In summer, 1954, Farley Mowat was sailing down the St. Lawrence River, making an "Eastern Passage" from Montreal to Halifax, when a deckhand "spotted a large, corpse-white something just beneath the surface directly in our path." Mowat swung the tiller hard and avoided a collision, but recognized the semi-submerged object as a 20-foot beluga whale - one that was clearly sick or injured.
A little farther east, from an old sailor, he learned of a horrific explosion that had occurred in these waters four years previously, in 1950 - the result, apparently, of an accidental dumping of bombs by a U.S. plane. Almost half a century passed, Mowat writes, before he pieced together the whole story.
A U.S. bomber had run into engine trouble while carrying a version of "Fat Man," the nuclear bomb that in 1945 had virtually obliterated the Japanese city of Nagasaki. The pilot, acting on standing orders, released the bomb into the St. Lawrence before attempting an emergency landing.
The official version claimed an empty "Fat-Man casing" and three conventional bombs were released, while admitting that the blast "was felt for 25 miles."
Mowat leaps forward to a 1988 New York Times article about "a mysterious die-off of beluga whales in the St. Lawrence." Since 1950, the colony had shrunk from 1,200 to 450.
"Pollution was suspected of being the cause," he writes, "but the identity of the pollutant had not been established." The implication is clear.
At 89, Farley Mowat is still raging. But in this memoir, his 44th and final book, the author reminds us that he can also reminisce. He focuses on the late 1940s and early '50s, flashing backward and forward as necessary, and achieving immediacy by ransacking old journals and letters.
The book shines in its depiction of the young Mowat, struggling to gain traction as a writer while drafting and redrafting what would become People of the Deer, his first book. He grumbles about detailed feedback from an editor, explaining that "his letter implied that the author's role was that of artisan, while the editor was effectively the architect."
People of the Deer castigated the Hudson's Bay Company and the Canadian government for mistreating the Ihalmiut people, and Mowat was surprised by the ferocity of the counter-attack. He beat it back and carried the day. But in Eastern Passage, for the first time, Mowat links that early counter-attack to the destructive profile of him that turned up in the late 1980s in Saturday Night magazine. That profile, he writes, "turned out to be a character assassination constructed largely from the canards the Hudson's Bay Company [and others]had spread about me during the imbroglio over People of the Deer."
A professional writer for six decades, Farley Mowat has sold almost 20 million books in more than 25 countries - a track record that precious few Canadian writers have ever rivalled. And certainly, this author can still turn a phrase. "Looking back on that summer now," he writes of the season when his first marriage began falling apart, "I view the entire sorry contretemps as scenes from a confusing silent movie bereft even of explanatory subtitles."
Eastern Passage lacks the sustained vision and energy of Mowat's best books. Yet it contains vivid anecdotal surprises and fills in a final gap in the author's multi-volume autobiography. For admirers of Farley Mowat - and we are legion - this is a necessary work.
Ken McGoogan writes about Farley Mowat in his new book How the Scots Invented Canada.