Bay of Spirits: A Love Story by Farley Mowat

Author:Farley Mowat
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Canada, Autobiography, Canadian, Travel, Personal Memoirs, Biography
ISBN: 078671994X
Publisher: McClelland & Stewart
Published: 2009-01-13T06:00:00+00:00

The boys also took us to visit the graveyard on the hill in the centre of the Point. Standing among the wooden markers we could look up and down the entire reach, blue-hazed in the evening light. Jack, the younger son, pointed out other, now abandoned, settlements: Fox Island, Snooks Cove, May Cove, Patrick Harbour, Jack Daws Cove, Harbour la Gallais, Hatchers Cove. Nothing visible to us now remained of any of them.

As we made our way back to our vessel Claire picked a small bouquet, which she placed on our little galley table. There were tears in her eyes as she poached cod fillets for our supper–tears that did not come from cooking.

One rainy day we sheltered in the Dominies’ dimly lit tilt listening to Phil talk about his life while Meg made pots of tea and baked biscuit bread for all of us.

Phil’s story was essentially that of most outport fishermen: a struggle to endure, not against the sea and the land but against the rapacity of merchants, large and small, upon whom the settlers depended for what they could not find or make for themselves; such things as flour, sugar, molasses, tea, fishing gear, guns and ammunition, oilskin coats and rubber boots.

Phil had been a fisher since the age of nine, handlining from a dory with his father. By the time he was fifteen, he was spending his winters on the stormy waters of Cabot Strait, fishing from small schooners in the worst of the winter weather. In summer he had gone down the Labrador in larger vessels to fish among the icebergs there. Now that the schooner days were finished, he fished with his son Ralph close to home–Hermitage Bay in winter and Long Reach in summer.

“’Tisn’t the best, you understands. But ’tis all we got left.”

He and Ralph had a venerable three-horsepower engine in their dory and fished with the latest in nylon nets.

“We gits out to the grounds quicker now than in old times and catches fish easier than ever we could fishing cross-handed. Our gear’s better than ever it were…but the fish is fewer and far between. Nowadays we got to find four or five dollar for every dollar us needed when I were a youngster, but the merchants hardly pays no more for fish than in olden times. ’Tis all a wonder to me.”

Most autumns when Phil “settled up” at Garland’s store (the principal merchant at Gaultois) it was to find himself in debt.

“I got no learning so’s I can’t rightly argue with what the merchant’s got wrote down. But I knows he sells our salt fish to the Portuguese for forty dollars a quintal and pays we five. I knows he buys molasses, butter, and other stuff in St. John’s for a few pennies a pound, and we pays dollars. They’s not much as I can do to keep out of the hole, but I hopes my boys’ll get enough learning to come out in the clear.”

Phil Dominie did not speak of such matters with bitterness, or try to excuse his lack of financial success.

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