The Boat Who Wouldn't Float Read Online Free Page B

am very fond of Newfoundland, St. John’s is not one of my favourite cities. There is nothing wrong with the physical nature of the place; it is old, pleasantly decrepit, sprawling on steep slopes overlooking a marvellous harbour. Nor do I have any antipathy toward the majority of its people, particularly those who work the vessels at the waterfront, or who, in defiance of the fact that this is a capital city, continue to live and fish as true outporters in a community of straggling houses stuck to the cliffs along the Narrows—the entrance to the harbour.
    My dislike of St. John’s stems from the fact that it is a parasite. Through at least three centuries it has been a leech squatting behind its high rock portals, sucking the life-blood of the outport people in order to engorge itself. In the early 1960’s it still had more millionaires per capita than any other city in North America, including Dallas, Texas. These fortunes were made by remorselessly bleeding the outport fishermen who, until Newfoundland joined Canadian Confederation in 1949, were exploited by the St. John’s merchants in a mediaeval fashion. The merchants, whose great warehouses and counting-houses lined Water Street, were called, in helpless bitterness, the “Water Street Pirates.” They were the targets for a passive but enduring hatred which they countered by developing a bleak contempt for the people. Totally oriented toward England, they spoke with English accents, sent their children to England to be educated, and were Newfoundlanders in name alone.

    The peculiar aroma they gave to the city lingers on and is compounded by a stench of corruption which, while it may not be unique, takes second place to none. Politics in Newfoundland have always been of the Banana Republic—or, to be more accurate, of the Codfish Republic-variety.Dictatorship has been only thinly disguised under the shabby cloak of threadbare democracy. Some of the most unsavoury figures in North American history have wielded power in St. John’s and there is, as yet, no indication that some day the old pattern may be broken.
    I did not linger in the city but set out on the Caribou Path along the Southern Shore that very evening. Wheezing and shaking as with palsy, but still game, Passion Flower slowly worked her way south through the long night. At dawn she surmounted the last hill behind Muddy Hole and coasted down the rubble slope toward the village. I let her pick her own way among the boulders and gave my attention to the scene below.
    The little harbour, a mere slit in the crooked coastal cliffs, lay quiescent in the pearl-blue light of early morning. Thirty or forty open boats slumbered at their moorings like a raft of sleeping eiders. A ramshackle filigree of fish flakes (racks for drying fish), wharves, stages, and fish stores patterned the shores of the cove in grey and silver. Two-score square, flat-roofed houses painted in garish colours clambered up the slope from the landwash. Directly below me sprawled the fish plant, a drift of oily smoke rising from its stark, iron chimney.
    It was a somnolent, gentle scene and of a piece with the rest of the thirteen hundred Newfoundland outports which in those days still clung, as they had clung for centuries, to the convoluted coast of the great island. I took in the scene with a pleasure that slowly changed to anxiety.
    Something was missing—and that something was my dream ship. She should have been lying in the harbour below me, bobbing gently at her moorings, alert and lovely, and waiting like a bride for her lover to come. The lover had come—was here, was now—but of the sea-bride there was not a trace.
    Passion Flower butted her way through the last rocky barricade on the goat track leading down to the fish plant, hiccuped once or twice and quietly expired. When I tried tostart her again she only whined piteously. I climbed out and was confronted by a very small boy who seemed to