Читать книгу Recollections of an Unsuccessful Seaman - Dave Creamer - Страница 10

The horses are discharged onto the Liverpool landing stage and we sail for Canada almost at once, taking with us those of the horse tenders who aren’t in gaol. Nine days later, after an uneventful crossing of the Atlantic, we arrive for bunker coal at Sydney, a pretty little harbour surrounded by pine forests on Cape Breton Island which lies to the south of Newfoundland. The town is reported to be ‘dry’ until we find some ‘wet’ in the first store we enter. Being good sailors and ambassadors, we always observe the customs of the country we are visiting!

We sail up the St. Lawrence River and berth in Montreal under a 300-foot grain elevator that looks like a large packing case affair. As soon as the ship is moored, a gang of men commences breaking up the horse pens whilst the horse tenders are driven away in motor lorries, under the surveillance of the police, to the railway station. These men live and play hard; despite it being November and getting cold here, many are poorly dressed, some walk in bare feet, and most of them carry not a single item of luggage, which does, admittedly, have its advantages when travelling.

A ship can arrive in Montreal in the morning and by night have her nose turned eastward towards the sea with 300,000 bushelsi of grain in her holds. Canada is one of the great granaries of the world, but I can’t say I like Montreal; it’s too cold in November and the whisky is not to my taste. I find the Gaiety Music Hallii as warm a spot as any in that city.

We load 3,500 tons of oats and 1,000 tons of hay before setting off for the 800-mile journey down the mighty and swift-flowing river to reach the ‘blue water’ of the open sea. The St. Lawrence River has a certain cold grandeur in the autumn season. We keep close along the southern shore, steaming past the clumsy square-sailed timber crafts plying their local trade between the grassy islands. In the distance we can see little farm houses with canvas covered ricks, and the low and level plains broken only by the occasional rocky hill, as if they were boulders intruding upon a freshly mowed lawn.

At Sorel, the river widens into a great lake – shallow, unprotected, and windswept – with a deep hidden waterway cut into the solid clay through which the ocean traffic can pass. Beyond the lake on the northern shore, the foothills grow higher and turn purple in the fading daylight. The sun slowly sets in a blood red sky, painting the vast river a soft amber below the deepening blue of the evening sky, and then…the steering gear fails and the vessel runs ashore on the rocks at a particularly nasty bend in the river. Fortunately she can be backed off, and then we scurry off downstream with the current behind us towards Quebec.

The engines refuse to go astern when we try to stop off at Quebec. The ship is swept some miles downriver before she can be brought up, and all the time she is taking in water fast. Without further delay, tugs are summoned and we are towed back upriver and the cargo rapidly discharged. In the dry dock, the ship’s bottom is repaired and returned to a temporarily seaworthy condition at a cost of some £4,000.

I find Quebec to be a tranquil city, but as cold and hard as a diamond on a snow bank; a city where miracles are enacted daily in the way the little horse cabs slither down the steep icy streets in safety. From the chateau on the heights there is a fine view looking over Orleans Island and down the amphitheatre of the lower St. Lawrence. Six miles below the city are the Montmorency Falls,iii one of the finest water cascades in eastern Canada, made all the better by the café at the top of the falls that sells hard drinks.

After leaving the dry dock in a genuine blizzard, with the snow and wind making it impossible to see more than a few yards ahead, the ship drags her anchors and nearly goes ashore again. The cargo is loaded back on board and we sail off down the river steaming under the giant suspension bridge,iv the largest of its kind in the world. The serenity of this mighty stream seems to be absorbed by the many contented-looking little towns nestling near the river banks; the black pine woods outlined against the snow gives the country that frosted Christmas card appearance. At Father Point, which is practically at the entrance to the St. Lawrence River and the scene of the Empress disaster,v thin ice is beginning to form on the water and there is a green steely look about the distant mountains. It is high time the vessel is out of it.

I don’t want to see eastern Canada again, but unfortunately my next voyage leads to my return, and the second glimpse is worse than the first. For all those intending to emigrate, you should take a look at a winter’s gas bill before deciding whether you like it or not, and I don’t like it, not in November. I don’t intend putting off those who wish to emigrate; after all someone must go out onto the prairie and grow the wheat to keep old England going. Perhaps, like me, you have flattened your nose against the windows of Canada House, that building in London displaying a big sheaf of wheat in the window and a photograph of a young man ploughing the land with 20 horses moored abreast. How I have longed to be that man, but not now, not in eastern Canada. You have to be a special type of person to emigrate: fond of hard work, bronzed, and a lover of wide open spaces; a person capable of living and competing with Polish people and Armenian Jews, and of standing at the pier head in Aberdeen on a bitter winter Sunday without an overcoat and enjoying it. If you are really this type of person, then emigrate and good luck to you, but don’t lose the return half of your ticket! Even Mr W. J. Egan, the Canadian Deputy Minister for Immigration, wrote in the Sunday Express that emigrants had to be ‘men of courage’. He couldn’t have been more right!

For my second sailing from Canada, the Newfoundland Banks are shrouded in their usual fog and we have to sound the recognised fog signal for a ship underway: one prolonged blast on the ship’s whistle every two minutes, day and night, continuously for three days. This gets on even the strongest of nerves. We arrive off France on a grey and wet November’s day, but with the docks being full, we anchor in Le Havre roads for two nights. When we finally head towards our berth, regiments of soldiers and military traffic are delayed as we pass slowly through the numerous dock bridges. The congestion inside the port is beyond belief with the dismal and muddy quaysides stacked high with every possible description of war material.

Many different nationalities and professions can be seen inside the docks: kilted Highlanders, Chinese labourers, burly West Indians, Indian Sikhs, blue-trousered Gendarmes, smart French officers, and pretty English nurses, as confusing a jumble of people as the average crew of a British tramp steamer. Our cargo is discharged by the Dockers’ Battalion, made up mostly of Scots, who work unceasingly and probably more thanklessly than any other unit in the army. They don’t even pause for breath from their labours when a munitions factory blows up outside Le Havre; the terrific explosion shakes the ship, although she is inside the dock.