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1970 Leacock Medal - The Boat Who Wouldn’t Float by Farley Mowat

 

The 1970 winner of the Leacock Medal for Humour

The Boat Who Wouldn’t Float

by Farley Mowat

Click Here for Audio of Podcast

 

This is a podcast about The Boat Who Wouldn’t Float, the 1970 winner of the Leacock Medal for Humour.  May 12, 2021 marked the 100th anniversary of Farley Mowat’s birth. Farley passed away just shy of 93 years of age on May 6, 2014. So, this recording  also marked the seventh anniversary of his death. 

One way to observe the occasion would of course be to read any of his books, Farley wrote 43 of them in all.  Some were children's novels. Some were autobiographical, and others were essay collections. At the age of 87, he published the book Otherwise about his early life and his years on the frontlines in World War II.  

At the time, many reviewers and fans presumed it would be his last book. But then two years later, he wrote and published Eastern Passage continuing the story of his life where Otherwise left off.

The Boat who Wouldn’t Float remains one of his most popular works.  In it, Farley tells the story of his adventures sailing a two-masted schooner, Happy Adventure, off Newfoundland and back to central Canada in the mid 1960s.

This podcast features an interview with Farley’s widow Claire, who met her husband during this adventure.

Claire Mowat (CM)

Well, I met him at that boat. I met him in the shipyard of Saint Pierre and Miquelon, which is where I went to study French, and I was a student there. And one day I went down to the boatyard to draw. I'm also a graduate of an art college. So I was drawing pictures of boat masts and ships hauled up and that kind of thing you know, very pretty, picturesque.  And sure enough, one of them was Happy Adventure.

So when he saw me sitting there earnestly trying to draw a picture of it, he said, would I like to come over; he was going to launch the boat that day. It had been repaired in that shipyard.  So I said, of course, I thought this will be great fun, and it was. We went out, and he circled around the harbour. He was getting his compass swung. This is something you have to do when you put a new compass on a vessel. So sure enough, we sailed around the harbour for, I don’t know, an hour or so. Anyway that's how I met him.

 

DBD

So did you join the boat to work on it?

 

CM

I didn't work on it. But in the next few days, of course, the boat was in the water. And he suggested a trip here and a little sail going somewhere else. You know, it was my summer holidays and everything. So sure. That's how that's how we got acquainted.

 

DBD
There's a story in the book about you using the over-the-side-of-the-boat head (and) falling into the water laughing.

 

CM

Oh, that came later.

 

DBD

You charmed him with that ability to laugh at yourself.

 

CM

Well, I did laugh. But it wasn't too funny because it was at night in the harbour, which is a filthy, dirty place. And there was a litter, somebody had drowned a litter of kittens, a horrible thing to do. But that was the way they did it.  He heard me splash into the water and helped me get out of it. Don't forget, I was fully dressed too. The call of nature, shall we say? Was over the side of the ship. And that's how I fell in.

 

DBD

I presume Farley loved Newfoundland, but a lot of Newfoundlanders thought he was sort of mocking them at times.

 

CM

Yeah, they didn't like it. You know, he was, well, he wrote a lot of funny things that we're setting Newfoundland, and some of them were in the book about the boat.

 

DBD

I forget the guy that took his false teeth out of his mouth to eat bacon.

 

CM

Yeah, Newfoundlanders, first when they joined Canada were very touchy because a lot of people had been quite insulting about them, their sensitivity at the time. Now, if you happen to notice the news this week, they are sending us doctors and nurses to deal with the plague, which I think is certainly a well-deserved reversal of the situation.

 

DBD

Were you at the Leacock Medal Award banquet where Farley infamously mooned the audience?

 

CM

I was.  Now why did he do that? I think it was something to do with Pierre Berton.

 

DBD

Various stories suggest that Pierre Berton egged him on.

 

CM

Yeah, he did. He was there, and they were both horsing around. I can't remember why he did it. But he did. He was wearing a kilt. So, you know, you get the picture.

 

DBD
When you read the book, it sounds like (when) Farley went on this voyage, he was maybe going through a difficult time in his life, but he always talked about rum being the antidote for it.

 

CM

Yeah, he talked about that a lot. But he really didn't drink as much as he pretended to. You know, it was sort of a joke, really. But I mean, he did like rum. But he wasn't besotted with it. I don't know. I sometimes think he got the idea from a couple of British writers: poets who drank themselves to death. Anyway, it was a kind of a thing that writers talked about and joked about.

 

DBD

Okay, that's good to know because he did give the impression of something different at times.

 

CM

Yeah, he couldn't have drunk all that much or he wouldn't have lived that long. Besides which writing is very disciplined, hard work.  You can't, you know, stay up drinking all night, get up early in the morning and work all day.  It just didn't happen.

 

DBD

So I find that quite interesting that you say that because I was always trying to reconcile that almost caricature of a heavy-drinker writer that he painted of himself and the fact that he was so productive.

 

CM

And the older he got, the less he drank I can tell you. By the time he was 90 something,  he wasn't drinking much if anything at all.

 

DBD

What happened to the boat?  Do you know whatever happened to Happy Adventure? The actual physical?

 

CM

Yes, I do.

He sold it. And I believe it was sold again. It ended up in this part of the world with somebody who was a sailor/boatman on one of the Great Lakes freighters. And this fellow had an ambition to sail it back to Newfoundland. By then, we had a house in Nova Scotia, and so he did get it indeed to our other house in Nova Scotia, and we repossessed it.

And we gave it to some friends of ours who had a restaurant in Marguerite Harbour, Nova Scotia. The name of the restaurant was The Schooner so it was appropriate.  We gave it to them, and they mounted it on something like a plinth or something in front of the restaurant. There, it sat for a few years, and then the Department of Highways of Nova Scotia had to widen the highway. And that meant taking down what was by then a rather decrepit boat, and they took it down and towed it away to the dump in pieces.

That was the ignominious end of that vessel. It's in a dump somewhere near Marguerite Harbour, Nova Scotia.  They offered to give it back to us, but um, you know, Farley didn't want it.  Nobody wanted it.  It was falling apart, and it really was just as well, that it ended the way it did.

 

DBD

I like The Boat Who Wouldn’t Float. I think, and maybe I'm projecting too much onto it, but it seems like a story of salvation. You know, he started out and the boat was having its challenges, but he sort of implied that he was working through challenges in his life, at the same time.  And I like to think that his encounter with you was the threshold of a nicer era in his life.

 

CM

I like to think that too.

 

DBD

Well, I did want to say that both you and Farley were great inspirations in continuing to write.

 

CM

Thank you. Lots of good luck.