August 30

We spent a very pleasant day here, waiting for the wind to become favorable. The story of Battle Harbour and the cod fisheries is too much for a blog, so I’ll leave that as an independent study project. Suffice it to say that it’s a wonderful snapshot of local culture and history on many levels. Nelson, our tour guide for the buildings, was born here, moved to Mary’s Harbor (on the mainland nearby), and has worked on the site’s restoration since it became a Trust in 1989. He used to return here to help his father during the summer fishing season, leaving school a month early and returning a month late. His accent is on the edge of incomprehensible, authentic to say the least. His account of the history came from first-hand knowledge and from the heart.  As for the ladies running the restaurant, you might as well be in a Newfoundland kitchen. Imagine a Plimoth Plantation where the interpreters’ parents and grandparents had lived there, built the houses, spoken the language, and lived in the style that is being “re-created”.

The geology on the island is a real smorgasbord, at last explained in detail with an academic brochure. Layers, folds, faults and intrusions, all metamorphic, are directly visible under your feet when not hidden by lichen. And it’s all the result of events that occurred between 1800 and 1000 million years  ago. The youngest rock on the island is a basaltic intrusion about 600 million years old. I struggle with the multiple time scales, here so visible and so extreme.

Last night it continued to blow hard from the south, which is why we stayed in port. It turns out Finley has a singing mast. It’s a hollow aluminum tube which allows the mainsail to be furled or reefed by rolling it up inside. The open slot acts like a coke bottle. I was annoyed and then fascinated. The pitch changes with wind speed (like a coke bottle), but the mast length is such that it’s way above the fundamental so the steps between pitches are whole and half steps like a regular scale. But it had the modal quality of Arabic or Persian music, with pitches slightly pushed from our boring tempered version, giving the melody great drama and feeling as the wind came and went.  Physics everywhere!