4. Farillon and Ferryland

THE HELLISH days I spent in Muddy Hole and in St. John’s might well have proved unendurable had it not been for the Morry family of Ferryland.

Ferryland lies not far from Muddy Hole but, unlike its sister outport, it remains habitable by reason of the fact that it does not have the dubious blessing of a fish plant.

My presence and purpose at Muddy Hole soon became known in Ferryland as indeed it was known along the whole Southern Shore. One day when she was bounding back from St. John’s Passion Flower had a conniption fit, snorted horribly a few times, and took a fainting spell outside the white-painted picket fence enclosing a big old house on Ferryland’s outskirts.

I went up to the house to ask for help and was met at the door by Howard Morry. Before I could open my mouth to speak he forestalled me.

“Come you in, Mister Mowat,” he boomed. “Come you in and have a cup of tay.”

Howard was then in his eightieth year but I took him to be a man of fifty. Tall, firmly joined, heavy set, with a rubicund and unlined face, he was the epitome of a farmer-fisherman from Drake’s time. He was a widower living with his rangy and laconic son Bill, and his voluble daughter-in-law Pat. Bill and Pat ran a small store and a small salt-fish-making industry. They had two charming children, a boy and a girl.

The Morrys seemed to know what I was undergoing at Muddy Hole and took it on themselves to provide an antidote. From that first meeting until I sailed away their home was mine. Pat fed me fantastic meals, bullied the hell out of me, and saw to it that I seldom went to bed sober. Bill made me a part of the ancient fishing pattern of the harbour, sending me out with the trap boat crews, showing me the arts and secrets of making salt fish, and subjecting me to his own fierce, unyielding belief in the importance of human continuity in all things. Young Peter Morry, age ten, took me on long, secret walks into the “country” over trails made by the Masterless Men and up to the high places like the Gaze, a long hillcrest from which, for centuries, women watched for the returning ships, or men stood guard to cry the alarm when pirate sails hove over the horizon.

However it was Howard Morry who truly took me into the heart and soul of Newfoundland and Newfoundlanders. Howard was one of those rare people whose feeling for the past amounted to an intense and loving intimacy. His great-great-grandfather had been the first Morry to reach the Southern Shore, and all the tales that had come down the long ladder of the generations had finished up in Howard’s head—and in his heart.

During his middle years he suffered a severe accident and had to lie a-bed for twenty months. He used this time to transcribe every memory of Ferryland he had ever heard into thirty school scribblers. When he was well again, and back at sea and at his trade, he negligently tossed this priceless treasure into a corner where some children found it and used the books to make a bonfire. When Howard told me about this incident, I was appalled. He only chuckled. “ ’Twas of no account. I still have every word of it written in me head.”

Howard not only knew the story of Ferryland during his own family’s time but he knew it, or felt it, as far back as history can go. That was a long way back since Ferryland is one of the places in Newfoundland where the patina of human occupation is thick enough to really soften the bony face of the old Rock.

The broad and well-protected harbour lying at the foot of low, swelling hills, fringed by a wide foreshore of grassy meadows, welcomed some of the earliest European visitors to North America. Basque whalers and cod fishers sheltered in Ferryland harbour well before the end of the fifteenth century. During the first decades of the sixteenth century Bretons and Normans had fishing stations along its beaches. It appears on an old French chart of 1537, as Farillon. Yet the French must have come late upon the scene for this name was not of their bestowal. Even then it was a corruption of an earlier name.

The French held Farillon as a permanent settlement until it was seized from them by English pirates about 1600. In 1621 Lord Baltimore chose it as the site of a grandiose plantation scheme he had proposed for Newfoundland. However, the Lord was hag-ridden. His wife could not stand Firiland, as it was then called, and two years later persuaded her master to shift south to what became the State of Maryland.

Over the succeeding centuries other overlords usurped nominal control of the place and sweated the inhabitants. But its people, of mixed French, West Country English, Jersey, and Irish stock went on about their business with the sea, paying very little heed to those who rode upon their shoulders. Tough, stubborn, infinitely enduring, they survived the black years of the Fishing Admirals when English kings bowed to the demands of powerful fishing interests in the Motherland and decreed that no one could settle in the new land; that it should be kept free of permanent inhabitants; and that it might be used only as a seasonal fishing station by the crews of English ships.

Nevertheless the people of Ferryland held to their home. They held to it through an interminable series of raids by French, New Englanders, Portuguese, and just plain Buccaneers. They held on with the tenaciousness of barnacles. Several times Ferryland had to fight for its life against full-scale naval and military attacks. It survived. It and its people have survived through more than four centuries. When I knew it in the early 1960’s its nature was not greatly changed from what it must have been at its inception. Howard had innumerable tales to tell that illustrated the nature of the crucible that had formed his people. There was the story of the Masterless Men for example.

During the eighteenth century the English fishing fleet was largely manned by men who had been driven to sea by starvation, or who had been tricked by “recruiters” into making the long, hard voyage across the seas. Having reached Newfoundland many of these men refused to return home again. Treated like slaves by the local “planters” they reacted like Spartan slaves and fled from the little harbours into the desolate interior. Here they formed a society of their own; one that endured for a hundred years. They became veritable outlaws in the romantic tradition of Robin Hood, living the forest life and robbing the rich to succour, not only themselves, but also the oppressed fishermen inhabitants of the coast.

The interior of the peninsula became the Country of the Masterless Men. Only the best-armed bands of King’s men dared enter their domain. Secret trails ran everywhere, and the villages of the Masterless Men were hidden in a score of deep vales, one of which was within five miles of Ferryland under the loom of a massive hill known as the Butter Pot.

The Masterless Men were never conquered and never subdued; they gradually melded with the coastal settlers and their blood still runs in the veins of the people of the Southern Shore.

Howard Morry brought these men to life again, and others like them, as he took me on little trips along the coast to outports like Bear Cove, La Manche, Admiral’s Cove, Cappahayden, Renews, Fermeuse, Aquaforte, Bauline, and other places with equally strange names. Yet Ferryland remained the heart of his love.

One afternoon he took me out to Bois Island which lies in the broad mouth of Ferryland harbour. Once it was well wooded, but that was in distant days. Now no trees grow on it and it is a place of fantasy.

Forgotten or ignored by official historians, familiar only to a handful of men like Howard, it is a great fortress. Around its almost sheer perimeter is an earthwork circumvallation. At least five heavy gun batteries still lie emplaced at intervals, the muzzles of the guns showing black and stark through a guanoed growth of mosses. Magazines, the ruins of dwelling houses, and even an ancient well can still be traced. According to Howard it was first fortified before 1600 by the French. By 1610 it had been taken by the English super-pirate Peter Easton and was gradually improved until it became an almost impregnable structure and the key to Ferryland’s long survival.

In shoal water at the foot of a great crevice lay four corroding, twenty-pound, long guns of the seventeenth century, just as they had been left when an eighteenth-century privateer attempted to steal them from the temporarily abandoned fort. Nothing else appeared to have been disturbed since the fort last lived. Here were no guides, no gravel paths, no fanciful reconstructions. Here was the true reality of the past; dimmed only and not obliterated by the flickering centuries.

With the passing of men like Howard Morry (and they are all too few in any land) most of the rich and vital human past of Newfoundland will have gone beyond recall. And a way of life four centuries old will have vanished.

I count myself lucky I had a chance to taste that way of life—the way of the cod fisher. One morning at four o’clock Howard woke me from a down-filled bed, fed me a whopping breakfast, and took me through the darkness to the stage head where I was to join the four-man crew of a trap boat.

She was a big, broad-beamed skiff powered by a five-horsepower, “jump spark,” single-cylinder engine. It was calm and cold as we puttered out of the harbour accompanied in darkness by the muted reverberations from a score of other “one-lungers” pushing unseen boats toward the open sea.

Our crew had two cod traps to examine. Essentially these traps are great boxes of netting as much as fifty feet on a side. They have a bottom but no top. Stretching out from a “door” on one side is a long, vertically hung leader-net to guide the slow moving cod into the trap. The whole affair is moored to the sea floor with huge wrought-iron anchors which are the last surviving artifacts of ancient and forgotten ships.

Our first trap was set in nine fathoms off Bois Island and we reached it just at dawn. While the rest of us leaned over the side of the skiff, staring into the dark waters, our skipper tested the trap with a jigger—a six-inch leaden fish equipped with two great hooks, hung on the end of a heavy line. He lowered the jigger into the trap and hauled sharply back. On the first try he hooked a fine fat cod and pulled it, shimmering, aboard.

“Good enough!” he said. “Let’s haul her, byes.”

So haul we did. Closing the trap mouth and then manhandling the tremendous weight of twine and rope took the best efforts of the five of us and it was half an hour before the trap began to “bag,” with its floats upon the surface. As we passed armloads of tar-reeking, icy twine across the gunwales, the bag grew smaller and the water within it began to roil. We had a good haul. The trap held twenty or thirty quintals^*1 of prime cod seething helplessly against the meshes.

One of our number, a young man just entering his twenties, was working alongside the skiff from a pitching dory. He was having a hard time holding his position because of a big swell running in from seaward. An unexpected heave on the twine threw him off balance, and his right arm slipped between the dory and the skiff just as they rolled together. The crack of breaking bones was clearly audible. He sat back heavily on the thwart of his dory and held his arm up for inspection. It was already streaming with blood. A wrist-watch, just purchased and much treasured, had been completely crushed and driven into the flesh.

The injured youth lost hold of the net and his dory was fast driving away from us on the tide rip. Our skipper cried out to us to let go of the trap while he started the engine, but the young man in the drifting dory stopped us.

“Don’t ye be so foolish!” he shouted. “I’se able to care for myself! Don’t ye free them fish!”

Using his good arm, he swung an oar over the side and hooked an end of the header rope with it, then with one hand and his teeth he pulled himself and the dory back to the skiff along the rope. We took him on board, but he would not let us leave the trap until every last cod had been dip-netted out of it and the skiff was loaded down almost to her gunwales. During all this time, perhaps twenty minutes, he sat on the engine hatch watching us and grinning, as the blood soaked the sleeve of his heavy sweater and ran down his oilskin trousers.

When we got back to the stage it was ten o’clock and the sun was high and hot. Pat Morry met us with a truck and we took the lad away to the doctor who set the bones and took sixteen stitches to close the wound. I went along and as we left the doctor’s little office the young man said to me;

“Skipper, I hopes I never spiled yer marnin!”

No, he did not “spile” my morning. But how was I to find words to tell him what kind of a man I knew him to be? He would have been dreadfully embarrassed if I had tried.

Whenever I stayed at the Morrys’ overnight I would go to the stage head the following morning to welcome the trap boats home. Invariably I would be joined there by Uncle Jim Welch and Uncle John Hawkins. They were eighty-eight and ninety years old respectively. Both had been fishermen all their lives but, as Uncle John put it, “We’s just a mite too old for that game now, bye. No good fer it no more.” Nevertheless they were still good enough to check each boat, to make acid comments on the quality and quantity of the fish, and to keep the “young fellers” (men of forty and fifty) up to the mark. Uncle John first went to sea in a dory, jigging fish with his father, at the age of eight. He was a late starter. Uncle Jim began his fishing career at the age of six.

The individual stories Howard Morry had to tell were legion and they were a blend of the comic and the tragic, for that is the blend of ordinary life. One evening we were talking about the priests along the coast (the Southern Shore is almost exclusively Roman Catholic) and Howard told me the tale of Billard and the goat.

Everybody on the Southern Shore grew potatoes and Billard was particularly proud of his patch. Unfortunately one of his neighbours kept goats, and goats like potatoes too. One morning Billard was harvesting his spuds, back bent, eyes on the peaty ground, when the priest happened by. The Father paused, leaned on the fence and asked:

“Are ye diggin’ ’em, Billard?”

Billard glanced out under his bushy eyebrows, failed to see the priest, and met, instead, the amber stare of a particularly outrageous billy-goat peering through another section of the fence.

“Yiss, ye whore!” answered Billard fiercely. “And if ’twasn’t fer you, there’d be a lot more of ’em!”

The same evening Howard told me a different kind of tale. A hundred and seventy years ago a middle-aged man appeared in Ferryland. He was a runaway from a fishing ship, an “Irish Youngster”-the name given to the men and boys of any age who, fleeing starvation in Ireland, indentured themselves to the English fishing fleet and the Newfoundland planters.

Ferryland people took him in and made him welcome but he was a haunted man—”afeard.” He was convinced he would be recaptured and returned to servitude. He stayed in the settlement for a few months, took a young girl for wife, and began fishing on his own, but fear never left him. One autumn he took his wife and two babies and rowed away down the coast to a hidden cove which no large ship and few small boats would dare to enter. Here he built a tilt (a tiny wooden cabin) and began living an exile’s life.

Once or twice each year he would row into Ferryland to trade his salt fish for essential goods. Then he would disappear again. Apart from these rare trips he, his wife, and his two young sons lived as if they were the only people in the world. They lived from the sea and off the land, catching fish, killing caribou and ducks for meat, and growing a few potatoes in a tiny patch scrabbled out of the moss at the foot of the sea cliffs that guarded them.

One February morning the man was stricken with paralysis. For two weeks his wife nursed him, but he grew worse. Finally she decided she must go for help. She left the boys, aged nine and ten, to care for their father and set out single-handed in a skiff to row thirty or forty miles to Ferryland. It was wicked, winter weather and the pack-ice was particularly bad that year.

She had made fifteen miles when a gale came up and the ice set against the shore, nipping the skiff, and crushing it. The woman made her way on foot (“copying,” they call it) across the floe-ice to the land. She then climbed the ice-sheathed cliffs, swam or waded several small rivers, and eventually fought her way through the snow-laden forest to Ferryland.

It was some time before she recovered enough strength to tell her story; and it was seven long days before the storm, a roaring nor’easter, fell light enough to allow a party of fishermen to make their way along the landward edge of the ice to the distant, hidden cove.

They were met by the two boys; shy to the point of utter silence at this intrusion of strange faces. The men went up to the little house and found it snug and warm and tidy; but the bed was empty. They asked the two boys where their father was and the eldest, the ten-year-old, led them off to a lean-to shack some distance from the cabin. They opened the door and there they found the missing man.

He was strung up to the roof beam by his feet and he had been neatly skinned and drawn.

“You see how it was,” Howard explained “The boys had never looked at human death before. But they had seen a good many deer killed and had watched their father draw and skin them, and so, poor little lads, they thought that must be the right way to treat anything that died, be it man or beast. They did the best they could….”