Canadians by Roy MacGregor

Author:Roy MacGregor
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: PENGUIN GROUP (CANADA)

Nine

The Invisible Founders

SO, THIS IS what it feels like to die.

I was not alone in thinking this. Later, days after I had used up several of the extra lives that are handed out to stray cats and stupid journalists, I would learn that the three others lost with me that week on James Bay felt exactly the same. We did not, any of us, think we’d make it.

It was late June 1986. I had come to Waskaganish on the Quebec shore of James Bay for the launch of Billy Diamond’s new boat. The Grand Chief of the James Bay Cree of northern Quebec had already built a successful regional airline and was now moving into a rather different form of transportation. He’d gone to Japan to meet with the giant manufacturer Yamaha, and by combining traditional Cree knowledge and Yamaha technology they had completely redesigned the famous Hudson’s Bay canoe—the accepted, albeit dangerous, method of transportation for the northern Cree for generations. Far too many lives had been lost to freak storms and overloaded boats and hidden rocks. Billy Diamond wanted a new boat.

He’d capitalized on the Japanese fascination with North American Aboriginals by striking an early meeting with Yamaha executives in Toronto. Then he’d gone to Tokyo for deeper discussions, and now, two years later, the first Cree–Yamaha boats—wide, handsome fibreglass craft—were rolling off a brand-new assembly line in the old fur-trading village of Fort Rupert, now reverted to its Native name, Waskaganish. The boat was about to be launched from the docks along the shore of the Rupert River where the freshwater flush from Quebec’s Ungava Peninsula empties out into the saltwater flats of James Bay.

Billy Diamond and I had known each other for several years—more on that later—and he’d invited me to witness the launch and perhaps even do a story for the Ottawa Citizen. I thought it would be a business story, not a survival tale.

With an Ottawa friend, Doug Sprott, I’d driven the better part of a day up through Maniwaki and La Vérendrye Park to Val d’Or and then caught the regular Air Creebec flight north. Nearly two hours later we bounced down onto the gravel runway and hitched a pickup ride into a village where the residents were so excited they could barely contain themselves. A feast was already in progress—beaver and moose nostrils, spring goose, bannock and smoked whitefish, huge pots of dark tea—and word was that the Japanese were coming by executive jet from Tokyo.

Peter Gzowski would also be calling in the morning. Chief Billy Diamond would go live on Morningside for the launch of the most unusual joint venture in Canadian corporate history.

A shipment of advertising posters had arrived on the same plane that brought us in. No boat appeared on the poster, but instead an effective message—“The waters of James Bay are not always friendly”—under a rising, threatening swell of churning water. Already that spring five Crees had drowned on the unpredictable waters of James Bay. This boat, the Crees believed, would put an end to such tragedies.

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