Fun fact: The island of Newfoundland is home to zero snakes, zero ticks, and zero skunks. Like a dog, I do best when kept clear of this trio of critters, and that was reason enough for me to sail up and pay a visit. For my wife, Alex, the idea of sailing our 36-foot boat to Atlantic Canada sounded foreboding, damp, and unpleasantly untropical. In her mind, critters, or lack thereof, didn’t justify subjecting ourselves to such a rigorous coast.
More research was needed, so we set ourselves to reading. We learned about the history, climate, and geography of the place easily enough, and then we stumbled upon Canadian author Farley Mowat. His portrayal of life on Newfoundland and in the waters that surround it captivated us. The more we read, the more we knew we had to see this place with our own eyes. So we pointed our bow north last summer to explore the coast that Mowat wrote so fondly of and once called home. It would be our first literary pilgrimage under sail.
“Newfoundland remains a true sea-province, perhaps akin to that other lost sea-province called Atlantis,” Mowat writes, “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.”
Few write about “the hungry ocean” of the North Atlantic with the same reverence and awe as Mowat. The man was a sailor. The full fury of the sea screeches out of his pen in one line, and humorous tribulations with boat failures fill the next. The harbors, boats, and people who call Newfoundland home are keenly understood and shared across the page with fervor. There was no one better to guide us as we voyaged into those cold, unfamiliar Canadian waters than the Sage of Burgeo, the de facto magister navis of Newfoundland himself, Farley Mowat.
Mind The Sunkers
Mowat’s disquieting, nonfiction narrative about the arduous life of a Canadian salvage tug in the “Western Ocean”
