The Doryman Read online

  “It’s too bloody early for hail,” Danny said. “It’s not April.”

  “It’s not you who says what weather we gets,” Steve answered, grim-faced and tilting his head skyward. Then he added, “That’s it, that’s all you can do. Best keep working.”

  Larry nodded, Danny sighed, and they all carried on. Richard paused for a minute to stare at the sky. The translucent spheres came down hard and fast, hitting the deck with little thuds. They bounced slightly, as if they were jolly and happy, putting him in mind of the small rubber balls his brothers Jack and Jimmy played with. Then he remembered that he was here to work, and he went back to the chains.

  After their quick suppers, the men began preparing their tubs of trawl, the line with which the fish were caught. The Laura Claire carried five dories. Each dory required six tubs: four to be carried in dories to the Banks and two to spare. The trawls were 2,000 feet long, made of strong strands of tarred cotton. Every thirty-five inches or so another line, a ganger, was spliced into the trawl. The ganger was about thirty inches long and held a strong steel hook. Every trawl line had about 600 hooks. Until almost midnight the men repaired the trawls, replacing rusted hooks with new ones and inspecting every inch of every line.

  The hardest work, after a day with the anchor chains, was stretching the main trawl to get the kinks out. Once again, the men strained and sweated, this time in the cold, dark night. Then they coiled the trawls again and placed them into the tubs.

  “We’re not allowed to do this during the day,” Matty told Richard. “Not on the merchant’s time, no sir.”

  “No?” the boy asked in disbelief.

  “Uh-uh,” Matty shook his head.

  Richard didn’t know it, but they would be at this work every night for the next three or four weeks. It was slow work that required some concentration in spite of its tediousness. It was dangerous work, too, and as the weeks passed, nips and cuts appeared on all the men’s hands.

  During the third week, when he could hardly see straight from work, Richard asked his father, “How much money have we made so far, Father?”

  Steve snorted and then laughed from somewhere deep inside himself.

  “Not one red cent,” he said finally. “Nothing, absolutely nothing.”

  Richard was stunned. He could form no words.

  “This is just preparation time,” Matty elaborated. “We’re just getting ready for the real work. We got to do all this so our gear is in working order to go fishing. Now that’s the hard stuff.”

  Richard’s mouth went dry and he tried to swallow. He thought of his mother and Rachel and wanted to go home, back to the shore fishery. Even further deep down, he wished he could be in school like his little brothers. But he couldn’t. He was stuck on the spring trip, and he feared he’d be stuck on every spring trip for the rest of his life. He returned to the broken hook in his hands and, in his only expression of anger, ripped it off the trawl.

  The crew of the Laura Claire gradually got through their daytime work, straightening out the anchor chains and then overhauling all the running gear, replacing what needed replacing. It was oily, smelly work, sometimes making Richard queasy. He was afraid he’d get seasick if the onshore smells affected him this much. Several times during shore fishing he’d nearly thrown up. Only the fresh open air had saved him. But he couldn’t worry about that now. He had work to do, and plenty of it.

  Chapter Six

  When the running gear was finally overhauled, the men began checking the standard rigging. By now Richard’s arms were beginning to bulk up. Any excess fat was gone from them, and his little biceps were beginning to harden. He worked as hard as he could in his eagerness to please the other men. Once in a while the Captain strolled by to ask them how things were going. He rarely pitched in, and Richard saw how the men stiffened a little in his presence. Quiet anyway as they worked, they were always silent after he left. Again, Richard felt the red heat of a shame he could not articulate.

  The men began replacing the broken ropes with new ones, and then they started the arduous task of removing the sails from the hold. This was no easy task, Richard was to learn. He had never seen sails folded up in ships’ holds before. To him, they were always rigged, flapping, and pulling the western boats out of the harbour. It had never occurred to him that they weren’t always attached to their masts, but he saw now that that was the case.

  The sails were heavy, “damned heavy” as Danny Spencer said. This was especially true of the mainsail, which was seventy-five feet along the main boom and fifty-two feet along the gaff. It weighed 600 pounds, more than Matty, Steve, Danny, and Richard combined. So they tugged at it and heaved it slowly onto the deck under the bleak early-March sky. Again their faces grew wet with sweat, and they began the inevitable ritual of removing clothes to make their work bearable.

  On the merchant’s time, they brought up sail after sail and spread them on deck, ensuring that they were in good condition. They checked every inch of the hundreds there were, looking for frays and tears. Some of the sails had to be mended, so Steve and some of the others set to it with twine. As he sewed, Richard noticed that Steve squinted so that his eyes almost disappeared. Maybe his eyesight is going, the boy wondered. The next job was to hoist the sails: fore, jib and jumbo; midships, the foresail; and aft, the huge mainsail. This, too, taxed the men’s strength, given the heaviness of the sails.

  “It’s important to get this job right, son,” Matty said to Richard. “This is one real important job.” The boy noted how the men seemed to take some pleasure in hoisting the sails, though it was still work on the merchant’s time. He noticed that a small hint of anticipation crept into the air. The men seemed to feel that they were finally getting somewhere. In the evenings, though, they still scoffed their suppers like starving animals and worked on their trawls until midnight, frequently licking the blood off their fingers and pressing their thumbs into wounds to stop blood from flowing.

  After some days, they were finished hoisting the sails. Captain Brinton stood on deck now admiring their work.

  “All right,” he said. “Tomorrow we sail to Burin. Should be a fine day for it.”

  The men all nodded. Burin was the headquarters of Brinton & Sons, the firm that owned the vessel. The Brintons were the Captain’s family. It was the habit of South Coast Banks fishermen to bring the vessel to its owners and home port for the next phase of preparing for the spring trip.

  The day itself dawned sunny and bright and the sky seemed to tease them with just a touch of spring. The Catholic men, who numbered more than half the crew, began the day with a decade of the Rosary down below. Even before they had eaten their breakfast, they said the first joyful mystery and envisioned the Angel Gabriel telling Mary that she would conceive and give birth to a son who would be revered by all the world. Their visions matched the anticipation that marked the day.

  This was Richard’s first time on a moving schooner, and his chest grew with the pride of it. He so wished Rachel and his mother and little brothers were here to see him off. He still missed them but was glad for the one Sunday he and his father had trekked out to Little Bay to visit them. They had been too tired on the other Sundays, when they spent the day laying in their bunks, listening to Danny’s jokes and Matty’s stories. Even during their day in Little Bay, they had both fallen asleep in their chairs as Elizabeth fretted about how thin Richard had gotten. And they had eaten like vultures in a desert.

  The Laura Claire seemed equally proud as she left off her moorings in the cove. Her sails made thundering noises, so strong that the men had to shout to each other to be heard. To the south of them was Marystown, Creston North and Creston South, originally Christ’s Town North and South, Matty reminded them. Mooring Cove itself had once been called Gold’s Cove, a name which filled Richard’s mind’s eye with pirates and stolen loot. This was an old place for fishing. Men had come from the
Basque country and France three centuries before Captain Brinton’s schooner sailed out the bay that crisp March morning.

  Mortier Bay, the massive bay that led away from the villages, was free of ice year-round. It was one the largest harbours in the world. In turn it led to Placentia Bay, Newfoundland’s biggest bay. Placentia Bay was seventy-five kilometres wide at its mouth and had a depth of ninety-six kilometres, making it more than 3,600 square kilometres. For this reason it earned the title “that far greater bay” some years later.

  Although Richard didn’t know it – plucked from school as he was – English and Irish fishermen did not have access to Placentia Bay until the Treaty of Utrecht was signed by England and France in 1713. From that point on, the area was under British rule, and the French were no longer allowed to fish in Placentia Bay. Then it became the province of the English and Irish fishermen whose blood ran through his own, men and women who were transported from England or fleeing the poorhouse in Ireland, looking for a new life in a new world.

  As they sailed out of Mortier Bay with Richard scrubbing the foredeck, the boy looked to the south and saw the mouth of Little Bay. He could not see the bottom of the harbour, for Little Bay was really a deep inlet, a fjord. All he could make out was the rich fir and balsam trees in the bottom. On either side of the narrow valley that made up the community were dots of houses. They looked so tiny from this vantage point, Richard thought, and unfamiliar in their smallness. He could hardly imagine the women and children inside them, going about their endless rounds of chores.

  He could just about discern his family home atop a hill that rose some four hundred feet out of the water. He tried to picture his mother taking bread out of the oven and Jack and Jimmy and the little girls lining up for a slice, maybe with molasses if their mother had any left this time of year. He wondered if Rachel was standing on the hill, looking out for him, maybe waving. He looked around carefully and, seeing no one near him, waved slightly himself, just in case she was there. The gesture made him happy and he carried on scrubbing, satisfied with himself, his work, and the world. He would soon see Burin, the busiest town in the bay.

  Chapter Seven

  Once the Laura Claire was outside Mortier Bay, the air grew colder. Back in the bay, the prevailing southwest wind had warmed the air, even this early in the year, and kept the perennial fog a few miles offshore. Here, though, the cold set in fiercely, and when the men were on deck, the dampness seemed to sink into the marrow of their bones.

  The Laura Claire passed the mouth of Beau Bois Harbour and Duricle on her way to Burin. She sailed past little islands, some of them not more than rocks that rose up from the sea, clifftops, and harbour mouths. She streamed past larger islands, too.

  Burin was the mercantile centre of the western side of Placentia Bay. The slipway here could accommodate the largest banking schooners in the fishery, vessels of 200 tons or more. Burin, or Burin Proper, as the people of Placentia Bay called it, was actually a collection of villages perched on bald rocks near the water. There was Pat’s Cove, where a large extended family lived; Whale Cove, home to fifty souls; Shalloway, where over seventy people lived; and the much larger Step-a-side, named after the English town its first settlers had come from. There was also Dodding Head with only one family, and Great Burin Island, where more than 200 people lived. And Pardy’s Island, home to another 170; Shandy Hall; Bull’s Cove; and Narrows.

  Many of the houses here were large: two, and even three-storied edifices with neatly painted trim, and grand picket fences out in front. Others, of course, were little more than shacks. And there were many in between. Unlike as in Little Bay, where everyone travelled on foot, there were horses and carriages here in Burin, and Richard felt giddy at the sight of them.

  The streets of Burin were filled with people readying for the spring trip. There were coopers, sail-makers, shipwrights, and blacksmiths, all manner of tradesmen. There were cooks directing the loading of barrels of food – beans, pork, flour – onto the vessels. There were stores selling tightly woven cotton and even silk cloth brought back from more exotic climes than these. There was noise and lots of it: the clip-clop of horses’ hooves, the smack of barrels on wharves, the shouts of the tradesmen, the laughter of small children, the call of their mothers.

  The Laura Claire docked in Little Burin Harbour, between Bull’s Cove and Path End. In awe of the place, Richard stood on the wharf and barely missed getting hit by a thick rope that flew through the cold air. Alongside the Laura Claire was the Emma Jane with her crew of Rushoon men, and the Fair Haven, crewed by men from farther up in the bay, places like Southeast Bight and Petite Fort, not too far from where Richard’s mother was from, though he’d never been there. Steve and the others seemed to know most of the men from deep in the bay. The men of the Laura Claire all doffed their caps to Captain Moulton and Captain Travis as they walked ashore. As the captains passed by on their way to the Brinton offices, Richard found himself looking at the ground. That uncomfortable feeling invaded his pores again and his cheeks flushed red.

  “Two hundred years ago, the French fleet hid in these harbours,” Matty said, interrupting the boy’s thoughts. “They were hiding from the English, see? They hid on little islands and coves tucked away like this one. Sir John Norris commanded the English and he was after them. I guess he was a bit of a terror.”

  “Yeah?” Richard replied, somehow sounding much less interested than he really was.

  But Matty didn’t need the boy’s affirmation and continued. “And not too long after that, Captain Cook was here, Captain James Cook.”

  “I heard tell of him,” Richard said excitedly. “He’s right famous.”

  “Indeed he is, lad,” Matty nodded. “He surveyed the whole of the Burin Peninsula. Sure, that’s where Cook’s Lookout got its name.” He flicked his head in the direction of the lookout.

  “Oh!” Richard said. It had never occurred to him before that real things happened here, in this place near where he was born. In the irregular schooling he’d had, he’d heard only a little about the English kings and queens and battles fought and bloodshed way over in Europe. It thrilled him that such a figure as Captain Cook had been so near the place he knew as home his entire life.

  “Captain Cook was all over Newfoundland, sure. There was privateers here, too, lad,” Matty said, widening his eyes. “Sure, they were here less than a century ago, in your great-grandfather’s time when they first came over from Ireland. Burin had to have fortifications, sure, there were so many privateers.”

  “Privateers? Really?” Richard said.

  “Yes, son,” Matty answered, nodding studiously. “They were from America, and they were hard old men. Tough and greedy, nothing could stop them. These were dangerous waters one time, my boy.”

  Suddenly, Burin seemed to offer all manner of adventure to Richard. But he found there was not much time to explore the town. In fact, there was virtually no time. The next stage of preparation for the spring trip began almost the moment they docked. Again, their hours were filled with non-stop work. As soon as the Laura Claire was moored, the men traipsed up to the Brinton premises where their dories lay in storage. They fetched their small boats, five in total, and lugged them down bottom-up to a cleared space on the wharf near their schooner. Richard watched his father’s eyes go over his dory, Dory Number 2, with a fine-tooth comb, taking in every detail. He took the oars in his hardened hands and turned them over again and again, like a surgeon examining his patient. Some minutes passed. He turned the dory over and peered into her belly. Then with his son’s help he lowered the dory into the harbour and floated her to check for leaks. They hauled the dory up and Steve examined her once more. When he was done, he patted the little boat twice on the upturned bow.

  “She’s all right for another year,” he said, almost happily. Richard smiled. Things seemed to be going well so far.

  He watched his father take som
e thick rope and make nose straps and stern straps for the dory. Then his father knotted them into place, his hands doing a frenetic dance. He then set about on making repairs to the oars, which showed some battering from the previous season.

  Like his shipmates alongside him, Steve checked his dory’s thwarts again and looked more carefully at the bulkhead, which he removed from the dory and noted was a little worn. “It’ll have to be replaced,” he decided. “It’s best to take no chances.”

  The next day his father showed Richard how to make a bulkhead. They used no pencil or paper; instead, Steve did all the calculations in his head. They retrieved panel wood from Brinton & Sons just up the hill and cut the wood to the right size and shape. With some help from the other men, they inserted it in the dory. It fit perfectly.

  “She’s seaworthy now,” Steve announced finally. Richard noted that his father seemed really to be in his element here in Burin, in the middle of all the frantic activity that marked the beginning of the year’s Banks fishery, and in spite of the cold that still seeped into their bones. Things here were so different from the matriarchy that was Little Bay and the quiet that characterized their days at home.

  With the dories in good repair, the men walked up to the Brinton & Sons stores again to get paint. Every dory heading out to the Banks had to have a fresh coat of paint. That was their tradition, and they took pride in it. Their carpentry finished, the men set about carefully applying paint to the little crafts. They all used yellow, paler than lemon but with a nice glow, as was the practice.

  Then they began hauling chocks aboard; these were large puncheons they retrieved from the store sheds. They needed six large puncheons for each boat to make into liver butts, where the Captain would render the miserable-tasting cod liver oil. They also dragged on board four large fish crates where they would cut, throat, and head the fish they caught. Then they made two large fish tubs by sawing a puncheon in two. These were for washing the dressed fish.