Free The Boat Who Wouldn't Float by Farley Mowat

well spar’d with Windsor wood. It’s what those trees was growed to be.”
    Spit-and-polish yachtsmen may shudder at the thought of anyone cutting down a tree one day and stepping it as a mast two days later with the sap still flowing out of it. Let them shudder. Those spars are still in the vessel as I write and they will last her lifetime, for Newfoundland black spruce, grown on the edge of the ocean, is one of the toughest woods in all the world. However it does have one peculiarity. The grain does not run straight up and down as in trees that grow in more favoured locations. In order to withstand the might of the everlasting gales, shore-grown black spruce grows twisted like a corkscrew or a barber’s pole. This gives it great strength but, as the dead tree dries, it tends to unwind. What this meant to us was that both our masts gradually untwisted, turning the crosstrees or spreaders in a circular movement. The cure was simple enough. Every month or two we simply eased off the stays, lifted up the masts, and re-stepped them after giving each a quarter turn. No problem.
    The stepping of the masts was a great day at Muddy Hole. To celebrate the occasion Jack made a rapid trip to St. John’s and. finding the pettifoggers off their guard, he actually managed to buy a case of rum.
    Most Southern Shore Newfoundlanders acquire a taste for rum soon after abandoning their mothers’ breasts, and by the time they are grown men they have developed a high degree of immunity to it, but it is not total immunity. Up until this day I had been master of the rum situation and had governedthe issuing of rations according to the three cardinal tenets of rum drinking in Newfoundland. The first of these is that as soon as a bottle is placed on a table it must be opened. This is done to “let the air get at it and carry off the black vapours.” The second tenet is that a bottle, once opened, must never be restoppered, because of the belief that it will then go bad. No bottle of rum has ever gone bad in Newfoundland, but none has ever been restoppered, so there is no way of knowing whether this belief is reasonable. The final tenet is that an open bottle must be drunk as rapidly as possible “before all t’good goes out of it.” Having learned these rules I made it a point never to produce more than one bottle at a time.
    Unfortunately Jack did not know the rules and I did not have enough foresight to brief him. When he arrived back from St. John’s I was away at the other end of the harbour. He carried the case on board the vessel and lovingly unpacked it, placing all twelve bottles on the saloon table, lined up like twelve little soldiers.
    Enos and Obie came below to watch him, and Jack told me later that the ruby glow given off from the bottles, as they sat in a ray of sunshine coming through the forward portlight, was reflected in the oddest manner from the eyes of his two companions.
    Jack then went back to the jeep for another load of supplies. When he returned to the boat every bottle was open and the corks had vanished. He went on deck to ask Obie about this phenomenon and Obie, wordless as usual, simply pointed to the water of the cove where twelve corks were floating seaward on the receding tide like a child’s flotilla.
    It was at this moment I returned and at once I realized we had a crisis. Jack was for recorking the bottles with plugs of toilet paper, in lieu of anything better, until I explained that such a departure from tradition would certainly result in a mutiny and might well get us run out of Muddy Hole. The die was cast. There was no turning back; there was only one thing to be done.

    â€œLook,” I said in a whisper I hoped would not carry to the deck, “by afternoon every one of those bottles is going to be empty. That is a fact and you can rely on it. And if Enos and Obie do all the emptying there’s going to be damn little work done on the boat in the