellow powder that sifted down from heaven upon our bared heads, like the debris from a crematorium. So awful was the stink that four wooden barrels standing at the end of the stage, wherein Obie was wont to throw the livers of newly caught codfish, so they could rot and reduce to oil under the heat of the sun, gave off a rather pleasant fragrance by comparison. Our clothing, bodies, hair, became slimy with the effluvium of long-dead cod and, of course, every inch of the vessel was thickly coated with….

It was a situation where a man needed all the optimism he could get!

 

However not even all the optimism in Newfoundland could enable us to accomplish the impossible, and as the day of Jack’s arrival drew nearer I was forced to admit to myself that the little ship was not going to be ready to sail on schedule.

By July tenth she still lacked spars, rigging, sails, a propeller, and a variety of other vital items. She also lacked sufficient pumps. Late on the evening of the tenth we finished paying her seams and painting her bottom and at high tide hauled her to the head of the wharf. She immediately proceeded to give evidence of what was to be her most salient characteristic. She leaked as no boat I have ever known, before or since, could leak.

The water did not seem to enter from any particular place, but to come in by some arcane process of osmosis through every pore. It was necessary to pump her every hour, on the hour, and in between the hours, just to keep abreast of the inflow. There was no question of getting ahead of it since there were only three of us and we could only operate three pumps at a time.

The little schooner’s apparent desire to commit hara-kiri did not bother Enos or Obie. From Enos I heard a phrase which was to echo like an eternal whisper in my ears throughout the next several years.

“Southern Shore boats all leaks a drop when they first lanches off,” Enos told me soothingly. “But once they’s been afloat a day or two, why they takes up.”

Like most things Enos told me there was truth in this. Southern Shore boats do take up. They take up unbelievable quantities of salt water, and they take up most of a man’s time just working at the pumps. The fantastic arm and shoulder musculature of Southern Shore fishermen is sufficient testimony to this.