Bay of Spirits: A Love Story (Globe and Mail Best Books)
Selected Book Details
- Paperback
- Author: Farley Mowat
- Publisher: Emblem Editions
- Release Date: October 2009
- ISBN-10: 0771064675
- ISBN-13: 9780771064678
- List Price: $16.95
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Summaries and Customer Reviews provided by Amazon
SummaryIn 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. |
Customer Reviews
Average Rating: 
This is too much of a "story," despite its depiction of an interesting area and time
Rating:
Farley Mowat writes well and his material is very interesting. I don't like his mix of the personal and the "antropologic" in this story though. I found it disingenuous that it is on page 79 (hardcover edition) that he reveals the following: "Claire had to return to Toronto and her job. I was a married man...." Then a few pages later, he reveals Claire's response to his phone call when he traveled to Toronto a little while later and asked her to meet him: "I never expected to hear your voice once we were back in Ontario. I ... was sure it could never be more than a summer romance. How could it be, when you were a man with two small children?" Well, eventually they found a way. When Mowat's refused him a divorce, he and Claire decided to proclaim themselves man and wife and live "common law." It's kind of ironic that one of the later chapters, entitled "Seduction," tells how Mowat and a friend reported a large suspicious vessel, which refused to identify itself to them, to the Canadian authorities. The authorities sent a bomber to check out the vessel, which still refused to reply, and then contacted the US Navy, which sent a destroyer to stop the vessel. The ship was the yacht of an otherwise low-profile millionaire who had the arrogance to not do the paperwork and to sail into Canadian waters to do some illegal salmon fishing. The Navy let the vessel go, despite the Canadians' request to detain it. Mowat waxes lyrical over the millionaire's "arrogance" in not following the legalities; Mowat makes disparaging comments on the Navy's letting the yacht go. Mowat accusingly mentions the great wealth of the yacht's owner as the deciding factor. (Perhaps the US Navy found no security threat and didn't feel the honor of Canada had been greatly violated). I found Mowat's indignation comical and ironic here. Was the yacht owner so different from Mowat, who failed to do the paperwork that would make his "marriage" to Claire legal? And in a later chapter Mowat doesn't condemn the ship's official who refused to let him and Claire share a cabin because they didn't have a marriage license, but reversed himself when Mowat announced he wanted a refund of the tickets. So it seems okay that money talked for "the Mowats," despite Mowat's conjecture that it did and shouldn't have talked for the yacht owner. As another reviewer mentioned, this does cast a pall on the story--and Mowat's integrity, I would add. This is a book that Mowat couldn't have written at the time--too much social disapproval then. Nor do I think he would have included the oft-repeated swear word "she-c..t," which even today is very rarely seen in print.
(in this latter case, he attributes the success of this threat to the official not wanting to lose business).
A "natural" love story
Rating:
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.
A tale of two loves...but you'll want more of both.
Rating:
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
Rating:
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.
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