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September/October 1998 issue	In this issue Table of Contents Editor's Notebook Feature: Worm-picking Our home and native tongue À la carte

Dwell in the shadow of a mountain long enough and the desire to know the other side grows into an obsession. The eye projects the imagination beyond all horizons. Early Irish Christians believed the land toward the sunset was peopled with saints and other holy men. Journeying toward it was an act of faith, as Saint Brendan and 17 fellow monks were said to have done in a skin-covered boat in the sixth century. Early Irish literature offers several dozen versions of the Navigato, which many believe is a recounting of an actual sea journey Brendan made to the coast of North America. In the 1970s, British writer Tim Severin studied the Navigato, constructed a skin-covered vessel based on ancient Irish boat-building techniques and sailed it across the North Atlantic to Newfoundland. His remarkable voyage, described in a compelling book, The Brendan Voyage, showed not that Brendan had made such a journey, but that it could be done.

An act of imagination. Historical reconstructions all proceed from an act of imagination. For his new book, The Farfarers, which is excerpted in this issue, Farley Mowat did not construct his own skin boat. But his speculations about a people he believes preceded the Vikings to North America well before the year 1000 are based on a broad understanding of early European history, a careful reading of ancient texts ranging from Norse sagas to the writings of medieval Irish monks, a sailor's appreciation of the perils of the North Atlantic, and a 30-year obsession with a story whose outlines lie beyond the horizon of recorded history. The tale he fashions from these sources is plausible. The people he calls the Albans undoubtedly had the navigation and boat-building skills to have sailed from the British Isles to Canada. Severin proved that. What no one knows is whether they did make such journeys and whether they ever established any settlements here. In what are the most contentious sections of the book, Mowat argues that physical evidence of an Alban presence exists in the form of some 45 mysterious longhouse stone foundations found on Quebec's Ungava Peninsula and in the High Arctic.
Mowat knows this book will be greeted with great skepticism within the academic community. He says it is "subjective, imaginative" and was written unfettered by the constraints of peer-reviewed science. His hope is that a vigorous debate about this theory will shake loose research funds for new archeological field work in the Arctic, northern Quebec, Newfoundland and Labrador. Look for responses from archeologists, historians and readers in upcoming issues.

The worms-for-bait industry is slippery, shady and, well, a can of worms. Writer Allen Abel pried it open for us and discovered few people willing to talk on the record about a business worth an estimated $50 million a year. When he completed the story, his manuscript was handed to photographer Peter Sibbald, who spent weeks attempting to locate the elusive pickers. Although he was misled several times, he eventually found a group and spent the night gingerly photographing them. At dawn they gathered to load and sort their worms. Sibbald asked for permission to photograph this part of the operation. Several abruptly turned on him."They belted me a couple of times," he said, "and demanded my film. One of them lunged at me and smashed my camera." The suddenness of the violence stunned everyone and Sibbald managed an escape. He called the police and they invited him to press charges. He declined. Sibbald spent other, less eventful nights in the field and did manage to find pickers who reluctantly agreed to be photographed if their faces were covered.

Sibbald's photos illustrate in stark terms the key point of Abel's story: this is an industry erected on the backs of a nighttime labour force operating largely beyond the scrutiny of tax authorities. The work is so tough and so weather-dependent that the people who are attracted to it are, for the most part, the economically desperate. Like people who live in the shadow of a mountain, those who collect taxes can only imagine income-earning activity they cannot see. Abel's story and Sibbald's photos should dispel any illusions that pickers are getting rich in this shadowy industry.

— Rick Boychuk

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