The Gale of 1929 Read online

  The next day, December 10, the Farnorth steamed into the haven of St. John’s harbour with the Effie May Petite still tied to her stern. The schooner’s ordeal at sea was over. Her attempted 100-mile run for home had kept the schooner adrift at sea for eleven days. And snoring gently in the cradled arms of young Doris Kean, and bristling with a brand new calico coat, was the schooner’s cat!

  9 Lloyd Jack

  Only two schooners made it back to land under their own sails and control. The first one was the smallest one of the fleet, the little Water Sprite of Wesleyville under the command of John Bishop. She sailed back to the port of St. John’s after six days at sea. The only other one to do so unaided was the Lloyd Jack under Skipper Eldon Bishop, also of Wesleyville. The two captains were cousins. Incredibly, before she fought her way back, the Lloyd Jack was at sea for twenty days.

  Edward Churnside Bishop was born on the Salisbury plains of south central England on March 22, 1798, when Britain and Ireland were ruled by King George III. George was one of the Hanover kings. A Saxon. Hanover was in reality in Germany, but due to a union with British royalty, the Hanovers, though German-born, ascended to the throne of England. Many of the British population called them the German kings. King George III, however, was born in England, he spoke the English language, and he never went to Hanover, Germany. He was the first of the Hanover line to be considered by the British people a true English king.

  England was a major world power of both land and sea. Amazingly, the tiny English-speaking island nation floating on the western edge of Europe controlled one fifth of the entire world land mass and no less than one quarter of the world’s population, most of which could not speak the King’s English. When the British royalty boasted that the sun never set on their flag, it was probably true. England was a controlling, dominating nation that had no respect for boundaries, no matter how distant they were.

  At home, the British industrialists were just as dominating, and they were entering into the age of an industrial revolution, which would change the world forever. Electricity was invented. Modern machinery thrummed away in their mills. New means of communication and travel were invented. The modern English businessmen had something else to keep their bottom lines black: child labour.

  When evening whistles announced the end of another day of terrible labour and hordes of men and women poured out of grimy factories, around their legs scurried hundreds of young children, boys and girls. Many of them were not yet tall enough to reach the cluttering shuttlecocks that raced back and forth over their heads as they carried heavy bolts of cloth and skeins of wool to their masters’ bulging shelves.

  Far below the English soil, in dust-choked stopes of unvented, gaseous, lamplit coal mines, children were placed on their bellies on wheeled trolleys and pushed into crevices too small for men. They carried in their pudgy, coal-gritted hands, handmade explosive devices with fuses already alight. After placing the bomb in a fracture of the seamed coal vein, the yelling child was pulled rapidly backward by the rope attached to his pram. Sometimes they were not pulled back fast enough.

  Into such an England young Eldon Bishop was born and raised. He was a fortunate child. His father was a well-established member of the Church of England, and through his influence Eldon received a top-notch education. He grew up just eight kilometres away from one of the greatest mysteries known to man—Stonehenge. The colossus dominated the Salisbury plains and downs where the growing boy sometimes played. Reported to be as ancient as 3,000 years and feared by almost everyone—especially religious people—it was just a place of weird-looking stones to the growing Eldon. However, no boy was brave enough to enter the ruins when the sun had gone.

  Weary travellers walking, and peddlers with jingling wagons always found a welcome at Eldon’s parents’ door when evening came. They lived by a winding, gravelly road that disappeared into the lonely plains of Salisbury. Frequently, travellers who found their feet under his mother’s table were seamen. Their faces were weather-burnt and crinkled. Their eyes squinted and seemed to pierce the listener as they told their wayward tales. Tales of oceans that had taken months to cross over. Where emerald seas, warm as the water on the stove hob, washed upon glittering white beaches that burnt a man’s bare feet. Tales of rum-drinking pirates who never washed or shaved, who stole rich cargoes from ships at sea and sometimes dark-eyed women from the land.

  But always they spoke of a New-founde-lande. A huge island so big they had never sailed all the way around it. It was a place where icy seas snarled around the most terrible of coastlines, where ghostly fogs came creeping up out of a clear sea—a place where schools of fishes so thick as to foul a ship’s keel crowded the water to very cliffs. Young Bishop listened with wonder at such tales of the distant seas. The only body of water he had ever seen was the confluence of the Bourne, Wyle, Ebble, and Nabbeb rivers, all tributaries of the river Avon, at Wiltshire, where he lived.

  Then one day when he was a man—though still a young one—he found himself at the mouth of the Avon River where it ran into the English Channel. There in the crowded seaport of Christchurch, a very excited and extremely nervous Eldon Bishop boarded a brigantine outbound for Newfoundland. The ship had two masts, one of which, the foremast, was square-rigged, and the other, the mainmast, was fore and aft, or schooner-rigged. The vessel was badly in need of paint and both her hulls looked as though they had scrubbed against the spiles of far too many wharves.

  They left the harbour on the ebb tide, without fanfare and with no one waving, with the promise of day still below the aft sails. Late evening of the second day found them still beating southwest. They had left the Lizard behind and were passing the Scilly Isles to starboard when a brisk southwest breeze coming up out of the Bay of Biscay found them. Her sails filled with new wind and her lee scuppers flooded. The brigantine left the islands of Britain behind and reached into the open Atlantic for another great island.

  It took the ship thirty-eight days to reach the northeast coast of Newfoundland. Though he had no fear of the sea, for nearly twenty of those days Eldon Bishop was sick. No one pitied him. He envied nimble sailors who climbed ratlines and hung from shrouds. He watched as they ran without a care out over yardarms high above unsteady decks and cried like perching ravens to men below. He had overcome his illness and was enjoying the experience of his first sea journey when the ship lowered sail and hove to off the small yet treacherous Greenspond harbour. There they would have to clear customs. The Bishops of England had arrived at the north side of Bonavista Bay.

  Bearing the credentials of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts, as well as the Colonial and Continental School Society, Eldon Bishop became involved in the church and also served as a schoolteacher. The man who had been raised on the Salisbury plains of far-off England spent his lifetime around the isolated islands of Bonavista North. He eventually fell in love with and married a young Wicks woman from Fair Island. He lived on Pinchard’s Island for a while. He died on Swain’s Island on May 13, 1885.

  * * *

  The sense of freedom and adventure that had borne their ancestor away from possible servitude and indenture, unbeknownst that another way of life even existed, was well-founded in his progeny. The man who bore the old pioneer’s name, Eldon Bishop, was captain of the schooner Lloyd Jack. He and his crew had been adrift at sea for days and all of them were nearing exhaustion. Water came lacing over the weather bow of the schooner and stung into his salt-encrusted eyes, but by now he was immune to it.

  The flung spray came again and he licked the warm water from his lips. Warm water? The water was actually warm! They had drifted out into the Gulf Stream!

  Almost immediately, despite the northwest gale, came the feel of his schooner bearing to the northeast. Bishop knew about the warm waters of the Gulf of Mexico reaching all the way to Newfoundland, of course. Dozens of stories were told, when schooner captains gathered in port
, about these same ocean currents. Stories such as the one about two banking schooners each laden with codfish harvested from the far offshore Banks. One had beaten farther out to sea in a winter gale and had survived, and the other, which had tried to make it to land in the same blow, had not. The difference, of course, was that while both schooners had to weather the same gale—in fact, the one that had headed farther to sea probably encountered more wind—the one that found the warm waters of the gulf did not have to deal with the added weight of tons of freezing water on its deck.

  Although the Gulf Stream gets its name from the Gulf of Mexico, from where it veers north and follows the eastern seaboard all the way to the east coast of Newfoundland and beyond, this largest of gulfs is not its origin. It actually begins in the warm waters around the Canary Islands, off the northwest coast of Africa. Sometimes it even spawns out of the heated sands of the great Sahara Desert. This “Canary Current” first bears south to the bulge of Africa before flowing west toward the Americas, then north into the Gulf of Mexico before it turns toward the northeast. Its flow reaches as far north as Norway on the edge of the Barents Sea.

  Some of North America’s earliest explorers thought the warm waters of the Gulf Stream originated from the Mississippi River. Although that river drains a large portion of the North American continent and its source can even be traced into Canada’s north—and though it spews its voluminous warm flow into the Gulf of Mexico—they were wrong. The Gulf Stream is a ponderous flow of sea water that makes even our planet’s mightiest rivers seem like shallow streams in comparison.

  Eldon Bishop had no exact way of telling how far off shore he and his crew had drifted. He had a compass on board, which gave him direction but not position. It was built into the binnacle next to the helm. He had a dogvane of his own devising, a simple thing that gave him wind direction and nothing more. There was no other means of navigation on board the Lloyd Jack. By his calculation, based on hours adrift and by taking frequent speed checks with the taffrail log, he figured they were as far as 200 miles east of St. John’s.

  The warm waters of the Gulf Stream vary from year to year, depending on how close they come to the east coast of Newfoundland. Some years the stream can be detected as close as fifty miles, other years as far as 300 miles. After passing the Grand Banks and standing far to sea from the east coast of Newfoundland, the current is divided. Its tributary, which bears part of the flow steadily north, is called the North Atlantic Drift, while the flow that prevails to the west holds its name of origin, the Gulf Stream.

  Bishop was a man of infinite patience with an ever-curious and inventive mind. He was also that type of individual who becomes bothered by not knowing where he is, and he was bothered now. He was convinced he was right about being out into the warm gulf waters. It had to be: there was nowhere else around the coast of Newfoundland like it. He had several charts aboard that he could read more by rote than by education. However, he had no charts for anywhere along the southern coast of Newfoundland, west of Cape Race. These marine maps were of little use to him now, anyway. He knew they had sailed out over the edge of his charts days ago, but exactly where he was he wasn’t at all sure.

  Like most schooners, there was a sounding lead aboard the Lloyd Jack. This was a simple, ancient instrument used the world over by sailors to determine water depth. A leadsman stood in the chains, or bows, of the schooner. If the schooner was moving, the lead was whirled and thrown as far forward as possible. Leadsmen were chosen for their good throwing arm as well as for their ability to simultaneously measure the line as they pulled it back. This was done by stretching the retrieved line the full extent of a man’s reach. A man’s extended arms were considered to be one fathom. One fathom is six feet. This method of measuring the bottom had produced many idioms over the years. The “Deep Six,” six fathoms or thirty-six feet of water under a ship’s keel, was considered to be safe.

  One of the terms used with this method of measurement was made famous by one of America’s most celebrated authors, Samuel Langhorne Clemens, or, as he is better known, Mark Twain.

  While still a young man, Clemens was trained as a pilot on a stern paddle wheeler on the Mississippi River. The Mississippi bears tons of silt along with its determined flow of water. Due to the constant addition of soil swept from its nation-long banks as it passes, its bottom is constantly shifting into different depths. It makes for dangerous conditions for the boats that ply their way over its murky surface. The bottom had to be constantly sounded, and this was Clemens’s main job as pilot. He quickly learned the jargon of a leadsman: The words “By the mark—twain” or two fathoms, were sung out so often they were shortened to “Mark Twain.” When Clemens started writing about life along the Mississippi River, he of course adopted the pen name Mark Twain.

  The sounding lead was a good tool when sailing in strange waters, especially the isolated rugged shores of Labrador, where most of the schooners fished. Most of the Newfoundland schoonermen simply threw the lead cod jigger for sounding the bottom, but Bishop’s lead was a better one. He had seen one, years before on a big tern schooner out of the French port of St. Pierre, and Bishop made it his own. He poured a short, cylindrical piece of lead with a shallow concavity in one of its ends. The other end was attached to a strong, thin fishing line fifty fathoms long. While dry, the lead was smeared with tallow. The hollow in the lead’s end was packed with tallow, or sometimes a sticky grease. This instrument could tell observant skippers of rocky or muddy bottoms, which could mean good holding grounds, or of sandy ones, which would not.

  For days now the thrown lead aboard the wayward Lloyd Jack had brought from the bottom pebbles and sand and, once, grey mud, with two tiny, sideways-crawling shrimplike creatures stuck to the tallow. Another time it brought up pink coral pulsating with life. Sometimes the line ran out the full fifty fathoms and found no bottom at all. Other times the bottom had risen to thirty fathoms. It once showed an amazing fifteen fathoms—this was an area of immense ocean swells that seemed to rise up out of the very depths of the sea, as if the land would soon appear, and still no land was seen.

  Another Bishop aboard the Lloyd Jack was the first mate. Churnside Bishop carried the given name of his forebear. He made his way aft and joined the captain at the wheel.

  “We’ve reached warm water as you planned, Eld, b’y,” Churnside shouted above the roar of wind and crashing waves. He never called Eldon Skipper. Not only were they family, they were close friends.

  “Aye, we ’ave, though mind ye I’d sooner take the cold water, providin’ we were under the lan’. The warm water means we’ve come out into the stream we’ve always ’eard about, a’right,” came the bellowed answer.

  “’Tis a wunnerful t’ing to see the snow an’ ice melt an’ the brutal wind as col’ as ever.”

  “Aye, ’tis jest one of the mysteries of the sea, I s’pose. I’ve heard the current ’ere in those warm waters can run as much as eight knots. No bottom either on the last soundin’. You’re right about the wind. It’d still burn ’ee.” Eldon tried once again to button his wet coat collar as he had done many times on this voyage, but again his neck lay exposed. The button had been missing for days.

  “The ice is drippin’ from the riggin’ like ice from the eaves of me ’ouse on a spring day. We’re ridin’ higher already!” Churnside shouted.

  “P’raps I should’ve kept our cargo on deck,” the skipper said. He spoke this in a voice so low Churnside could barely make it out over the noise. He watched the skipper’s eyes flash around the near-naked deck of the heaving vessel before he spoke.

  “’Twas the rite decision, Eld. We was too top-’eavy. If you ’adn’t ordered the freight overboard we would’ve swamped days ago. Don’t be punishin’ yerself over the loss of a few barrels of h’oil an’ such.”

  “I guess yer right, b’y. ’Sides that, ’tis no good to be cryin’ over spilt milk.”

 
“Spilt h’oil in dis case,” shouted the mate. He was actually grinning and it brightened the skipper’s mood. Churnside had that way about him.

  A thin smile broke through the stiff beard on the skipper’s face. “We’ll soon be ice-free again. Den we’re beatin’ our way nar’west again. Back into the cold waters fer ’ome. I still says our rotten sails ’ave been the bigges’ cause of our misery. Dat bloody S’n John’s sailmaker! ’E’s like all the rest of the S’n John’s merchants. The buggers can’t be trusted.”

  And with that the skipper of the Lloyd Jack put the helm over and the schooner heeled away from the warm waters of the Mexican Gulf toward the island of Newfoundland again.

  * * *

  “What do ’ee mean not ready? We’re leavin’ on dis evenin’s tide! All the scunners are. I’ve got to ’ave all of me new sails. The ones on her spars now ’ave even got patches in the mendin’.”

  “’Tis not possible fer me to do, Skipper Bishop. All we’ve got ready of yer order is the jib and jumbo. Wit’ all of the schooners in town an’ half of ’em wantin’ sails either made er mended, ’twas not possible.”

  “Well, why did ’ee tell a man fer if ’ee knew ’twas not fer the doing? I give ’ee me arder fer a brand new suit of sails better dan five days ago!”

  “Why don’t you wait a day or so, Skipper? By that toime I’ll ’ave all of ya sails finished.”

  “Wait! Wait! An’ not leave ’arbour wit’ the rest of the fleet? Why, you must be sillier dan a narry-face capelin!” Eldon expostulated. He felt insulted. “Never a Bishop yet was lef’ in the wake of no man, sir, fer not being ready fer sea. Get what you’ve made onto yer ’arse ’n dray an’ down to the dock, sir. I’ve barely time to get ’em aloft afore the tide turns.”