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CHAPTER ONE
I have outdone Judas Iscariot, for he was
paid only thirty pieces of silver for betraying his Lord, and I
have been paid forty. The sardonic Dominican friar at
the Exchequer in Westminster told me that I should feel proud to
be the first man to be paid in the new shilling coins.
“To the priest who is going to the new island,” he read
from the king’s Household Account book, “forty
shillings”.
He counted them out to me across the table. The light coming from
the window behind him made the brand new coins sparkle among his
bony fingers. He had an old man’s hands though he could not
have been aged much more than twenty. The Dominicans are never
young.
I admired the bright shillings as he counted them again.
“I’ve never had new coins before,” I told him.
“It feels like an honour to be the first man to spend
them.”
“New coins for a new year,” he replied. “We call
them testoons, little heads, because they bear the king’s
head.”
He pushed four neat piles of ten coins across the chequered table
that gives the Exchequer its name.
“The king is paying you well for this exile.”
“It isn’t exile. Newfoundland is an English possession,
as English as London or Devon; but the king is paying me well for
ministering to the fishing fleet this summer.”
“I wish I could do more pastoral work, but the Church has
assigned me to financial duties.”
Whenever you meet a friar, monk, or priest who is employed on
administrative work, they always tell you that they wish they
could be working with the poor or the sick, caring for souls
instead of scratching on account rolls. It is a strange thing
that they never prove it by actually coming forward and
volunteering for pastoral work among the unwashed, the unholy,
and the ungrateful.
I brought the forty coins across the ocean to Newfoundland in the
same great chest in which I keep my Mass kit and my portable
altar, the tools of my calling. Being a priest is an easy trade
if you do only what you are obliged to do, and an impossibly hard
one if you try to do all that you should, because you can never
heal all the spiritual wounds that are laid before you every day
in the tense whispers of confession.
It is the quiet part of my day now. The fleet are out fishing,
and the shore workers have gone into the vast dark forests to cut
wood. I am alone here, guarding our encampment, against what or
whom I do not know.
I decided to clean out my great chest, which is so old that even
my father did not know its age when he entrusted it to me for
this summer in Newfoundland. When I opened it for the first time
since we landed, I was pleased to find no damage to this thick
blank book in which I am writing, my or to my goose quills and my
ink, and that no one had stolen my forty testoons.
I write the name as testones in Latin, meaning “little
heads” just as the English name does, from the head of King
Henry VII that they bear. They were issued in April of this year,
the nineteenth year of his reign, 1504 by the calendar. They are
the first silver shilling coins ever minted. Why did I bring them
here, where no one sells anything and there is nothing to buy?
I am writing in Latin because I suspect that some of the
fishermen can read, and I know that a few of the ships”
officers can, but I doubt that any of them understand Latin. They
have spent all their lives listening to Latin words in church,
and even speaking them by rote when the priest requires a
response from the congregation, but many have no idea what they
are saying, as they have told me.
Latin is a good language for secrets, and I like secrets, as does
my father. How do I write my name in Latin? Well, I write it now
in English, Ralph Fletcher, priest to the Newfoundland fishing
fleet. The name Ralph looks strange in Latin, and I thought about
calling myself Radulphus, but then I realised that I did not know
the Latin for “Fletcher”, one who makes arrows. It is
my father’s great shame that our very name proclaims that we
come from a family of common craftsmen, but there is no way that
a man can change his name. My father would if he could.
I have just gone out of the hut for an hour, weighting down my
pen with a beach stone as a defence against the wind, which seems
never to stop blowing in Newfoundland. An unsecured goose feather
might find itself carried all the way back across the ocean to
England on those relentless Westerlies.
As I closed the door behind me I had to stop it shut with the
rock that is kept outside for just that purpose. One of the
curiosities of this strange land is that although the wind never
stops, the land never changes. The dark trees of the forest and
the purple-grey rocks splashed with sad patches of lichen never
change. Even the hut that we have built (we? My soft
cleric’s hands took no part in the work) has the appearance
of a natural thing, because it is the same colour as the forest
of whose trees it was constructed.
Now that I had resolved to write down my impressions of
Newfoundland before I sail home with the fleet at the end of the
summer fishing season, I tried to put my observations into words,
the precise, correct words, as I was taught to do by my
composition master when I was at school at Winchester College.
How much easier it is to find the words in Latin than in English,
even though Latin had never been heard in Newfoundland before
John Cabot’s crew muttered their prayers on that first
voyage of discovery seven years ago. Yet somehow this is a land
made for Latin, with that language’s spareness and austerity
and its sense of communicating a deep meaning. I wondered what
Newfoundland meant for me and for England, for God must have
created it for some purpose that we must find out.
I had turned my back on the shore, looking towards the forest so
that I contemplate it with full concentration while I tried to
find my words, when Horsfall the under-carpenter came out of the
woods dragging a pile of small logs along the ground on a frame
attached to his back.
“Hullo, Sir Ralph! No work to do?”
Why does everyone call a priest ‘sir', whether he deserves
it or not? I suppose it is a privilege given to the deserving and
the undeserving alike, in the same way that the power to turn
bread and wine into the body and blood of Christ is given to all
priests regardless of whether their manner of life is holy or
dissolute.
“Priests don’t work, Horsfall. You’ve all been
telling me that since we left England.”
“Ah, that’s just rough teasing. You must not have spent
much time among rough men.”
“I haven’t, that’s true. You’ve been working,
though. What’s all that wood for?”
“Firewood, Father, for the winter crew. You know, the men
who over winter in Newfoundland until the fleet returns in the
spring. We’ll need a great store of firewood. The winters
are bitter here. The first winter crews lost most of their men
from cold.”
“God help our winter crew, then.”
“I hope so, for I’ll be one of them. I’m
staying.”
“You, Horsfall? What will you find to do in the long cold of
winter?”
Horsfall began stacking the logs against the front wall of our
hut, fighting the gusts of wind that rolled them around as fast
as he tried to lay them down in good order.
“It’s not I who want to stay. It’s Young Martin.
He’s never been on a voyage before, and he wants to take in
all he can of new things and a new land.”
“Has he heard the tales of what the winter is like
here?”
“Oh, indeed, but he won’t listen. He’s still in
wonder at having crossed the ocean, and he wants to be able to
say that he’s spent the whole year in Newfoundland.”
“God grant that he sees the next spring then, and you as
well.”
“Thank you for not forgetting to add me in that
prayer.”
Horsfall turned away from me with that sharp shrug which
signifies that a man is not interested in my conversation any
more. I am accustomed that shrug of dismissal; I have been seeing
it ever since we landed in Newfoundland, and indeed all my life
before that. I do not know how to deal with men, and I have no
experience of women. I can only hope that my religious training
has equipped me to talk properly to God on behalf of myself and
my surly flock.
I resumed my attempts to frame the right words to describe the
new island, although it is new only to Englishmen, being five and
half thousand years old like the rest of the world.
I walked to the far end of the hut and turned right to look at
the sea. We are always as aware of its presence as we are of the
opposing presence of the forest.
The first sight that meets anyone passing our hut is the fish
flakes. These are not fish scales, as my Latin translation would
suggest, but are wooden structures on which the cod are spread
out to bleach and air in the sun after they have been cured by
being heavily salted and left all summer. The flakes look flimsy,
but they have withstood the gales of what passes for summer in
Newfoundland, and the men assure me that they are the same fish
flakes that have been in use for several years now. I am not sure
that I believe them, but they tell me that one of the tasks of
the winter crew is to maintain the fish flakes ready for use in
the spring. This may well be one of their jokes at my expense. I
sometimes wonder whether they value me more as a priest or as a
buffoon.
The fish flakes are the same as the ones in Devon and Dorset from
which our fleets come, but instead of looking upon the green
hills of southwestern England they face the barren rock of the
coast of Newfoundland and the forests which cover the land
beyond.
In the seaward direction the view is different as well:
Newfoundland is the only place that I have ever been where the
sea is blue. Everyone speaks of the blue sea, but around England
the sea is always a deep green, close to the colour of these
forests. I always wondered why the sea was called blue, but off
Newfoundland the ocean is a deep dark blue. Now I wonder why the
sea is green on one side of the ocean and blue on the other.
When I stand by the sea the wind is at my back. In the spring,
when the sea is covered by ice, men have been lost because the
wind blew them out onto the ice, further and further, towards
their death by freezing, with their companions watching them
stagger unwillingly to their end, flailing their arms and crying
for help which no man can give.
The thought of the ice makes me wish that I had started writing
this account earlier, as soon as we landed, or during the voyage
out, because the greatest astonishment for me was the icebergs.
I had thought that the sea froze in winter, but it is not so: the
ice comes down in the spring, if one can call it spring, in the
month of May, a merry month in England but a bitter one in
Newfoundland and the northwest seas.
After weeks upon the ocean, the ship had become the whole world,
with nothing else to see except water and the clouds overhead,
but as we approached the shores of England’s newest
possession, still invisibly distant, my eye was caught by strange
unnatural specks of colour on the horizon.
“What are they?” I asked one of the fishermen who had
sailed to the Newfoundland fishing grounds several times before.
“Icebergs. You’ll see them clearly later, although we
won’t come too close. They’re great floating blocks of
ice.”
“But the colours! Look, they’re like a rainbow laid out
along the horizon. Ice isn’t coloured.”
“If you say so, Father. You’re an educated man who can
read the words of scholars and prophets. I can only speak from
experience, and I tell you that they’re icebergs.”
The next morning we passed by the icebergs, and I was able to
tell that the fisherman had been right. We came within a land
mile of the vast floating palaces of ice, in dull and wet
weather, but the colours silenced me with their beauty. The ice
was attempting to be white, but it was washed through with
blue-green, a colour which seemed too pure and heavenly to be
natural, and the edges of the blocks of ice reflected shocks of
pink and purple even in the gloomy light.
I believe now that this was the moment when I first truly
understood that I had come to a New World, as many men now call
these lands on the western side of the ocean. I had not then
noticed that the sea was blue instead of green, but I could not
fail to be astonished by the icebergs, the first sight I had seen
which I could never have seen in England.
Those who have stayed in Newfoundland with the winter crew tell
me that sometimes in April the ice covers the sea, and that if
you stand on the shore and look east, you see only a sculptured
field of ice, so that you can hardly believe that it will ever
clear to allow the fishing fleet to come and take the winter crew
home.
What else must I describe? Ice, sea, forest, rock, wind, fish
flakes, living huts; surely that is all of Newfoundland for us?
No, there is something more that always frightens me.
I have written of what the forest looks like from our huts by the
sea. When you walk into the forest, and I have never gone far for
fear of becoming lost, you are attacked by a disturbing silence.
The trees are small compared to those in English forests. Perhaps
the harsh climate and poor soil prevent them from growing larger.
What is eerie is the lack of birdsong and the absence of life.
The fishermen tell me that they have never seen a snake in
Newfoundland, and that few birds sing here. It is troubling to
the spirit that the great silence somehow exists together with
the roar of the sea in the distance and the howling of the wind
overhead. How can there be silence in such noise? Yet there is,
as though one had walked into a kingdom ruled by unhallowed
powers.
So much for the land. What of its people? I have not seen them,
and I have not found a fisherman to admit to having seen one, but
there are people in Newfoundland.
We have never met the inhabitants of Newfoundland, but other
English expeditions have done so. I wanted to meet the three men
of Newfoundland whom Sebastian Cabot brought back to England two
years ago.
They live in Westminster Palace, and I am told that they now live
like Englishmen, but when I was in Westminster for my visit to
the Exchequer the officers of the palace told me that I would not
be allowed to see them. I am sure that they were taken prisoner,
or brought onto the ship by a trick and taken to England against
their will.
The fishermen with whom I have spoken have seen only strange
pieces of carved wood are found along the shore, and broken
needles of bone on the floor of the forest among the trees.
Since I have found out nothing about the people who belong here,
I must describe instead those who come here every spring from
England.
They are all of one class, the fishermen. (No women are ever
brought here, and so far as I know no English woman, or indeed
any European woman, has yet seen this new continent.) The only
distinction is that between the mass of men and the fishing
captains, and among the captains there is yet another, and
ultimate, distinction: the first captain to arrive on the coast
of Newfoundland is called the Fishing Admiral, and holds a
pre-eminent position among his fellows.
The fishermen themselves, all from the West Country, are a rough
sort of man as one might expect, but because I have been brought
up in the Church since infancy this is all as much of a discovery
to me as the sight of the new island itself. I am not happy to be
among them, but it is my duty as a priest. I would prefer a
gentle life among the priests of an old and tranquil cathedral,
but I must go where I am sent and do as I am ordered. I can see
that this experience may benefit me by teaching me how to deal
with all conditions of people, if I am later sent to be pastor of
a parish, but I am not sure whether it has been of benefit to my
coarse and scornful flock here. How I hope that none of them can
read Latin.
It may be so, because perhaps not all of them have always been
fishermen. Harry Chard, the Fishing Admiral, took me aside one
day by the sea and asked me what I thought of Gloucester.
“I don’t know,” I said. “I’ve never been
there. I know only the south and east of England, and not much of
that.”
“Ah, the city of Gloucester,” he replied, as if he had
just received a new and unexpected thought. “No, I’ve
never been there either, not as a place,” and with that
mysterious comment he left me staring baffled at the cold sea
while he strolled away with his hands clasped behind his back
like a schoolmaster.
At that I finally began to think. I do too much thinking; the men
are right, I do too little work, but I was born not to work. I
must admit that most of them, in spite of their sinful lives,
would make better priests than I would make a fisherman. At least
they have the power to lead and master other men, which all can
see that I lack.
My thoughts led me to the notion that Harry Chard had not been
asking about the city of Gloucester, but about the late Duke of
Gloucester, who usurped the throne of England under the title of
Richard III, and fell nineteen years ago when King Henry VII
defeated him. Is Harry Chard a supporter of Richard? Was he an
eminent man under Richard, now hiding in the disguise of a master
of the fisheries? Was he sounding me out to see whether I was
also a sympathiser? These words are dangerous to him and to
myself. I must blot them out before we return to England, which
we shall do at any day now.
I hate those writers who begin a passage with the words “I
now take up my pen again”, but indeed I do take up my pen
after four days lapse, including a Sunday. My pen has been
repeatedly sharpened, and is so worn and resharpened that it
would have earned me a whipping at school, but I must conserve my
pens. There are no geese in Newfoundland for me to chase for a
new quill, not that I have ever tackled that perilous task
myself.
We are waiting for Harry Chard as this year’s Fishing
Admiral to declare the end of summer. This is not a reference to
the climate. I do not believe we ever had a summer as we know it
in England. There have been a few warm, sunny days, but most of
the time the weather has been like that of a kind autumn or a
promising spring. The end of summer means that the fishing season
is over and the summer crew sail back to England with all the
ships loaded with dried cod to feed the pious every Friday.
Here in Newfoundland the cod feeds both the pious and the
impious. The fish merchants do not pay to provide the men with
food, so they must find their own, which means fish. The land has
hardly any soil, and I wish I understood what the trees grow in.
They always remain thin and spindly, and seem never to grow up,
like Young Martin. Everyone, not only Horsfall, calls him Young
Martin, although he must be about thirty years old, old enough to
remember when Richard was king. I must try not to mention that
again; that it is a dangerous name for suspicious men to find
among your writings.
Young Martin, who, as I say, is not young, is so called because
there is something about him that has remained becalmed in
childhood while the winds of the years have turned his fellows
into tough and ruthless men. His body is fully grown, so much so
that he is often called upon for tasks that need a particularly
strong man. His mind is that of a man, too; he can speak as well
as anyone, unlike the unfortunates who keep the minds and manners
of babes all their lives, and who groan and shriek among the
monks and nuns who nurse them because even their own families
will not do so.
Young Martin’s affliction, if it is right to call it that,
is that he is an innocent. He laughs and cries. He will run after
an animal that he glimpses darting across the forest floor, and
sometimes he breaks into vulgar songs while I am celebrating
Mass, not to mock me but in an excess of cheerful spirit.
The men are frightened when he does such things. They live
ungodly lives, and have no respect for me as a man, but they fear
God and glower at Martin when he behaves wrongly at the Mass.
“Make him quiet, Horsfall,” they say, because Horsfall
is always able to rule him.
The fishermen are afraid that Martin’s antics will bring
them to damnation, although I reassure them that the Mass is
valid whatever the behaviour of the congregation. After all, the
character of the priest does not affect its validity; no matter
how sinful and corrupt a man I may be, a subject which I ponder
too much for my own good and that of my flock, I can still invoke
the Holy Spirit to turn bread and wine into the Body and Blood of
Christ.
Yes, the church. I set up my portable altar in one of the huts in
which spare fishing gear and food are stored. The hut stinks, but
probably no worse than the streets of Jerusalem whose smells must
have sidled in through the windows of that famous upper room in
which Christ first gave that command to his disciples which they
were to do in memory of him. I have tried keeping the door open,
so that the incessant wind will remove the smell, but it does not
do so, and a smell, which cannot be blown away by the winds of
Newfoundland, will surely offend noses until the Day of
Judgement. The wind even blows draughts through the cracks and
joins of the huts, and I fear for the winter crew who must live
in them until the fleet comes again.
Two more days have passed, with nothing for me to do but to
celebrate the Mass for surly and impatient congregations, and to
watch the men packing up and carrying boxes, bags, and baskets
out to the ships in little rocking dories which were brought out
in earlier years. One of the winter crew’s duties is to
repair them after the season is over.
Any day now Harry Chard the Fishing Admiral will declare the end
of summer. I must prepare to leave too. I have little enough to
pack. My portable altar and Mass items can be tidied away quickly
enough, no doubt a reminder of the days when Christians were a
persecuted minority and priests had to be ready to flee in a
hurry with all that they possessed or had been entrusted with.
This morning the sun is shining, the wind is gentle, and the sea
is oddly calm. The world must feel like this just before a great
miracle or revelation. I decided to take a last walk into the
forest.
Once again I found myself in that silence which was yet not
silence, with the oppressive lack of sound among the trees lying
over the rip of the wind and the growl of the sea. It was like
the four-level allegory we were taught for understanding the
Bible, where the layers of meaning in a sacred text, Literal,
Figurative, Anagogic, and Tropological, all express themselves in
the same words; and yet it is not the same, for none of the four
levels of allegory is stronger than another. They are all equal,
but in Newfoundland the forest seems stronger than the sea. I do
not understand how that can be.
I seem to be the only man in the fishing fleet who does not fear
the forest. I respect it, and never go into it without telling
someone that I have done so and how long it will be before I
expect to return. Would they search for me? They would, for fear
of having no priest to conduct Mass.
There is a thought which keeps coming to me, whether from my own
mind or from Satan, which I do not like thinking but which I
cannot suppress; it is like a painful memory to which one cries
“No!” whenever it returns, as if it could be forbidden
from arising. That hateful thought is that the men see me as a
wizard, casting spells, and that my portable altar is a place at
which magic is daily performed. If there were no priest they
would be defenceless before the powers of evil. I keep explaining
that this is not so, that God does not grant favours to the
righteous any more than to the sinful.
I nearly reminded Horsfall once that the only promise which Our
Lord ever made to Christians was not that they would be granted
an easy life in this world: he promised them only trouble,
whippings, and the hatred of their neighbours. I do not know
whether I would be brave enough to preach Christ in the face of
such opposition, but I am safe, because all Englishmen have been
baptised as Christians even if they do not lead the Christian
life. I stopped myself from telling Horsfall that, realising that
his simple mind might draw strange and dangerous conclusions from
such an idea.
For the first time I sat down on the forest floor. I listened for
animals, but I could hear none. We know that there are catamounts
in the woods, great cats with tufted ears. Harry Chard swears
that the same cat is found in the north of England, but I have no
desire to meet one either in England or in Newfoundland.
I noticed something that I had never seen before: the tracks made
by people, pressed into the wet ground. I am no country poacher
and have no skill in these matters, but I could tell that at
least one person had passed by. The prints showed no trace of a
heel, so I wondered whether an Englishman could have left them.
It rains so often here that I could not judge how recently my
unseen companion had passed.
No animals, no men, no birdsong, and no sound, there was nothing
for me in the forest. I had been sitting on the twigs and fallen
leaves for half a morning. I stood up awkwardly, clawing at the
air as if it could help to support me, and trudged back to our
huts and the rocky frontier of the sea.
I saw Horsfall piling more wood in front of our hut, and our
over-carpenter, William Durdle, carrying water inside as though
for some ritual. It would certainly not be for washing.
Beyond, out to sea, the sight of strange ships amazed me, all
abreast, with full sails set. Who could be sailing to
Newfoundland at this time of the year? Was it a foreign attack?
Had some great or terrible thing happened in England, and were
these the bearers of that news?
I cried out to Horsfall.
“What ships are those, Horsfall? Who’s coming?”
“Nobody is coming, Sir Ralph. Those are our own ships of the
fishing fleet. Harry Chard the Fishing Admiral has declared the
end of summer.”
“But does that mean -”
“Yes, Sir Ralph. That is the fleet sailing back to England.
I am staying behind until the spring. I told you that Young
Martin and I were going to be in the winter crew.”
Horsfall put down his logs, shaded his eyes to look out at the
departing ships, and then dropped his hand and stared straight at
me.
“We are part of the winter crew, and Harry Chard has ordered
that you are to be one of the winter crew too.”
“He never told me that!”
“He told us that you knew, and had put yourself in our
service, and that you had already been paid forty testoons to
stay with the winter crew.”
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