By W. Lacey Amy
From Collier’s
magazine, January 20 1912.
Down on the Battery, Where Cod Flakes,
Goats, and Children Make the Cliff Sides Picturesque
The Battery is that quaint
suburb of St. John’s, in that oldest colony of the Empire, a scene of cod
flakes and children and goats and rugged climbs, of intricate traceries, of
flake-covered paths and stairways in the rock, of an undecided roadway, belligerently
obstructed by houses in all degrees of whiteness, of odors and flies.
Newfoundland is
synonymous with cod; and to advertise this fact its leading city has leased
its front yard to the cod fishermen. To be sure, nothing but a fisherman and a
goat could make use of a mountainside of rock that seemed to give no foothold,
but under the conditions that developed after the former had established
himself, the evidences of wall-like rock are hidden under marvelously
constructed flakes that push back into the mountain and totter precariously at
the front on poles that appear to be kept up by faith and a tradition that they
cannot fall.
The
Real City
You enter St. John’s by
what is modestly called the Narrows; and the first thing—and the second and the
third, and so on—you see is not a city-crowned hill and a steeple-broken sky
line, but a rugged mountain of rock with its foot hidden behind a wonderful,
disjointed, unreasoning tangle of poles, up and down and across, with perhaps
the peep of a house corner or gable window. At first glance it is ugly in its
malformation and untidiness. At second glance it reveals enough to be interesting;
and when you cut out one of the stereotyped trips of St. John’s and struggle
through the entrance to the Battery road you begin to feel that at last you
have come to the real city.
Fishermen have always
had an attraction for me, and when I inquired where I could get in touch with
them, I was invariably directed to Quidi Vidi, Newfoundland’s
show fishing village. Nobody in St. John’s thought of the Battery. Probably
some artist or litterateur has dilated learnedly upon the quaintness and
beauty of Quidi Vidi, and it is more inconvenient to reach; and no one with a
name has found the obscure street entrance to the Battery. But I had dutifully
climbed Signal Hill, had “done” Quidi Vidi, Topsail, the dry-dock, the golf
links, etc., in recognition of what was demanded of the tourist; and still no
one had steered me into the Battery.
So one
morning—the day after the Regatta—I started off by myself with nothing in
view but the Battery. And I found it—of which fact I have reason to be proud,
for the entrance to the only street it possesses is at the end of a dirty fish
wharf, close to the water. It has no pointing finger or signboard; rather
everything, including the police-court records, tends to direct one elsewhere.
A weather-browned house standing at an angle that must have been haphazard
forms one side of the entrance. About five feet away is the corner of an
equally unsightly fence, streaking off at a slant that is as irresponsible as
the house wall. It looks like the accidental provision for an entrance to the
only door in that house, but a wheeled vehicle of some sort had squeezed
through and I took chances and dived apologetically
between the corners. Had I
been hailed I would have retreated precipitately; but beyond the first turn
there were indubitable evidences of a general passage of human feet and I felt
less lone-some in my trespass.
Up a slight
slope, down another, and up again, and I was in the midst of the flakes,
beside, and overhead. Every available nook was flake covered, and the houses
had to be satisfied with second choice. Children swarmed around me—also flies,
both characteristic of the Battery.
Much of the
roadway ran beneath the flakes, and from the side ran more flakes out over the
water. A group of children burst up seemingly out of the flakes themselves, and
then, upon closer investigation, I discovered that down there was a network of
paths, with steps cut in the rock, assisted here and there by a crude bit of
woodwork. Gates swung in the center of steep stairways, either to keep the
babies out of the water or to designate the limits of a squatter’s domain. And
down there was the real life of the place. Fishermen half-heartedly climbed
down the stagings and cleaned their boats a hundred feet below where I stood
gazing through a network of poles and drying fish.
Women and
children dodged backward and forward across the narrow openings through which I
looked, calling to each other of the stranger that had broken into their seclusion.
Two little girls came toiling up the countless stairs to where I stood, opening
and closing the gates as they grew larger and larger in approach, I stepped
back and placed my camera, calling to them to stay where they were so that the
picture would catch them.
“Does it cost
nothing?” asked the larger of the girls.
I laughed in
sympathy with the mild joke, as I thought it.
“There was an
Eyetalian at the races yesterday charged twenty cents to take yer picture.” she
explained, gratified with the abundance of my philanthropy in doing it for
nothing. Then I remembered to have seen a foreigner at the Regatta races with
one of those cannonlike affairs by which he supplied a tintype for twenty
cents.
Of a Sudden the road came to
an end and I was forced to struggle up a steep
path that disappeared around the face of the cliff over the water’s edge. I had
remembered that beyond, nearer the mouth of the Narrows, was another stretch
of fishing town, and this was the only path that could lead to it. A man from
the city sauntered out on one of the highest stages and proceeded to undress,
and I climbed down with some awe of him who would leap from that height into
the icy water of the deep harbor. He leaped calmly enough, and again, and then
hustled into his warm clothes. Feeling cooler in sympathy, I reached the path
again, only to find that it ended abruptly in a sheer cliff edge. The closest
investigation failed to reveal any way of reaching the village beyond, and I
climbed downward to look under the stages and cod flakes to see the life more
intimately.
It was dark
down there, and cool and damp, and fishy and mysterious. The fishermen stood
out at the edges of the stages in sunlight, working at their boats, or cleaning
out their fish houses; and out of the darkness children and women would come to draw water and to exchange a word
of banter with the men. Clothing was drying wherever the sun could reach,
trousers and smocks and sweaters and mitts that had been soaked with the spray
of the fishing boats; the house washing flaunted up above in the streaming sunlight.
At each staging a boat lay tied, or a sculling fisherman would push the nose of
a boat into an empty place, and after tying it clamber up the ten feet of poles
to the level above.
Again in the
upper path I passed back, looking for a way up the cliff to reach the village
beyond. Two girls lay outstretched near a spring that bubbled from the rock,
waiting for their pitchers to fill, while I took my life in my hands and plowed
up a field of loose rock that needed only a glance to roll on to the water
below. A hundred feet up I reached a path, and, walking around, came in full
view of the scene I was after. But still another dangerous climb to a higher
level was necessary to place me on the path that led down to the flakes just
within the Narrows.
The
Fisherman’s Request
Down in the
roadway a fisherman besought a picture of his cod flakes and wife (the order is
his), and to get it I was forced to pass through a fish house that still retained
many evidences of the last catch. Across a rickety pole staging I stumbled, and
down the irregular ladder of poles to a boat waiting below. And the woman,
with a baby in her arms, came out on the flakes twenty-five feet above the staging,
and stood on its very edge, with a straight drop of thirty-five feet to the
water below.
“I can’t get
anyone to come over here to take the picture,” he remarked. “I’ve never had a
picture of them before.” And he waved his arm at the flakes rather than at the
family above.
He rowed me around the harbor, slouching in the stern
of the boat and sculling, as is the custom of the fishermen, but putting up a
small sail whenever our direction made the use of the slight breeze possible.
And he talked of the fishing, and the ambition that lived with him always of
owning a gasoline engine to put in
his fishing boat so that
he would not be dependent upon the uncertain
wind for reaching and leaving
the fishing grounds.
“You don’t know
of anything in your country, do you?" he asked somewhat pitifully, as if
every traveler must carry a few loose positions in his pocket suitable for a
man whose life for generations had opened each year with the preparation of the
net or tackle, and ended with the delivery of the last quintal of cod.
Later I met the
rest of the dissatisfied returning at noon from their work in the city. Already
there was a change in their faces from the new contact with life, and to me it
was not very pleasant. Dreamy desire had given place to frank discontent. The
scanty, unconcerned attire of the fisherman was replaced by the mixture that
denotes a pocket unable to keep up with the ambitions. The slow, loose saunter
of the lifelong fisherman was gone and had come the definite, peevish step of
commerce. My last impression of the Battery, as I brushed through between the
corner of the drab house and the corner of the untidy fence, was less agreeable
than the first. But before I left I turned to the utmost plank of the near-by
wharf and looked again into the life under the flakes, and saw the children
playing up and down the half-hidden paths, flashing in and out through the
streaks of sunlight.
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