Product Description

In 1957, Farley Mowat shipped out aboard one of Newfoundland’s famous coastal steamers, tramping from outport to outport along the southwest coast. The indomitable spirit of the people and the bleak beauty of the landscape would lure him back again and again over the years. In the process of falling in love with a people and a place, Mowat also met the woman who would be the great love of his life.

A stunningly beautiful and talented young artist, Claire Wheeler insouciantly climbed aboard Farley’s beloved but jinxed schooner as it lay on the St. Pierre docks, once again in a cradle for repairs, and changed both their lives forever. This is the story of that love affair, of summers spent sailing the Newfoundland coast, and of their decision to start their life together in Burgeo, one of the province’s last remaining outports. It is also an unforgettable portrait of the last of the outport people and a way of life that had survived for centuries but was now passing forever.

Affectionate, unsentimental, this is a burnished gem from an undiminished talent.

I was inside my vessel painting the cabin when I heard the sounds of a scuffle nearby. I poked my head out the companionway in time to see a lithesome young woman swarming up the ladder which leaned against Happy Adventure’s flank. Whining expectantly, the shipyard dog was endeavouring to follow this attractive stranger. I could see why. As slim and graceful as a ballet dancer (which, I would later learn, was one of her avocations), she appeared to be wearing a gleaming golden helmet (her own smoothly bobbed head of hair) and was as radiantly lovely as any Saxon goddess. I invited her aboard, while pushing the dog down the ladder.

“That’s only Blanche,” I reassured my visitor. “He won’t bite. He’s just, uh . . . being friendly.”

“That’s nice to know,” she said sweetly. Then she smiled . . . and I was lost.
–From Bay of Spirits


From the Hardcover edition.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #148894 in Books
• Published on: 2007-09-18
• Released on: 2007-09-18
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 376 pages

From Publishers Weekly
In this ruminative memoir, Mowat chronicles the disappearance of a way of life in Newfoundland and the chance encounter that brought him the love of his life. As a young writer in 1957, Mowat decided to travel on a tramp steamer among the small fishing villages known as outports that dotted the Newfoundland coast. These outports were the home of hardy and colorful fisherfolk of Basque, English, Irish and French descent. Government policy and the depletion of the regional fisheries by huge commercial trawlers were slowly forcing the locals out of their centuries-old homes. Mowat enjoyed the area so much that he bought a schooner for further exploration. Soon afterward, a young woman fleeing the overeager attentions of an amorous mutt stumbled on board his ship and romance quickly followed. Mowat and Claire Wheeler spent the next decade sailing in the rocky bays, thick fogs and sudden squalls of the region. The author of 40 books, mostly on nautical and adventure themes, Mowat has a deep understanding of the sea and the natural world. His observations of the outporters are equally perceptive and provide a fascinating window into a little known corner of North America. In this tender elegy to a lost Newfoundland, Mowat shows an amused tolerance for almost everything except the human greed that has inexorably destroyed his adopted home's cultures and environment. (May)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From The Washington Post
Reviewed by Jonathan Yardley

In the summer of 1957, Farley Mowat was 36 years old. He had served with distinction in Europe in World War II, then returned to his native Canada, where he studied biology, married and had two sons. According to the biography in Wikipedia, "during a field trip to the Arctic, [he] became outraged at the plight of the Inuit people," which "led him to publish his first novel, People of the Deer," in 1952. It was the beginning of a very long, productive and distinguished writing career, one that has made him a celebrity in Canada and has brought much useful publicity to the humane and environmental causes in which he believes so deeply.

During the summer about which he writes in Bay of Spirits, he went to Newfoundland because he wanted to explore that island off Canada's easternmost coast. "Newfoundland is of the sea," he writes. "A mighty granite stopper thrust into the mouth of the Gulf of St. Lawrence, its coasts present more than five thousand miles of rocky headlands, bays, capes, and fiords to the sweep of the Atlantic. Everywhere hidden reefs, which are called, with dreadful explicitness, sunkers, wait to rip open the bellies of unwary vessels." Scattered along this coast were 38 "outports,"

tiny communities of "as few as a dozen inhabitants" or as many as a hundred, each "a little world of its own, living by and on the sea." Mowat wanted to explore these towns, meet their inhabitants, hear their stories.

He did all that and more. Much more. On the tiny island of St. Pierre he met Claire Angel Wheeler, 27 years old, a resident of Toronto who had studied at the Ontario College of Art and "longed to experience something of what lay beyond Toronto's confines. She also wanted to learn colloquial French, so when she heard about a summer school . . . being started in St.

Pierre, she travelled east to enrol in its first session." Mowat immediately fell under her spell, and walked away from their first encounter with a feeling that "this might be the beginning of the happiest adventure of my life."

It wasn't long before he and Claire were in love, which is why the subtitle of this memoir is, simply, "A Love Story." By summer's end they were deep in a passionate affair and desperately wanted to stay together, but "I was a married man so she did not anticipate a long-term future with me, nor I with her." Back at home in Ontario, "I failed to screw up my courage sufficiently to tell my wife I wanted to leave her. My two small boys, Sandy and David, proved to be the mooring lines that held me and I could not muster the strength to break away." Claire "made no attempt to persuade me to leave my family for her," so "the two of us spent the winter in a kind of limbo, lightened by an occasional loving rendezvous."

But winter turned into summer, and once again Mowat and Claire met in Newfoundland. Returning to Ontario, Mowat finally faced the music and told his wife, but "Frances would not agree to an uncontested divorce, and in those times obtaining a contested one was a horrific ordeal entailing such unsavoury expedients as having oneself photographed committing adultery in a sleazy motel room." Instead he and Claire "concluded that the only solution for us was to live together common-law." In Canada at the time "two people living together without benefit of marriage were pretty generally regarded as being outside the social pale," but that's what they did, beginning a "marriage" that now has lasted nearly half a century.

They knew they wanted to live in Newfoundland, at least long enough for Mowat to do research about the place, but they didn't know where. They had Mowat's sailboat, Happy Adventure, but though they loved it deeply, it was hardly the same as a house. They especially wanted to find a house at Bay Despair, also known (less despairingly by far) as Bay of Spirits, "a bit like the fiord country of Norway, only without high mountains -- an enormous water hand with spread fingers thrusting deep into the rocky vitals of Newfoundland" -- but "felt it might be too difficult of access, especially while I was researching my history of the island and would need to get in and out quickly and often."

Then, in 1962 at a settlement called Messers, they found just what they were looking for: a "white-painted frame bungalow perched, somewhat precariously, I thought, on a bald granite dome commanding an unparalleled view of the outer islands and the rolling ocean beyond." The asking price was $4,500, "a give-away price for the snug little house with its large, airy kitchen; cosy parlour; and three small but adequate bedrooms, all on one floor," even with a bathroom, "something few outport homes possessed."

They bought it and settled in, staying there off and on for several years.

They made many treasured friendships and seem to have been treated utterly without prejudice, even though they not merely were living in sin but were outlanders in a place fiercely, proudly and literally insular.

The feelings that Mowat developed for the islanders were strong, but scarcely sentimental. He admired their fortitude, especially that of "most outport fishermen: a struggle to endure, not against the sea and the land but against the rapacity of merchants, large and small, upon whom the settlers depended for what they could not find or make for themselves; such things as flour, sugar, molasses, tea, fishing gear, guns and ammunition, oilskin coats and rubber boats." Time after time he and Claire were beneficiaries of their generosity, sometimes expressed in taciturn ways but always open and obviously heartfelt.

But the islanders were capable of savagery, the sort that often lurks inside people who live too close to nature and see it as something to be exploited. In three different passages, Mowat describes with passion and awar. It was the ultimate Killer Animal at his demonic worst." After another, an utterly purposeless massacre of seals, Mowat developed passionate feelings about "this butchery" and eventually made several expeditions to explore it:

"I went on these bloody expeditions to record and to bear witness against a holocaust that was consuming as many as a million seals a year, a massacre committed with the full support of Canada's federal government and of the legislatures of the several Atlantic provinces, a slaughter of wild creatures on an almost inconceivable scale actively or implicitly sanctioned by most of the Canadian media and by all-too-many citizens of my country.

"An atrocity that is being continued to this day, I hold it to be a heinous crime against life on earth."

Surely his revulsion at this savagery was one reason why Mowat and Claire eventually moved away from Newfoundland. Another doubtless was that his writing commitments began to take him to many places around Canada and the world as his reputation grew, along with his determination to speak out against man's destruction of the environment and his fellow creatures. But Newfoundland had changed by the late 1960s, and it no longer was the simple (if occasionally violent) place he had come to love. Automobiles arrived, and sewage, and new schools "staffed by teachers skilled at denigrating the old ways and arousing in the students a hunger for the golden future promised by the industrial millennium."

It was time to leave, though with far more regret than relief. If this deeply felt book, written in the middle of Mowat's ninth decade, is a love song to his life's companion, it is also a love song to a time and place in which he found the happiness he sought. All in all, a lovely book.

Copyright 2007, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

From Booklist
Canada's most idiosyncratic province is as large a presence as Canada's most idiosyncratic writer in this moving memoir of the love of a woman and the love of a particular place. In 1957, Mowat boarded a steamer that plied Newfoundland's rugged coastline. It was love at first sight, and Mowat would revisit often until he bought his Happy Schooner. On one Newfoundland nautical adventure he met Claire Wheeler. He was married to another then and had two small children. Never trying to justify his behavior, Mowat presents how he transferred his affections and his domicile matter-of-factly. The emotional heart of the story lies in remote Burgeo, Newfoundland, where he and Claire settled. The book concludes bittersweetly when the killing of a trapped whale nearly becomes an international incident with Mowat in the thick of it. Mowat has visited whale killing before (A Whale for the Killing, 1972) but here offers a more personal perspective. In Newfoundland, he realized that, no matter how he loved this orneriest of provinces, he would forever remain a stranger. June Sawyers
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Customer Reviews

A tale of two loves...but you'll want more of both.
This is the tale of two love stories -- one covered extensively, one almost glossed over by books' end.

Farley Mowat came to Newfoundland in the early 1960s and fell in love, both with the land and its people, and with a young artist named Claire Wheeler. It's the former that Mowat dwells upon most in this book, and as a reader I left frustrated because we learn so comparatively little about Claire and about their life together. It takes 1/3 of the book for Mowat to reveal that he was married when he met Claire, and that he the tug of his family -- including two sons -- delayed his eventual divorce. His former family is dismissed in a paragraph.

Having faced the music, Mowat settles down with Claire aboard his famously unseaworthy boat, "Happy Adventure", the star the classic "The Boat Who Wouldn't Float." Readers of "The Boat" will be startled by anecdotes, names and dates changing from one book to another. It gives creedence to the charge leveled against Mowat that he never lets the facts get in the way of a good story.

Ultimately this lovely book covers a period of but seven years, and ends just after Mowat's futile attempt to stop the people of his adopted home of Burgeo from killing a whale that has become trapped in a tidal pond. The whale died, the locals were savaged by the press, and the Mowats decided it was time to leave Burgeo and venture in Happy Adventure to Expo 67 (a voyage that nearly ended many times, if "The Boat" is to be believed.)

This is a wonderful book but I wanted more -- what happened to Happy Adventure? What happened to Mowat's sons? Where did they settle after the Expo trip? Much has happened between 1967 and now! -- I hope to hear more about the Mowat's voyages though these most interesting times.

Storm-tossed and falling in love - with a place and a woman
Farley Mowat's notion of an idyllic day's sail more often than not involves heavy seas in shallow, rocky waters, accompanied by gale force winds, pelting rain and/or pea-soup fog, in a leaky boat with engine issues.

Therefore armchair adventurers will enjoy this memoir of Mowat's 1960s love affair with "a special woman and a special world" as much as romantic sorts looking for travel among the bygone fishing villages of Newfoundland.

Readers familiar with Mowat, however, will know there must be bitter with the sweet. The Newfie fishing communities, fiercely independent and attached to their way of life like limpets to a rock, were in serious decline by the 1960s. The teeming schools of fish had disappeared under the relentless onslaught of the big fishing operations and the government wanted to resettle the fishermen in factory towns, bringing Newfoundland (which had only joined Canada in 1949) squarely into the 20th century.

The book opens with Mowat's harrowing and exhilarating trip aboard a 200-foot coastal steamer, one of six (now gone), which took freight and passengers to the outposts of Newfoundland, their main contact with the world.

"Newfoundland is of the sea. A mighty granite stopper thrust into the mouth of the Gulf of St. Lawrence, its coasts present more than five thousand miles of rocky headlands, bays, capes, and fiords to the sweep of the Atlantic. Everywhere hidden reefs, which are called, with dreadful explicitness, sunkers, wait to rip open the bellies of unwary vessels."

Though Mowat saw little of the coast, due to foul weather and impenetrable fog, he was hooked. He bought a fish-slimed schooner, renamed it Happy Adventure and arranged to have it refitted for cruising.

But, flying in to reclaim his refurbished boat, he makes a dismaying discovery. "My wishes had conflicted with centuries of tradition, which dictated that space allotted to people aboard a boat must be kept to the irreducible minimum so as to leave as much room as possible for fish."

Then, on its maiden voyage the boat sprung a leak, a serious leak. The bilge pump jammed, the fog rolled in, water engulfed the engine and they (Mowat and his friend and longtime publisher, Jack McClelland) luckily ran aground. Next trip out they realized they should have had the compass adjusted while fixing the leak.

It was while working on Happy Adventure that Mowat met Claire Wheeler, a Toronto artist. It was love at first sight, but after several mostly idyllic (including the requisite sprinkle of sudden storms, engine troubles and fog) the pair go their separate ways. Mowat was already married, with two small children, a fact he had previously failed to mention to the reader and which naturally casts a bit of a pall.

Though Mowat makes no excuses, his friends and family - and hers too - seem remarkably enthusiastic about the romance. Either his first marriage was something awful, which does not seem the case, or his memory has reshaped itself. Eventually Mowat tells his wife and goes off with Claire.

They take up residence in Burgeo, Newfoundland, and continue spending summers sailing the coast and meeting its people. While a few communities are insular and suspicious, most are immediately hospitable, inviting the couple into their homes for meals, drink, stories and, when called for, a bed.

Arriving in Francois (Fransway) during a Force 7 gale, he and Claire are taken in by a friend who fed them rabbit soup and roast caribou. Mowat then "learned that it would be necessary for Les to take us to visit every single one of the family connections to show he and Carol weren't trying to hoard us. Visitors had to be shared, just like everything else in an outpost."

The anecdotes and tall tales Mowat collects form an endlessly fascinating portrait of people's work lives, bravery, quirks, superstitions, and customs. These are seamlessly complemented by historical research and interviews, documenting the long and inexorable decline of a proud, hardscrabble way of life. There is regret and sadness, but no self-pity among the Newfies.

Mowat has written more than 40 books, mostly about the people, places, creatures and history of a rapidly disappearing natural world. While this book meanders more than some, his customary passion, humor and eloquence draw the reader into his world.

But it's a world in which he remains an outsider. He is reminded of this from time to time, but the senseless killing of a lone whale (documented in "A Whale for the Killing") stranded in a nearby lake, ends the book and the Mowats' happy sojourn in Burgeo. Though many disapproved of the louts who slaughtered the whale for sport, more disapproved of Mowats' actions in bringing the press down upon them.

A postscript lists other Mowat Newfoundland books, including "This Rock Within the Sea" "Sea of Slaughter," and "The Farfarers." "The Boat Who Wouldn't Float" describes his restoration of the Happy Adventure.

A "natural" love story
Farley Mowat writes a moving story about how he met his wife Claire by accident while trying to escape a vicious dog, and, in doing so, also "kills two birds with one stone" by portraying the colorful, insular people of Newfoundland in the 1950's as well as the inhabitants of the almost unheard of French islands of St. Pierre and Miquelon in the North Atlantic off the coast of St. John, NF. I would highly recommend this book to those who enjoy learning about new places and people, and at the same time would want to curl up with a well-written love story.