Spindrift, page 17
“Okay,” he said. “Put her in forward.”
I hesitated, shoved the wrong lever. The engine roared, but there was no movement. I imagined crowds at dockside, smirking. Then he was beside me, hauled the throttle back and shoved the gearshift ahead. The boat moved gently forward. I tried to steer, but she balked momentarily, as if aware of a stranger at the controls. Then she grudgingly swung her bow … too far. And we were heading toward the side of someone’s large, expensive boat. He gently reached past me again and corrected the wheel then stepped back, arms folded. I was sweating as we moved slowly along the line of docked boats toward what seemed to be an impossibly narrow channel out of the harbour. “You’re doing great,” he said.
Once outside, I shoved the throttle forward again and my heart accelerated with the diesel. The boat surged.
“Excellent,” he said. Then turned and walked toward the stern and just sat there, looking around.
We sailed toward an island that seemed to be about five miles out. “Henry Island,” he called out, pointing. The roar in the cab was deafening. The boat was determined not to follow a straight line, and when she’d veer away from the wind she’d pitch violently against the frothing waves. After about half an hour I turned back. The ride became smoother. Danny took the wheel and I went outside, then climbed toward the bow, clinging to a rail above the cab.
I was startled by the near silence there. The wind was icy and my teeth were chattering. Perhaps to reduce my exposure to the chill I lay flat, head over the side, watching the rush of water. Sluicing, foamy furrows fell away cleanly from the flared bow, the sea opening behind like a ploughed field. I thought I heard a strange, sad murmur, a voice I hadn’t heard for years. What are you saying to me?
Approaching the mouth of the harbour, Danny opened a window and shouted up, asking if I wanted to take her in. I shook my head. I’d hardly got her out; I couldn’t imagine manoeuvring my way back in and docking. He managed to do everything at once without hurrying. Turned and tucked the boat smoothly alongside the dock, stepped ashore and secured both lines, then turned off the engine. I just watched.
Ashore, my ears were ringing, my face was on fire. I was chilled to the bone, but I just wanted to laugh.
—from The Bishop’s Man (2009)
Rowboat Meets Cruise Ship
Kenneth Macrae Leighton (1925–1998)
At age sixty-six the author rowed from Vancouver up the west coast to Prince Rupert. Not once in that long journey would he have traded his 14-foot jollyboat for a more comfortable vessel!
It rains hard all night. Morag Anne spins at her mooring but I hear no sounds of scraping on rock. All the same, I don’t sleep much for the night is filled with strange groaning and moaning. I get up several times, once crawling forward on the foredeck in my pyjamas, trying to trace the source of these peculiar cries. It is black as pitch and very wet.
When dawn comes I am quite disoriented. I think at first that I must have been swept down Hawkins Channel. It takes some time to realize that everything looks different at high water and that the boat has turned completely around. My fears are groundless but there is a momentary frisson of anxiety which sets the tone of the day. The moaning and groaning I had worried about all night comes from kelp wound between the rudder and the hull, like a great, tangled ball of string stretching and relaxing with each wave. It takes more than half an hour and a lot of bad language to get free.
It is still raining hard.
In retrospect you wonder if you really enjoyed all that. How could you? I’m here to tell you that, in spite of everything and even, who knows, because of it, I wouldn’t have changed places with anyone.
But it is a gloomy row up Grenville. The channel is nowhere more than a mile wide. When a cruise ship bears down on something the size of Morag Anne it seems very large indeed. Sometimes I feel I can reach out and touch the sides of the huge ships that slowly, very slowly and sedately slip up and down the channel. It is surprising how little wash they make. Seiners on the other hand, not all that much bigger than one of the orange lifeboats stacked like toys on the sides of the giant ships, set up a wash that makes rowing very unpleasant.
I feel sorry for the folks on the boats on such a day. They can’t see to the tops of the mountainous sides of the channel; for all the view they get they could be sailing along a Dutch canal. The sea is a dull, sullen grey. A gloomy scene indeed and more so, I imagine, if you are paying the earth to see it. If you are standing on deck, hands in the pockets of your parka, woollen hat down around your ears and a drip on the end of your nose, bored out of your mind, full to the gills with breakfast and nothing to look forward to but lunch, you might well be wondering about the cost-benefit ratio. I know I would.
I am better off in Morag Anne.
—from Oar & Sail: An Odyssey of the West Coast (1999)
“Now welcome, fish, you who have come, brought by the Chief of the World-Above that I see you again, that I come to exert my privilege of being the first to string you, fish. I mean this, that you may have mercy on me that I may see you again next year when you come back to this your happy place, fish.”
— Kwakiutl Prayer, “To the Olachen,” Franz Boas, in The Religion of the Kwakiutl Indians (1930)
“There are no cod in the whole frigging ocean.”
—Michael Crummey, from “Cod 2” in Arguments with Gravity (1996)
Chapter VI
Bounty Bestowed—Bounty Betrayed
Indigenous oral tradition is rich in tales of oceans once teeming with life, a gift of the Creator. Later stories of John Cabot’s arrival on the Banks of Newfoundland in 1497 speak of cod so plentiful that one could walk on their backs. But in the last century stories began to darken: human ignorance, mismanagement and greed intrude, triggering a shift from stewardship to exploitation. The tragic result—depleted fish stocks, closure of fisheries, loss of jobs and dereliction of old communities—is now a matter of public record. Writers weave these themes through their poetry, novels, tales and memoirs.
Walrus Hunting
Aua (c. 1870)
Aua, an Iglulik angakok—or shaman—shared this song of his success as a great hunter with his friend, the Greenland explorer and anthropologist Knud Rasmussen, during the latter’s renowned Fifth Thule Expedition of 1921–1924.
I could not sleep
For the sea was so smooth
Near at hand.
So I rowed out
And up came a walrus
Close by my kayak.
It was too near to throw,
So I thrust my harpoon into its side
And the bladder-float danced across the waves.
But in a moment it was up again,
Setting its flippers angrily
Like elbows on the surface of the water
And trying to rip up the bladder.
All in vain it wasted strength,
For the skin of an unborn lemming
Was sewn inside as an amulet to guard.
Then snorting viciously it sought to gather strength,
But I rowed up
And ended the struggle.
Hear that, O men from strange creeks and fjords
That were always so ready to praise yourselves;
Now you can fill your lungs with song
Of another man’s bold hunting.
—as told to Knud Rasmussen in Across Arctic America: Narrative of the Fifth Thule Expedition (1927)
The Whalers of Pangnirtung
Aksaajuuq Etooangat (1902–1973)
Between the 1840s and the 1920s, the area of Pangnirtung, Baffin Island, became part of a lucrative, international whaling industry. Chasing the bowhead whale across the waters of the Eastern Arctic Ocean, whalers from Canada, Scotland and the United States came to rely heavily on their Inuit partners to assist them in the hunt and provide them with food and clothing during the long months of wintering in the ice. After the industry moved offshore, the former whaling station became a Hudson’s Bay Company trading post, attracting Inuit families to settle in the area. Today, the hamlet of Pangnirtung has a thriving turbot processing plant and is internationally renowned for its traditional Inuit art.
When I was a child, if the whalers were short of men I was asked to fill in and help them. I actually took part in killing the blue whales even though I was only in my early teens. Every spring, in the month of June, while the floe edge was still a long way from land, the whaling boats would be taken down to the water on big sleds pulled by lots of dogs. The kind of boats I’m talking about had a roof over them, although some were open boats. Once the seal hunting began, the boats would stay out for weeks. Every week a boat would come around the other boats to pick up the catch and take it back to camp, and the other hunters would carry on hunting more seals to fill their boats. The boats would stay in the water until the ice was all gone, which is usually in July. Eventually, each boat would be carrying something: one would be filled with seal meat, another with blubber, etc. Everything was well organized. The qallunaat [non-Inuit people] … would take the skins and blubber and the meat would be given to the women for food.
The women would also go seal hunting when there were lots of seals in the springtime. Every spring, they would plan to go hunting while their husbands were whaling. They would be using their husband’s harpoons, etc. The men who were still in camp with the women would also help. They would pull the qamutiks and women would ride on them. Lots of seals would be killed without using guns. The women would stay beside the seal holes until the seals came up for air; they would kill a lot of seals that way. The men who were still in camp would skin them and take the blubber off the skins.
Regardless of the things that the ships had brought with them, the women would be given cloth free of charge to make dresses. The men would go mainly for the things that they might need for their kayaks or some of the boats. They would take them even though they were all [old] and not fit to be used anymore. And whenever oil or blubber would go bad (yellowish in colour) the men would boil it and when it blackened they would then paint the boats with it, and this thing that we called soot would help to give the boats their colour …
—from Penny Petrone, ed. Northern Voices: Inuit Writing in English (1988)
Whaling Camp
Alice French (1930–2013)
Alice French tells of growing up in the Arctic prior to World War II. She dedicates her book to her children with the words: “Listen, listen my children. / And I’ll tell you a story of where I was born / and where I grew up. / About your ancestors and the land we lived on, / About the animals and the birds. / So you can see.” Here she recalls her extended family’s summer whaling station near Tuktoyaktuk on the Beaufort Sea.
While we were living on the coast we depended on the sea for our food and we had to be very careful not to anger the sea spirit. This meant that we could not work on the skins of land animals. There was rivalry between the sea and land spirits in providing man with his livelihood. Should we be so foolish as to forget this rule, the sea spirit would cause storms to keep us from going out to hunt on the sea. She might also lead all the sea creatures away in her jealousy.
Our whaling trip included all my grandfather’s family. There were my uncles Michael, Harry, Colin, and Donald, and my aunts Olga, Agnes, and Mary. My grandma’s married sister and husband were with us, and then there was our own family of six. In all we had five tents. The whaling camp, as a whole, was made up of some thirty to forty families. A freshwater creek flowed into the sea and made a good harbour for our boats.
Once we had settled in, my grandfather went up the hills with his binoculars, and soon sighted some whales. The men launched the boats and headed out to sea. They could be gone a few hours, or all night, so we supplied the boat with enough food to last for two days. When a boat returned we looked at the mast to see how many banners were flying. Our boat had two on the mast when it came in. This meant that they had two whales. Everyone rushed to the beach to help pull the white whales to shore. The children, with their jack-knives and small ulus [Inuit knives], cut bits of muktuk off the tail flipper and ate it raw. Then the women began to work and within an hour the whale was just a skeleton. The meat was sliced into big slabs and hung up on the racks to dry. The blubber was stripped off the hide, sliced into narrow strips and stored in the 45-gallon drums we brought with us. The first layer of the hide was made into muktuk. It was cut into nine-by-nine-inch squares, hung on racks in bunches of ten and dried for two to three days. Then it was cooked and put into the same barrel as the blubber. This preserved it for eating through the winter months. The middle layer of the hide, called ganek, was stretched, dried, and used for shoe leather.
Grandfather was kept busy making ulus and sharpening them. My grandmother’s job was to teach us the art of cutting up the whale and making use of every bit of it. She taught us how to make containers from the stomach, but first we had to practise separating the layers of skin on the throat. Until we could do this without putting a hole in the skin, we were not allowed to start the more serious task of container making. There were three layers to the stomach and it took two hours to take them apart. Only the middle layer was used. This was blown up and dried for use as a container for whale oil, dried meat, dried fish and bits of muktuk for the winter. The containers were also used for storing blueberries and cranberries and for floats to mark the position of a harpooned whale.
At the whaling camp the girls learned to make waterproof boots. The top part was made of canvas or of sealskin; the sole of the boot was made from whale skin, crimped with the teeth. I was not good at this, much to my grandmother’s dismay. As a result my value as a wife went down. Almost all our clothing was made by hand, so it was important to be good at all these things.
—from My Name is Masak (1976)
Victoria’s Cape Breton Sailors
Donald MacGillivray (1942– )
By the 1880s the east coast fisheries and sealing hunt had peaked and fallen into decline. Particularly hard hit were the fleets of Cape Breton Island. Faced with the choice of migrating or working in industries ashore, many chose to sail their ships around Cape Horn to Victoria, BC. Here they experienced great success in the North Pacific seal hunt, and changed the character of the port. Thus while Nova Scotia’s sealing fleet dwindled, Victoria’s grew. The Cape Bretoners’ adventures were the very stuff of popular romance, attracting novelists like Jack London (The Sea-Wolf) and Arthur Hunt Chute (Far Gold).
On a spring day in 1888 the bustling port of Victoria had its cultural mix enhanced with the arrival of three boatloads of Cape Bretoners. At 8:00 a.m. on Tuesday, 24 April the 113-ton schooner Annie C. Moore under Captain Charles Hackett arrived, having departed North Sydney 158 days earlier. Thirteen hours later the Triumph, a 97-ton schooner under Dan MacLean appeared, after a 128-day passage from Halifax. She was followed within minutes by the Maggie Mac, a 196-ton three masted schooner with Captain John Dodd at the helm, having departed Halifax on 9 November. Hackett was from North Sydney; Dodd was a native of Sydney; MacLean was from East Bay. The majority of the crews were also Cape Bretoners, most of them on the West Coast for first time; only Dodd and MacLean had previously sailed out of Victoria. A fourth schooner with a Cape Bretoner at the helm also sailed into James Bay that evening. The Mary Ellen, under Alex MacLean, Dan’s brother, returned from a nine-week sealing trip along the coast with the largest catch reported to date, entitling the vessel to “carry the broom” as she sailed into port. The most successful schooner would hoist a broom on the main halyard signifying a clean sweep.
That evening the saloons at Tommy Burnes’ American Hotel, Erickson’s Hotel at the foot of Johnson Street, the Garrick’s Head on Bastion Street and other waterfront spots surely rang with a variety of Cape Breton dialects. The Cape Bretoners in Victoria for the first time were probably fascinated with their new home port. It was quite a change from picturesque Arichat, sleepy Sydney or rustic East Bay. The 1880s was Victoria’s decade, and as Ivan Doig phrased it, through the lens of diarist James Swan: “Not at all like the dry and dowdy little Queen whose name it wears … the city is in the manner of the youngest daughter of some Edwardian country house family, attractive and passionately self-absorbed and more than a little silly.” Maybe a bit risqué as well for the innocent Cape Bretoners, considering the openly advertised opium joints and the Johnson Street brothels. At this time, [wrote historian Charles Lillard] Victoria “had the largest red-light district on the Northwest Coast” and sources suggest that a section of the waterfront was “a miniature Barbary Coast full of sailors and gamblers, whores and drunks … the men were wild and free and the women just as mad.”
Most of these Cape Breton mariners were born in the 1850s and 1860s and came of age when the “great days of sail” period was peaking. In 1880 [according to historians Eric Sager and Gerald Panting] Canada had probably “the fourth largest merchant Marine in the world,” with almost 75 percent registered in what is now Atlantic Canada. Two decades later local fleets had declined by two-thirds. The “golden age” there had barely lasted a generation. Given the limited economic opportunities for Cape Bretoners, large numbers went down to the sea in coastal vessels, long distance trade and banks fishing, the latter primarily in American schooners from New England ports. With the protective tariff [promoted by Sir John A. Macdonald after becoming Prime Minister in 1878] the 1880s would see significant increases in secondary manufacturing in the region; such land-based economic opportunities help explain the rapid decline in vessel ownership. But few of the new factories located in Cape Breton. Almost 10,000 migrated from the island in the 1880s, twice the rate of the previous decade.
