River Odyssey Read online

  He hadn’t served in the war, he said, because of an accident when he was a boy. That’s when he lost his eye. He never told us what the accident was. He said that he and his friends played on the river a lot and that the river was a dangerous place to play. I believed him. As a young man, he floated logs downriver to the sawmill and sometimes rowed his girlfriend out at night to see the lights of the peninsula from the water. It was on one of those nights, in the summer of 1942, that he saw a German U-boat surface in the river.

  “She broke the surface like a demon from the deep,” he said, with his big eye fixed on me and the smaller one wandering around the room. You could tell that he enjoyed telling the story. “She climbed out of that dark water and pulled herself up on top of the surface and snorted like a beast. She snorted just like a bull! And there she was, not more than a hundred and fifty feet away from us.”

  “How big was she?”

  “Hey?”

  “How big was the submarine?”

  “Long! Long as a giant eel! Two hundred and fifty feet long! They caught her off the coast of Nova Scotia the next year and sank her. But she sent a dozen ships to the grave first, including the ferry between Port aux Basques and North Sydney. Killed a hundred and thirty-six people that night, before they rammed her.”

  “They rammed her?”

  “Hey?”

  “They rammed her?”

  “Oh, yah! Ran over her like a snake on the road, sent her to the bottom. HMS Viscount.”

  Wow. I tried to picture a ship ramming a submarine. It was like sea monsters fighting. “And the night you saw the submarine?”

  “Hey?”

  “Tell us about the night you saw the submarine, Grandpapa.”

  “Oh, yah! She sank the Carolus that very night. A big Finnish freighter. Canadian government seized her for the war then the Germans sank her a few days later. Right off Metis Beach.”

  He jumped to his feet, went to the bookshelf and pulled down a heavy book. As he dropped it onto the table, the book opened by itself to a page where it was creased. He stuck it with his finger. Then, he pointed out the window towards the river. “She’s out there!”

  I leaned closer and saw an old black and white photo of a merchant steamer with a single smokestack in her centre. She was over three hundred feet long! Now, she lay on the river bottom. I wondered if we would see her on our way.

  “Were you afraid?”

  “Hey?”

  “Were you afraid, Grandpapa?”

  He laughed. “Oh, yah! I was afraid. But they were nice enough.”

  “What? They saw you?”

  “Hey?”

  “Did they see you, Grandpapa?”

  “Yah! They saw me and they waved to me. They were just regular sailors like anybody else. Caught up in the war. They sank the Carolus, and then it was their turn. War doesn’t play favourites.”

  War doesn’t play favourites. His words stayed in my mind after we left. They reminded me of Ziegfried’s saying: the sea doesn’t care if you are sincere. Beware all who sail. True enough. Some of us cannot resist it still.

  Marie stayed the night. Hollie and I returned to the sub. He hated to leave. I knew he would. His only consolation was that it meant another walk. Marie’s grandpapa was horrified that we would leave so late at night, but she told him I wanted to sleep on my boat. She never told him it was a submarine.

  We planned to meet in the afternoon the next day. She would sail with us as far as Quebec City. We didn’t usually take passengers but she was used to the sub now and we were going there anyway. It seemed like a good idea at the time.

  When Hollie and I returned to the sub, I was shocked at what we found. We had moored at high tide. Now, the tide was out. The sub was sitting on the river bottom! It was exposed! Thank heavens it was dark. I would have to wait an hour or so for the tide to reverse enough before we were even able to move! I knew the tide came up the river but never dreamed it would change the river’s height that much. I wouldn’t make that mistake again.

  I paddled the dinghy over and we climbed in. I hated the feeling of the sub not moving, and was only happy when the river returned enough to lift us free. I motored to a deeper spot, tied up again to rocks but left enough slack in the ropes to allow for the tide. Then I submerged to periscope depth and went to bed. Seaweed was still out but he would have no trouble spotting us. Chances were he’d be sitting on the periscope when I woke.

  It was late afternoon when I peeked through the periscope and saw Marie sitting patiently on a rock. The tide had come and gone once more and we were able to motor closer to shore again. I surfaced awash, showing the portal merely a foot above the surface, and kept the hull hidden. I inflated the dinghy, rowed over and picked her up. She was carrying her pack and holding a bag with a dozen crepes and a Thermos of hot chocolate. Her face was beaming. If she were sad about Jacques, she was dealing with it well.

  “How exciting is this?” she said. “We’re sailing to Quebec City in a submarine! Will you let me look out of the periscope, Alfred?”

  “Sure.”

  “Oh! Wonderful!”

  Marie’s grandpapa had said that the Carolus was lying just outside in the river but the map suggested she had actually sunk a hundred miles upstream. No one had found her yet. We went up against the retreating tide, which I measured at almost four knots with the current, although the current seemed to change easily depending upon depth and other things such as the wind. It was tricky. Marie stood at the periscope and kept an eye on other vessels while I watched the screens, studied the map and tried to determine our true speed.

  “I see a ship! Oh! I see another one! This is so exciting! They are passing so close to us and they don’t even know we are here!”

  We were sailing under battery power, submerged, at thirteen knots. Our true speed against the land was probably only about nine knots. As soon as the tide reversed, the current reversed and the river actually flowed backwards! Then, our true speed was closer to sixteen knots, but I was mostly just guessing because it was too hard to determine speed accurately when it was constantly changing. It took us all evening and most of the night to reach Metis Beach. At least we were able to ride on the surface after dark and sail by engine. We arrived in the middle of the night, dropped anchor in thirty feet of water in high tide and went to sleep for just a couple of hours. We set the alarm for a few minutes before sunrise. I didn’t want anyone spotting us when the sun came up. We wanted to look for the wreck in daylight as we passed. I dropped onto my bunk and fell asleep instantly. Hollie curled up with Marie on her sleeping bag and I heard her whisper sweetly to him as I drifted off.

  Chapter 11

  WE NEVER HAD a chance of finding the Carolus. I should have realized that. The river was too murky and way too deep. A few miles offshore the bottom fell to a thousand feet! It was fifty miles between banks still. That was some river! Maybe, if we made hundreds of passes back and forth, crisscrossing like a spider’s web, we might have picked her up on sonar. Maybe. But we could never go down there, not even close, and could never even peek at her. I had other things I was supposed to be doing anyway, like getting to Montreal and back.

  So, we moved on. An hour and a half later, we found another wreck. It was lying in our path in only a hundred and thirty feet of water and it was gigantic!

  The Empress of Ireland was the biggest naval disaster in Canadian history, not counting the Halifax Explosion, and I had never even heard of it. Marie told me all about it but I could hardly believe it. In 1914, the giant luxury ocean-liner, five hundred and seventy feet long, was sailing down the river from Quebec City when she collided with another ship, tore up her bow and sank like a stone. Within minutes, over a thousand people drowned. This was kind of hard for me to grasp. The Empress of Ireland was as long as eleven of Cartier’s ships in a row! That was unbelievable! Now, she was lying in only a hundred and thirty feet of water. If she stood on end, four hundred and forty feet of her would stick out of the water. T
alk about a sea monster! And yet, as we slowed to a drift above the wreck, just offshore from Rimouski, the river was peaceful and friendly. You would never know such a monstrous vessel lay beneath the river’s gentle flow, or that such a terrible tragedy had taken place here, one of the greatest tragedies Canada has ever known.

  But there was more.

  Marie said that the Empress was carrying a sarcophagus with a princess from ancient Egypt. A mummy. And the mummy was supposedly cursed and believed to have caused the disaster.

  “Whoa! That’s crazy,” I said. “Do you believe that?”

  “Not really. But a lot of people did. And some say that the wreck is cursed still.”

  “Why?”

  “Because a lot of divers have died here, looking for treasure and stuff. And bodies and parts of bodies have washed out of the wreck ever since it went down.”

  “Creepy. Do you believe in ghosts?”

  “No. Do you?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  Marie ran her fingers through Hollie’s fur. “I believe in the Loch Ness monster.”

  “What? You don’t believe in ghosts but you believe in the Loch Ness monster?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why?”

  “Because ghosts are not from this world, but large creatures have always existed, especially in the deep. In prehistoric times they were really big. And, we have other prehistoric creatures around today, like the coelacanth.”

  She put her face to Hollie’s face. “You’re precious.”

  “The what?”

  “The coelacanth. A fish from the dinosaur age. We used to only find fossils of them. Then, fishermen started catching them in their nets.”

  “Cool.”

  “So … that’s why I believe there is a huge creature deep in Loch Ness.”

  We were gliding through the water on battery power at periscope depth. Visibility was about ten feet through the observation window, but a murky visibility, nothing like at sea. A hundred feet down, visibility would be even worse. No doubt that contributed to the danger of diving at such a wreck. A bigger danger, I imagined, was the size of her. Divers would swim inside, become lost and their air would run out. That’s what happened to underwater cave divers sometimes. Diving was a dangerous hobby.

  It didn’t take long to find the Empress with sonar. She was enormous! We were like a little bug in the water above her. Marie sat close to the window, leaning on her elbows and staring down. Hollie stared too but was just pretending. He never took an interest in the observation window because he couldn’t smell anything through it. It was just part of the decoration of his living space.

  We descended slowly but I warned Marie that the wreck might appear very suddenly and scare her.

  “Oh, mon Dieu! This is probably the most exciting thing I’ve ever done!”

  I was glad. You got used to seeing wrecks when you lived in a submarine. All the same, I was a little excited too.

  “I’ll turn on the floodlights when we’re closer. We won’t see much without those. And we’ll never be able to see the whole ship, just parts of it as we pass over it.”

  Down, down, down we drifted, quite slowly because even with sonar it was difficult to tell if there were pieces of the ship sticking up, and I didn’t want to hit anything.

  “Sixty feet.”

  “I don’t see anything.”

  “You won’t see anything yet.”

  “It’s pretty dark.”

  “I’ll hit the lights at seventy-five feet.”

  “This is kind of spooky.”

  “Be warned. It might scare you.”

  “It can’t be that scary. It’s just old twisted metal under water, right?”

  “Yes, but… it can look pretty scary. Seventy feet… seventy-five … here are the lights.”

  “Wow. They’re really bright. But I still don’t see anything.”

  “You will. Eighty feet.”

  “Nothing.”

  “Eighty-five feet.”

  “Nothing.”

  I smiled. It was fun having Marie on board.

  “Ninety feet.”

  “Noth—ahhhhhh!”

  Marie screamed and jumped away from the window. Hollie ran over to me and hid between my feet. I picked him up, stopped the sub and came to the window. Marie’s eyes were wide with fear but she was quickly calming down.

  “Oh… mon … Dieu! That scared the heck out of me! It’s just so … spooky! Look at it!”

  I scratched Hollie’s ears and looked down through the window.

  “Yup. There she is.”

  Marie took a deep breath.

  “Sorry for screaming. It just caught me off guard. It looks like it is reaching up at us, trying to grab us.”

  The sub’s bright lights created a world of shadows, and the river current created movement, so there were lots of things to look at besides old twisted metal. Long, stringy weeds stuck out of holes everywhere and waved like tentacles. The current pulled patches of debris in and out of dents and holes and they really did look sometimes like they were reaching up at us. But Marie calmed down.

  “Wow! It’s like looking at another planet. I mean, I’ve seen such things on TV, of course, but somehow, when it’s right outside your window, it’s different.”

  The wreck was pretty beaten up, as wrecks always are. There were gashes in her side and huge holes that we could even have sailed through. But I would never take such a risk. My experience with the old wooden wreck at Anticosti Island was still fresh in my mind. My leg was still sore.

  We glided over the entire wreck, much of which was covered by silt. No doubt the river would eventually hide all traces of her, just as sand from the Sahara Desert blew into the Mediterranean Sea and covered ancient temples and cities the sea had swallowed. I learned that on our second voyage. Given enough time, the powers of nature can hide anything.

  We turned, dropped a little closer and glided over the wreck again. It was so interesting. Two hours passed like nothing. I was feeling a little concerned for Seaweed because I knew he couldn’t spot us. And then, Marie saw something.

  “Alfred?”

  “Yes?”

  “What’s that?”

  I came over and looked down. “I don’t know.”

  “But what do you think it is?”

  “I don’t know, but I suppose it looks like a person bent in half.”

  “It does, doesn’t it? Do you think it’s a body?”

  I looked harder. “It probably isn’t. Things have a way of looking like something else underwater, especially when they’ve been there for a long time. Chances are, if you touched it, it would be nothing but a big clump of weeds stuck together.”

  “Do you think we should try to get closer just in case it’s a body? Because, if it is a body, then we have to report it.”

  “Hmmm.”

  I didn’t really want to move closer because there were so many tentacles dangling free, and while most were surely just weeds, some of them could be old rope, or even metal cables. I didn’t want to get the propeller wrapped up in a cable.

  “Just a little closer. Then we can see what it is.”

  “Okay. Just a little closer.”

  But it wasn’t easy to move just a little closer. The current across the surface of the wreck was creating a turbulence that I didn’t realize until we were almost touching it. Before I knew what was happening the sub started to tilt sideways.

  “What’s happening?”

  “Umm … just a bit of turbulence, but we’d better get out of here.”

  And then I heard the motor whine. “Shoot!” I raced to the panel and shut the power off.

  “What? What happened?”

  I ignored Marie’s question. I was too preoccupied. I stared down through the observation window and watched to see if we would drift free. We didn’t. Slowly the sub turned and faced away from the current, like a kite on a string.

  “What is it, Alfred? What happened?”

 
“Ummm … there’s a cable jammed in the propeller.”

  “Oh! No!”

  “No, it’s okay. Don’t worry. Everything’s fine. It’s no big deal.”

  “Oh. That’s good. I was frightened there for a moment.”

  I didn’t want to lie to Marie—this had never happened before—but I couldn’t let her panic. I needed to sit calmly and think it through and make smart choices. To do that, I needed her to be calm. The truth was: we were stuck.

  Chapter 12

  MY MIND RACED through the possibilities and I had to keep slowing it down. It was so important to think clearly. When a cable was wrapped around the propeller, the thing to do was go out and unwrap it by hand. If we were on the surface, that’s exactly what I would have done. But we were a hundred feet down. Since that was my maximum depth for diving it was not impossible for me to go out, unwrap the cable, swim to the surface, catch my breath and swim back down. But, of course, I couldn’t get out without flooding the sub. When we built the sub, we tested it for exactly that—flooding. We sank it twice on purpose, and I practised opening and sealing the hatch underwater, and sealing myself inside when the sub was filled with water, which was certainly one of the scariest feelings in the world. The hatch now had an automatic sealing mechanism. The sub would flood, but the hatch would shut by itself and the sump pumps would remove the water, but not as fast as it would rush in. We had tested for that too. Ziegfried had insisted upon testing everything. I understood his obsession for testing better all the time.

  The sump pumps could not keep up with water flooding through an open portal. The hatch would have to open and shut immediately. If it didn’t for any reason, the sub would fill completely in just seconds. And though I would probably survive by swimming to the surface, Hollie and Marie wouldn’t.

  “What are you thinking, Alfred?”

  “What? Oh. I’m just thinking it through. Don’t worry. It’ll be fine.”

  “That’s good. I was so worried. What will you do?”

  “Well, there are a number of ways to fix the problem. I just have to decide which method I want to try first.”