Mowat seeks help via a Peruvian amateur radio operator

Farley Mowat seeks help via a Peruvian amateur radio operator after deciding that he must ask Ottawa for new orders. The attempt turns a weak field transmitter into the beginning of a long-distance misunderstanding: a brief message sent from the subarctic is heard in Peru, interpreted as coming from near Tierra del Fuego, and passed into Canadian channels as an apparent coded communication. The episode links the practical limits of Mowat’s equipment to the procedural habits of government, while leaving the consequences of his message unresolved in the field.

The attempt to reach Ottawa

Mowat’s decision to try again followed a discouraging response to his first radiogram. He understood from his orientation course in Ottawa that information from another department was not to be questioned, and that failures in field operations would be blamed on the person in the field. Even so, he had no alternative but to seek new instructions. He uncovered the portable radio, set it on a pile of boxes, and consulted its manual for the first time.

The manual made the attempt seem unlikely to succeed. The radio was intended for forest rangers and was not normally expected to work over more than twenty miles. Mowat nevertheless connected its batteries, rigged the aerial, and followed the operating instructions. The name assigned to his transmitter was Daisy Mae, a call sign chosen, for reasons the narrative attributes to the Department of Transport, by the authority that licensed mobile transmitters.

A signal from Peru

For an hour, Daisy Mae sent into the subarctic sky without drawing a reply. Just as Mowat was close to accepting the manual’s pessimistic range estimate and abandoning the attempt, he heard a faint human voice through the static. He adjusted the set until he could identify the speech as Spanish. The contact was not a nearby station but an amateur operator in Peru.

Mowat later reported that he had no technical expertise with which to explain the connection. An expert subsequently attributed it to “wave skip”: under particular atmospheric conditions, especially in the north, a very low-powered transmitter could sometimes reach a great distance. In the episode, that explanation makes the extraordinary contact intelligible without making it predictable. A radio designed for short-range use had reached across a continental span, but the distance also made clear communication harder.

The operator’s English was no better than Mowat’s Spanish, and he initially believed the transmission came from somewhere near Tierra del Fuego. It took time for the two men to understand one another. The operator eventually agreed to record the substance of Mowat’s message to his chief and forward it to Ottawa by commercial means. Mowat kept to the government’s ten-word minimum, recalling the recent instruction to limit radiograms. The shortness of the message did not protect it from distortion: in Peru it was inadequately understood, and Mowat later learned that double translation had further corrupted it.

Misrouting and mistaken identity

The message did not go directly to Mowat’s department. Perhaps because it originated in South America, it was delivered instead to External Affairs. There it seemed to have come from Tierra del Fuego and to be written in code. Inquiries involving the Ministry of Defense could identify neither the supposed code nor any known Canadian agent in the Cape Horn region. A request for help from a field worker had thus become, in the receiving offices, a baffling question of identity and location.

The mystery was resolved only by coincidence. Some weeks later, a secretary at External Affairs mentioned the message while having lunch with a senior official in Mowat’s department. In recounting the incident, she casually gave the signature as VARLEY MONFAT. The senior official recognized this as probably a distorted version of Mowat’s name and inferred that he was the likely sender. That recognition solved one part of the puzzle, but raised another: no one could be found who admitted authorizing Mowat to go to Tierra del Fuego in the first place.

Orders that could not reach the field

The mistaken identification prompted urgent instructions for Mowat to report to Ottawa at once. They were sent through the Canadian Consul in Chile, a route shaped by the very error that had placed him near Cape Horn. None of the messages reached him. His radio battery could power the set for only six hours, and after the Peruvian contact the only station he managed to raise before the battery died was broadcasting light music from Moscow.

The episode therefore ends not with a restored line of communication but with the field worker beyond the reach of the orders generated by his own appeal. Its chain of causes is sharply ironic: the radio’s improbable success creates a distant administrative crisis, yet the equipment’s limited power prevents the response from returning. Months later, Mowat learned that the ten words had been enough to cause a crisis, but the account does not detail its full consequences. By the time he had finished dealing with Peru, darkness was gathering around the hills, and he still had no new orders.