bound as I was to the island of my birth;
I wanted an excuse to stay and found one
but a man’s heart is never satisfied
and there is still a song
in my head on times that
will not let me be
‘Boat Building.’ (1899)
Before the snow settles in
have your wood cut and
carried to the dockyard where
you can work away at her
through the winter.
Scarf the joints to frame her out,
fit the beams, sides and stanchions,
then caulk her timber tight with
old rags or moss chinked in
with maul and chisel.
Give her a name before you
fit her out with rigging,
christen her bow with a prayer.
When the spring drives off the ice
launch her into the harbour
and hope for the best
when you let her go.
Remember this if you can:
a boat on the water belongs
to the water first
regardless of her name
or who it is that names her.
‘Who can understand the heart of a man.’ (1907)
He sat reading a paper until eleven,
knocked out his pipe,
doused the lamp.
His wife already in bed,
he undressed in the darkness,
folding his clothes across
a chair-back.
Around midnight he turned out
to get his knife,
his wife sitting up to see
what he was about.
He had two daughters,
the eldest screamed Daddy Daddy
look what you have done
and he ran out of the house
to the canal where he drowned himself.
I watched them haul his body
from the water and carry him
to the dead house.
He was a stranger to me –
met him coming across from Tilt Cove
aboard the Marion two days before.
I slept next to him in the forecastle
and he did not stir through the night.
When he bolted from the house
he carried the knife with him
and there’s no saying
where he left it.
In the mouth of the harbour maybe,
the silver blade still catching light
beneath the shallow water.
‘Distance from Newfoundland.
Northernmost grave in the world.’ (1913)
A cairn of stones tells the story,
broken oar and a sledge runner
roughed into a cross
where the remains of George Porter lie,
the end of an expedition to Ellesmereland
eighteen hundred miles from St. John’s harbour,
the vessel found wrecked
and nearly forgotten
on the Carey Islands.
I have travelled twelve thousand miles
to Van Diemen’s Land,
crossed the line and lost sight
of everything I had looked upon,
the North Star put out like a pauper
when the Southern Cross
appeared in the sky;
the Water Bear, the Albatross,
the South Sea Seal guiding overhead,
so many strange things that seemed
strangely familiar
as if I was visiting an old city
I knew well from maps and stories.
In Constantinople I stepped into
the Dardanelles that drowned Leander
swimming for the light of Hero’s torch;
I walked the streets of Salonica
where a seller of purple and fine linens
became Europe’s first Christian,
a convert of shipwrecked St. Paul,
the two of them praying together
among bolts of cloth, Lydia
was the woman’s name.
George Porter lies under stone
only eighteen hundred miles from Newfoundland
and almost further than a man could travel –
an initialled watch beside the cairn
where sailors stumbled upon it,
a notebook with the dead man’s name
how close he came
to being lost forever.
‘Life and its pleasures.’ (1921)
The only lesson the years have to teach
is that life is a lottery and
my name has been called a few times
when I wish it had not.
My third year trading
I engaged John Pelley of Exploits
to build me a fifteen-ton boat,
brought her down from
Little Burnt Bay in the spring
and went into Art’s Cove
to cut a load of birch wood,
leaving her at anchor.
She was fitted with everything new
and was worth four hundred dollars
when a hard breeze of wind
took her ashore,
I sold what I could save
for ten dollars and fifty cents.
Coasted lumber between Gander Bay,
Brown’s Arm and Botwood in
the little schooner Mary March
she lay frozen in ice all the winter,
and a heavy sea close on
the breakup wrecked her
before I could get aboard
in the spring.
Served as master on the forty-seven-ton
schooner Rolling Wave
when she parted her chains
in Deep Cove and the rocks beat
out the bottom,
keel and planks floating
out of the harbour like
life’s pleasures lost,
we were lucky to get off her
before she wrecked.
The eighteen-ton sloop Blanch
came free from her anchor
on the last trip of the year,
the Arthur Janes struck
a rock in Dildo Run;
the Prima Donna we salvaged
and worked on all the winter
only to lose her on the shore again.
If Fortune shows favour
she’s fickle besides;
in thirty years trading
I have owned more boats
than I could name,
and have lost almost
as many as I have owned.
‘At home on a cold winter’s night.
The changing scenes of Life.’ (1928)
November bluster,
the night sky obscured by cloud.
On the tall ships I was taught
to steer by the stars,
took them for granted,
like a portrait of grandparents
hung in the hallway before
you came into the world.
There is a telescope on Mount Wilson
in California whose lens
weighs four and one half tons
and measures one hundred inches across –
they say it has mapped the heavens
for hundreds of millions of miles,
that the darkness is deeper than
we ever imagined.
New galaxies and constellations
discovered every day
and it is still only
the simplest things we understand.
The speed of light exceeds
eleven million miles a minute,
it travels through space
for thousands of years after
its star has collapsed;
it is possible
that all my life I have
taken my mark by
a body that does not exist.
A chunk of wood shifts in
the fireplace,
falls;
through the window I watch
winter clouds drift and gather.
Clotted field of stars beyond them,
light rooted hard in darkness.
‘An old sailor’s portion.’ (1932)
I am an old man now
hard aground in Twillingate
and telling tales to skeptics,
my finger dipped in tea
to sketch a map across the table.
The young ones drop by with
whiskey to hear me talk,
I give them streets
cobbled with marble in Italy,
the long spiralling line of China’s wall,
the songs I learned while drinking
with the darkies in Virginia,
those sounds as old as a continent ...
I can tell they don’t believe
the half of it.
It’s an old sailor’s portion
to be disbelieved so often
that he begins to doubt himself;
the best part of my life has passed
as a shadow, and shadows are what
I am left with –
perhaps every place I have ever been
is imaginary, like the Equator
or the points on a compass.
Don’t ask me what is real
when you hear me talk,
I can only tell you
what I remember.
Look down at the table.
The map has already disappeared.
‘Pulling along toward the last end of
the Warp of life and the man changes.’ (1935)
I can’t explain why I was
never happy to stay ashore back then ...
159 thousand nautical miles
I have travelled,
laid my eyes on the colours
of thirty-two countries around the globe
and gladly said goodbye
to them all
I used to say I loved the water,
knowing from the start
it wasn’t that simple
I’ve sailed in seas running higher
than a ship’s topyard,
watched it take down
mast and sail together
before settling into a meditative calm,
the waves like saints of God
resigned to death
When I was a boy in Twillingate
the sailors would say
the ocean is a cruel master,
but I know now it is merely
indifferent, distant,
like the stars;
that it will go on being
what it is long after other things
are lost forever in the dark –
grey horse, garlanded with foam,
at night alight with phosphor;
or lying placid on the tide swell
spangled with a map
of constellations
A Map of the Islands
This is what it means to use a map. It may look like wayfinding or a legal action over property or an analysis of the causes of cancer, but always it is this incorporation into the here and now of actions carried out in the past.
– DENIS WOOD, The Power of Maps
. . . a map is but one of an indefinitely large number of maps that might be produced for the same situation or from the same data.
– MARK MONMONIER, How to Lie with Maps
WHAT’S LOST
The Labrador coastline is a spill of islands,
salt-shaker tumble of stone,
a cartographer’s nightmare –
on the coastal boat fifty years ago
the third mate marked his location after dark
by the outline of a headland against the stars,
the sweetly acrid smell of bakeapples blowing off
a stretch of bog to port or starboard,
navigating without map or compass
where hidden shoals shadow the islands
like the noise of hammers echoed across a valley.
The largest are home to harbours and coves,
a fringe of clapboard houses
threaded by dirt road,
grey-fenced cemeteries sinking
unevenly into mossy grass.
Even those too small to be found on the map
once carried a name in someone’s mind,
a splinter of local history –
a boat wracked up in a gale of wind,
the roof-wrecked remains of a stage house
hunkered in the lee.
Most of what I want him to remember
lies among those islands, among the maze
of granite rippling north a thousand miles,
and what he remembers is all I have a claim to.
My father nods toward the coastline,
to the bald stone shoals almost as old as light –
That was fifty years ago, he says,
as a warning, wanting me to understand
that what’s forgotten is lost
and most of this he cannot even recall
forgetting
NAMING THE ISLANDS
Inhabitants and Explorers
Iles des Esquimaux. Indian Island, Indian Bay, Indian Tickle.
Frenchman’s Island. Cranford Head, Turner’s Bight, Gilbert Bay.
Lac Grenfell, Tom Luscombe’s Pond.
Cartwright, Cabot and Granby Islands.
No Comment Necessary
Island of Ponds, Bay of Islands.
Iles du lac, la Grande Ile.
Woody Point, Rocky Bay, Stoney Arm.
Drunken Harbour Point.
You’ll Know It When You See It
Table Island, Square Island, Narrow Island.
Saddle Island, Iles Crescent.
Chimney Tickle, Quaker Hat, Spear Point.
Castle Island. Conical Island.
Tomayto/Tomahto
You Say Napakataktalic!
I say Manuel Island
" " Tessiujalik
" " Lake Island
" " Nanuktok
" " Farmyard Islands
" " Wingiayuk
" " Lopsided Islands
" "Nunaksuk
" " Little Land Island
Mostly Wishful Thinking
Belle Isle. Bonne-esperance, Baie des belles amours.
Comfort Bight. New York Bay.
Paradise.
Abandon Hope All Ye Who Enter Here
Devil’s Lookout, Black Tickle, False Cape, Bad Bay.
Savage Cove, Brig Harbour.
Battle Island, Cut Throat Island. Wreck Cove.
Pointe aux morts.
The Dead Islands.
Phallic and Phallocentric
Big Island and Long Island. Cox Head. Stag Island.
Halfway Island about ten nautical miles from Entry Island.
The Shag Islands.
Snug Harbour.
The post-coital Tumbledown Dick.
All Creatures Great and Small
Porcupine Island. Crab Island, Caribou Run, Deer Island.
Iles aux chiens, Bull Dog Island.
Seal Bight, Capelin Bay, Partridge Bay Pond.
Goose Cove, Fox Cove, Hare Harbour.
Duck, Eagle, and Gannet Islands.
The Ferrets, the Wolves. Otter Bay.
Venison Island.
Snack Island in the mouth of Sandwich Bay.
Come Again?
Haypook Island. Horse Chops Island.
Bed Head. Separation Point.
The River S-t-i-c-k-s.
Nothing Bay.
ALL THE WAY HOME
Hawke Island Whaling Station, late 1930s
The Kyle went into Hawke’s Harbour every season,
shallow bay stained the colour of wine;
storm of gulls over the water,
a racket like the noise of
some enormous mac
hine choked with rust,
grinding to a standstill.
Went ashore to have a look one year,
the whaling room about the size
of an airplane hangar but lower,
the air inside the building bloated
with the stink of opened carcass;
the one I saw was as long as a small schooner
maybe sixty or seventy feet,
five men in cleated boots scaling the back and sides,
hacking two feet through hide and blubber
with a blade curved like a scythe;
hook and cable attached to winch
it off in strips then, as if they were
pulling up old carpet from a hallway.
A man can get used to anything, I suppose.
I tried a piece of whale meat and liked it,
although it was coarse, and stringy
as a square of cloth.
One of the whalers showed me the harpoons
up close, explained how they explode inside
the body or open up to grapple bone and tissue.
He said a big one might drag the boat
half a day past Square Islands before
they could winch in and turn for the harbour,
a narrow trail of blood on the water’s surface
like a string they could follow
all the way home.
STEALING BAIT
Nain, 1957
The year he came to teach at the school
someone began following the trappers’ lines
through the bush, stealing bait,
setting free whatever was found alive.
There was talk of spirits and such at first,
we should have known it was just the white man.
He’d come into the classroom with bandaged hands
or a nip in his face where the foxes got at him
when he knelt to pry them loose.
An elder went down to see him,
explained how the legs in the trap
are broken, the freed animals
limping off to die of starvation
in a hole somewhere, it made no difference.
He was a crazy sonofabitch anyway,
off in the woods all alone like that,