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Too much grog. PHOTO: VIRGINIA MARSHALL
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Small Miracles
HOW TOUGH WERE THE VOYAGEURS, REALLY?
A
h, les voyageurs, short on height but leg- endarily long on suffering and strength.
What of those happy-go-lucky little gnomes chanson-ing across the country, paddling 60 strokes a minute and tumping two 40-kilo- gram packs across freshly chewed goat paths, their bowels pushing through rotting abdom- inal walls. Behind their cheerfully coloured ceinture fléchée, how tough were they, really? Can you imagine hour after hour, day af-
ter day, week upon week of those call and response ditties? Try this: Visit the iTunes store, search by V’la l’Bon Vent, buy the kara- oke rendition, synch your iPod and select re- peat, then board an overcrowded Greyhound for a six-week trip from Bonavista to Buenos Aires. It’s amazing more of them didn’t bail into the wild icy waters of the Ottawa’s Culb- ute (ass-over-tea-kettle) Rapid just to escape their musical hell. Maybe the strangulated hernias were a pleasant diversion of suffi- cient intensity to buffer another round of early traditional folk. And then there’s the food. No matter how
you serve it, a steady diet of pea soup or ber- ries and fat mixed around ground hair and animal parts is going to cause a deadly com- bination of nitrogen, carbon dioxide, oxygen, methane and hydrogen sulfide. My research suggests that, on average, a regular diet pro- duces about half a litre of gas per day, distrib- uted over an average of about fourteen daily farts. Imagine what it might have been like in a long line, nose to tail, straining up a steep and muddy portage. Phew! I’m thinking that in the classic works of Frances Anne Hopkins or Arthur Heming there was more hanging in the air than the early morning mist. And don’t even get me started about the grog. Skunky spruce beer or corked wine is
16 SUMMER/FALL 2010
strangulated hernias were a pleasant diversion of sufficient intensity to buffer another round of early traditional folk music.
one thing, but these guys got into some seri- ous rotgut. Although they carried fine wine, good
rum and French brandy, it was for manage- ment only. More often than not, the engagés were offered bumbo—a rum so black, thick and ugly with wood alcohol that it had to be sweetened with brown sugar and flavoured with nutmeg. Te worst of the worst was English brandy, a cheap gin flavoured with molasses. It has been explained to me as drinking juniper-tinted naphtha stove gas. A great fire starter or fine anesthetic per- haps for when your entrails are dragging on the ground. What has truly earned my admiration for these trippers of yore however was their
tolerance for sleep deprivation. Imagine the time required to make and break camp, to cook up the gruel and make canoe repairs. In the fur traders’ journals it reads that
voyageurs were often up at one and two in the morning having only gone to bed at 10 p.m. (and don’t get me started about paddling and portaging in the dark). Tese hardy chaps couldn’t have slept more than a few scant hours, only three or four, night after night. Eighteen hours of paddling and portaging. Two hours of bug-infested camp chores. Four hour sleeps. I get tired just thinking about it. “Hey Etienne, apportes-moi un petit peu de cette bière d’epinette s’il vous plaît.”
JAMES RAFFAN enjoys the odd swig of spruce beer now and then.
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