Spindrift

A Canadian Book of the Sea

Anita Hadley, Michael L. Hadley, Anita Hadley, Michael L. Hadley

• Publisher: Douglas & McIntyre
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9781771621731
• eBook ISBN:
  9781771621748
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Essays
• Index: Literature

"an excellent anthology … a lovely project"

--Silver Donald Cameron

Given that Canada has the longest coastline in the world and its motto is "From Sea unto Sea, " it is not surprising that virtually every Canadian writer has been inspired to write about some aspect of the sea at some point in their work. As this book shows, those watery passages are some of the very best writing the nation has produced. Journeying coast to coast to coast, from the picturesque and isolated Vancouver Island village of Ucluelet, through the desolate Northwest Passage, to historic Signal Hill at the tip of Newfoundland's Avalon Peninsula, Spindrift: A Canadian Book of the Sea invites the reader on an evocative voyage. Reflecting on a myriad of sea-related themes--including the earliest Indigenous presence, the first nautical exploration of Canada, the arrival of immigrants on the nation's shores, the realities of making a living on the water, tragic marine events, warfare and celebrated vessels and people-- Spindrift paints a compelling portrait of Canada.

Editors Michael and Anita Hadley have distilled the essence from a vast collection of maritime reflection by some of Canada's greatest fiction and non-fiction writers including Milton Acorn, Pierre Berton, Earle Birney, M. Wylie Blanchet, Emily Carr, Donald Creighton, Michael Crummey, Barry Gough, Lawrence Hill, Edith Iglauer, Joy Kogawa, Malcolm Lowry, Linden MacIntyre, Yann Martel, L.M. Montgomery, Donna Morrissey, Farley Mowat, Alice Munro, Peter C. Newman, E.J. Pratt, Al Purdy, Nino Ricci, Stan Rogers, Jane Urquhart and Rudy Wiebe, to name but a few. Whether yachtsman, professional seafarer, or simply an admirer of ocean vistas, the reader will be moved and delighted by this treasury of Canadian voices.

Please note that, due to licensing concerns, selections in the ebook differ slightly from the print book.

“Injured Choriant or Paeonic” · Malcolm Lowry

The sea

Pouring

Harmlessly

Past the port

Is yet the

Menacing

Tyrant of old

That the

Drowned

Know.

—Malcolm Lowry, “Injured Choriant or Paeonic” from The Collected Poetry of Malcolm Lowry

Chapter I

The Face of the Deep

The expression “the face of the deep” is an ancient, biblical term that conjures up a primordial, re-creative phenomenon. Endowed by mariners with human moods and emotions, this face conjures up equally ancient notions: might, majesty, dominion and power. Indeed, writers who have actually experienced the phenomenon themselves, or whose creative imagination is alive to it, turn repeatedly to evocative language to express it. They speak of the sea as menacing, beckoning, mothering, creating, shifting, hungering—and awe-inspiring. This sense of awe captures what the face of the deep ultimately means: a synergy of fascination and attraction, mystery and invitation, and a reverential fear mixed with dread and delight. Venturing upon the deep invites one on a two-fold voyage: one, a journey into an untamed external world of the senses, and another into the human soul.

The Call of the Sea

L.M. Montgomery (1874–1942)

“I understand now why some men must go to sea,” said Anne. “That desire which comes to us all at times—‘to sail beyond the bourne of sunset’—must be very imperious when it is born in you. I don’t wonder Captain Jim ran away because of it. I never see a ship sailing out of the channel, or a gull soaring over the sand-bar, without wishing I were on board the ship or had wings, not like a dove ‘to fly away and be at rest,’ but like a gull to sweep out into the very heart of a storm.”

—from Anne’s House of Dreams (1920)

Sea Magic

Theodore Goodridge Roberts (1877–1953)

Who has not heard the call of the sea? Many of us can respond only with yearning hearts, in our dreams. It is heard in the markets and offices of inland cities; in vineyards and orchards; in sloping forests, upland farms, prairie kitchens and mountain fastnesses.

Those who go to her are the lucky ones—in the opinion of the rest of us. Yet of those who go to her, many curse her; and yet again many of the defamers return to her.

We know that salt is in our blood, for chemists have found it there—but that fact is a small part of the truth of the allure of salt water for the children of men. Salt is present in the flame of the human spirit and the tissues of our imaginations. Salt of the Seven Seas is the very stuff of our ancestral dreams. In our origins pulse the urge and zest of the turns and tumults of dark and flashing tides, sea winds, sea coasts, sea triumphs and sea-bred fears are native to our souls as to our blood. Of sea salt and sea magic are we fashioned and sprung.

One, two or many generations ago, your ancestors and mine were seafarers and dwellers beside salt water. Swing of flow and ebb of salty tides is the primal rhythm of life in us. Adam was not of an inland garden, but of a sea beach and a seaward facing cave; and not of fig leaves was Man’s first dress, but of kelp and dulce and pearly shells.

Man’s first tales were of sea adventure—if the truth were known! And Man’s first pictures were of great fish and flippered sea beasts, drawn on sand and scratched on soft rock; and the sea rubbed them out and scrubbed them away. Do you think that the first pictures were of elk and bison? Those pictures are the work of the great-great-great-grandchildren of the first artists—if only the truth were known!

When mountain or plain or any inland place breeds a poet, does that poet sing only of inland life and scenes? Not in one case in ten. The chances are that he sings early and often of salt waters, beginning his spiritual seafaring and salty rhyming before even so little as the frothy edge of the least of weedy landwashes becomes known to his physical eye. Soon or later, his feet follow his dreams down to the sea, by sloping valleys and swift rivers, down and seaward to tidal marshes and ringing beaches; for to the sea his mind must go for its creative salt, even as his ancestors went to it to take their daily food from its gleaming shoals and mysterious depths. The business dearest to the poet’s heart (after those of romantic love and heroic death) has to do with islands, reefs, glimmer of topsails on heaving horizons, opal landfalls after weary voyages, pale sands edged with spent foam, wave-worn spars awash in green caves and seaward forests grey with blowing fog.

—from The Leather Bottle (1934)

The Hungry Ocean

Farley Mowat (1921–2014)

The interplay of wind and weather upon the high seas and coastal waters, and their significance for navigation, is frequently the subject of technical writing. Creative writers have taken the analysis a step further by imaginatively capturing the interplay between these forces, and linking them to human fates and character. In the excerpt that follows, Mowat reflects on powerful natural forces and human responses.

The North Atlantic is a hungry ocean, hungry for men and ships, and it knows how to satisfy its appetites. From September through to June a sequence of almost perpetual gales march eastward down the great ditch of the St. Lawrence valley and out to the waiting sea. They are abetted by the hurricanes which spawn in the Caribbean and which drive north-eastward up the coasts as far as Labrador. Only in summer are there periods of relative calm on the eastern approaches to the continent, and even in summer, fierce storms are common.

Gales, and the high seas that accompany them are, of course, the weapons of all oceans; but this unquiet seaboard has two special weapons of its own.

First of all it has the ice—continental masses of it that come sweeping down with the Greenland current to form a great, ­amoeba-like bulge extending from the coasts of Nova Scotia eastward as much as a thousand miles, and southward five hundred miles from Flemish Cap. The bulge swells and shrinks and throws out new pseudopods from month to month, but there is no season of the year when it or its accompanying icebergs withdraw completely from the shipping lanes.

The second weapon is in many ways the most formidable of all. It is the fog. There is no fog anywhere to compare with the palpable grey shroud which lies almost perpetually across the northern sea approaches, and which often flows far over the land itself. There are not a score of days during any given year when between Labrador and the Gulf of Maine the fog vanishes completely. Even in the rare fine days of summer it remains in wait, a dozen or so miles offshore, ready at any moment to roll in and obliterate the world. It has presence, continuity, and a vitality that verges on the animate. In conjunction with its ready ally, the rock-girt coasts, it is a great killer of men and ships.

The coasts themselves are brutally hard. Newfoundland, Labrador, Nova Scotia, and the Gulf shores appear to have been created for the special purpose of destroying vessels. They are of malignant grey rock that has flung its fragments into the sea with an insane abandon until, in many places, these form an impenetrable chevaux-de-frise to which the Newfoundland seamen, out of a perilous familiarity, have given the prophetic name of “sunkers.”

The coasts are of tremendous length. Newfoundland alone exposes nearly six thousand miles of rock to the breaking seas. Everywhere the shores are indented with false harbours that offer hope to storm-driven ships and which then repulse them with a multitude of reefs. The names upon those coasts betray their nature. Cape aux Morts, Cape Diable, Rocks of Massacre, Dead Sailor’s Rock, Bay of Despair, Malignant Cove, Baie Mauvais, Misery Point, Mistaken Point, False Hope, Confusion Bay, Salvage Point, and a plethora of Wreck Bays, Points and Islands.

Yet by the very nature of their animosity towards seafaring men these coasts have brought out of themselves the matter of their own defeat. Men in these parts have always had to take their living from the sea, or starve; and those who survived the merciless winnowing became a race apart. There are no finer seamen in the world. The best of them come from the outports of Newfoundland and Nova Scotia, and from the islands of Cape Breton and the Magdalens. The best of them are men to ponder over, for they can hold their own no matter how the seas and the fog and ice and rocks may strive against them.

And yet it is also true that these men do not properly belong in our times, for they follow an outmoded creed with undeviating certainty. They believe that man must not attempt to overmaster the primordial and elemental forces and break them to his hand. They believe that he who would survive must learn to be a part of wind and water, rock and soil, nor ever stand in braggarts’ opposition to these things.

“Ah, me son,” as one old Newfoundland skipper phrases it, “we don’t be takin’ nothin’ from the sea. We has to sneak up on what we wants, and wiggle it away.”

—from Grey Seas Under (1958)

Coming Suddenly to the Sea

Louis Dudek (1918–2001)

Coming suddenly to the sea in my twenty-eighth year,

to the mother of all things that breathe, of mussels and whales,

I could not see anything but sand at first

and burning bits of mother-of-pearl.

But this was the sea, terrible as a torch

which the winter sun had lit,

flaming in the blue and salt sea-air

under my twenty-eight-year infant eyes.

And then I saw the spray smashing the rocks

and the angry gulls cutting the air,

the heads of fish and the hands of crabs on stones:

the carnivorous sea, sower of life,

battering a granite rock to make it a pebble—

love and pity needless as the ferny froth on its long smooth waves.

The sea, with its border of crinkly weed,

the inverted Atlantic of our unstable planet,

froze me into a circle of marble, sending the icy air out in lukewarm waves.

And so I brought home, as an emblem of that day

ending my long blind years, a fistful of blood-red weed in my hand.

—from The Transparent Sea (1956)

A View from Signal Hill

Wayne Johnston (1958– )

In Johnson’s novel, Joey Smallwood—first premier of Newfoundland—prepares to leave Newfoundland for the first time. He confronts his fear of the sea—a vast hostile force that makes a mockery of human endeavour and threatens to change his life forever.

It occurred to me, for the first time, that I might not come back.

The sea brought out such thoughts in me. My virtual nonexistence in comparison with the eternal sea-scheme of things. I never felt so forlorn, so desolate as I did looking out across the trackless, forever-changing surface of the sea, which, though it registered the passage of time, was suggestive of no beginning and no end, as purposeless, as pointless as eternity.

I had never liked to think of myself as living on an island. I preferred to think of Newfoundland as landlocked in the middle of some otherwise empty continent, for though I had an islander’s scorn of the mainland, I could not stand the sea. I was morbidly drawn to read and re-read, as a child, an abridged version of Melville’s Moby Dick, a book that, though I kept going back to it, gave me nightmares. Ishmael’s notion that the sea had some sort of melancholy-dispelling power mystified me. Whenever it was a damp, drizzly November in my soul, the last thing I wanted to look at was the sea. It was not just drowning in it I was afraid of, but the sight of that vast, endless, life-excluding stretch of water. It reminded me of God, not the God of Miss Garrigus and the Bible, whose threats of eternal damnation I did not believe in, but Melville’s God, inscrutable, featureless, indifferent, as unimaginable as an eternity of time or an infinity of space, in comparison with which I was nothing. The sight of some little fishing boat heading out to sea like some void-bound soul made me, literally, seasick.

—from The Colony of Unrequited Dreams (1998)

The Virgin Berg

Wayne Johnston (1958– )

Every year, icebergs calved from West Greenland glaciers are carried south in the Labrador Current, and eventually appear along the coast of Newfoundland from March to July. Wayne Johnston’s memoir opens with his father’s childhood recollection of one particular iceberg that caused great excitement when it appeared off St. John’s harbour in 1905.

My father grew up in a house that was blessed with water from an iceberg. A picture of that iceberg hung on the walls in the front rooms of the many houses I grew up in. It was a blown-up photograph that yellowed gradually with age until we could barely make it out. My grandmother, Nan Johnston, said the proper name for the iceberg was Our Lady of the Fjords, but we called it the Virgin Berg.

In 1905, on June 24, the feast day of St. John the Baptist and the day in 1497 of John Cabot’s landfall at Cape Bonavista and “discovery” of Newfoundland, an iceberg hundreds of feet high and bearing an undeniable likeness to the Blessed Virgin Mary appeared off St. John’s harbour. As word of the apparition spread, thousands of people flocked to Signal Hill to get a glimpse of it. An ever-growing flotilla of fishing boats escorted it along the southern shore as it passed Petty Harbour, Bay Bulls, Tors Cove, Ferryland, where my father’s grandparents and his father, Charlie, who was twelve, saw it from a rise of land known as the Gaze.

At first the islands blocked their view and all they could see was the profile of the Virgin. But when it cleared Bois Island, they saw the iceberg whole. It resembled Mary in everything but colour. Mary’s colours were blue and white, but the Virgin Berg was uniformly white, a startling white in the sunlight against the blue-green backdrop of the sea. Mary’s cowl and shawl and robes were all one colour, the same colour as her face and hands, each feature distinguishable by shape alone. Charlie imagined that, under the water, was the marble pedestal, with its network of veins and cracks. Mary rode without one on the water and there did not extend outwards from her base the usual lighter shade of sea-green sunken ice.

The ice was enfolded like layers of garment that bunched about her feet. Long drapings of ice hung from her arms, which were crossed below her neck, and her head was tilted down as in statues to meet in love and modesty the gaze of supplicants below.

Charlie’s mother fell to her knees, and then his father fell to his. Though he wanted to run up the hill to get a better look at the Virgin as some friends of his were doing, his parents made him kneel beside them. His mother reached up and, putting her hand on his shoulder, pulled him down. A convoy of full-masted schooners trailed out behind the iceberg like the tail of some massive kite. It was surrounded at the base by...

Table of contents

• Introductions
• Chapter I: The Face of the Deep
• Chapter II: At the Edge
• Chapter III: Vessels
• Chapter IV: Passages
• Chapter V: Just for the Joy of It
• Chapter VI: Bounty Bestowed—Bounty Betrayed
• Chapter VII: Peril and Loss
• Chapter VIII: Migration and Exile
• Chapter IX: A Noise of War
• Chapter X: Portraits
• Acknowledgements
• Permissions