The Boat Who Wouldn't Float Read Online Free

iron. Harry assured me I would find no more durable soap anywhere; and he wasright. A decade after acquiring that case I am still on the first bar and it may well be another ten years before it softens up to the point where it produces its first lather.
    Late that evening we reached North Sydney on the northeast tip of Cape Breton, from which port a car ferry sails over the Cabot Strait to Newfoundland lying ninety miles away across some of the roughest water in the world.
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    Here I must interrupt the log of Passion Flower ’s voyage to intrude a few words about the great island which was to become so much a part of my life in the months and years ahead. I shall not attempt a new description of it, for one already exists; one which I doubt can be surpassed. I unblushingly plagiarize it. It is from a book called This Rock Within the Sea by John de Visser and Farley Mowat.
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    Newfoundland is of the sea. Poised like a mighty granite stopper over the bell-mouth of the Gulf of St. Lawrence, it turns its back upon the greater continent, barricading itself behind the three-hundred-mile-long mountain rampart which forms its hostile western coast. Its other coasts all face towards the open sea, and are so slashed and convoluted with bays, inlets, runs and fiords that they offer more than five thousand miles of shoreline to the sweep of the Atlantic. Everywhere the hidden reefs and rocks (which are called, with dreadful explicitness, “sunkers”) wait to rip the bellies of unwary vessels. Nevertheless these coasts are a true seaman’s world, for the harbours and havens they offer are numberless .
    Until a few generations ago the coasts of the island were all that really mattered. The high, rolling plateau of the interior, darkly coniferous-wooded to the north but bone-bare to the south, remained an almost unknown hinterland. Newfoundland was then, and it remains, a true sea-province, perhaps akin to that other lost sea-province called Atlantis; but Newfoundland, instead of sinking into the green depths, was somehow blown adrift to fetch up against our shores, there to remain in unwilling exile, always straining back towards the east. Nor is this pure fantasy, for Newfoundland is the most easterly land in North America, jutting so far out into the Atlantic that its capital, St. John’s, lies six hundred miles to the east of Halifax and almost twelve hundred miles east of New York .
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    Mowat’s prose may be a little overblown, but essentially his description stands.
    The voyage across the Cabot Strait was Passion Flower ’s first encounter with salt water. Shortly before midnight I drove her aboard a huge, slab-sided, unseaworthy monstrosity called William Carson , which the Canadian government built to ply the Strait and so link Newfoundland to the rest of the nation. This thing (in truth she cannot be called a vessel) is about as kindly as an old goat with a sore udder; and just about as beautiful. In her swollen belly she carries several hundred cars and trucks, and on this particular evening she was filled to capacity. Each vehicle was secured to mooring rings welded to her decks; although “secured” is perhaps not the word that one should use.
    We sailed at midnight. By 0200 hours the Carson was wallowing in a heavy beam sea and heaving her great flanks over under the weight of a fifty-mile-an-hour nor’west gale. Her human passengers clung to whatever supports they could find, or rolled about in their bunks moaning an obbligato to the high squeal of the wind. Down below in the vehicle hold all hell broke loose.
    The so-called seaman who had made Passion Flower fast to the deck must have been a farm boy from Saskatoon, Saskatchewan. Otherwise he would have realized that while four lengths of quarter-inch wire may be enough to moor the insubstantial shell that is your standard North American car, such moorings would be as pack thread to a two-ton jeep, laden with about three tons of