A Remarkable Sailor

We are marking Father's Day this weekend, so I decided to write this tribute to my Dad.
Hyacinth Pottie was born in April, 1900, in Hawker, Cape Breton. (This post office ‘station,’ located on the west side of River Bourgeois, no longer exists.)
As many of the local boys did, he left school at age 14, to go to work. He worked as a sailor for the next 40 years.

It was wartime, during the waning of the age of sail, and he began by working on the 'coal boats,’ mostly schooners, which carried coal from the bustling mines of Cape Breton to ports in the Maritimes, Newfoundland (which was a British colony until 1949), and beyond.
Older boys — and others who lied about their age — enlisted and performed with distinguished service in the Canadian fighting forces.
We next see him as a well-dressed young man (shown in a formal photo taken in a portrait studio), in the Port of Vancouver.
During the 1920s, he served on a number of sailing vessels as well as steamers to many ports up-and-down the West Coast of the Americas, including voyages to Lima, Peru and Santiago, Chile.
I am constantly in awe of the exciting travels and adventures of many of the young men from his tiny village, who got to sail all over the world.
Around this time, he earned his coveted ‘Mate’s papers,’ which now made him eligible to become a skilled ‘helmsman,’ the crew member who served on the bridge, who stood beside the captain and actually steered the ship.
Upon his return to the East, his next sailing assignments were carried out as member of the Canadian Merchant Marine service in the St. Lawrence River system in Québec, including the Saguenay River.
He got to know the River well; he would tell of the village of ‘Pointe-au-Père' (English: Father Point), near Rimouski, where the fresh water from the Great Lakes flowed into the salt water of the Gulf of St. Lawrence.
Here, ocean-going ships entering / leaving the St. Lawrence were — and probably still are — required to take /drop off on a Pilot here.
(Landlubber alert: Any ship entering coastal waters or harbours, has to take on a Pilot, who is familiar with the local shoals and ship routes, and is in charge of bringing that ship into and out of those areas.)
Decades later, before the completion of the Autoroute 20, I stopped there during a car trip to Ottawa, to check out the lighthouse, and then recall its significance from what my Dad had said.
He could also describe the exact spot nearby where the Canadian Pacific liner ‘Empress of Ireland’ had run aground in 1916 with loss of more than 1,000 lives (only a few months before the sinking of the Titanic).
Back in his hometown, during the years of the Great Depression of the 1930s when jobs were scarce, he was seen as something of an oddity: he had steady work every summer on the St. Lawrence!
(There was one exception: one summer he stayed to tend the family garden, a task he never enjoyed nor repeated.!)
He was still working in the Merchant Marine when World War II broke out, and enlisted in the Royal Canadian Navy (before being the victim of a press gang) in Halifax a while later.
(Landlubber alert: ’Press gangs’ — all legal in wartime because of strong conscription laws — were groups of military men with patrol wagons, who would scour the streets and docks of mostly port cities, looking for any able-bodied man they could round up and force to ‘enlist’ in the armed forces.)
Still single at age 40, he was embarking on this new chapter in his life, and was already considered to be an old man to be entering 'Ordinary Seaman' naval service.
-- To be continued ...