Spindrift, page 14
A constant stream of marine traffic worked its way up and down the strait: freighters, passenger steamers, tugs and tows, seiners, trollers and yachts. Some of these vessels called in at our little harbour at regular intervals, some simply passed by, and some of them appeared unexpectedly from nowhere, moored for an hour, a week or a summer, and then vanished as completely as if they had never existed.
The most regular of our callers were the Union steamships. Each week, without fail, either the Cardena or the Catala arrived. Their black hulls, white superstructures and red funnels were familiar to every coastal inhabitant, for they were the north coast’s supply line to the city. Each week on “boat day,” the ship’s radio operator broadcast the estimated time of arrival and then, there they were, rounding the point and blocking the entrance to the harbour with their bulk. Suddenly the air was full of acrid smoke from their funnels, the store was full of fresh food, and the Post Office was full of the mail they delivered.
As children, we made many trips with our mother to and from Vancouver on these ships, and they were always thrilling adventures. Encumbered as we often were by an aged aunt—and sometimes even a canary—we required two staterooms. My sister and I shared one of them, revelling in our independence. However, when it came time to go to bed, we needed help from an adult. Employing some secret procedure that died with them, the stewards on these ships made up the berths so tightly that it took a strong and determined adult to pry the sheets apart. No child was equal to the task. Even when one finally wriggled in under the blankets, it was only those with the general body contours of a postage stamp who could be comfortable.
We were shy country children, and when we descended the broad brass-trimmed stairway to the dining saloon we were always overwhelmed by its magnificence. There were big, round tables with snowy napery, clusters of silver cutlery, glasses tinkling with ice cubes, and stewards in black uniforms and immaculate white shirts. The menu always included the item “celery and olives” and we astonished our adult table-mates by quietly devouring every olive in sight. Travelling thus we had acquired a taste for them and we never, ever, had them at home.
In retrospect, the service that the Union Steamship Company provided was remarkable. They pressed doggedly on through violent winter storms and, perhaps even more remarkably, they kept to their appointed schedules in blankets of fog. Long before radar, these sizeable ships negotiated the convoluted channels and narrow passages that formed our difficult coast, and made their regular appearances in the tiniest, most remote settlement. Year after year, with no fanfare and little recognition, their tired-looking captains performed remarkable feats of seamanship.
—from Time & Tide: A History of Telegraph Cove (2005)
Challengers of the Northwest Passage
Henry Larsen (1899–1964)
Henry Larsen was a deep-sea Arctic sailor and navigator who became one of the most renowned officers in the RCMP. Known among the indigenous peoples of the Canadian Arctic as “Hanorie Umiarjuag”—Henry with the Big Ship—he skippered the RCMP vessel St. Roch on daunting and record-breaking northern voyages. Under his command the North Vancouver–built 100-foot wooden vessel became the first ship to transit the Northwest Passage from west to east. It took him two years, from 1940 to 1942. In 1944 St. Roch became the first ship to transit from east to west in a single season: eighty-six days via the more northerly deep-water route. She later became the first ship to circumnavigate the North American continent. Throughout these arduous voyages, as his memoirs reveal, he remained deeply conscious of the historical dimensions of his undertaking. He loved the people of the North, understood the importance of the northern sea, and pondered its future. In what follows, Larsen recounts a portion of his 1944 passage from east to west, during which he came upon a remarkable cairn. It had been laid by the colourful Quebec mariner Joseph-Elzéar Bernier (1852–1934). As skipper of the Canadian Government Ship Arctic, Bernier had, between 1904 and 1911, led many seagoing expeditions into the Arctic and played a pivotal role in laying Canada’s territorial claims.
We ran into more history a bit later when we reached Dealy Island off the southern coast of Melville Island, nearing the eastern approach to McClure Strait. The weather had been bad and continuous snowfall had made navigation rather difficult for several days as both the land and the sun had been obscured. The magnetic compass had been bafflingly unresponsive for days, often with its north point fixed on the ship’s head regardless of the direction we were travelling. Then the weather cleared and we spotted a cairn on top of Dealy Island. It was a huge pile of rocks with a large spar surrounded by three barrels and could be seen from a great distance. We anchored close inshore and set out to examine the massive cache which, like the cairn, had been built in the spring of 1853 by Captain Henry Kellett, who had spent the winter there with HMS Resolute.
The cache was partially destroyed and its contents had been scattered all over by marauding bears. Originally it had been built in the shape of a house, but only the sturdy stone walls remained, the roof having long since fallen in. At one end were iron tanks of what had been hard, square biscuits. The tanks were rusted through and the biscuits were wet and soggy. By rummaging around, however, we did find a few that were still hard as rock, stamped with a broad arrow, indicating that they were the property of the British Navy. Canned meats and vegetables, stacked up and covered with sod, formed part of one wall, and the centre of the building was a hodge-podge of broken barrels of flour, clothing, coal, rope, salt beef and broken hardwood pulleys for ships’ blocks. It was amazing to see the various items left here. Much of it was frozen in ice, but leather sea boots, broken barrels of chocolate, peas and beans and other items were spread around outside. No doubt the bears had had many a good picnic there down through the years. On the beach we found two broken Ross army rifles and some boxes of ammunition, left behind by Captain Bernier …
On the beach we also found an eighteen-foot boat turned bottom-up. It had been left by Captain Bernier, too, and was built of light oak planking. Two steel runners, like those on a sleigh, were fastened to the bottom, and these made the boat useful on the ice as well as in the water. It was far superior to our own skiff or rowboat built for us in Victoria in 1940, which was heavy, clumsy and leaky, so we decided to trade ours for Captain Bernier’s.
Regardless of how fascinated we were by all this history we had to push on, as it was already getting late in the season. After a brief examination of Bridport Inlet, a fine harbour on Dealy Island, well protected and seemingly big enough to hold a fleet of ships, we left on August 28. While we had a wide expanse of completely ice-free water along the shore, we could see the ice tightly packed a few miles to the south in Melville Sound. When we passed Cape Bounty, I recalled that Lieut. William Edward Parry, R.N., had passed here too in 1819 with his two sailing-ships, the Hecla and the Griper. It was he who had named the Cape, and most appropriately, for by reaching that spot on 110th Meridian he won a sum of five thousand pounds. It had been offered by the British Admiralty to the first man to pass that Meridian in the quest of the Northwest Passage …
On Parry Rock we also saw a large copper plate. It carried an inscription of the Union Jack and the Canadian Coat of Arms with the following words: “This memorial is erected today to commemorate taking possession for the Dominion of Canada, of the whole Arctic archipelago, lying to the north of America, from long. 60 W to 141 W, up to lat. 90 North. Winter Hrb. Melville Island, Arctic.” July 1st 1909, J. E. Bernier, Commander, J. V. Koenic, sculptor.”
Thus, thirty-five years before our visit, on Dominion Day, this doughty and great Canadian skipper recorded Canada’s claim to the vast Arctic region north of her mainland to the North Pole. We realized the significance of this declaration and before we left we deposited the record of our call together with various papers and ordinances in a brass cylinder and placed it on top of Parry Rock.
—from The Big Ship (1967)
Crossing the Straits
Richard Greene (1961– )
The Port aux Basques–North Sydney ferry crosses Cabot Strait between southwestern Newfoundland and northern Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia. Approximately 170 kilometres wide, and named after the fifteenth-century explorer John Cabot, the strait is an important international shipping lane connecting the Gulf of St. Lawrence with the Atlantic Ocean. The name Port aux Basques recalls the whalers from the Pyrenee regions of France and Spain who sheltered and took on fresh water there during the early sixteenth century. By 1857, following the laying of an underwater cable between Newfoundland and Cape Breton Island, Port aux Basques became an important link in the race to complete a transatlantic telegraph cable.
The sea is moving under our passage,
an old year out and a new year in
between Port aux Basques and North Sydney.
The ship rolls in the first breaths of a gale;
it has been so long, ten or twelve years,
since I last sailed, I do not trust my legs
or stomach to hold against the weather,
so lie still as a narrow berth allows,
reminding myself that disaster
is a kind of lottery, and to sink
as hard as winning millions on dry land,
and that sailors, having made profession
of storms, know their work and die old.
In an hour, anxiety drowns in sleep;
the mind, as ever, opposes passage,
and I dream of my flat in Toronto,
its wooden deck stretching across the roof,
a ship remote from this night’s turning.
At six I wake and walk through lounges
where some have sat up all night playing cards
or talking, their New Year’s revels queasy
and circumspect where the ship’s movement
began the hangovers before the drinks.
More have slept in the rows of Lazy-boys
before an almost bloodshot T.V. screen,
its hoarse voice still croaking festively
about the crowds that gathered in Times Square.
The gales have subsided and the sea is calm
less than an hour out of North Sydney;
a heavy breakfast later, I walk along
a deck where snow-crusted lifeboats are hung.
I imagine that in summer this is
the ship’s best place, but the air is frigid
this morning, and Newfoundlanders crossing
the Straits see water enough in warmer times
to forego the prospect now, but this moment
of pent chances, between home and home,
is not mine alone, and for most who travel
there is some tear in memory between
the longed for and the given, what they left
and what they are. Nova Scotia looms,
and the purser summons drivers to cars
in the ship’s belly, where tractor-trailers
are already roaring for landfall.
—from Crossing the Straits (2004)
“They left their punt on the collar, jumped lightly aboard, and loosed the boat from her moorings. Then Eli hoisted the sails while Christopher took the tiller and sent her skimming over the waves between the sunkers straight into the rising sun. And when the first splash of spray struck his tawny cheek the boy laughed and tossed his black hair in the rising breeze and felt like a buccaneer of a younger day, coasting down through the glittering Spanish Main, seeking the isles that lie under the wind.”
—Harold Horwood, Tomorrow Will Be Sunday (1966)
Chapter V
Just for the Joy of It
Build a boat, buy a boat, own a boat, sail a boat: these are among the abiding dreams weaving their way through Canadian nautical folklore and coastal life. Relationships and marriages have been made—and broken—by them. Rich experiences have been gained, and tall tales told. In some respects these nautical ambitions constitute a great escape, either away from, or into, a self-fulfilling reality. Boat names attest to this: Elsewhere, Dawn Treader, Wanderer, Pilgrim, and the arguably more realistic one, Costa Lotta. On good days “yachties” speak euphorically of being “in touch” with nature; they speak of spirituality, zest, vigour and inspiration. On bad days they curse their floating mistress as “that hole in the water” into which they pour all their money. Yet for all that, whether slopping about in the autumn rain, battening down for winter, touching up the brightwork in spring or cresting the waves in summer, they experience yachting as an eminently meaningful preoccupation. It is, after all, a vocation: in answer to the call of the sea.
Farewell Nova Scotia
Joshua Slocum (1844–1909)
Nova Scotia–born Joshua Slocum was the first to circumnavigate the world alone. His equally famous vessel is the 37-foot yawl Spray, which he fully restored from its derelict condition before setting off on the historic voyage in July 1898. His memoir, published in 1900, is a classic: vivid, fast-paced and reflective, always delightfully understated, and frequently opinionated. Here, Slocum departs from Yarmouth, an historic harbour in Acadian territory on the southwest coast of Nova Scotia.
I now stowed all my goods securely, for the boisterous Atlantic was before me, and I sent the topmast down, knowing that the Spray would be the wholesomer with it on deck. Then I gave the lanyards a pull and hitched them afresh, and saw that the gammon [a rope connecting bowsprit to stem] was secure, also that the boat was lashed, for even in summer one may meet with bad weather in the crossing.
In fact, many weeks of bad weather had prevailed. On July 1, however, after a rude gale, the wind came out nor’west and clear, propitious for a good run. On the following day, the head sea having gone down, I sailed from Yarmouth, and let go my last hold on America. The log of my first day on the Atlantic in the Spray reads briefly: “9:30 A.M. sailed from Yarmouth. 4:30 P.M. passed Cape Sable; distance, three cables from the land. The sloop making eight knots. Fresh breeze N.W.” Before the sun went down I was taking my supper of strawberries and tea in smooth water under the lee of the east-coast land, along which the Spray was now leisurely skirting …
On the evening of July 5 the Spray, after having steered all day over a lumpy sea, took it into her head to go without the helmsman’s aid. I had been steering southeast by south, but the wind hauling forward a bit, she dropped into a smooth lane, heading southeast, and making about eight knots, her very best work. I crowded on sail to cross the track of the liners without loss of time, and to reach as soon as possible the friendly Gulf Stream. The fog lifting before night, I was afforded a look at the sun just as it was touching the sea. I watched it go down and out of sight. Then I turned my face eastward, and there, apparently at the very end of the bowsprit, was the smiling full moon rising out of the sea. Neptune himself coming over the bows could not have startled me more. “Good evening, sir,” I cried; “I’m glad to see you.” Many a long talk since then I have had with the man in the moon; he had my confidence on the voyage.
About midnight the fog shut down again denser than ever before. One could almost “stand on it.” It continued so for a number of days, the wind increasing to a gale. The waves rose high, but I had a good ship. Still, in the dismal fog I felt myself drifting into loneliness, an insect on a straw in the midst of the elements. I lashed the helm, and my vessel held her course, and while she sailed I slept.
During these days a feeling of awe crept over me. My memory worked with startling power. The ominous, the insignificant, the great, the small, the wonderful, the commonplace—all appeared before my mental vision in magical succession. Pages of my history were recalled which had been so long forgotten that they seemed to belong to a previous existence. I heard all the voices of the past laughing, crying, telling what I had heard them tell in many corners of the earth.
The loneliness of my state wore off when the gale was high and I found much work to do. When fine weather returned, then came the sense of solitude, which I could not shake off. I used my voice often, at first giving some order about the affairs of a ship, for I had been told that from disuse I should lose my speech. At the meridian altitude of the sun I called aloud, “Eight bells,” after the custom on a ship at sea. Again from my cabin I cried to an imaginary man at the helm, “How does she head, there?” and again, “Is she on her course?” But getting no reply, I was reminded the more palpably of my condition. My voice sounded hollow on the empty air, and I dropped the practice. However, it was not long before the thought came to me that when I was a lad I used to sing: why not try that now, where it would disturb no one? My musical talent had never bred envy in others, but out on the Atlantic, to realize what it meant, you should have heard me sing. You should have seen the porpoises leap when I pitched my voice for the waves and the sea and all that was in it. Old turtles, with large eyes, poked their heads up out of the sea as I sang “Johnny Boker,” and “We’ll Pay Darby Doyl for his Boots,” and the like. But the porpoises were, on the whole, vastly more appreciative than the turtles; they jumped a deal higher. One day when I was humming a favourite chant, I think it was “Babylon’s a-Fallin’,” a porpoise jumped higher than the bowsprit. Had the Spray been going a little faster she would have scooped him in. The sea-birds sailed around rather shy.
July 10, eight days at sea, the Spray was twelve hundred miles east of Cape Sable. One hundred and fifty miles a day for so small a vessel must be considered good sailing. It was the greatest run the Spray ever made before or since in so few days. On the evening of July 14, in better humor than ever before, all hands cried, “Sail ho!” The sail was a barkentine, three points on the weather bow, hull down. Then came the night. My ship was sailing along now without attention to the helm. The wind was south; she was heading east. Her sails were trimmed like the sails of the nautilus. They drew steadily all night. I went frequently on deck, but found all well. A merry breeze kept on from the south. Early in the morning of the 15th the Spray was close aboard the stranger, which proved to be La Vaguisa of Vigo, twenty-three days from Philadelphia, bound for Vigo. A lookout from his masthead had spied the Spray the evening before. The captain, when I came near enough, threw a line to me and sent a bottle of wine across slung by the neck, and very good wine it was. He also sent his card, which bore the name of Juan Gantes. I think he was a good man, as Spaniards go. But when I asked him to report me “all well” (the Spray passing him in a lively manner), he hauled his shoulders much above his head; and when his mate, who knew of my expedition, told him that I was alone, he crossed himself and made for his cabin. I did not see him again. By sundown he was as far astern as he had been ahead the evening before …
