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.