Otherwise by Farley Mowat
Author:Farley Mowat
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Biography & Autobiography, Canadian
ISBN: 9781551993232
Publisher: McClelland & Stewart
Published: 2008-02-24T06:00:00+00:00
November 8 found us being bludgeoned by a full nor’west gale some 390 nautical miles from Kap Farvel, the southernmost tip of Greenland, and 432 miles east of the Strait of Belle Isle. By noon Blommersdiik was making very heavy weather of it. Towering greybeards were bursting clean over her bluff bows and water was running so deep and fierce over her open decks that Roy, Spike, and I were effectively marooned in our cabin all that day and most of the succeeding night.
I was convinced the V-2 and the submarine would be swept overboard, but no, when dawn came again they were still with us though they had a different look. White-streaked with salt, they seemed to have been shriven of their aura of death and destruction. Perhaps they were undergoing a sea-change, even as I was.
The following day we entered the Labrador Current and the temperature dropped ten degrees, bringing a change in our avian escort. Jaegers vanished to be replaced by a scattering of sooty shearwaters, a greater black-backed gull, common murres, and dovekies – sparrow-sized seabirds that flew like bullets so close to the surface they seemed to be running on the water as storm petrels do.
As I tried to plot our position on the chart by dead reckoning (it was too foggy to get a sight with the sextant), the skipper came and looked over my shoulder.
”If you are not sure where we are, Captain, you must ask the birds. The black-back out there, and the murres will tell you we are closing with the land. Yes, just as they told old-time sailors who came to fish on this side hundreds of years ago with no sextants, charts, and, more often than not, not even compasses. Often all they had was the lead to find the depth; a chip of wood, a piece of knotted string, and a sand glass to estimate their speed; and the fetch of the seas so they could steer a course. But always they had the birds.
Those old fellows kept their eyes peeled. Ja, they had to, or never would they have got home again.”
I took special mental note of the emphasis on keeping one’s eyes peeled if one was to find the way home. For that, of course, is what I was trying to do.
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