Spindrift, page 22
Newfoundland Sealing Disaster
Michael Crummey (1965– )
Each spring sealing ships would set forth from Newfoundland ports on what amounted to an ancestral, commercial ritual—hunting seals. The ships steamed into the vast ice packs that were then drifting down the Labrador coast from the Arctic, and set their men onto the floes to engage in the slaughter. In common parlance, they were working “in the seals.” Thus on 31 March 1914, the steel steamer Stephano (Captain Abram Kean) lay alongside a floe, while some six miles distant, tucked deep in the ice, lay the wooden sealer Newfoundland, skippered by his son Westbury. Nothing in the atmosphere suggested the fateful events that followed. Forced by severe weather to spend two days and nights marooned on the ice, seventy-eight of the Newfoundland’s men perished. There was tragic irony in this, for the men had first sought refuge aboard Stephano, but were sent back onto the ice to their own ship as the weather seemed favourable to the hunt. A Commission of Inquiry found no fault, but recommended that in future all sealing vessels carry radios and basic meteorological equipment. Newfoundland poet and writer Michael Crummey recreates the last desperate moments of the crew members who perished.
Sent to the ice after white coats,
rough outfit slung on coiled rope belts,
they stooped to the slaughter: gaffed pups,
slit them free of their spotless pelts.
The storm came on unexpected.
Stripped clean of bearings, the watch struck
for the waiting ship and missed it.
Hovelled in darkness two nights then,
bent blindly to the sleet’s raw work,
bodies muffled close for shelter,
stepping in circles like blinkered mules.
The wind jerking like a halter.
Minds turned by the cold, lured by small
comforts their stubborn hearts rehearsed,
men walked off ice floes to the arms
of phantom children, wives; of fires
laid in imaginary hearths.
Some surrendered movement and fell,
moulting warmth flensed from their faces
as the night and bitter wind doled out
their final, pitiful wages.
—from Hard Light (1998)
From Flores
Ethel Wilson (1888–1980)
The small fishboat, Effie Cee, makes her way southward along the open, unprotected west coast of Vancouver Island, heading for Port Alberni in time for Christmas. On board are her captain, Fin Crabbe; his crewman, Ed; and two passengers—Jason, a young logger hurrying back to Josie, his pregnant girlfriend, and an injured First Nations boy whose parents have entrusted him to the captain’s care in hopes of getting him to hospital. En route they encounter a sudden, violent storm during which the Effie Cee is lost at sea.
A few days later the newspaper stated that in the recent storm on the west coast of Vancouver Island the fishboat Effie Cee was missing with two men aboard. These men were Findlay Crabbe aged fifty-six and Edward Morgan aged thirty-five, both of Alberni. Planes were continuing the search.
A day or two afterwards the newspapers stated that it was thought that there might have been a third man aboard the Effie Cee. He was identified as Jason Black aged twenty-two, employed as a logger up the coast near Flores Island.
On the second morning after the wreck of the Effie Cee the skies were a cold blue and the ocean lay sparkling and lazy beneath the sun. Up the Alberni Canal the sea and air were chilly and brilliant but still. Mrs. Crabbe spent the day waiting on the wharf in the cold sunshine. She stood or walked or sat, accompanied by two friends or by the gangling son and daughter, and next day it was the same, and the next. People said to her “But he didn’t set a day? When did he say he’d be back?”
“He never said what day,” she said. “The Captain couldn’t ever say what day. He just said the beginning of the week, maybe Monday was what he said.” She said “he said, he said, he said” because it seemed to establish him as living. People had to stop asking because they could not bear to speak to Mrs. Crabbe standing and waiting on the busy wharf, paying the exorbitant price of love. They wished she would not wait there because it made them uncomfortable and unhappy to see her.
Because Josie did not read the papers, she did not know that Jason was dead. Days had passed and continued to pass. Distraught, alone, deprived of hope and faith (two sovereign remedies) and without the consolation of love, she took secretly and with terror what she deemed to be the appropriate path.
The Indian, who had fully trusted the man who took his son away, heard nothing more. He waited until steady fine weather came and then took his family in his small boat to Tofino. From there he made his way to Alberni. Here he walked slowly up and down the docks and at last asked someone where the hospital was; but at the hospital no one seemed to know anything about his only son.
—from “From Flores” in Mrs. Golightly and Other Stories (1961)
Oil Rig Disaster at Sea
Lisa Moore (1964– )
On the night of 14–15 February 1982, the Ocean Ranger sank during a wild storm on the Grand Banks, 267 kilometres east of St. John’s, Newfoundland. Built by Mitsubishi, it was the world’s largest semi-submersible oil rig. All eighty-four crew members on board perished in the disaster. The Federal-Provincial Royal Commission on the Ocean Ranger Marine Disaster concluded that the rig had design flaws, and that the crew lacked proper safety training, survival suits and equipment. Lisa Moore’s novel February traces a widow’s loss and devastation in the years following the sinking. Fragments of memory return to haunt her as she tries to imagine her husband’s last moments. Although Helen is a fictional character, the well-researched novel is based on the facts of the case.
The phone rang and woke Helen. Telling her to turn on the radio.
Do you have the radio on?
That’s the way the families were informed: It’s on the radio. Turn on the radio.
Nobody from the oil company called …
The men on the Seaforth Highlander saw the men in the water. One is always haunted by something, and that is what haunts Helen. The men on the Seaforth Highlander had been close enough to see some of the men in the waves. Close enough to talk. The men were shouting out before they died. Calling out for help. Calling out to God or calling for mercy or confessing their sins. Or just mentioning they were cold. Or they were just screaming. Noises.
The ropes are frozen, the men on board the Highlander were telling the men in the water. The men on the Highlander were compelled to narrate all their efforts so that the dying men would know unequivocally that they had not been abandoned. And the Highlander crew were in danger of being washed over themselves but they stayed out there in the gale on the slippery deck and took the waves in their faces and tried to cling on and did not give in to fear. They stayed out there because you don’t give up while men are in the water, even if it means you might die yourself.
We’re cutting the ropes.
Have you got the ropes cut?
Bastard is all iced over.
Hurry up.
And there must have come a moment, Helen thinks, when all this shouting back and forth was no longer about turning the event around, because everybody on both sides knew there would be no turning it around. The men in the water knew they would die and the men on board knew the men in the water would die. But they kept trying anyway.
And then all the shouting was just for company. Because who wants to watch a man being swallowed by a raging ocean without yelling out to him. They had shouted to the men in the water. They had tried to reach the men with grappling hooks. They saw them and then they did not see them. It was as simple as that …
A radio handset caught stray sound floating between neighbouring rigs out on the ocean. A line or two of talk crossed wires. The men on the other vessel, the Seaforth Highlander, heard this talk, and they wrote down what they heard. What the men on the Ocean Ranger knew was the weather. They knew the waves were thirty-seven feet and the wind had reached eighty or ninety knots. Or the waves were ninety feet and the wind was gathering speed.
On one of the other rigs, a metal shed bolted to the drilling floor blew away.
We’re going to need every helicopter they got, someone from the Ocean Ranger said. This was the line that came through. Consider the hope in it.
Or the line that came through was: Tell them to send every helicopter they have.
They said: Send everything you have. Someone listening remarked on the calm. It was a calm voice that said about needing helicopters. Of course, there were no helicopters because there was rime ice in the clouds, because of a low ceiling, because helicopters could not fly in that weather, and the men must have known it.
The men on the Ocean Ranger sent out a mayday. We have a list from which we cannot recover. They gave the coordinates. They said, ASAP. They said eighty-four men.
—from February (2009)
Death by Drowning
Elizabeth Brewster (1922–2012)
Plunging downward through the slimy water
He discovered, as the fear grew worse,
That life, not death, was what he had been after:
Ironic to die in life’s symbol and source.
Drowning was not so easy as it looked from shore.
He had thought of sinking down through layers of peace
To depths where mermaids sang. He would be lapped over
By murmuring waves that lulled him into rest.
But all death is a kind of strangulation,
He had been told once and remembered now,
Choking on water like a rope, and coughing
Its bloody taste from his mouth. He had not known
Before how the body struggled to survive
And must be forced, and forced again, to die.
—from Passage of Summer: Selected Poems (1969)
Fathers and Sons
Michael Falt
On 23 February 2013, five fishermen on an extended halibut fishing trip were lost at sea when their 13.5-metre vessel, Miss Ally, overturned in heavy seas 129 nautical miles southeast of Halifax. A Lunenburg reader posted the following response to the CBC website.
I have read several of the comments over the past days since this tragedy has happened and I have decided to put my perspective down. My father was lost at sea several years ago when I was seven years old. He was a lobster fisherman. I remember everything as if it was yesterday. Where I was, how I found out, how I felt, how the community felt and came together for us. I remember the devastating feeling of helplessness, not knowing where he was and holding out hope even when you knew that he had to have died. Praying every day to find his body, I remember my family and I along with people from the community walking the shoreline daily hoping and praying that his body would wash ashore. My mom refused to have a memorial service for him without a body to lay to rest. In those days, all the local fishermen did the search and never gave up—even when hope had gone. Closure is an overused word in today’s language but you really do need to have answers to go on with your life. Whenever someone is lost at sea, I am immediately sent back to that day and what I went through. I wish that I could say it got better but it doesn’t. Sure, you function and move on, but it doesn’t go away and you always think “what if?” My story had a good ending. After months of [our] walking on the shoreline daily, my father’s body washed ashore onto a beach and we were able to give him a funeral and get some relief from the pain. My heart goes out to these families and I pray that they do find those bodies to lay to rest. My final thought is that, with all the technology in this world today, I really thought that the bodies would have been found before this, and I stand beside the fishermen that are out there searching in rough waters for their own.
—“Devastating Loss” from The Chronicle Herald, 26 February 2013
“Land, bloody land—thanks be to God.”
— Sally Armstrong, from The Nine Lives of Charlotte Taylor (2006)
Chapter VIII
Migration and Exile
A nation built by immigrants on Indigenous land, Canada has become a multicultural, pluralist country. Even its earliest inhabitants likely came to it from other continents. Prior to the 1960s, when aircraft began to predominate on international routes, migrants came primarily by ship into the great sea ports on the Pacific and Atlantic coasts. The sea is therefore an overarching settlers’ experience. They came as entrepreneurs in the fur trade, as “daughters of the King” to be brides for the settlers of New France, as indentured workers from China and Japan, as displaced persons and war brides after the European wars. Following World War II, they came in response to successive government policies of immigration that actively recruited workers in a variety of trades and professions. These policies changed over the years: from attempts to preserve the predominance of British and European “whites,” to a gradual broadening of “acceptable” nationalities. In time, too, an increasing number of political and economic refugees found new homes in this “promised land,” this “land of unlimited opportunities.” Yet, Canada’s record of dealing with refugee ships has sometimes been harsh. One thinks, for example, of the 1914 expulsion from Vancouver Harbour of the SS Komagata Maru with her 376 British subjects from the Punjab. Or again, of the event in 1939 when an anti-Semitic Canadian government refused to grant sanctuary to the ocean liner MV St. Louis, carrying 930 Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi Germany. Other vessels with asylum seekers followed into the twenty-first century. Whatever the challenges, neither the journey nor the resettlement process has ever been easy: even once having gained a foothold, some migrants may still encounter racism, marginalization, extradition—even exile.
The Voyage of Paul Le Jeune, 1632
Francis Parkman (1823–1893)
The storm-tossed ship that brought Paul Le Jeune, Superior of the Jesuit mission in Canada, to New France in 1632, carried a fervent missionary and educator. He spent seventeen years in the colony, avidly learning various Indigenous languages and teaching, not only among the Hurons, but also among the children of local African slaves. His descriptive anthropological account of the Hurons, and his personal recollections of the cold, hunger and conflicts he endured, are recorded in the Relations.
It was then that Le Jeune had embarked for the New World. He was in his convent at Dieppe when he received the order to depart; and he set forth in haste for Havre, filled, he assures us, with inexpressible joy at the prospect of a living or a dying martyrdom. At Rouen he was joined by De Nouë, with a lay brother named Gilbert; and the three sailed together on the eighteenth of April, 1632. The sea treated them roughly; Le Jeune was wretchedly sea-sick; and the ship nearly foundered in a gale. At length they came in sight of “that miserable country,” as the missionary calls the scene of his future labours. It was in the harbor of Tadoussac that he first encountered the objects of his apostolic cares; for, as he sat in the ship’s cabin with the master, it was suddenly invaded by ten or twelve Indians, whom he compares to a party of maskers at the Carnival. Some had their cheeks painted black, their noses blue, and the rest of their faces red. Others were decorated with a broad band of black across the eyes; and others, again, with diverging rays of black, red, and blue on both cheeks. Their attire was no less uncouth. Some of them wore shaggy bear-skins, reminding the priest of the pictures of St. John the Baptist.
After a vain attempt to save a number of Iroquois prisoners whom they were preparing to burn alive on shore, Le Jeune and his companions again set sail, and reached Quebec on the fifth of July. Having said mass, as already mentioned, under the roof of Madame Hébert and her delighted family, the Jesuits made their way to the two hovels built by their predecessors on the St. Charles, which had suffered woeful dilapidation at the hands of the English. Here they made their abode, and applied themselves, with such skill as they could command, to repair the shattered tenements and cultivate the waste meadows around.
—from The Jesuits in North America in the Seventeenth Century (1897)
The Bitter Taste of Freedom
Suzanne Desrochers (1976– )
Between 1663 and 1673 some nine hundred young women, known as the filles du roi, arrived in New France as wards of King Louis XIV. Provided with a small dowry, they were sent at state expense to become wives to the bachelors of the colony. Over time, their arrival achieved the desired effect. Whereas in 1663, there had been one woman to every six men, some twenty years later the sexes were about equal in number and the population had burgeoned. In the novel by Desrochers, Laure Beausejour is an indigent woman from the notorious Salpêtrière hospital and prison in Paris.
Beyond, at some distance into the sea, is the ship they will board for Canada. Laure doesn’t know if it is the cold misty air or terror at what lies ahead that makes her shiver. The boat, although one of the largest of its type, looks fragile, almost ridiculous, against the immense backdrop of the ocean. Laure has heard that early summer is the best time to undertake this journey to New France. Attempted too early or too late, their vessel would be shattered on rocks along the coast before they even reached the cruel centre of the North Atlantic …
The passengers are gathered in the hold at dusk for their dinner. The cook’s helpers, each carrying an end of the iron cauldron, descend below. One of the Jesuit priests comes out from behind his chamber curtain and heads upstairs for the captain’s table. The captain has his apartment and deck that looks out over the water. A few members of the nobility and the clergy, each with their own compartment below deck separated by a curtain from the public area, go up each night to dine with the captain. In the hold, along with the three hundred or so passengers, are the ship’s livestock. The animals are separated from the passengers by the boards of their pen, but the dirty straw makes its way through the cracks into the general filth of the ship’s bottom, and the smell of the animals permeates the air. A few of the sheep, cattle, and chickens are destined for the colony, but most are to be eaten during the crossing. But the animals are not intended for the indentured servants, ordinary soldiers, and women from the General Hospital. One calf was already killed for the first feast in the captain’s chamber. The passengers grumble that they hope the notables will be quick about eating the animals, as they are tired of sleeping with the smells and bleating of a stable.
