Part 1

Long Interviews

Setting the Stage

Derrick Bowring, b.1916, Int.1986 [retired managing director, Bowring’s]

I suppose as long as I can remember I can recall something about the seal fishery because my father was in the London office of the company and he was the chief marketing agent for Bowring Brothers’ sealskins. His department was responsible for selling the skins that were produced on this [Newfoundland] side. The market was mainly in England or in Europe. So I had a faint introduction to the seal fishery, but I really became connected with it in 1935 when I knew that I would be coming out to Newfoundland.

I’d just left school and I was then taken to the tanneries that handled the skins and to the furriers who also marketed them as a separate operation. I remember thinking at first they were all a bit smelly and a bit dirty, a bit hard to handle, and I couldn’t tell one from the other. I could tell a fur from a tanning skin because it had hair on it and the other one didn’t. At the stage they were when they reached England, they had been simply packed in puncheons in salt and that was the way they arrived on the other side. Then they were culled for what was known as a “fast fur,” which could be handled as a furrier’s skin or one with the hair or fur loose, and that had to become a tanned item.

So I was looking at sealskins before I ever saw Newfoundland. When I came out in the summer of 1935, of course the seal fishery for that year was over, but I did see the skins from the other point of view of being packed from the bulk salt piles on the Southside and being shipped over to England. In that sense I’ve always been familiar with it, and the seal fishery was relatively important to Bowring Brothers. The company’s investment in ships and plant was quite considerable, and they had to keep the thing in motion.

At that time we owned five ships. The pride of the fleet was the Imogene, and then there was the Beothic, which was also a steel ship. The other three, the old Terra Nova, the Eagle, and the Ranger, were the wooden ships.

The Imogene, interestingly enough, was the only ship up to that time that had been specifically built for the seal fishery. The others, the wooden ones, had been built as whalers; the Beothic, a steel ship, was one of the World War I American quick-production jobs built to beat the U-boat game, and she’d been converted for the seal fishery. The Ungava was another sister ship of the Beothic owned by Job’s, and she was the same.

The Imogene had been built in 1929 specifically with the seal fishery in mind and because of that fact she was vastly superior in the ice. But to obtain good ice-breaking qualities, you sacrifice something else, and in this case we sacrificed carrying capacity. She could carry ample sealskins [pelts] to make it a thoroughly paying voyage, but she was a very difficult ship to use in ordinary trading in between periods. For example, in the coal trade, she couldn’t carry enough coal to justify the cost of operating it.

They were the five ships I first remember, and then there was the Southside plant with the fat-rendering cookers and the boilers to provide the steam and all the machinery for the skinning machines and the others for preparing the pelts. I remember it all being rather slippery and not unpleasantly smelly, but certainly smelly. Well, there it was. When you’re 18, you accept what’s put in front of you as being something that it should be. So those are my earliest recollections of it.

Originally seals were caught for their fat. The fat was the marketable product which had the greater value. By the time I remember the seal fishery, of course, that had changed. The fat was a by-product of it; seal oil was an edible oil, as opposed to a technical oil, so that you produced as much of it as you could. It had a market price geared to other edible oils, and it was sold usually in the Canadian market to people like Lever Brothers or that type of company, and it was quickly disposed of. It was usually sold, in fact, before the seal fishery for that year took place. And when the oil was produced, and had been cooked and bleached, the best price for oil was obtained from what was known as “water white.” It was virtually water white if you looked at it in a bottle. Well, it had low acidity and low, what we called “unsaponifiable matter,” but at that point it was the return from the furs and the hair seals that were important to the financial result, particularly the fur which led, of course, to the whitecoat. The idea was to get the whitecoat while the fur was still fast [when they started to moult, they were no good for the fur market].

Hence, the Imogene could reach them when other ships couldn’t, and so the marketing of furs was virtually all done in England. There was some pottering around with it in the States, but it was not a market that was really significant. And also the same applied to the hair seals or the “ragged jackets,” as they were called.

The sealskins were tanned in the United Kingdom, and I remember at that point the tanning was done by a company called Bevington’s in South London, and they used the old traditional tanning methods known as vegetable tanning, which produced perfectly good leather, but, unfortunately, it was no use in the shoe trade, where there was the best demand for leather, because this leather would stretch; and no shoemaker wanted leather that would stretch after he’d made it into a shoe.

So the great problem, and it was about 1935-37, and I know my father was endlessly searching for a tanner who could “chrome-tan,” which was a chemical tanning process which produced leather that the shoemaker would accept, and you’d open up a whole new market. He eventually found the man, almost by accident. A typical little, tiny tannery in London, a minute little spot, you know. The man’s name was Duckworth, Frank Duckworth, and his family had been tanners since William the Conqueror, I should think. He thought he could chrome-tan a sealskin—and he did. So the upshot of that was that he chrome-tanned skins, which were then introduced to the shoe trade, and they were acceptable. They were marketed to the Clark Shoes [Co.], and they’re still on the go today, very well-known, good quality shoe. We sold a great many sealskins tanned by Frank Duckworth. Because old man Duckworth didn’t have any children, the tannery was eventually bought by C.D. Bowring and Company, and it was operated as a subsidiary of theirs. But chrome-tanning was a very important part of the marketing process, and it opened up an entirely new field.

As I said, the oil just went at whatever price the edible oils were. The furriers were, of course, of interest to the fur trade, mainly for trimming. You didn’t see many garments made entirely of seal fur—whitecoat fur. Mostly it was made into collars, cuffs, muffs, trim around the edges. And there was plenty of market for the fast fur, and we did very well.

Of course in the 1930s we were still in the Depression and there wasn’t that much of a good market for anything anywhere. I know by the time the war started in 1939, we had a very large stock of untreated sealskins in London that had been shipped over. Of course, they soon got gobbled up like everything else during the war; everything was used up that was available, and we very quickly were out of our stock of sealskins, and, of course, during the war, there was no seal fishery [very little].

The period I remember really well, that from 1935 to 1939, was really the last years of the seal fishery. During the war we lost the Imogene, we lost the Beothic, we lost the Terra Nova, we lost the Ranger, and we were left with the Eagle, which was wooden, very old, and she was ceremoniously sunk after the War because the cost of maintaining her was beyond any returns you could expect. We built one little wooden vessel, which was called the Terra Nova II, but she was very small. She pottered around in the ice. She brought in a few seals, but it was only a joke compared to the seal fishery beforehand.

We converted an ocean-going tug, an American wooden, ocean-going tug, which was strengthened for ice at enormous expense. It was a farce at the seal fishery, and when we realized that there was simply no way that you could build a ship or buy a ship or convert a ship that could support itself out at the seal fishery, and at that point we, Bowring Brothers, gave it up.

And, of course, the seal fishery was really ended partly by economics in that way; you couldn’t afford to employ an expensive ship in that industry and, secondly, it was finished by the helicopter. The minute anybody got out to the seal fishery, it was obviously doomed because it’s not a pretty sight. It’s nice to go steaming around the lovely white ocean and looking at the icebergs and see[ing] the occasional tracks of a polar bear or something. It’s all very romantic, but in fact it’s just an unpleasant spectacle—the seal fishery itself.

You have heard of the Viking disaster, and that was one of our ships. She was used by the filmmaking company for them to take scenes at the ice, and, in the process, they blew the ship up. They caused a great deal of grief and misery, and people were killed, and the ship was lost. We always thought it was because they had taken some dynamite out in order to make some spectacular scenes with icebergs or growlers or whatever, but nobody knew, because the ones who were mixed up in it were lost.

From that date on, we would never take a passenger to the ice. Never, ever. Occasionally there was the odd scientist who wanted to go out. If we ever allowed them out on the ships, there were to be no cameras, no publication, no anything, and they had to sign an agreement to that effect. But there was hardly anybody [who] went. I remember when I was out myself that I was quite disgusted that I wasn’t allowed to take any of my friends with me. You know, it seemed a nice sort of occasion that you could have two or three friends along. “No, sir! You’re going out and that’s that! We’re not going to have anybody there who isn’t part of the actual operation.”

And you know, what finished the seal fishery, of course, was the publication of all these horrifying pictures, some of them faked—a lot of them faked. Often times, they weren’t even at the Front, they were up in the Gulf. And the skinning alive of seals was done by the people faking them, who had nothing to do with the seal fishery. But it’s exactly the same if you allowed the general public into a slaughterhouse: we’d all be vegetarians because dear little calves and dear little lambs and dear little everything else are being done in. It’s not a very nice sight and it’s certainly no better sight out at the seal fishery, added to which the little white seals are cute-looking things. I mean, I saw them myself. But what finished it off was the minute helicopters started landing lunatics out there, it was doomed, and that’s that. I doubt if it will revive.

It wouldn’t revive mainly for economic reasons. Referring back to the Imogene for a moment: the Imogene could steam through at 3 or 4 knots when everything else was jammed. It was unbelievable. I’ve seen it myself—that all our other ships and Job’s ships just sitting there. Naturally it was a competitive business and the Imogene was duty bound to help Bowring’s ships and leave Job’s ships jammed. That was the game.

I mean, if they were in real trouble, she would help, but not otherwise. I remember once we were steaming through ice up near Belle Isle, through which the Imogene could go, say about 4 knots, and here was the Terra Nova absolutely belching smoke, you know, plenty of steam up, just not able to move. Well, we slipped across her bow to give her our wake and got her into the wake, but she couldn’t even hold the wake because a pan would drift into it and stop her and then the thing would close in, and there were limits to how much help you could give.

The Imogene was built as an icebreaker; she had the icebreaking bow. She had a stern that enabled a pan of ice to capsize and run down the side of the ship tilted up. If you haven’t got the proper stern, the pan of ice will straighten out at the end and knock the blades off your propeller. So she had a right stern with a gradual runaway that enabled the pan to level out before it got to the propeller, and she never lost a blade, but she could get to the whitecoat seals in the patch while it was still fast fur. That was the economically important thing to do. The Imogene holds the record for the largest number of seal pelts brought in, but she doesn’t hold the record for the greatest weight brought in. That belongs to the Ungava. The Imogene would get in, get her load of fast furs, and you wanted to get them back as quickly as you could because the best furs would take the lightest dyes, and if you allowed a skin on board to become oxidized, it would turn an earthy sort of yellowy colour and it wouldn’t take a light dye. You had to dye that sort of a chocolate brown, which was not as marketable.

There was always experimental work going on with the furs in trying to keep the product that we shipped as white as possible so that it would take pale colour dyes, which were much more marketable than the dark ones. I remember we drummed them in sawdust, we washed them in various solutions. We almost had a great sort of laundry room on the Southside at one time in which skins were, I think, first drummed in sawdust, then they were washed in a great laundromat thing. The object always being to keep them as white as we could, but the most important part, really, was keeping them white on the sealing vessel.

So she’d get her load of whitecoats, she’d pick up a few beaters, which were valuable because they had short hair, and she’d pick up a few bedlamers, and then she’d call it quits and beat it back to land her catch. The others would be out there picking up bedlamers and old seals and hoods and Lord knows what because of the weight, and they’d take a good weight of seals. That was always a rather stupid part of the seal fishery. Traditionally, the shares were based on the weight, the price set for the catch was so much a hundredweight, which obviously was geared to the days when the oil was the important thing and the weight of oil was what counted. When it became that the fur was more important, the weight was fixedly ridiculous and, yet, that’s the way it went right until the end. The price that was set at the beginning of the voyage was geared as so much a hundredweight and that’s how they were paid. Obviously, the company did far better off a load of fairly lightweight white, fast-fur whitecoats than it did off a great heavy load of bedlamers and old seals.

The Imogene in that sense justified herself, but it was ludicrous. The cost of the Imogene was over $300,000 in 1929. The same ship built after the war was well over $1 million and today it might be umpteen million—absolutely implausible to build it. When you look at the new Caribou, a ruddy old ferry which I think cost $100 million or something. That’s almost enough to tell you that no seal fishery can stand anything approaching that. She was a ship that obviously could handle all the other ones, and if we had a couple of Imogenes, it would have been a very nice seal fishery, producing economically and giving you as much as you could market. Satisfactory business to limit that sort of production.

Various firms engaged in chartering ships for the seal fishery. The Caribou, the ferry on the Gulf, was chartered once or twice. The Sagona was chartered as well. I think most of the chartering came when the chartered vessels belonged to the government or the Newfoundland Railway. They were part of the coastal service or the Gulf service. If you could charter them cheaply enough, it was worth doing. If the price of skins and the market looked promising, that was done.

The Commission of Government was in existence in those days and they were, as governments are today, always trying to create a bit of employment. If they could get something going at the seal fishery, well and good. They controlled these railway vessels and they would charter them to people who wanted to prosecute the seal fishery at pretty giveaway rates. In fact I remember one superb row, in fact it was on when I came out, which had to do with the Caribou.

The Caribou was a very good iceboat: she was Dutch-built and, except that she had a lot of passenger accommodation, she was a very similar boat to the Imogene, and she was very good in ice. The Commission of Government were willing to charter the Caribou for the seal fishery, and Bowring Brothers certainly wanted to charter her, but, for some reason that nobody has ever explained to me, she was chartered to Crosbie’s, who had nothing to do with the seal fishery whatever. They weren’t in it, never had been, but they thought it was, you know, like they thought we made a lot of money out of it and they’d like to get an entry into it on the cheap, as it were, because if you can charter a vessel and use it for six weeks and hand her back again and have no maintenance in between, you’re very comfortably away.

And the row was that: Sir Edgar Bowring was the senior one at the time and he was belting into the government because he said that was absolutely outrageous to ignore the people who kept the thing going for years and were in it seriously but, then give the break of this kind to a fellow outside the industry who hadn’t done anything with the seal fishery. Well, that raged for a bit and, you know, people weren’t speaking to other people, but they chartered her to Crosbie’s. She was very good at the ice, but that was the only time she was out, I think.

The Sagona was fairly often out, but she wasn’t worth chartering. She wasn’t very good in it. I think the Kyle probably went for a year or two. We would have chartered the Caribou on that particular occasion because she was a good icebreaker, but we didn’t bother with any of the others. Bowring’s also owned the Florizel and the Stephano that were on the Red Cross service to New York. In most years the seal fishery was an off-season for that trade, so they used to go out. The Florizel went to the ice a number of years. You’d just shut off the passenger accommodation. She was a very able ship in the ice. But chartering from our point of view was never anything considered very seriously unless it was an outstanding ship. More often we had more than enough capacity for seals. It’s a question of how much you can sell. No use loading yourself up with seals that are unsellable [unsaleable].

The only advantages that were there in using your own vessels were you knew their capacity, you knew their ability, and you had total control of them, so you knew their machinery was working. We never seriously considered chartering anything for sealing except for that episode of the Caribou, which led to a lot of hard feelings all round. The old wooden ships that we owned were simply tied up when they came in to St. John’s and they stayed tied up except for maintenance and when they were on dry dock. They’re very expensive things to maintain, but they simply couldn’t carry enough ordinary freight to justify the cost of operating them.

The Beothic was the best one because she was built originally as a proper cargo carrier and she could, if the freight rates were marginally high enough, carry coal from Sydney to St. John’s, or something of that nature. Actually I remember her carrying a cargo of pit props from Tommy’s Arm in Notre Dame Bay to Barrow in Furness, simply because freight rates at that particular period were high enough to justify the effort, but basically she was tied up, too, for most of the year.

The price was agreed upon by Bowring’s and Job’s on the telephone. There were only two companies that I remember who were in the seal fishery seriously, and one was Job’s and the other was Bowring’s. Job’s never had more than, in my time, more than two ships. I don’t know why Job’s were still at it in those days, to tell you the truth, because they weren’t busily engaged, as we were, in the marketing end of it. They didn’t have any sort of establishment there. They marketed it in the old way. They’d sell the oil. They used to sell their fur and leather unprocessed. They sold them as raw skin. We never did if we could avoid it. So Job’s would almost be compelled to go along with whatever price we’d set, I would say. Well, we knew them all pretty well. There’d be a telephone call: “Well, we’re going to set prices at so and so.” Job’s would probably say, “Oh that’s terribly high!” because they didn’t have the market that we did. But they went along with it.

The crew owned a third of the seals—that was the basic share. The cooks, the firemen, the engineers, the navigating element, the stewards, and the trimmers; these people had a certain guaranteed monthly pay. The others got shares in the seals; the captain got a nice little chunk out of it, and there were other people called bridgemasters, master watches, assistant master watches, and cooks, and people who took responsibility of one kind or another, all came in for an extra slice of the cake.

We always tried to get the captain who was the most skilled at getting his ship to the seals, getting a load, and getting back as fast as he could. In my memory of it, the captains were pretty well the same men year after year. Obviously they changed prior to that, but sometimes captains made mistakes in taking a ship. On the whole we had five ships and we had five captains who were graded unofficially in order of seniority, and the senior one had the choice whichever ship he wanted, and the second and so on, and the last man got what was left.

When I first came out, Abram Kean was an old man then, but he was still taking a ship to the ice, and he was certainly senior captain by every measurement. I think the governor of the day had got him recognized as the sort of commodore of the sealing fleet and he could fly a blue ensign, which was a quite a mark of honour. But he could have the choice of our ships. Well, he’d been out in a number of them and, at the time I came out, had been going in the Beothic. Before I came out, the Imogene appeared on the scene, and he looked at her and thought, “She’s a bit small. No, I don’t think I want to have the Imogene. I’ll stick to the Beothic.”

So the second man, who was Al Blackwood from Wesleyville, was given the choice, and he took the Imogene and he was with her for the rest of the time and he did very nicely out of it. He was extremely lucky that old Kean didn’t quite see the point of this ship that was built for the job.

Then Stan Barbour had the Terra Nova and Charlie Kean had the Eagle and Captain Richard Badcock had the Ranger. Now, Barbour came from Trinity, and over the years we’d always had Barbours and Keans; it ran in families. Charlie Kean, who had the Eagle, was a nephew of Abram Kean. In the period I remember, that is up to 1939, there was no change in those. They took the same vessel every year. Billy Winsor was a permanent fixture in the Ungava for Job’s and J.C. Dominey had the Neptune. He was lost during the war.

They were all characters. In the period I remember they never changed. They had the same ships and they probably took the same crew all the time. The thing I do remember mostly is the great mistake that Captain Abram Kean made in not taking the Imogene and the bit of luck that old Al Blackwood had in getting her, because he, up to that point, had had the Eagle, which was a good ship—best of the wooden ones.

They were characters of the first order; they all wanted, naturally, to select every single one of their crews and there was more fuss and bother, and basically they did select certainly 80, 85 per cent of the men, and, of course, they all came from their own settlements or own areas. If you came from Wesleyville, you weren’t going to have anyone from Conception Bay. You know, the best men were always in your bay. I don’t know whether Badcock, who came from Bay Roberts, I don’t know whether he took mostly Conception Bay people or not. Mostly they preferred Trinity Bay and Bonavista Bay, and they came from all over the place. There was always a great kerfuffle because what you earned from the seal fishery was a worthwhile contribution to your income.

And, of course, the local merchants liked to get men out to the seal fishery who owed them money, and that was a thing we had to be frightfully careful of. We were aware that went on, and you see Bowring Brothers were in the wholesale business. They were supplying all these merchants, some of whom had credit. Credit, my God, was a real problem in those days. If you had supplied some outport merchant for many years, he was totally unable to pay you, because he, in turn, didn’t get paid by the people to whom he gave credit. He liked to collect a few coppers by whipping them off to the man he could get a berth for at the seal fishery. Well, if that man was a good sealer, it didn’t make any difference to us, but if he was just some old deadbeat, we weren’t a bit interested in that.

However, the captains chose their crews most of the time, I’d say, of about 85 per cent. The other 15 per cent of the berths led to more uproar, and almost hard feelings, in a way, because even if you’d kept every berth and gave them all out yourself, you still wouldn’t have enough to give them to all the people who wanted them.

You see the seal fishery was more than a money-making thing; it was a great old holiday.* After a long winter, cooped up at home, you know, cutting firewood, the seal fishery was a very nice little break for an awful lot of men who liked it because of its bit of adventure and there was a bit of pay attached to it. Altogether it was something that a great many men wanted to go on, so berths were very much sought after, and this led to a lot of silliness. But the captains, on the whole, chose their crews. They had to, because they were the ones who were responsible for getting the catch and, if you were going to saddle them with a lot of undesirables, you weren’t going to do very well.

The only thing the owners picked were the engineers for the ship and the navigators, because most of the sealing captains didn’t have their deep-sea tickets. They were mostly coastal skippers and you couldn’t clear a ship without a proper certificate. So there was always, on each one, a master mariner, who went under the name of navigator. He was a highly necessary member of the crew. So they were all appointed by the owners. The bo’sun and the chief engineer were permanent employees of the company who were always on the ship, either at the seal fishery or for maintenance. All the engineers and the stokers [firemen] were hired by the owners.

The navigators were hired by the owners on the basis of their necessary certificate; they were licensed mariners. They were very necessary because there’s a lot of carelessness went on in the seal fishery. Expensive pieces of equipment those ships were, you know, not toys to be run around in. Nor were they dories. There was a good deal of slapdash use of them.

You see one of the things you had to do at the seal fishery was conserve your coal because there was a limit to how much coal you could take with you and, since you couldn’t get seals after dark, the method of conserving coal was to do what they called “burn down” for the night. That is, bank your fires down and just keep the very minimum of steam on. You weren’t going to go anywhere because you were nicely established in the icefields—so there you sat.

Now, what they used to do was put the bow of the ship into the biggest pan of ice they could see and leave the engines running. Now, there was always an engineer, naturally, on duty, and firemen. They would put her into the pan of ice, leave the engines running “slow ahead,” and the reason for that was it kept your wake open. The propeller turning, churning water back would keep ice from building up astern, and when you wanted to get out, get going in the morning, you had something to back up into and take a run at it.

So you always had her running slow ahead, but slow ahead on some ships could drive them along at several knots if they’re in open water. The chief engineers, the seamen part of the crew, and the navigators, occasionally, having done all this, the ice pan that you stuck her bow into broke or drifted aside or she slithered off sideways, and she’d be steaming through the ice at 2 or 3 knots, and a lot of the time you were fairly close to land. You could just as likely pile into Cape Bonavista because, although there was a watch on the bridge, since she wasn’t going anywhere, they could be holed up in the wheelhouse smoking or playing forty-fives [card game]. They didn’t pay as much attention as they should have, and the people who did worry were the engineers and the navigators.

They were endlessly popping up to see “where we are now.” One of them told me, a chief engineer, Will McGettigan—he only died the other day—he said, “I got out. Whenever we were near land, I hardly went to sleep at all.” He said, “I came up one night, and we’d burnt down in a patch of ice, put her in a big pan with the engines running dead slow. When I came up, here we were steaming at 3 knots through open water heading for Cape Bonavista.” Well, he woke them all up you know . . . but that’s why the navigators and the others were a very, very important part of the ship. They didn’t interfere in any way with the seal fishery thing except to say, “Well, you can’t take her there.”

But there were endless old tricks that went on. In the Imogene with Blackwood when I was out, when we left St. John’s, and we were pretty quickly into some fairly heavy ice, and, to my mind, we were steaming through it very nicely. But according to Blackwood, she wasn’t really, she wasn’t doing what she’d done before. She ought to be able to do better than that. But then he’d look back from the bridge at the huge funnel—she was a very powerful vessel and there would be the foghorn, siren, and the steam safety valve. And he’d look at that, and he’d say, “You know she hasn’t got a plume of steam coming out of the safety valve. You haven’t got the proper pressure on.” This was to the chief engineer.

“Oh, yes, we have, you know I’ve got to run her a little with correct pressure anyway. It’s not a matter of putting more on. If I put more on, it’ll only blow off.” So this sort of argument went on for a bit, and Blackwood wasn’t satisfied. The chief didn’t really care. I mean, he was running it the way it should be run, having regard to his owner’s interest and, anyway, that was that.

Well, that night, after dark, when all had settled down and everybody retired to their bunks, two of the engineers went up the funnel—they had a ladder for getting up to it—and they drove a small wedge of wood into the outlet of the safety valve. A lovely plume of steam came out. All they did was just narrowed the opening. Next morning, himself [Blackwood] said: “There, now she’s going! Now she’s really moving. Look at that bit of steam. I told you!” And not an ounce of difference in the pressure, but just the psychological benefit for the captain that she was now properly equipped to go to sea.

I mean, that sort of thing went on. There was always the tale that the Ranger was not really very powerful, she was old. She used to go to the Gulf actually, not the Front, but the tale always used to be that “Oh, no, don’t blow the foghorn. If you blow the foghorn”—which, of course, was a steam-driven thing—“Don’t blow the foghorn, you’ll take 2 knots off her speed!”

There was always a difference in a way men took these ships, particularly the Imogene and Beothic, to the seal fishery, only Abram Kean had his deep-sea ticket. He was a properly qualified master, but the others weren’t. Their biggest ship was sailing off in a schooner. Take poor old Will McGettigan on the Imogene; when you were steaming in fairly open water, she could do 15 knots, and if you hit a pan of ice at that speed, it was the most awful clang. God knows what damage it did. But they would say, “Gee, she’s a big steel ship. She can put up with that. What are you complaining about?”

I remember one time all the ships, that’s our five and two of Job’s, were up, we’d really finished with the main patch up in Belle Isle, and we’d all drifted south into the Straits. We all wanted to get out, but the Imogene was the only one to make it. We wanted to get near another patch of reported seals somewhere near Grey Islands. So we were heading off in that direction in relatively open water, certainly able to move easy enough, but the poor old Ungava had got herself pinned on the other side of the Straits, where the ice was heavy and she couldn’t wiggle. So as the Imogene headed out, and the Ungava was in sight a few miles back, we got a wireless message from the Ungava: “I’ve damaged my rudder. Could you help me out?”

Blackwood, first of all, he said, “Are you sure that’s what you got?” “Oh yes,” said the fellow, Dick Ryan, the wireless operator. So I said, “What are you going to do about it?” “Nothing.” I said, “Well, God, you know, this fellow’s in peril.” “Not at all! He’s not in peril. Don’t believe a word of it.” So we just steamed straight out of the Straits, left him up there. And I was sort of half-worried. I figured that’s not the way that seamen operate, you know, the rules of the ocean and so on. So we went out, and that’s the occasion when we helped the Terra Nova, but we couldn’t keep her in our wake, she couldn’t hang onto it. So anyway, off we went.

And then by the evening of that day we got into heavy ice ourselves and we had to butt. Well you’re not making much progress when you’re butting. By God, we hadn’t been butting for more than a couple of hours when the Ungava, the Neptune, and the whole shooting match came right up to our stern. I said, “My God, that’s the Ungava!” “Sure it is,” said Blackwood, “I told you there’s nothing wrong with it.” And sure enough, there wasn’t.

In fact the ruddy Neptune damn near smashed her bowsprit on our stern because she got into our wake and she was a fairly able ship, rather like the Eagle. So she was belting along in our wake, you know, a few knots and we brought up in an ice jam that stopped the Imogene. So our method was, don’t try to get in too far. Put her astern and back out of it quick to get a run at it. Well, the Neptune wasn’t looking, you know. She didn’t realize we’d been stopped by the ice and, by jeez, I saw this bowsprit, it overhung our stern before she stopped. I mean, she could have done us some damage, so this was simply not paying attention. So that’s the way they operated at the seal fishery.

Some of the things they do that are, to me, miraculous. We’d put 300-odd men out on the ice in four watches, and they would disappear beyond the horizon. I never saw any of them in a patch of seals. I said, “My God, we’ll never find them again.” And in the evening, the whole ruddy lot turned up. They called the roll, and everybody was there. Amazing, the way they managed, because we’d been wiggling around in the ice picking up pans of seals all day, you know. There were things like that the men were extraordinarily clever at. At other things they were careless and inattentive.

The worst bloody people at the ice actually were stowaways, because stowaways were not on anybody’s crew list. They just materialized from somewhere, but you couldn’t lose them. They were just young teenagers who’d come aboard. Every ship always had them. You’d try to flush them out before you left, but there were always a few who managed to escape the search, and they were a pest because they’d be over the side and out getting seals. They wanted to bring back flippers: this was the big deal. And, of course, nobody was responsible for them. I remember the Imogene, after the crew had been picked up at night, and somebody said, “What about the blankety-blank stowaways?”

And they went, checked them out, two of them missing. Well, how long had they been missing? Well, nobody knew. They might have been gone for days. Anyway, they appeared. They were out on the ice somewhere. But that caused more trouble and nuisance because nobody had them on his list. I mean the master watch knew that he had 50 men, and he had to account for all of them, and he did it every single time. He had a deputy who helped. It was routine. But nobody had any stowaways listed.

In the days before the wireless, when Arthur Jackman was one of the great sealing captains, he was in a place you didn’t want to get, up in White Bay, because you could very easily spend the whole spring up there if the weather turned against you. You know, if the wind was from the east, you’d never get out. He was in there, or partway into the bay one year, and he got a nice patch of seals and he didn’t want anyone else in with him. So the other ships, he could see them on the outside, and he said, “You know they’ll probably come in unless I do something to make it unattractive.” So he piled on coal and blanketed it down until he had black smoke coming out of his funnels, you know, like a forest fire. And the rest of them from outside saw him. They said, “By Jesus, he’s jammed in there! We better not get in there.” They all sheared off.

When they all disappeared, he lowered the boom. Got on with his private patch. Some of the other ships could well have been ships with the same firm. But the captains were always inclined to look out for themselves, and I think when I was out that I was an embarrassment in a way to the captain because I was just as interested, and he knew it, in how the Terra Nova did, or the Eagle did, or the Beothic did, as I was in the Imogene. And under normal circumstances he would give them a sort of a little bit of help if it wasn’t too inconvenient. But if he didn’t like the idea, he’d just shear off, and say, “I never saw you. What were you doing? I thought you were all right.” But when I was there, it wasn’t quite so easy. I’d say, “Are we going to help the Terra Nova?” And he’d say, “Oh yes, yes. We’re going to help the Terra Nova,” he’d say, and we would, but I suspect I wasn’t too popular. Owners were a nuisance.

Some ships signed on the stowaways as sealers, but we never did it. Every one of our ships pulled out from the wharf and stayed out in the stream in the harbour for a half an hour or more searching for stowaways, and you always found some and you landed them. We never signed them on. You tried to make life miserable for them in a sort of semi-humanitarian way. You wouldn’t give them any decent accommodation, for sure. They were a nuisance, a perfect nuisance! They were just a perfect pest to everybody. They had to be fed, and, as I say, you had to be sure you didn’t lose them. They were totally out of hand, you know. Nobody had any control over them. As for signing them on—not likely! Let them have a share! No, sir! And you couldn’t turn a blind eye to them because you were out there with a hell of a lot of men on a ship, all of whom you had to bring back.

Now, Abram Kean was fairly old when he was going out in his latter years. And in those days it was the sort of problem you were always running into in those days when pension plans were not in vogue and people worked, on the whole, until they dropped. It was the sort of standard procedure and Abram Kean was well into his 80s. My uncle was the chairman of Bowring Brothers at the time in the late 1930s and I think he simply came to the conclusion that you couldn’t, in all conscience, send a ship to the ice with a man in charge of her who was that old. Not that there was anything visibly off, but it was just not reasonable, and so he was, I suppose you’d call it, retired. I mean he was told that “Look, we simply must make the change.” He didn’t like the idea, thought it was ridiculous, and that he was as good as ever he was.

I had that same problem very soon after that when I became responsible for what they called the stores’ operations at Bowring Brothers, at 26 or 27. It was just after the war and I had four managers, who were 79, 74, 73, and 69. The youngest was my present age, and I was, to them, an absolute nipper of 27 or so. It’s impossible. No pension plans, no nothing. But you can’t go on. That’s when Bowring Brothers’ pension plan started, because I had to pension them. But, however, that’s nothing to do with the seal fishery, but the same applied to Abram Kean. He just went on until his age came against him. In his opinion it didn’t handicap him, but in our opinion it was not right to send a ship to the seal fishery in [the] charge of a man of that age. He didn’t like that idea at all. He was as good as new. That’s what happened, and it happened in so many things. It was not just the seal fishery; it happened all the time. People did go on, and the wretched employer was always in trouble. He had to do something one way or the other. It would be manoeuvred around: “Look here, you resign; we don’t fire you.”

We used to insure our ship and our cargo, and we had liability insurance. In my day we never had a disaster. Fortunately there was never a problem after the case of the Viking, and that wasn’t really the seal fishery. She was only out making this wretched film, but it cost the company a lot of money in pensions being paid to people who were disabled. I don’t know whether that was the cause of it, or what, but we always insured for any liability or disasters of that kind.

You had to think of the ship as a ship, and the ship as a sealing platform. The ship as a ship had to be treated according to the Merchant Shipping Act, and you couldn’t neglect that. You couldn’t, for instance, send any of those ships to the seal fishery without a master mariner with a ticket on board. Whatever he was called—he could have been called the chief steward—but he had to have his ticket. And obviously with the engines and that you had to have engineer[s]—the Imogene carried four engineers. The chief never stood a watch. He was free roaming and almost in the way. The chief engineer was the company representative more than the nominal master.

The sealing master was a sealing master. On the whole we considered that a lot of the sealing masters didn’t have too much regard for the ship itself, and if it hit a lot of pans of ice very hard and put a lot of dents in the plating, it’s an expensive game for the owners next year in dry dock to take off the plates and straighten them out and straighten the frames, and so on, you know. It was the chief engineer who looked after the owner’s interests more than the captain, I would say.

There’s one interesting anecdote that I should tell you about. Immediately after the war—we’d lost the Imogene in the war—and we were still very much interested at that time in the seal fishery. This would be 1945, ’46. We figured we must replace the Imogene with just such another and that was going to cost about $1 million plus, which in ’46 was one hell of a pile of money, and it was obvious that you couldn’t justify spending that much money on, let’s say, another Imogene which could only go to the seal fishery and possibly get a bit of off-season trading but probably wouldn’t.

So you had to have some non-sealing period of employment for her. And the most obvious thing to us—because the Caribou, which was the railway’s ferry, had been lost—the obvious thing to us was, we’ll build this vessel, we’ll fit her with passenger accommodation, and we’ll make a deal with the Commission of Government, which Newfoundland had at the time, that, “Here, we’ll build the vessel. We’ll use her for the seal fishery, and then you run her on the Gulf as a ferry boat instead of the Caribou, and we’ll charter it to you at whatever we can work out.” Anyway, this whole proposition was presented to the Commission of Government as a serious venture. It would have been very useful, very good. No, no, they couldn’t, the answer came back after a bit of thought. No, they couldn’t do that. That was far too favourable to us. We were asking the government to subsidize the ship.

And it gave my uncle, at the time, the greatest satisfaction, because he said, “Oh well, if that’s what they think, we’ll soon fix that. We’ll go to them and say, ‘Well do it the other way round! You build the ship and we’ll charter it from you for the period we need it. So that if it’s too favourable for us, then you take the favourable side.’ We’ll do it on exactly those terms.” Well, I don’t say it even embarrassed them. They just turned that down, too, and that was that. It was simply not feasible to build it unless you had a firm proposition for the non-sealing season.

There were several characters that were well-known in the St. John’s seal fishery. Probably the most famous one was the bo’sun of the Terra Nova and later the Eagle. He was a fellow called Tom Carroll. There’s a mountain in Antarctica called Mount Carroll after him. He was one of the permanent people on as bo’sun of, I think, the Terra Nova and then the Eagle in the end.

He had been a whaler in the days when you went after whales by rowing after them. You stuck a harpoon in them and then chased around the ocean.

Tom Carroll was one of them and, boy, was he tough! Even when I knew him, he was an old man. He lived to be over 90, and he was quite extraordinary, really. He was a seaman to his fingertips. Couldn’t read or write, and I don’t think he could write his name, but when it came to the rigging of a ship and the maintenance of her, and there was nobody could touch him. He was like Abram Kean: he went on and on and on and on, and I mean into his 80s, into God knows what. I know he was with us when we still had the Eagle. And he was still bo’sun on the Eagle, but to protect the company, we had forbidden him to go up into the crow’s nest on the mast. “Tom, you’re not to go up the ruddy mast,” because, I mean, it would look awful if he fell out of the rigging or something and broke his neck, you know. What are you doing, letting a man that age go.

So he was flatly forbidden, and he got it writing. Not that it did any good to him in writing, because he couldn’t read it, but the letter was passed to him by the manager of the Southside premises to explain to Tom exactly what it said. So one of my colleagues who was involved with the ship was over on the Southside and he went on board the Eagle to get hold of Tom and ask him something. Couldn’t find him anywhere, so he went to the wharf office and asked the lot, “Has anyone seen Tom?” No Tom. Anyway, he couldn’t be found, so that was that. It transpired later on that he’d been up in the ruddy crow’s, up in the barrel up on the top of the mast, and then he saw this Jeffrey Milling, who was a director of Bowring’s, and who had been the one who’d forbidden him to go up. When he saw him down below, he ducked down in the barrel and he stayed there until he’d gone. Then he emerged, you know, right as rain. I mean, you couldn’t stop the man.

There was anther funny incident: The Eagle wasn’t doing anything at this particular time, and she was tied up in St. John’s. The chief engineer was on board and so was Tom Carroll, minding their own business and looking after the ship. Now, St. John’s was a major naval base and most all the other ships were tied up or were at sea. The fellow in charge of the escorts was a captain who lived in the top floor of the old Newfoundland Hotel, where he had his headquarters. He sent a naval messenger to the Eagle with orders. All he could find was Tom Carroll, who took the message but he couldn’t sign for it because the poor old boy couldn’t write nor read. So, Tom stuck it in his hip pocket and went about his business. Several days later Bowring’s got a telephone call from a man who said, “I’m Tom Carroll’s son-in-law, and I think I ought to let you know about this because, because old Tom just handed me a piece of paper that he found in his pants which he says seems to be two or three days old. It seems to be a naval message.” The fellow in the office said, “Well, what does it say?” And he said, “Well, I’ll read it to you if you like.” It said it was addressed to SS Eagle and, you know, Master, SS Eagle. “Proceed to sea immediately to position so and so and so and so to assist. Such and such a vessel has lost its propeller in the ice.” You know, Tom couldn’t read it. He’d forgotten about it. The son-in-law got a bit panicky, I suppose. They didn’t know but Tom might be clapped in the clink for aiding the enemy. It was just a bit of stupidity, typical bureaucratic naval operation. The Eagle couldn’t have gone to sea. She didn’t even have a crew on board; she didn’t have a steam operator. But that was Tom.

There were other bo’suns who were characters. One that comes to mind, he couldn’t have been more than 5 feet tall—Billy Barfoot, who was the bo’sun of the Imogene. I can remember that he used to drink a bit, but everybody did; it went with the job.

One of the noticeable features of the seal hunt was that, when the vessels sailed for the seal fishery, it was a big gala event—signal flags flying and all the rest of it, and people down to see them off, and a lot of blowing of sirens and foghorns and the rest of it, and a great many of the ships didn’t really have quite enough steam up. They’d chuff out, but they weren’t much use if they hit any ice, because the firemen were all drunk.

The firemen were signed on and given an advance and, so, they hadn’t had a drink in weeks, so it all went into the liquor store and you couldn’t get a proper head of steam on the ship until you’d sobered up the firemen. I mean, I know in my diary I’ve got a note, “Not making much progress. Firemen still drunk.” Well, that was a recognized feature of it. I mean the engineers knew. They tried to get one or two firemen who would be sober and, of course, there was a limit to how long they could go on stoking.

The Imogene carried a lot of coal and 12 firemen shovelling coal. There were six on and six off, but they could heave a lot of coal into the boilers of a ship. Anyway, they always started the voyage with a good old “waggo” so steam was not at the highest pressure that it might have been. However, 24 hours later, everything was back to normal.

Well, the crews were always entertaining, really. Another paid man on the crew was the wireless operator. He was provided by the Marconi Company. They were interesting characters because they’d been on all kinds of ships. You know, they were employed by Marconi, and they were put on ships as the people required them. The thing I never realized before was that they could recognize who was sending the message and not only listen to the dit-dit-da, he’d say, “That’s Joe Blow.” It was just like handwriting; they could tell the way they operated. It just sounded [like] a lot of blips to me, but not to the Marconi men. Once they knew who was on which ship, they didn’t have to read the part that said who it was from. Well, who did we have? Dick Ryan.

Dick could recognize every operator in the place. When I was out, because we rented the radios, the wireless sets from Marconi, and we had all these operators and things. When I was out they gave me what they call a frank, you know, free message sending, which he dit-dated into Signal Hill, and then the fellow there, it wasn’t an official message to be delivered by a cable company, he’d pick up the phone and telephone whoever I’d send it to, and just give them the message over the phone. Poor old Dick! He got some queer messages back and forth over it. He didn’t really know half the time what he was sending because I mean when you are out at the seal fishery most of the time you’re not doing anything except steaming around looking for the darn things and, so, you’re there for six weeks. You run out of books, you run out of magazines, you run out of conversation; you’ve said everything to everybody on board, and you’re down to doing things like crossword puzzles and so on. And then you haven’t got a dictionary with you. We used to use the wireless, you know, “What is so and so?”

And a rather astonished uncle in St. John’s: “What on earth are you doing?” And I said, “Well, I’m doing a crossword puzzle and I need to know a certain word.” He couldn’t believe that I was using the wireless operator to find words for my puzzle.

Eventually we got out of the seal industry completely. The Southside premises was scrapped and sold to Husky Oil in recent years, after I’d retired.

The only thing I regret about the seal fishery—and it couldn’t have happened anyway because the ship was lost during the war—but the Terra Nova should have been put in the sort of dry-dock museum the way the Fram is in dry dock just outside Oslo. She would have been a very interesting tourist attraction—the Terra Nova herself, the one that went to the Antarctic to bring back Scott’s body. It was a most important industry to Newfoundland in the early days, but it will never be revived.

[*Mr. Bowring was the only informant to mention that some sealers viewed sealing as a holiday or as an adventure. I suspect that he came to that conclusion on his own. It was always about the money, and during the Great Depression, free food was an attraction as well. Furthermore, as he goes on to say, captains, local merchants, and clergymen knew that their reputations and income depended on giving berths to active, productive sealers.]

Bertram Shears, b.1895, Int.1976 [retired senior secretary, Bowring’s]

I was born in St. John’s, 31 December 1895. I was 15 when I went to work with Bowring’s in 1910 and began as office boy or junior, collecting accounts and doing whatever you were ordered to do at that time. The office in those days had high desks and inkwells, blotting paper, steel pens. Our job was to see that the inkwells were properly filled every morning; one side would be red ink and one side black ink. Lot of ruling in those days: you ruled off your ledger. Great deal of attention paid to keeping things in order like that. You saw that a clean blotter was there for the bookkeepers. They stood at tall sloping desks to put their ledgers on and right on top of that were brass rails on pillars, see. If your desk was 6 feet long, there’d be perhaps four pillars with brass rails across to put books they weren’t using on top.

Those old desks were well made. They were mostly walnut, high-class desks. Then, to make things easy to walk to and fro in front of your desk to do posting, there was a stand or step with a sway to it, and people walked to and fro on that. There was a stool there, too. Sometimes he might sit down or, if he had a helper to do some work for him, he might be allowed to sit down. But as a rule, you didn’t have that privilege of sitting down in an office. You were supposed to stand. These were the bookkeepers. Our job was to tend them, see that the books were all out and in order for them to post in the morning. The office hours for the staff was 8:45, junior staff; others came in at 9; supposed to close officially at 6, but you got away when you could. Then we put the books in when the work was over. We had a very busy day and took directions from anyone who gave them to you; do some correcting, or go down to the stores nearby, or go down to the wharf to see somebody on the wharf or one of the vessels. You worked around the office and had to go to the telegraph office. But there was an elderly man as a full-time messenger. You went up and got the mail, of course, and posted the mail, a variety of duties, and answer the bell in the private office; the private office was a little further in, a little electric bell. The director would give us some instructions. Usually two directors resided at the same time there. They sat opposite each other at a long table. Then you had to answer the telephone, too.

In those days they had two telephone instruments. They had a number, 251, I think it was, and they had another with a special connection to the side where the seal factory was.

When the seal fishery time came around, we were all kept busy and everyone was doing something. They had shore stewards, whose job it was to see that things were got together in time for the seal fishery: place orders with tinsmiths, sailmakers—to make tarpaulins—and anything necessary.

Our marine superintendent would have to see to it that all the ships were in order themselves, because when the seal fishery was over, they were cleaned off and repaired, because there was a lot of damage done, as a rule. Then the time came to take on quantities of bunker coal. In some cases we’d get a ship in with that coal. Everybody’d want so many tons of coal, and she’d come in at a certain date and each ship would get its quantity from her—that was in the fall, see.

I moved on to other jobs through the year. On one occasion I was dealing with mail orders. We’d get a lot of mail orders in those days from different parts of the island. People sent in, ordering different merchandise from our various stores. We had different order forms for each store. There was grocery, hardware, dry goods, and perhaps one for provisions. So, as you saw what they wanted, you wrote it down on the specific order form, copied from the letter, and that was called over to make sure you hadn’t missed out anything. Those orders were signed then by one of the directors, who had that responsibility, and they would go to the respective stores and their orders would be filled. Sometimes they’d be small orders, sometimes quite substantial. That would be an open account. They’d know they were regular people, and, if a new name came up, they’d probably introduce themselves in some way or other or have some method of dealing with a newcomer. But we had large numbers of people that just wrote in to get their goods. There was a lot of trust. You had reliable dealers and customers. My responsibility for a while was looking after that section of it. Ryans, King’s Cove, were customers. Honourable James and Honourable Dan [Ryan] would come and have a chat and read the paper.

We had Hiscock as well as Lewis Dawe—big Labrador businesses. After six or seven years, I became a junior bookkeeper. The ledgers in those days were divided into sections: an outport ledger, two sections A-L and M-Z. City ledgers, another ledger for ships that came in we were agents for, for we were ships’ agents, and we’d have ships from different parts of the world.

I worked up through the ledgers to the main or control ledger. Then I was company secretary, corporate secretary, and in 1964 I retired—over 53 years with Bowring’s.

The Stephano and Florizel were actually not Bowring’s. They were part of the Red Cross line. The Red Cross was founded back in the 1880s, and there were a lot of Newfoundland shareholders, business people invested in that. It was managed from the Liverpool office of E.T. Bowring and Company. Then the operation was New York, St. John’s and Halifax. Those three ports a fortnightly service—the Florizel and the Stephano high-class passenger service and freight and general cargo—fish and oil to Halifax, etc. When it came to sealing time, they would give up the summer cruises, come to St. John’s and prepare for the seal fishery. They were usually chartered to Bowring’s. Furness-Withy made a proposal to take over the operation, which was accepted. The Furness boats that came to Newfoundland weren’t Furness-Withy; they were part of the Furness-Warren line (originally the Warren line, and taken over by Furness).

The most famous ship Bowring’s had was the Terra Nova; in the 1890s they bought her. She was built in the 1880s and was operated by the Dundee Seal and Whaling Company. In the early 1900s she went on an expedition to look for Scott in 1904; they bought her from Bowring’s. Then Captain Scott got up another expedition in 1909. Some officer came out and looked at the Terra Nova, talked to Bowring’s. They took the Terra Nova. She sailed in 1910, returned to Newfoundland in 1913. Her figurehead was removed from her and put in the National Museum in Cardiff, I think.

There was the Aurora, an old Scottish sealer, an oak vessel. She was purchased and refitted in 1911. She was lost later on the South Seas. I think she was carrying coal. The Viking was Norwegian-built, a sealer and whaler; [it] blew up in 1931. The Ranger—an old Scottish sealer and whaler—and she was a little different in her hull work; she was lost down on the northeast coast somewhere in the early 1940s. The Eagle, from Norway, was originally the Sophie. When she came out, she had sort of a bluff bow. They had her some years like that and then decided to give her a yacht bow. Mr. Taylor, the shipwright, fitted the modern bow. She stayed around till 1950. She was sunk intentionally off St. John’s. On a Sunday afternoon, July, 1950, she was towed outside the harbour. She was outfitted with a new set of signal flags, and she was sunk at a particular point with all flags flying. The Kite, built in Germany, was a small steamer. She was so small they used to say that the Kite had to stop to blow her whistle. She was lost in north Newfoundland. She was on charter. The Sagona was built by Sir John Crosbie, and the Fogota, I believe. We did charter the Fogota in 1918, I think, for the seal fishery.

In 1929 Bowring’s built the Imogene up in Stockton-on-Thames, I think. Built by Swift Docks Company, she came out in 1929 just in time to go out to the seal fishery. Captain Cy Taylor from Carbonear, he brought her out. She was lost in 1940 in a place called Boom Rock up near Cape Canso in September, shortly after a big storm.

A little while before that we bought the Beothic II from the Beothic Steamship Company. She was originally an American vessel converted by Job’s, who owned that company. The Beothic Steamship Company converted her and strengthened her for the ice and so on. We bought her in 1936 or thereabouts and she was lost in, I think, about 1940 down there at Lavee au Pigeon, north of St. Anthony, that way. She was lost in a snowstorm in December in the coal trade. That took our two steel ships at a time when they would have been invaluable. War was on and you couldn’t replace them—the Beothic II and the Imogene—two lovely ships. And what was ironic was here they were operating within our own waters and away from the submarine menace.

The Nascopie was a Job’s ship, a steel ship. Several ships were sold to Russia about 1916. The Beothic I was one of them. Mr. Alex Harvey was the promoter of steel ships. It was his idea. Adventure I, Bellaventure, and Bonaventure were steel icebreakers built to their own order in Britain. They were sold to Russia. One of the features was their special bow, sloped inward so you rolled up on the ice and crushed it—designed for that purpose. Once one of the ships was in New York harbour and they had half the shipping fraternity down looking at her operating in the ice in New York. They’d never seen a ship break ice that way.

The Florizel and Stephano were that type, too, you see. The Thetis, I think, was built by Captain Farquahar of Halifax—none built in Newfoundland, no facilities for it. There was a small dockyard over in Harbour Grace during World War I which did some small vessels; it was organized by a Norwegian concern. The Iceland was Baine Johnston’s steamer.

Farquhar, steamship owner and operator in Halifax of the Vanguard, a wooden Baine Johnston vessel, a Scots vessel; you see, Baine Johnston’s headquarters was in Greenock, Scotland, and they had their ships built there. They also had a plant operated by Murray & Crawford in Harbour Grace. They outfitted their sealer from there and manufactured their seals over there in Harbour Grace (Murray & Crawford Ltd.).

Munn’s in Harbour Grace were in cod and seal oil, very high quality oil produced in Harbour Grace, outfitting ships: butter, pork, beef, flour, molasses, split peas, hard bread, ropes and wires and naval stores of various sorts. Sometimes the ships would take sails and use them as tarpaulins. Tinsmiths to get tinware, big pots, big pans, boat’s kettles; stock of fresh meat which was lashed to the rigging when they went out; it kept nice and cool.

The captain would get his crew sometimes from his own neighbourhood, Bonavista Bay, Trinity Bay, etc., and would get so many tickets, entitling “N” a berth on the “N” and signed by the captain. Sometimes the ships sailed from Bonavista Bay; might go down to Greenspond and sail from there, but they might be signed on here.

Perhaps the firm would say we’re taking so many tickets and they would give them to certain dealers. It would be published in the newspaper when the crew would sign on; a little office on the wharf, bring in their tickets: special agreement. When they signed, you gave them a crop note entitling them to take up goods to the value of $9—their name and number—whatever they required. When the time came to settle, he was charged $12 for that. If the voyage failed, that was all forgiven. Everybody lost then. We’d buy a lot of gaffs and prises and stacked [them] up on the ship, bundled them all over the deck. Tow ropes were also provided. Pan flags were provided also, “R” for Ranger, “T.N.” for Terra Nova, etc.

When the pelts were weighed, that was the gross weight of the pelts. To make up the actual net weight, from that, each type of skin or pelt had an amount which brought it down to net weight.

Skins were exported to be used as leather in England. From the ’30s on they were used for furs. Those whitecoat skins would be put in a revolving drum with a certain type of sawdust, turn on the motor, and it would revolve and turn a greasy-looking skin into a clean-looking one. Those would be sent off to England later on in casks to be processed in the fur industry.

In 1927, I think, they introduced digesters, couple of stories high, filled with fat, and then live steam would be circulated in it to start cooking it.

Two hundred and fifty-six gallons in the Newfoundland tun—four hogsheads of 63 gallons.

Our hogshead was 64 gallons. We bought all our seal oil and cod oil at 256 gallons to a tun or 64 to a hogshead. We always used imperial gallons.

First our salt was bought in English tons, then in metric tons, which was used in Spain—2,204 pounds, whereas the long ton is 2,240 pounds.

Bowring’s rented land from the Admiralty up to the time the development of the harbourfront began. Then the Canadian government took over all properties for the Admiralty. This land, rented from the Admiralty, was near St. Mary’s Church and known as Mudge’s. It had been leased to Nicholas Mudge and Co., but was taken over by Bowring’s in the 1840s.

Cyril S. Chafe, b.?, Int.1976 [master cooper, retired manager of Bowring’s sealing plant]

I was born in St. John’s and I went to work for Bowring’s in 1917. From office boy I went to serve my apprenticeship as a cooper, and after working at the coopering trade for 16 years, I became a master cooper in 1936. In 1948 I was appointed manager of the sealing plant that used to manufacture the seals that the ships brought in from the icefields.

In the 1920s, when the ship would arrive, the men had to discharge the pelts. They had to throw them on a jig, an old-fashioned jig, and they were weighted on a swinging beam. The tallymen would tally it down, and the pelts would be wheeled away from the ship. There were two tallymen: one for the ship and one for the firm.

The pelts were all weighted by the quintal [112 pounds]. Then there were deductions of the weight of the fat for scraps of meat that was left on the pelts: 1½ pounds for each young seal, 6 pounds for a bedlamer, 10 pounds for an old harp, and 20 pounds for an old hood. Then there were deductions for holes: 10 cents for a single hole, 20 cents for a double hole, maybe 80 cents or $1 if the fur was [sun]burnt.

In the 1920s the pelts were skinned by hand. We had 25 skinners who would skin, on an average, 7,000 a day. One skinner would skin on an average 300-350 young harps a day. Mr. Cook, on the Southside, established a record of 656 for one day’s work. It was sort of a race on between Job’s and Bowring’s. He had the record for a nine-hour day and it still holds. Now, they wouldn’t skin 7,000 every day, because it would take longer to skin an old one than it would to skin a young one. The skinners worked at different trades during the rest of the year.

The skinners were paid by the pelt: 6 cents for a young harp, 7 cents for a young hood, 10 cents for a bedlamer, 10 cents for an old harp, and 30 cents for an old hood. Now, if they cut a hole in a skin, they were charged 10 cents for it. They averaged about $18 to $20 a day—for a week or two or three a year—which was a lot of money at that time, because the union rate of wages at that time was 30 cents an hour all over town. Clerks down on Water Street were receiving $10 to $12 a week. It was good for the skinners at that time of the year, because a lot of those men were idle in February and March.

The skinner’s table was a long table sloping away from you. There were just room for two pelts, and the apprentice had to serve five years at this table putting pelts on it for the skinners. You had to put the pelts on the table just right for those old skinners, because if it wasn’t, they’d lose a bit of time shifting the pelt to get it the way they wanted it.

The young fellow, or the tender, as he was called, would put the pelt on the table, and cut the tail off. When the skinner finished skinning this one, he’d go over to the other one and, while he was gone there, the tender would scrape off any scraps and put up another pelt. The seal skinner paid the apprentice $1.50 or $2 a day and sometimes he had to tend on two or three men. It meant a lot of stooping down. Sometimes the skinner would let the apprentice skin a pelt and he’d tell you what to do. But if you cut it he would be out 10 cents, so you didn’t get much chance to try.

You served your apprenticeship of five years and then you had to wait for someone to die to get a table, because they had only about 50 skinners altogether in St. John’s. We had 25 and Job’s had 25. That was enough. They’d produce enough fat to keep the machinery going.

They each had a skinning knife and a leather stall for your thumb—where you pressed on the back of the knife—and a steel. They wore a barbel [or barvel; apron] made out of calfskin with the fur inside. There was no heat in the building where we were skinning the pelts, so when your hands got cold, you just put them inside the barbel so they’d get warm. The knife, 10-inch blade and curved, was sharpened with the steel, and we’d always finish the sharpening stroke with the wire edge turning up, and not down. The seal skinners had a union—I’d say the oldest union in North America. It was formed on the Southside, where the Upper Dundee Company had its premises.

Then the companies got skinning machines to skin the pelts in place of the men. The union was against the skinning machines. The companies first tried them around 1890 or 1900, but they didn’t work. But in 1925 they brought in machines again. They didn’t cut out any labour, because it took just as many men to operate the machines. We had six machines over in our factory: two skinning machines and four fleshing machines. And quite a number of the men went to work on the machines. The machines were quicker. We had two, and they were capable of doing 6,000 to 7,000 pelts a day.

First, the pelt would go through a band knife on a conveyor, and that would take the fat off down to one-quarter inch of the skin. Then it would go through a fleshing, which was a cylinder with a rubber roller so it couldn’t damage the pelt.

Now, in the olden times the seal oil was sunned. They’d put it in shallow tanks with a glass roof on it and they’d bleach the oil by sun and ship it away in wooden barrels. It was called “water white” seal oil. A good lot of it at them times was shipped around the world to the various churches, and they’d have a floating light. It was also used for the manufacture of soap.

At that time there was a big demand for soap and a big demand for leather. They didn’t use seal skins as furs at that time. They all went into the manufacture of leather. It was only in 1926 they discovered they could use them for furrier purposes. They were then shipped as furs, and that brought the value of the skins up.

In the early 1920s they had grinders, and the fat was taken and put through a grinder. Then it went through the sausage cutter, a long tube with a lot of knives in it. From there it went into a tank, where it was cooked with a jet of steam. The oil would float off and run down in the receiving tanks. Then the residue that was left would be pressed in small bags. In 1925 Bowring’s got digesters like they used in hog factories. They cooked the fat quicker and not a better grade of oil and a quicker process and a bigger yield. We used to ship it by tanker to England, where they made Sunlight Soap.

First when I went to the Southside in 1917 I had to bring the books and the watchmen’s clock from the Southside over to the north side, walk up the Southside, across the bridge, and down Water Street, and pick up the mail. I was at that for six or seven months.

At that time you had to go to work at 6 o’clock in the morning and you had to walk and be at work at 6 and not five minutes after. So I used to leave home on Casey Street to walk to the Southside. It used to take me 20 minutes. At 8 you’d walk home to your breakfast and be back again at 9—one hour to walk 2 miles and have your breakfast. At 1 o’clock, you walked home again and back to work at 2, home at 6, and if you had to work in the nighttime, you’d go back at 7 and work till 11. In the dead of winter we’d go to work at 7 and lots of times you’d have to make your own path through the snow down the Southside. Then you wouldn’t come home at 8; you’d come home to your dinner at 12.

My father was a cooper by trade and after six or seven months I started my cooper apprenticeship. We repaired oil barrels. We’d get those barrels from the oleomargarine factories. We had three here at that time, and you had to serve five years as an apprentice. After five years you became a full-fledged cooper, with high wages compared to the times; $24 a week, 40 cents an hour; the majority of tradesmen were getting 20, 25, and 30 cents.

The barrels were all made by hand. Wet coopering and dry coopering were called tight work and slack work. A tight worker made a barrel that would hold oil and a slack worker made fish barrels. Fish was packed in half-drums, drums, casks, donkeys, and various kinds of barrels. A cask held 4 quintals of dry or 5 quintals of Labrador; a drum, 128 pounds to the Brazil market; half-drum, 64 pounds. In the shop at that time slack workers used to work on piecework. They had to make, say, 15 drums a day.

Herring, turbot, and trout were shipped in pickle in wooden barrels, and so was cod oil. Years ago the coopers had to make the 100-gallon puncheons to ship the seal oil away in. The wood came out from England in blocks, squared. They had to cleave them and make the staves out of them, join them, and then make the barrel and hoop it right up. You had to chop the piece of three-by-three with an axe, dress it with a knife to make the stave round, and then you had to rise it up and close it. That was tight work.

There was plenty of wooden barrels at that time. There were no gasoline barrels, but all the kerosene was imported into Newfoundland in barrels. Then Imperial Oil came here and established a plant over on the Southside in 1914, 1915. They used to bring the oil in, in tankers, put it in the barrels, and ship it out to the outports. That’s where the fishermen would get barrels to put their cod liver oil in—kerosene barrels.

You were allowed one apprentice on each mercantile premises. He had to work in the building. He wasn’t allowed to go outside and do his work until his fourth year. They followed the old tradition from England, and whatever days you missed in your apprenticeship over the five years, you had to serve them as back time. If you missed a month in your five years, you had to serve that for nothing before you became a tradesman. After five years you were a cooper—no exam. You joined the union then. It depended on yourself then. If you were a good one, you got a job. If you weren’t, you got nowhere.

In 1892 the old Cooper’s Union was formed. Their slogan or motto was “United we stand; Divided we fall,” with a picture of a man putting staves together. It was a very strict union. You had an adze. If a man was packing fish, and picked up the adze to clinch a nail, he was grabbed. Some old coopers would likely chop his nose off. A labour man wasn’t allowed to do a cooper’s work—not even to drive a nail.

When my father retired, I became a master cooper. There had to be a master cooper on each mercantile premises, and there were all premises on the Southside and the north side. The master cooper didn’t do any coopering. He was a foreman; he was an inspector for the Department of Fisheries; and he had to know how to gauge oil.

However, boxes soon took the place of wooden fish drums, and steel drums took the place of wooden barrels, especially after they began to ship gasoline in steel drums. Then the coopering trade began to die.

The last time I needed a fish barrel I was manager at Bowring’s. It was needed to go on a spar on the Algerine like a crow’s nest. Bert Harvey was the only cooper I knew could make it, and he was working with Harvey’s on the Southside. So I had to make it myself. It stood 6 feet high and was about 80 inches in diameter. It had a hatch in the bottom, and it was strong because a man’s life depended on it—70 or 80 feet in the air. The man would go up to the bottom, push up the hatch, and when he was inside, the hatch would fall down, and he would stand on it. That was the last barrel I made.

Harold Abbott, b.1913, Int.1986

When I was around 13, 14 years of age, we’d be listening to the old people’s conversations about the seal fishery. In the nighttime they’d congregate in certain houses and that would be the topic, in a good many cases. They’d be speaking about the ships at the seal fishery, how many seals they pelted, and that sort of thing. Listening to the old people talking about the seal fishery, it was only natural that I became interested myself.

Around the age of 18 I decided to try for a berth. My father was a fisherman, and he would ship his catch to the merchant in Bonavista, J.T. Swyers Company Limited. Mr. Swyers would have so many berths that he would get to the ice, and I went over to see him myself. I was talking to his son, Bert, and told him I’d like to get a berth to the ice. He sort of smiled at me, and he said he’d do his best. In those days there were a lot of people looking for berths to the ice, and you considered yourself fortunate if you were lucky enough to secure a berth. Anyway, after contacting Bert several times, I succeeded in getting a berth in the Eagle.

Now, the Eagle was one of the older ships, and he said to me, “Maybe when we go in St. John’s we might be able to get a better berth than in the Eagle.” And it so happened that we went in to St. John’s with the sealers on the train, which was about 12-18 hours’ journey in those days. After we got in St. John’s, the first or second day, I think, I saw him, and he said he did have a berth in the Ungava, which I considered, and he considered, too, was better than a berth in the Eagle.

After three or four days in St. John’s, you’d go down to Job Brothers, and you’d take up what the ice-hunting people would call a crop. You’d get maybe a knife and other things that you needed, that you’d thought you’d need out on the ice. You’d take up the sum of $9, and then when you came back from the icefields, you’d be charged with $12 for the $9 worth that you had taken up before you left St. John’s.

Anyway, I remember in the Ungava that the Captain was Peter Carter from, I think, Greenspond [Newell’s Island, Bonavista Bay]. And his son, Sam, was with him. We sailed from St. John’s, on, I think, the 10th of March. You were allowed to take the seals on the 14th. That year we entered the ice down around Cape Bonavista. After three or four, or maybe four or five days, we got further north and the ice was much heavier.

Anyway, around the 18th of March, the news [wireless] was that the Imogene was into the main patch of seals. Now, the Ungava and the Beothic were two sister ships, as far as I know, and the ice was heavy and we were butting the ice side by side for two days, and the Imogene at this time was into the main patch of seals. Captain Al Blackwood was her captain.

After two days we got into the patch of seals, too. As I remember now, we understood that there were 11 vessels [but only six steamers] in the same patch of seals. I remember distinctly being on the ice and you couldn’t even see the smoke of another vessel. That would give you an idea of how large the patch of seals was. Captain Al Blackwood, he secured, I think it was, around 50,000 or 55,000 whitecoats [55,636 total seals]. Anyway, after the patch of seals was cut [harvested], we secured around 30,000 whitecoats, and then it was picking up scattered seals. You’d be what the ice-hunting people would call quintering from the side of the steamer.

There’d be sidesticks on each side of the boat, three or four heavy planks about 6 by 6 [inches] and they’d be 3 or 4 feet apart, something like a ladder coming up the side of the boat. Then it would be mostly the young fellows that would be on the sidesticks. The vessel would be proceeding quite slowly through the slack ice, and as you’d see the scattered seal on the ice, the fellows that was on the sidesticks would jump and run, and whoever would get to the seal first, of course, would kill it. Maybe you’d kill three or four seals and perhaps it would be three or four men out at the same time. You’d have a hook and a line from the steamer. You’d hook your seal onto the hook, or two or three seals, whatever the case may be. You’d take the seal and carcass as it was. You’d just slit it open down the middle and hook it on and let it go aboard the boat.

Now, aboard the boat, you would have your buddy, your bunkmate and most of the sealers would have barrel on the barricade of your steamer [enclosed area of stern or deck, where the men put their boards]. Your buddy would be watching this seal, or your seals, when they came aboard; otherwise, when they get up on deck, if your buddy wasn’t there to get it, you’d be looking for your seal, maybe, when you’d come aboard. That was how you would fill your barrel with carcass and flippers. Salt it in.

You’d probably get a quart of salt from the cook or whoever you could get it from and you’d sprinkle a bit of salt on the seal as you’d fill your barrel and then you’d get some [salty pot] liquor from the cooks and throw it in your barrel. You’d fill your barrel in this way. You couldn’t have better seal than what was put up in this way. It was a bit of salt and liquor from the cooks where they’d be cooking the salt meat for about 225 men, seal hunters, and, of course, the ship’s crew [firemen, etc.]. This is the way that you’d secure it [the seal meat that you were taking home].

Now, after a while all the young seals would be cut [killed and sculped]. And then you’d go after the older seals—the bedlamers. Well, there’d be so many gunners selected from the ship’s crew to go on the ice. There would be a gunner, and maybe with that gunner there would be one or two fellows that you’d call “dogs.” They’d carry the cartridges for the gunner.

Now, if you had a good gunner, it meant that you’d have a lot more work because you were supposed to get a snip of the tail of each seal that the gunner killed. If your gunner was good, as I said before, the dog would have a lot of work. Anyway, I happened to be dog for a fellow by the name of Raymond Dyke from Bonavista. I would say he was a good gunner, because if there were two gunners selected to put out on the ice, he usually would be one. I tried to make sure that I’d do my part if he killed a seal; I did my running over the ice to take a part of every tail that he killed. It wasn’t easy, with a bag of cartridges and that. But you’d sort of get used to it.

This spring I’m referring to [1933], now we got enough older seals to make up around 40,000 seals [49,285]. Then we bore for St. John’s. After a day, a couple of days and a night, we arrived in St. John’s [April 17]. We went over on the Southside to Job Brothers. The next day, or pretty soon, we started to take out the seals.

The ship’s crew would be divided into watches. One day there would be so many watches on and you’d be taking out the seals. The rest of the crew would be free to go where they liked. The men that were on the day’s work landing the seals, they would take the flipper that was left in the seal and that would be cut out. In the evening, when the day’s work was finished, what flippers that was cut out were shared. If you landed 10,000 seals that day, you’re supposed to have 10,000 flippers.

Sometimes there would be an order come from some places like the orphanage or maybe the hospital—anyway, this is what you’d hear among the crew. There would be so many flippers given to those institutions. What was left in the evening would be shared up among the crew.

If I remember correctly, you’d get maybe four dozen flippers for each man. That was, that’s a day’s work. The price, as I remember it now, that we got for the seal flippers, that first spring I was to the ice, was 30 cents a dozen. You couldn’t sell them all then for 30 cents a dozen, because I remember giving them away to people that I knew in St. John’s. Anyway, it would take you maybe four days to discharge the seals. You be on for two days, so you could get around eight or perhaps you’d be lucky enough to get ten dozen flippers. You’d sell them or give them away.

As I remember now, we had around 40,000 seals. Then came the day when you would be paid off over in the little office over on the other [north] side of St. John’s. If I remember correctly, the amount of money that we got for each man at this particular time for 40,000 seals, was $89 and some cents [$80.36?]. But in those days $89 was quite a lot of money. This is how I spent the first spring to the seal hunting.

Now, if you want to know about how you worked when you were out to the seals, well, first when we struck the seals you’d be on your legs around 4 o’clock in the morning. Your master watch, he would be sure and have his men alerted around 4 o’clock in the morning. And in the boat I was in, the Ungava, you’d go up in the galley. There was a place to sit down with tables. You’d have your breakfast. I don’t remember what—you’d have boiled beans and bread sometimes.

You’d get your breakfast and then everybody would go down in their berth and get ready to go on the ice. Now, what you would take on the ice for the day would be: you’d have a tin on your belt with molasses in it. It would be hooked on your belt behind. You’d have your knife and sheath on your belt, all ready for to go into action when you’d get overboard at the seals. You’d have a bag [often called a nunny bag] to keep your items in, a small amount of rolled oats and you’d have an orange, maybe, that you’d bought in St. John’s before you went out. You’d have perhaps four or five, or five or six Gibraltar candy. This is what you have for your lunch out on the ice in the day [usually supplemented by hard bread and raw seal hearts]. But, anyway, as soon as daylight, when the captain saw the right place to put out his men, out they’d go. There’d be so many men down on the sidesticks, and they’d get over with their gaffs and their ropes around their backs.

They’d start in to pelt the seals. The steamer would go on and leave you. I remember that there were times when you didn’t even see the steamer—you wouldn’t know she was out there. You wouldn’t see her at all. You’d see men here and there, all scattered over the ice. You’d have your flag with you, or maybe two flags. You start in then, the master watch would tell so many men to start in around here and pick up the seals. Now, sometimes the ice would be bad: it would be heavy ice and it would be bad, it would be heavy ice and it would be hard to get over it.

Down among the ice, the little whitecoats would be hid away. Anyway, this is how you had to get the seals in some cases. This spring the seals, I think they averaged around between 40 and 50 pounds per pelt, which was good. Some seals [pelts] would weigh as much as 70 pounds. You’d kill maybe two, four or five seals or whatever was in the small area where you were; you’d kill what seals were there with your gaff. Then you’d tie up two seals and, if the ice was good, perhaps you’d tie up three seals, depend on the size of the seal and what the ice was like [slippery or dry].

One of the men, maybe in your lot there would be three or four men, or two men, and you’d stick a flag. Then you’d haul your seals to the flag and you’d take them off. You’d have them laced up with your rope and you’d untie them and you’d drop them where the flag was. This was how you’d spend the day at your seals, and when you cleaned up your seals around this way, you’d decide to walk, maybe, another 300 or 400 yards. If you saw many seals, you’d stick another flag. Where you’d pick up your seals, you’d stick a flag. Then you’d pick up your seals around there in the same way as you did the first. You’d have your flags stuck in the middle of the seals. You’d have some spun yarn rope tied on your flag and you’d tie it on your pelt to keep your flag upright so’s the captain would know where he had to come pick up the seals.

Now, you wouldn’t see your steamer, then. That would be maybe around the middle of the day. So, when you get your day’s work finished, perhaps you’d see your steamer, he’d know, he had his course and that he had his men laid out in a line. Where he went in the evening then depended on what the situation was, where he was to at the particular time. He’d come back maybe around dark, perhaps sometimes before dark and pick you up and pick up your seals at the same time, and sometimes he’d go and pick up his men first and leave the seals. It all depended on what things were like.

There would be some times, I remember being on the ice until 1 o’clock in the night. All the men and the master watches would congregate on the one place. They’d wait then for the steamer or maybe there would be three or four lots of people. But they’d all come together and get on a good sheet of ice, where the flag was at and so on. [Two flags side by side informed the captain that their men were gathered at that particular site.] Then they’d just wait, that’s all they could do. Wait until the steamer came to pick you up. On one occasion, I remember it was around 12 or 1 o’clock at night before we got picked up.

But the weather wasn’t bad and you’d be all right and you’d go around then while you were waiting for your steamer to come. If you saw some flippers that was left on the ice, you would pick them up because you had to take the other one in. You’d go around and, if you were lucky enough, you’d pick up a dozen flippers. You string them on your belt, you see, tie them on your belt. When you got aboard then, if you got aboard okay, by then you’d have your flippers and you put them in your barrel and salt them in this way. You wouldn’t take any carcass aboard.

Now, you can imagine, maybe 30 men waiting for your steamer to come up. Then they all would rush to get up the sidesticks with their gaffs and with a dozen flippers or a half a dozen flippers on your belt and trying to get aboard the steamer. But most of the people were young and, once you’d have hands ahold to the sidesticks, well then you’d bring your body and what you’d have tied on. This is how you’d fill your barrel, in this way. Now, this is how I saw when the first spring I was out to the ice, and I enjoyed it, to tell you the truth.

I don’t know what there was about it that made you want to go again, but as for me, I’d be longing for the next spring to come because I’d go out to the ice. You’d be out there and some fellows wouldn’t shave from the time they left St. John’s until they got back. The day before or the night before, perhaps they’d shave and clean up. But as for me, I didn’t grow much of a beard myself. I certainly enjoyed it out to the ice. But one thing about it, I didn’t go on the ice on Sundays. I was trying to live as good a life as I could, and I didn’t think I should go onto the ice on Sundays. But I wouldn’t be the last to be there on a Monday morning. I wouldn’t have to be called twice to get out of the bunk.

Now, this is all you saw to the ice when I was at it, and that was a good many years ago. I was only around 18 or 19 years old. Today I’m 73.

We’d have church service on Sundays. I don’t remember the man’s name, but there was a man and he was bo’sun on the Ungava. On Sundays we would gather in what we’d call the mess room or the galley. Anyway, it was where the tables were. He’d have service and, as for me, I enjoyed it. But I can’t remember the man’s name. Now, I do know that he was bo’sun on the steamer. But he was at least a middle-aged man at that time. I guess he’s passed on to his reward by now.

It would be one service and whosoever will might come to the service. The people—there’d be quite a few people—40, 50 people gathered in that room. He’d have prayers; he’d have a talk on the Bible. There’d be some people would get up and give their testimony. We’d have someone to pray, and I enjoyed it, although I was just a young man.

We used to wear to the ice what they call moleskin [hard-wearing cotton fabric] pants. Now, one thing you—more or less—was you had to have and that was a pair of skin boots. If you didn’t have a pair of skin boots, you was considered not fitted for to go to the ice, in those days. But now, the people now [1980s], as long as they got on a pair of logans or a pair of rubber boots.

But anyway, I got my first pair of skin boots. I bought them in St. John’s. I don’t remember just how much I paid for them. They were considered light for going over the ice, and they’d have leather taps on them and heels and you’d have what the old fellows used to call sparables and chisels. [The latter were larger and used for the heels while the former were smaller and used in the soles.] You’d have them in your boots so as to protect you from slipping on the ice.

Then you’d have, in my day you didn’t have any parkas because there was no parkas as is now in these days. But a lot of people used to have what they call a white canvas jacket. I remember I had a white canvas jacket with a sort of a hood on it that my sister made. Well then, to go out on the ice with a white canvas jacket, it didn’t look too good. The first thing you would do when you killed the first seal was you’d get the blood and you’d put it all over your jacket to smear it up with the blood of the flippers. I remember an old fellow from Bonavista, Fred Phillips. When he’d pelt the first seal, he was so much overjoyed that—I can see him now—he took the seal and he threw it up, the pelt, as far as he could in the air and then rubbed the blood in his jacket. That’s how it was when I was at the ice.

To get from here to St. John’s, you’d get on the train in Bonavista. You’d go in the cars with just those wooden seats. It took you six hours to get from Bonavista to Clarenville. Then if you were lucky, you’d connect with the train going in to St. John’s. While you were in Clarenville, you had to stay in the station or in your [train] car—with 30 or 40, because there would be at least 30 or 40 going from Bonavista, and some people would take advantage and go up on the sealer’s train. It was cheaper to travel on the sealer’s train. There’d be a nice crowd in Clarenville. Some would be staying in the old waiting station there. You’d go down to the boiler house to boil your kettle—most of the fellows would have a small kettle among three or four men. You’d go down there and you’d boil the water and come up and steep your tea. You’d get a mug of tea and you’d have a lunch with you to take along.

Now, then, when the train would come through, you’d connect, and you’d get on the train going in St. John’s. You’d get into St. John’s maybe 9 or 10 o’clock, around there, the next day. So it’s approximately a 24-hour journey from Bonavista to St. John’s to go to the ice. Now, there were fellows coming up from the north side of Bonavista Bay from Greenspond and those places. They’d come up and connect and they’d had to have maybe two or three days’ walking, as far as I understand. They’d come up and come in and connect with the train in Gambo. We’d get in and then there’d be a rush to go down and get your berth in the boat that you were going in. You’d be in your boat then for, maybe, two or three days—three or four days, perhaps, before you’d sail, getting ready to go to the ice.

You’d have three or four pairs of socks and that sort of thing and you’d always have a spare pair of mitts that your mother or your sister would knit to put in your sack that you carried on the ice, because you never knew when you’d be caught out and be out all night. I always had a spare pair of mitts, woollen mitts, and a pair of socks in my knapsack [nunny bag] on the ice, and you’d have your compass in your bag in case it came stormy, rough weather, so as you’d take off [a compass course] where the other men were and where your steamer was and that sort of thing.

You’d take along a cake with you, a special cake, and you wouldn’t cut that cake until you struck the seals. You’d have a cake that your mother made for you. Then, when you got into the seals, some of the fellows anyway, or most of the fellows, would cut the cake, and you’d share it out among your buddies around where you bunked. Now, where I bunked in the Ungava was down in the hold. There was 150 men in the old hold with bunks all around the sides. Three men in a bunk—around 150 men down in the one place.

I had a bunk filled with shavings; it wasn’t a real mattress. It was sort of a bunk bed made out of brin or burlap—whatever you want to call it—and shavings in it. You’d make the best you could out of that. [Men collected shavings from the cooperages and carpenter shops to put in the brin bags for mattresses.]

Before you left St. John’s, you’d go and you’d get a tin pan and a fork and knife or perhaps you’d buy that, get that out of your crop. You’d take along that and you’d keep that down in your bunk. When the time came that you had to go up and get your meal, somebody would sing out dinnertime, or whatever it was, and you’d take along your pan and your fork and your knife.

You’d go up, and the cook, or so many cooks, would put your meal, whatever it might be—salt beef, duff and pudding sometimes, and that sort of thing, potatoes and turnips—and you’d put it in your pan. You’d eat what you wanted. Then you’d come out with your pan and on the side of the steamer there was a tap. You’d let the water run in your pan and you’d stir it around with your fork and you’d tip it over and let it fall out. That was how you’d clean out your pan. You carried it up and put it in your bunk again until the next meal.

Sometimes when you were into the seals, you’d have flippers cooked. They’d make flippers and gravy. You’d have a lot of lopscouse—what they called lopscouse—a sort of a soup for meals. Well, as far as I’m concerned. You’d have bread. First, you’d have some—what do you call it—baker’s fog, that’s what the old fellows used to call it—baker’s bread. That wouldn’t last for very long because it would only be what they’d pick up in St. John’s.

Then you’d have the bread they’d put up and you’d have hard bread and that sort of thing. As I remember, I didn’t find the food too bad. I had a good appetite and that sort of thing. One thing about it, it couldn’t have been too bad because every spring when you’d come back, you’d be around 10-15 pounds heavier than when you went out. That’s the way I found it.

And then there was a meal of young liver from the seals. When you’d come off the ice in the day, you’d bring aboard, strung on your belt, enough liver to cook. You’d get a pan from the cooks and you’d get a piece of fat pork and you’d get an onion, maybe two. You’d cut up this whitecoat’s liver. You’d carry it up in the galley and, with your fat pork and your onions, you’d put it in the pan and you’d cook that. Brother, you’d have to go some place a long ways to get something better than that.

That was one meal that I certainly enjoyed. You’d have that then, then you’d come down with your pan. You’d have the pan, it would be about 16 inches long and about 6-7 inches wide, you’d have that filled up with liver, and you’d share it out among your bunkmates and the fellows that was nearest to you until it was all gone. Then the next night or some other night then, somebody else would do the same thing and share it up with you and that sort of thing. That was a real treat, as far as I’m concerned. Yeah.

Then the scattered fellow would know the cooks. We had a fellow near our bunk by the name of Pat Duggan, I think his name was. I don’t know if it was Duggan—from Melrose anyway—and he was the kind of fellow he knew the cooks who cooked for the staff. They’d have baked beans. Pat would go up and maybe there’d be some left over. He was the kind of fellow he could get a meal and he’d come down a share it with you. That would be real good because when the beans are cooked for 250 men, you wouldn’t expect them to be as good as if they were just cooked for 10 or 15 or 20. You’d get a scattered meal like that when Pat would go up and get it. I used to enjoy them. He’s dead now. But you wouldn’t get that every day because he wouldn’t take the time. Just now and then.

The crew would be divided up into watches, you see. The master watch, he had so many men. You’d be on four hours and off and maybe you’d be on the ice all day. You came aboard, you got something to eat, you’d have to go on watch. You’d stay then until your four-hour period was up. You’d be stowing seals or getting ice aboard, that sort of thing, whatever there was to be done. Then when your watch was off, there’d be another watch come on for another four hours, and you’d go back to your bunk and get some rest. That’s the way they’d have it: four-hour watches.

Yeah, the master watch would come down. Usually he would come down and [say]: “Come on, me cockies, we wants someone to go out and get ice aboard, and we got some seals to stow and ice down,” that sort of thing. The seals would be stowed down in pounds. There’d be pounds built in the hold of the steamer with heavy planks and the pounds would be about maybe 6 or 7 feet square. You’d stow your seals down there: a tier of ice and a tier of pelts, and keep them that way.

In the boat, the Ungava, that I was in, they must have taken on quite a drop of water before we left St. John’s because you wouldn’t have to be getting ice for water. But in others like the Eagle they’d be getting ice for water, that sort of thing, more often than you would in the larger boats like the Ungava and the Beothic, you know.

Nobody in the family would tell you not to go to the ice. They wouldn’t tell you not to go, but I don’t think they were, my mother especially, I don’t think they was very enthusiastic about their son going to the ice because they all heard about the disasters like the Newfoundland disaster. There were people from Bonavista who had been out and they were left crippled for life owing to losing their feet by frostbite. Some had died. Hughie Mouland and Henry Edsel from here were in the Newfoundland disaster. I’m sure there were others but I can’t remember their names right now. This was why the women, especially the mothers, weren’t very enthusiastic about their sons going to the ice. But that didn’t prevent the young men. There was something about it that you liked.

My father used to go to the ice. Listening to the old fellows talking sort of stirs you up to do the same thing. But they were in the older boats. I remember my father talking about when the ice hunters wanted more for their seals in St. John’s. They went on strike [1902], and they tried to haul the sealing ships up on Water Street in St. John’s [only the Neptune].

There was an old fellow from Bonavista who always went with Captain Billy Winsor. He always went by the name of Big Jack Abbott, and he was always a master watch. I happened to be in his watch the first spring I was out. He was a fine man, he would not ask the men to do something that he would not do himself. He worked just as hard, if not harder, than the men that were supposed to be under him. He was a big man, and he wanted his work done. But he certainly did his share. I liked him because he didn’t send anybody else where he wouldn’t go.

Now, I said the first spring I made $89 [$80?]. The second spring I was out [1935?], I had to be paid home by the government. We only made $14.

Everybody got along pretty well. Sometimes you would get jammed in the ice. When we were jammed in the ice on the Ungava, there wasn’t much to do, and there was nothing to do when you were off watch. You’d spend your time making buckets from a piece of gaff handle, using your pocket knife. I remember making at least three or four sets this particular spring. The next spring, when I went to join the boat in St. John’s, I saw the man that bunked alongside me the spring before. The first thing he said to me was, “if we get jammed, I want you to make me a set of buckets.” I said, “Okay,” but we never did get jammed. I haven’t got a set of buckets that I made; I gave them all away.

At night, if you had some time off down in your bunk, you’d be listening to the other fellows spinning yarns a lot of the time. I remember one fellow from Trinity who spent a lot of time in the States. When the Depression came, he was forced to come home. We all used to listen to him. He’d be telling lots of stories about where he worked in the States. Some fellows would be singing songs. Uncle Neddie Parsons from Greenspond was a good entertainer. He’d sing songs like “I Drinked out of a Puncheon.” You’d listen to those fellows and you’d be surprised how they could entertain people. They might not have had any education but I say they were well-educated just the same in certain things [chuckles].

I enjoyed every minute of it out to the ice; I always looked forward to going. But I was only out five springs. Then I started to work on land.

I was never out overnight or in a storm, but sometimes the boat would be late picking us up. While we waited for the steamer, we’d be picking up scattered seals, marching around to keep warm, or telling yarns.

You didn’t get much for your own flippers, maybe 30 cents a dozen. I remember three or four fellows from Bonavista; instead of getting rid of their flippers in St. John’s, they decided to take their ice-hunting box and fill it up with flippers. Now, I think the box at that time would hold 13 dozen flippers, and that’s what they did. They filled up their box, three fellows, and when they got out to Clarenville, they sold them. Now, in St. John’s, they could only get 30 cents a dozen for them. When they got out to Clarenville, they got $1.50 a dozen. That was a lot of money in those days—more than they’d get in St. John’s. Thirty cents a dozen, for a dozen flippers, that was a lot of meat for a small lot of money.

Quintering from the side of the Ungava could be dangerous. I did not fall in the water myself, but I do remember seeing three or four men fall in when we were quintering from the side of the Ungava. That was with Captain Billy Winsor. The ice was what you call “slob.” But they got them. But they didn’t look very good at that time. The boat was going very slow and Captain Billy Winsor handled it very good. But he was some concerned just for a few minutes.

Sometimes your boat wouldn’t be able to get to the pans, and then they’d send out the ship’s crew to haul the pelts to the ship. You’d go out, maybe 100 men, in line, that way. You’d take a couple of pelts, sometimes we wouldn’t take no more than one, depends on what the ice was like, if the ice was what they call hummocky, hard to get over, they’d get up on the pans of ice and pull the seal up and get over it that way. The vessel wouldn’t be able to get through the ice.

I have seen it when it was great big sheets of ice, I suppose, half a mile long. There were seals by the hundreds on the one sheet of ice. This particular time I was on the ice with a fellow from Bonavista by the name of Joe Phillips, and, believe it or not, we only stuck only two flags for the day, and we worked like dogs. This fellow, Joe Phillips, he wouldn’t stop to eat, and I was just as bad because I wanted to be as good as the other fellow. He’d eat going along, and the seals were so thick that you didn’t have to lace them up, you’d just reeve your rope through the flipper holes and pull them along, three or four or whatever you could pull along. Anyway, all day we only stuck two flags. He’s dead now, poor man. But work! My dear man, you had to go some to beat Joe Phillips on the ice. He was wonderful. He was only a young fellow like myself, maybe a couple of years older. Yeah, yes, sir. But the seals were some thick. I can’t remember just how many seals we did get now, but we got over 20,000 anyway, young ones.

The fellows that I bunked with were all from Bonavista; the fellow next door, Wallace Abbott, this was the first spring; there was a fellow, Al Keel; there was Fred Phillips; and there was a fellow by the name of Jimmy Best, well, he was an older man; and Tom Hicks—that was my buddy who filled the barrel with me, that I was telling you about. He’d be on deck. He was a man in his 40s and I’d be only 18. Well, I’d be on the sidestick getting the quinters and he’d be up, when they’d come aboard, to make sure we got them and put them in our barrel. There was Big Jack Abbott, he always went by the name of Big Jack; then there was his son, Hezekiah; Jim Keel, Roy Keel; Uncle Harry Wade; man by the name of Ed Skiffington; Elias Mouland, he was in the Newfoundland disaster, but still he didn’t give it up, he was out in the Ungava the first spring I was out. Yeah, yeah. There was more than that now, but I just can’t remember their names right now. Some of the others I knew included Victor Hicks, who was in the Viking disaster, Baxter Brown, Charlie Norris, and Charlie Downer, an old fellow who people really liked. I think he was from Greenspond.

You were talking about the ice. I’ve seen where the ship couldn’t get through the ice. The captain would put all the men—every man that was aboard—on a line out ahead of the steamer. I can’t remember what kind of line; it must have been a rope, a heavy rope in those days. They’d get out ahead of the steamer and try to help her through the ice. Then they’d put down little kegs of powder on a long pole and a fuse on it. This keg would be around a half-gallon can full of powder, or at least as big as a quart can. They’d find a hole in the ice out there some place and put that down and light the fuse. When it would blast off, it would blow the ice, break the ice up.

I remember the Ungava and the Beothic butting the ice side by side. You could throw a keg of bread aboard either one of the boats. They were so close together that when they’d come astern, sometimes they’d strike. There was a toilet on the underpart of the vessel on the quarter deck. I remember the Beothic backing up when she was going astern and beating the toilet off the Ungava. But the old Ungava and the Beothic couldn’t get through, that’s how heavy the ice was.

But I saw the Imogene come through the same ice and she’d go on—no slack—just a slow motion. The pans of ice turning from her bow and she going on. See, that’s the difference. So that’s an uneasy place to be, too. We were two days butting the ice and with the news that the Imogene was into the main patch of seals.

Some fellows wouldn’t sleep at night—all eager to get there. To give you an idea of the size of this patch of seals that we were in the first spring we were out—I can’t confirm this for sure—but the news we got is there were 11 vessels into the one patch of seals. Now, what I’m going to say now is the truth, there were times when you wouldn’t see even the smoke of another vessel, not even the smoke of your own vessel, because she’d be gone out of sight. That gives you an idea how big the patch of seals was, estimated at well over 200,000. The Imogene took 55,000, and the Ungava and the Beothic took around 25,000 to 30,000 each, and then the other boats, the Neptune, the Terra Nova, the Eagle, and others, I don’t remember the rest of the names. But there were 11 boats into the one patch of seals. That was what was reported at the time. I know for sure, you couldn’t see the smoke of another steamer at times.

Now, they say, there’s no seals. They got a closed season on them. As far as this what they’re talking about the Greenpeace, as far as [being] inhumane to seals, I don’t think—now this is my personal opinion—I don’t think there’s anything better than the gaff that they used when I was at it for killing a seal.

Now, you’d go up to a seal and he’d be looking up at you and give him a smop on the nose and he’s dead—he’s dead. Then you’d strike him on the head again to make sure that he was dead and you’d turn him over and pelt him. He knows nothing about what’s done, the seal. Now, I never saw any cruelty other than what I said. I was killing hundreds. I admit they do look pitiful when you go up and look at it—the little whitecoat looking up at you. What do you think they were put there for? That’s what they were put there for, for man to kill and for the use of man. It’s the same thing as the fishes in the sea. What about all the foxes they shoot for sport and all this sort of thing?

Wallace Abbott, b.1909, Int.1986

I was fishing on the side of Bonavista Cape, right in under the Cape, Cape Cove. Right in under the Iron House [cod trap berth?], that’s where we had our traps for years. Twelve summers I worked there. I fished out in Cape Cove. Rough spot, especially when the winter came.

In the summer, you wouldn’t make all that much money, and if you could get a berth to the ice, it would be very good. I got the berth to the ice in the Sagona through the skipper. The Port Union Trading Company was sending the Sagona to the ice. He gave us the berth; half of Bonavista would go to the ice if they could have got a berth at them times. The skipper that I was fishing with got a berth for me, through the firm, through the merchants.

This was the first berth I got. We went to the ice that spring with Martin George Dalton [1929]; he was a nice gentleman captain, captain of the Sagona. It was a cold spring, but I saw that man frostburn his face in the bridge. But we didn’t do nothing with the seals; we only got 8,000 to 9,000. That’s all we got. The Sagona was a nice little old boat for a passenger boat, but she was no good for the ice.

We struck heavy ice, and we would be using dynamite all the time. Half our crew would be out on the line hauling the Sagona. And those aboard would run back and forth rocking her. Sometimes a scattered man would fall down on the tow line, and people would walk over him. I believe we made somewhere between $35 and $40 that spring.

All right, that was all right. We never enjoyed much that spring. When you don’t get the seals, brother, there’s nothing for you to do. All right, that was in, I forget now [1929].

The next spring [1930] I had to get a berth on my own. A friend and I went over to Port Union and got there 11 o’clock. He had two dogs and I had two dogs and this was the first of March. Port Union is around 11 or 12 miles. We waited on the wharf, and we talked to Jack Scammell. He had a lot to do with the Union Trading Company, you know. He was a fine man, but he liked his drink. Who don’t, eh? We had seen him that day in the evening and we went to his house and asked him if there was any chance of a berth. Well, he says, “No, but when Charlie [Blackwood] comes down, I’ll be there’ and if he’s got a berth, you’ll get it.” That’s what he told me, and he told the other fellow.

All right, the Sagona came and Jack Scammell went aboard at about 12 o’clock [midnight]. And he never come out of the captain’s room before 1:30. And when he came out, buddy, he was just about soused, you know. He drank at that time. Well, it wasn’t every time you would get it [liquor] anyhow. There was no liquor sold around here anywhere, or Port Union either. The steamer came from St. John’s. We stayed on the wharf, afraid we would miss him on the boat. That was about 1:30 in the morning, and she was calling the roll [of the men with berths] the next morning.

He said, “I’ve got one berth boys for two of us, one berth.” And, “All right,” he says to the two of us, “draw for the berth.” And we drawed there and then, and my friend got the berth. “All right,” he says to me. “Wallace,” he says, he knew me, you know. “Wallace,” he says, “you go home and come back tomorrow morning fore she sails,” he says. “Bring your bunk and box. Bring your belongings.”

We left Port Union at 2 o’clock to go back to Bonavista. It was a bad storm, and we got lost on a pond and couldn’t find a way off, and the dogs started fighting. The four dogs, you know, and the mess we was in, my son. Well, I suppose I never swore so much in my life as I swore from the time I left Port Union till I got to Bonavista.

Jim had the berth see, and I with neither one, and I was going on spec now with no berth. The train was leaving Bonavista at 7 o’clock in the morning. So I took my bunk and my box, that’s all you had now, you see, and carried it up to the station. Jumped aboard the train and went on. Bought the ticket to the Cape in Port Union and got aboard. I was signed on before Jim. I had my berth before Jim.

Well, brother, I got so hungry, I never had no money, and I had carried no grub over, and we were there all day, you know. And I was starved to death when she come in Catalina. Now, I was in her the year before and I knew all about her. That was the year I was with Charlie Blackwood, the last year I was with Charlie Blackwood.

I got aboard the boat and went for the galley, grub store, where they kept the grub, the stewards were looking out after that, the food controller and the stewards. All right, when I went in I opened the door—nobody around, not a soul. Cause I knew where to look. I was going in now to get something to eat.

And, brother, look, when I went in there, a can of beef there, a round can of beef, this round, about 3 inches high. It was put there for me, I said, I always said it, and I believed it, it was put there for me. I took six cakes of hard bread, pound of hard bread. The room was full with hard bread, and this one can of beef. Oh, I don’t know if it was fit or not, but I ate it. And, brother, I ate six cakes of hard bread and the can of meat. Now, I was safe for the night. I’d of been starved; I don’t know what I would have done only for that.

Everybody was saying, “Now, she’s not going today, anyhow,” ’cause it was blowing hard, my son. But at 9 o’clock she slipped up, and she was only a small boat. And she was loaded, cause she was loaded with coal. She was a coal burner with 170 men. One hundred and seventy men and a load of coal, and she couldn’t carry enough coal. They had to build pounds on her quarter, right around her quarter, about 3 feet high. That was all coal for later; she couldn’t carry enough coal without putting it on deck, too.

All right, we came down to Bonavista Cape, and the wind was northwest. She was cutting the wind, the land, you know, a bit. All right, brother, when she got down to Bonavista Cape, we were bunking in the hold where the seals would come down. We was the last aboard of her and all the rest of the fellows had the choice berths. We got down in the hold, up in under the deck of her, you know. There must have been 15 or 20 of us there under the coamings [a raised frame around the hatchway to keep out water, often covered with a tarpaulin in heavy seas]. We were down in our berths when she turned Bonavista Cape, and they put down the hatches and tarpaulins and wedged them where the water wouldn’t get down in the hold.

We got in our bunks and that porthole, my son, we could only see the blue water. If she’d gone down, we’d have down with her, because there was no way to get out.

When we came up, there was nothing left on our deck. The galley was gone. Big duffs [made with flour and water] were rolling around; the coal was gone, the sidesticks were gone, and the flooring made out of board was gone. She had a steel deck and they had rough board over the steel to save the steel from the chisels in our boots. We had to go into Newtown to get everything sorted out.

Charlie Blackwood was the captain, and he had four or five brothers with him in her that spring. They were like dogs; they were the real water dogs, too—those Blackwoods. Al Blackwood, the fellow that was [captain of] the Imogene, was his brother, too. The same spring there was Charlie, Pete, and Martin. There was four Blackwood brothers. I forget the other fellow now, the fourth one. All good men, all good men, and Peter, too, all good men they were. Peter was second hand and one fellow was barrelman. They were dogs; they were dogs of men for work, for the ice, fish, and everything.

We managed to get 16,000-17,000 seals, and that was very good. She wasn’t loaded, but we did very good. We made between $60 and $70 [$58.28] in the spring. During that trip, I gave myself a hard beat one evening. Every watch was left there killing seals when we could get seals, but there was no seals to get this time. This day we jumped over to get the flags [of another steamer]. I wasn’t supposed to be over there at all. But I jumped over with the other watch because I was on deck, you know, and you had your knife and sheath and belt on all the time anyhow. You lived with it on, you almost slept with it, your sheath and belt on you, around your waist and when you’re on deck you had your rope on, too, because you didn’t know when you had to jump. Because that was it: when you had to jump, you had to go.

I jumped—I was foolish enough—jumped over, but me buddy, now this fellow I was talking about, Jim, he didn’t go. He didn’t go, but I went, foolish-like. All right, this was about 3 or 4 o’clock in the evening, and we got to the seals. I forget the master watch. I had to follow them, you know. It was just the same as if it was my watch then when I was into it. Now, you wouldn’t have nothing to do aboard, only in your watch, when your watch was on. But when your watch was on, if you were out on the ice, when you came aboard, if your watch was on, you had to go to work, you still had to go to work. Passing coal, there’s always a job with you on that one, the Sagona, passing coal with baskets. Some fellows fill the baskets. Other fellows pass them right, throw it away, making room to stow seals. And there were seals, always something to work.

That was all right. This was before my story now. We took three seals a man, everyone agreed on three seals a man. We laced them up from a flag [belonging to another ship!] to haul to the Sagona, and you know what, buddy? The boat turned stern on to us, and went on. And we were hauling and hauling and hauling. We could see her and thought she’d come back. She never came back, first nor last. And people began to get dirty [angry] about it, you know. People begin to get dirty and went on terrible, my son, some people were. So we all got on a pan and the ice was bad, too, brother, bad enough, people falling in and everything. We all got together, all hands said slip them [seal pelts]. Some fellows slipped them in the water, all hands slipped their seals, three a man that was around, that was a watch then, around 40 or 50 men.

And I was not in that watch at all. I wasn’t supposed to be there. I got roped into it. I done it on my own. And that was all right. We put the ropes on our shoulders, coiled around our shoulders, and give it to her for the ship. And we got aboard that ship, my son, we got aboard that ship in the night about 12 o’clock.

She was taking ice, taking ice to melt, boil down, taking ice. On a growler, laddie, you knows that’s how we got ice for water. Chuck it aboard and melt it into water. Sometimes, the water would be so salty, my son, it’d be like salt water. When I got aboard, I had to go on my watch. Our watch was on. You had to go on when you had your trip. But see, brother, some people had it all right—some people. The way it was with me, I kept me hand up with anyone, that’s the gall I had. There’s no one who didn’t want to do nothing for Wallace, but some people was not like that, was not like that at all.

Oh, it was a hard spring, heavy ice, and I dare say we got a lot of them [seal pelts] from other flags, other boats. Because I know we took them from Blackwood’s brother.

Now, that was all right. We come in Port Union and that’s where we took them out, in Port Union. I never washed, I never washed, I never showered till I came here in the house. I never stripped nothing, never even took off me pants at that time, you couldn’t, brother, you couldn’t at that time.

You wouldn’t get neither bit of good grub you know, not from the galley. You would only get hard bread, thousands of hard bread, if you was any good to eat that. Hard bread and butter—you’d get thousands of that. You’d get your whack, what they calls your whack; allowance, they called it, but whack, we called it, once a week. You’d get a baker’s loaf and some baked on board. You’d get to eat a baker’s loaf, and sometimes you couldn’t get the knife through it. Sometimes when we’d be on watch what we used to do was get the hearts and liver and fry it and the flippers. Fry it in the night on the watch you knows in the galley. Because there’s nobody in the galley in the night, you know. We’d fry a pan of hearts and livers or flippers and that, and so many of us would get together and eat it. Now, that was a funny trip, brother, going to make a dollar. All right that was over.

Now, the next spring, I was going again. But the Sagona never went, that was the last spring she went out of Port Union. I was here the two springs she sailed out of Port Union with two different captains. [I have no record of the Sagona going to the icefields again.]

The next spring [1933], I got to go to the ice I went with another fellow then in backside we’ll call it, backside the other side of this Cape. I asked him if he would be able to get a berth for me. Now, this man that I was with was a real fish dog, you knows, a good fish killer. Always, always did well. “Yes,” he said, “I’ll get a berth for you.” And he got a berth for me on the Ungava. Now, that was a better berth, see buddy, in the Ungava with Peter Carter in St. John’s. I had to go to St. John’s.

When the time came, we went. She was berthed on the Southside of St. John’s and whenever you got in St. John’s, see brother, the first thing you had to do was scrabble for your bunk and box and try to get over to get a good berth for sea, get a good berth for sleeping. That was your scrabble—that was the trouble in St. John’s. And you had to get a berth before they were all took up, because some berths were not as good as others.

The Ungava had 270-275 men—that was the crowd that was in her. And she was 200 or 300 feet long. The Ungava and the Beothic were alike—big boats, big straight boats. In the Sagona, you had to eat on your box in the hold, but on the Ungava you had tables just the same as you had in the lumber woods, in the cookhouse. Tables on each side of her, right up and down the ship.

If you bunked on the port side, well that’s the table you had to eat on her deck, which was all closed in, see. That was the table, that’s where you had to eat on the port side. It was great satisfaction, and we got better grub, too, with that. There were three or four cooks, and we had plenty of salt beef. You could eat all the salt beef you liked, and a man who didn’t eat salt beef, well, there was no place for him to be, to the ice. But that’s all we lived on, hard bread and salt beef and stuff like that.

We went, went out to the ice with Carter. We struck the seals. Brother, I never seen them so thick in me life. Well, she brought in the heaviest load [1933], not the biggest number—that was the Imogene. We had around 45,000 young harps [and the rest were old seals].

Besides killing the white coats, we’d be quintering for seals, and we be getting the hoods. The hoods are not like the harps; the harps are all together. The hoods are all in families—the dog and the bitch and the pup lived together. We’d go for the pup, because they were better than the harp, but you couldn’t make much because they were too scattered.

A fellow from near Catalina and another fellow from Bonavista and me—dead now, the two of them—and I’m the only living one. We got the pup and, when we got the pup brother, the dog came up and he run down and he jumped on the pan; he came mad for us, for the three of us. Anyhow, we tackled him. He was five or six or seven hundredweight. He was as big as a punt almost. I fought and I broke off my gaff, and then I had neither gaff. The other fellows fought him and we got him, killed him, and then we drove the handle of a gaff down his throat. [This was to save the sealers from the possibility that the dog hood was not dead, but only stunned.] There were people to the ice who would run miles from a hood and some people who wouldn’t even shoot them—afraid of them.

That was the last spring I was to the ice. We came into St. John’s in the Ungava. Oh we were over a week in St. John’s taking out the pelts. And we’d go down on Water Street selling flippers, 20 cents a half-dozen. We’d have them in half-dozens with a bit of spun yarn run through them.

I was with people who was to the ice for 50 years, old men, in Bonavista, too. Wore themselves out to the ice. There was a wonderful crowd in Bonavista used to go out to the ice seal fishing. A wonderful crowd.

The late years, or the war times, people didn’t go cause there was a better way to make a dollar. I went in the lumber woods, and sure there was plenty of hard work. Then when Gander started, I went into Gander. Then I came home and I happened to get a job on the highroads, that was about 1940, ’41. I was on the highroads until I retired.

When I went out to the ice, there was no use for nobody to talk to me about nothing. I went for to better meself. I couldn’t better meself on the land at that time, and you went for the dollar. No man went to the ice for the pleasure of it, because there was no pleasure in it. It was only plenty of hard work, plenty of hard work. But no one went there for pleasure now. You went there to make a dollar, and that was a gamble. If you struck the seals, you might make a few dollars, and if you didn’t strike the seals, that was it. We made, I believe it was, around $100 [$80.36?] that trip with Carter, around that, $100.

When you sailed to the ice, you’d be in watches. You’d didn’t know whose watch you were in until you’re way out. On the way out the master watch would come down and take all the names of the watch you were in. The ship had three or four master watches.

The bo’sun would give you the batons and a piece of rope. Now, you had to splice an eye in that—a round eye, not the regular eye, but a round eye in a rope, because they would use that one. If you got into a bad place and wanted to hook a rope with your gaff, the eye was opened. You could hook the rope, even if you was towing seals. And then you have to seize the end of the rope, you’d have to seize the end of it, with sail, all sail winded on so it wouldn’t ravel out or anything. So that’s the way it was.

Everybody, my son look, was one family to the ice, one family. You had your knapsack and everybody had a canvas jacket, a white canvas jacket made. There were no parkas then. A white canvas jacket, and you had skin boots. You would get them made and they were great boots and you’d tie them with a sting around your knee so the slob and the water wouldn’t get in. They were great boots with the pants. I got three or four pairs made when I was going to the ice. The local people made them here. But now those late years they don’t use skin boots anymore. They use the rubber boots and taps them with leather. But they’re not so good as the skin boot. Now, there was a boot.

We’d have sparables and chisels made before we went out. I used to go up the tinsmith’s and get them made. [Sparables were small bits of sharp metal driven into the soles of the boots, and chisels were larger pieces of sharp metal driven into the heels of the boots. This prevented slipping on the ice and some ships like the Sagona covered their steel decks with boards to prevent damage.]

And you get the crop in St. John’s. We got $9 whether we made anything or not, but if you made anything, you had to pay back $12. You could get oilskins and a cape ann [cap] and a pan [and knife, steel] or whatever with the $9.

That was it, boy, a hard racket. It was a hard racket, but still everyone wanted it. Everyone. People didn’t care. The second two years I was out there was a dead man aboard each year. He was on deck till we came in, salted in a big square box on her quarter. Salted right in, full of salt. One from north side of Bonavista Bay over there in St. Brendan’s. And the other fellow was up there around Torbay. They got a cold, got a cold and pneumonia. There was no doctor and there was nothing then that you could do.

Hard place to die, though, I guarantee you, brother. It was a hard place to die. And we had it comfortable compared to some people going to the ice [we could go by train]. But the men on the other side of the bay [Bonavista Bay] had to walk to Gambo to the railway, walk to Gambo, just to get to the railway. They walked from Greenspond, Wesleyville, and all those places. And there were a lot of people from there that went to the ice. A lot. You couldn’t get away from them. No odds what ship you were on, there were always Bonavista Bay people.

They used to walk from here, too, because I did it once when the trains were blocked with snow and we had to walk to Clarenville with our boxes and bags, boxes and bunks. No odds where you went, you had to have your box and bunk, because if you didn’t carry that with you, you had nothing. You had your stuff in the box. You never had much grub, but you’d have a cake or two, baked in iron pots then. You had to keep that for your lunch bag on the ice. You’d have a can and you’d have a stopper in it and you’d have that full of molasses, and you’d have a bag of oatmeal and raisins. When there’d be any snow on the ice, you’d make a hole, put the oatmeal in it, and stir it around, mix it with the snow. The snow would turn to water and that would help the thirst, too.

When I was pelting seals, I used to put a piece of seal’s heart in my mouth and chew it the same as tobaccy. Every day that was the first thing I’d do, get a heart, suck that, and I’d chew it all day. That’d quench the thirst; you wouldn’t get thirsty then.

You couldn’t get much with any nourishment. Only the rough old grub. The hard bread was the most of it you could get. Yes, sir, the most you could get. The most I could get was hard bread. You’d have a cake in your box, too.

You’d have a bottle of rum in your box. That was there, but if anyone knew you had it, my son you was badgered to death, badgered to death, even by the master watch. If they knew you had a bottle of rum and especially a fellow what likes the drop, you were badgered. It was different when the war years was on. Then they had it all the time. They’d pass it around, and some would come from the captain’s cabin. It was typical to get a drink every evening, after you came off the ice, everyone would get a drink.

For breakfast, we got beans, and tea, and bread. Sometimes we got baked bread and we’d get all the hard bread we liked. We’d go up with our boat’s kettles and get breakfast and carry it down and eat it on our boxes.

In the Ungava now it was all on the table—the jugs of tea, big enamel jugs, two-gallon jugs, salt beef and pork and beans. And your bread—you’d get a loaf every week. That was the allowance every week, and a block of butter. We call it a block, a pound of butter.

And there was one fellow there, when he come down with his butter—now the wooden bunks, they were board, all board—and he wouldn’t put the butter in his box at all. “Father always told me,” he said, “hang everything up.” Father always told him, he says, to hang everything up when he was going to the ice. And, anyway, he says in the lumber woods, “Don’t let nothing down on the floor, hang everything up,” and he took the block of butter and a big 4-inch nail and drove the nail right through the block of butter and nailed it to his bunk. And we used to ask him, “What you got your butter there for?” “Oh, Father always told me I had to hang everything up.”

And every man would try to get a barrel and fill it with carcass and flippers whenever you had a chance, especially when we were quintering. You could buy a barrel or sometimes get one from the cook. It was hard work.

And Sunday was like any other day. If she was in the seals, brother it made no difference, you had to cut them. You had to work like it was any other ordinary day. But the good man, he wouldn’t go out; if he was religious, he wouldn’t go. It was his choice. It was his choice. He could go or stay, but someone else was doing his work. I say a man, if he was in his right mind, there was no place for him on the ice. If he was a religious man, there was no place for him, because if he lay up, which he did, someone else was doing his work for him. Someone else was doing it for him. There was no Sunday service in the Sagona. But the Ungava did; they would go up to the tables and have their prayers: RC, United, all the good Christian people. What you’d call Christian people, but they wouldn’t go overboard. But the RC people, they didn’t mind it. They’d come up to church and go to work. But most of our people were reverent on the Sabbath day.

And quintering then—that was shooting them seals. Each gunner had two or three or four dogs that carried the bullets. I was two springs a dog after that with Alec Dyke from here in Bonavista. There was a family of them and they was all gunners, guaranteed whatever they pointed at they killed. That was in their blood. That was in the family of them, and I was to the ice with two brothers of them. The two of them stuttered and how much did they laugh—the best kind of people in the world. Stewart Dyke was older than Alec, and he was an ordinary sealer. But Alec had the gun all the time. He wouldn’t go out if he didn’t have the gun. I got dog with him and a fellow from down Bailey’s Cove, a Keough fellow, and me. Two dogs to the one gunner. He carried only his gun and a few bullets. The dogs carried a full canvas bagful. The dogs had to cut off the top of the tail of the seals that were shot so the captain would know how many were killed that day.

One day, I was on the edge of the pan, and it broke. I went in the water, and it washed the cap off of my head. I would have drowned if the other dog wasn’t there, because the shells were around my shoulder. He hauled me in and I took off every stitch. This was around the last of March. That’s usually the time that quintering starts, after the seals were cut, after they take to the water. I took all my clothes off. The other fellow wrung it all out, wrung out my boots, and I put it all on again. You was into that then till just about dark, till just about dark.

And we went a little ways, not very far, and in goes this fellow. The same thing, right, washed the cap off his head. I hooked him with the gaff and got him on the ice and done the same thing with him. Poor fellow, he’s dead now, too. They’s most all dead. There’s only a few of us left now, only a few of us left now, that’s all. That’s the way it was to the ice, brother.

There was lots of dirt and lots of lice, but I worked with two good captains, Peter Carter and Charlie Blackwood, and if you want to talk to somebody that was in the Viking when she blowed up, go see Israel Ayles. He lives over there by the station, the railway station, up in the harbour there, you know, the little harbour in on the road. [Ayles was not interviewed.]

George Adams, b.1911, Int.1987

[living in St. John’s at the time of the interview]

I was 13 years old when I went to the Labrador coast down in Groswater Bay, down in Indian Harbour, fishing with my father. My brothers and I were used to the water, and I didn’t mind water. I wasn’t a bit nervous or nothing like that. I used to go down in the schooner there in 1924, ’25, and ’26—schooner from Brigus, owned by the Palmer brothers. And then after that I used to go back and forth on the old steamer Kyle. I used to go down in the spring on her and come back in the fall. And we had to go ashore down there; we had a home down there, a bungalow, and our stage—a pretty little harbour. There was a hospital down there, too, run by the mission.

When I went to the ice in 1931, we took the train. Furey’s bus was running then but not in the wintertime. They started in the late 1920s but they only used the bus after the snow was gone and until winter started again. The bus was better. It was a little black one and it was quicker. It was about three hours or three and half hours on the bus, but the train would take five or six hours.

That year, 1931, I was 20 years old, and Captain Billy Bartlett, that’s Bob’s father, had so many berths sent him from Bowring Brothers. I went out and got a berth on the Viking from him. There were six or seven of us from Brigus and Georgetown. In fact three from Georgetown were killed on her: Bartlett and Linthorne, and, I think, a man Kelly. There were 15 or 20 from around Brigus and some from around Poole’s Island, where the captain came from.

The Viking was a wooden ship, and she had a high barrackhead on her. She used to steer by two big wheels back aft: two guys on the front wheel, and two on the back. Young Abram Kean was captain [a nephew of old Capt. Abe]. He was a very mild-mannered man; you’d never hear him cursing or swearing. He’d yell out to you and tell you to do this or that, but that’s all.

That was a hard spring. About 12 or 14 miles off Poole’s Island, it got pretty rough. The Viking had a big pound of coal on deck, and we had to shovel it all overboard to try and lighten her. She used to pump her own water, but with the shaking in the heavy sea the pumps got clogged with coal dust. She was taking on water, and the water was nearly up to the plates down in the stoke hole. If it came up to the fire, it would put the fire out. So around 11 o’clock in the night the master watch came and said, “Boys, come on deck and try to get the water out of her, or this is going to be another Southern Cross.” The engineers rigged up pumps on deck with two handles, and two men got on one side and two men on the other.

It was so rough we couldn’t get down to the pumps because they had a rope tied where we came out of the forecastle right back to the bridge. When the sea would pass over, we’d run and grab the line and get up on the bridge. Underneath the bridge they put ropes on the pumps and we used to haul and slack off and the other fellows would haul. All night we were at that, trying to get the water out of her. We were like that all night. We used to take turns and around 4 o’clock in the morning I went aft and asked the boys at the wheel if they wanted relief. They were there nearly all night. Dicky Walker, a good sailor he was, from Brigus, he was there. And young Bartlett from Georgetown.

We were there about an hour and a half and the captain sang out to us, “Boys, we’re going to run her. Watch yourself when she comes around.” And we put her hard over and came around; and she came around and never took a sup of water. Now, the snow stopped, and the wind started to abate a bit, and in an hour or an hour and a half it was as calm as it is here.

So we had to go in to Poole’s Island and get some cooking gear, pots and pans, because everything we had in the two galleys was washed overboard. They lowered a boat and three or four hands went ashore and brought back whatever they wanted for cooking.

Then we left, and the next thing we got jammed up in White Bay. We were stuck in the ice in the mouth of White Bay, around Cape St. John. There were no seals in White Bay, and we wanted to go up farther north because the Imogene and the Ungava and the Beothic were up around the Straits of Belle Isle.

Now we were stuck, and a bunch of us, perhaps 30 or 40 or 50, went aft and went down to the cabin where the magazine was at and started putting powder in tins. They were about 5 or 6 inches by 3 inches in diameter, and they were made out of tin. We used to put them on poles and shove them down in the ice and light the fuses. After we used about 100 tins, we got our boat loose.

We broke loose, and the captain decided to steam north. When we got to the edge of the ice, there was a heavy swell in the ice because of the storm. We had struck a storm before that, and there was still a heavy swell on in the ice. There were 30- or 40-foot swells, and she was going mad; we were rolling and the ice was coming in on our deck. It was too risky out there right at the edge of the ice, so we decided to spend the night in the ice. So we turned around and steamed back and burned down in the ice.

Sunday was a nice day and a nice night—a beautiful night. The weather was good, but the sea was pretty rough. Varick Frissell and the other two Americans were taking pictures running over the ice that day because they were going to make a movie. I think they were going to call it White Thunder. But when the ship blew up, Frissell was killed, and they lost all their equipment and everything.

Anyway, I was lying back in my berth getting a smoke for myself, about 8:45 on Sunday night. Some of the boys were on deck; some of them were around talking when she blew. And once she blew, everything in the ship went dark, because we lost our lights. They had the power magazine in the cabin down aft, and that’s where she exploded. We slept in the front, in the forecastle, and that’s what saved us.

We had just left St. John’s, and she was blocked with coal, so when she blew, she blew back; the coal stopped her from blowing ahead. Only for that, she’d have killed us all. But she blew back and took the bridge and all with her. The bridge went, and Captain Kean was picked up 30 or 40 feet from the ship. She blew out everything, right down to the water’s edge. Cleaned her right down to the water’s edge, and she never touched us at all.

I got out of bed in the dark and looked for my clothes. Now, I couldn’t see nothing; it was some dark, and I couldn’t find my clothes. But I did find a suit of rubber clothes I had hung up at the end of my berth. I got that and I tried to find a cap and a pair of mitts, but I couldn’t find a thing. I just had a pair of pants, no overalls, and nothing warm to put on. I got my boots; I knew where they were, underneath the berth, and I found them and got them and got up on deck.

It was light on deck because of the fire, so I put on my boots and hauled on my rubber clothes. I had neither cap, neither pair of mitts, but as it happened, it was a warm night—only about 30 degrees Fahrenheit.

We got over to the dories—we had four or five dories—and we got them overboard, and we got on the ice. We saw the captain on the ice, trying to crawl, and we picked him up. He was shook up a good bit from the fall and in pretty hard shape. We picked up one fireman, who got out through a porthole, but the rest of the firemen and engineers were all killed. We didn’t see Frissell; you couldn’t see anything. The only thing you could see was the flame from the fire on the ship. You couldn’t see anyone who was blowed clear of the ship.

It was about 10 o’clock in the night, and we didn’t know where we were. But Captain Kean knew right where to go to get to the Horse Islands. He said, “I’ll tell you where to go. I can’t walk, but I’ll tell you where to go.” So we got four or five dories. We got the captain aboard one, the firemen aboard another, and so many men at each dory pulling it over the ice.

We left the ship about 10 o’clock in the night. We travelled all night and at daylight we could see the island. We didn’t know where we were going, but the captain knew. We had to leave two or three dories because the bottoms went out of them. We were on solid ice then, so we didn’t mind. We travelled all night, and about 4 o’clock in the afternoon we got to the island. It was only a small place—must be seven or eight houses—and the families there knew about the Viking. They were in their little church on Sunday night and [had] heard the explosion. When they were coming from church, they saw the flames.

Just before we got to the Horse Islands, we could see the people down to the beach. We had the captain and fireman in one dory, and the landsmen came out in a punt and they took over. There was a heavy swell in the ice, so they threw out ropes to us. We ran over the ice, holding on to the ropes, and got ashore. We had a job getting ashore. Then we went to the houses there.

In one house there were five of us, and we had a stowaway from the Viking; his name was Michael Gardiner. He used to stay with us on the Viking, stay where we were sleeping, and we’d feed him. In fact there were two stowaways on the boat—another young fellow, Cronin. But he used to stay with the firemen, down in their quarters, right where the explosion was, and he got killed, the poor little fellow; he was a nice little fellow.

There was a wireless operator, a fellow named Bartlett, on the Horse Islands, and he got in touch with the rest of the ships and told them there was an explosion out there, but he didn’t know what happened until we got in on Monday afternoon. When we got in on the island, he interviewed us all—got our names who was safe, who was gone. We lost 24 men.

The other ships came. We left the island on Friday and walked out to the Imogene and got our lunch aboard her. She had on board our navigator and our wireless operator. They transferred them to the Sagona, which had come from St. John’s, and we walked over the Sagona, too. We got on the Sagona, and we stayed on her Friday, Saturday, and Sunday.

Then the Prospero came with provisions, because the Sagona didn’t have much food. The Prospero had to bring food for the people on the island, because we eat all they had. We eat everything; we had them cleaned. We got aboard the Prospero and came to St. John’s. The Sagona got in a few hours after us. We got in here and they brought most of us up to the Falkner House. I was there in that hotel two days.

Squires was prime minister. He came to see us, shook hands with us, and gave us $50 each. We were lucky to get that, but, still, we lost all our belongings, our clothes, and everything we had. We had nothing left. But we were lucky, not like other poor buggers who were lost.

That was my first trip. I didn’t go back to the ice until 1937. I was only out twice. The second time I went out was in 1937 on the Ranger. It was only a month from the day I left here till I got back. We got in quick and we got in first. We all got a pipe and some tobacco for being the first arrivals. And we had a lot of flippers, and no trouble to sell them. We were the first in and parked over there on the Southside, and Bowring’s sold all our flippers and carcasses. We were fortunate.

A couple got nothing, including the Neptune and the Ungava. When I came home that spring, I went with the Buchans Mining Company. I came back to Brigus in 1943 and went to work with the railway, and in August 1976 I was pensioned off.

Lester Andrews, b.1921, Int.1986

The first trip, I went to the seal fishery with Captain Charles Blackwood in 1938 in the Sagona. We had about 150 men [152] and we left Wesleyville on the first of March and walked to Gambo, 60 miles. We joined the train, and we spent 18 hours getting to St. John’s. The old train got off the track on the way in, and by the time we got on board the ship in St. John’s, the cooks had our meal provided, but all the duffs had gone as hard as rocks. We left St. John’s for the Gulf on the 3rd or 4th of March and began killing seals on the 13th. We were the first ship in from the seal fishery that spring, and we shipped our seals at Port Union. We shared $81 [$85.73] a man for our spring’s work.

The old custom then was that the Imperial Tobacco Company used to give you a pipe and two plugs of Beaver [tobacco]. Now, being around 17 years old, I didn’t enjoy Beaver or the pipe very much. I didn’t smoke at that particular time. I gave the pipe to my old friend I went to the ice with.

Now, we had to call at St. John’s for coal, but that didn’t count. We had to get in to Catalina before anyone got in to St. John’s in order to get the pipe and tobacco, because that was the place we were shipping our fat. So we, we were fairly lucky.

The pelts were taken out in Catalina and skinned; the FPU [Fishermen’s Protective Union] had a sealing plant there. By the way, the Sagona was chartered by a company called Ullman Company [E.S. Ullman Syndicate, New York].

Well, the Sagona was a steel boat [420 tons] that was used by the railway at that time as a passenger boat. She was a nice little boat in the ice. When she got ballast down good, she could handle the ice very good. But when she had no weight aboard her, she was useless; she was what we call a “cranky” boat. She was easy to tip back and forth until she got balanced, but that made her all the better for getting through the ice.

I thought it was a great job first when I went to the seal fishery. I was only young, and you’d be surprised how far that $80 could go. You’d get a nice suit of clothes for $10 then. I got one of those nice blue tams for 50 cents, and a blue raglan for $14.

The eating conditions were not good. You had to get a lunch up on deck in a big pan and then you’d go down in the hold. They had bunks built up, down in the hold, on top of the seals; it was what they called between decks. The coal would be under the lower decks and the crew would sleep on the lower deck.

On the Sagona it was a little better than most because you had some room, owing to her being a passenger boat. The crew was stowed away in the room. Myself and about 10 of us slept in the “post office,” two or three fellows in each bunk. Looking back at it now, it was terrible. But the Sagona was good.

The next spring [1939] I went out in the Terra Nova, and that was something else. It was an old wooden boat. They were steamers and every day you’d be shovelling coal until you got an officer’s job, and then you could tell the other fellows to shovel coal. In 1939, we went to the Gulf again, with Captain Stanley Barbour, and that was the same spring the Ranger went there and got stalled, full of water, and they had to get her towed down [to St. John’s].

We had a real bad spring. We got up there and got jammed all the spring—didn’t get any seals. When the ice loosened up to get around, all the whitecoats were gone. We landed back again around the latter part of April with $5 [$4.49] a man.

And the next spring I was with Captain Stanley Barbour again, but we were in Beothic. She was a steel boat, and we had 200 [225] men. She was a big-sized boat [1,077 tons]. That was a tough old spring, too. We got around 40,000 or the weight of 40,000 with the old and the young [33,001].

A lot of boats went to the seal fishery. There was the Ungava and Imogene, them big old boats. But we got as many seals as the other fellow that spring. The officers slept in the cabin, but all the workmen slept in the hold down with the seals and the coal. At that time we didn’t know no difference, but it was a dog’s life. I’ve got a dog now that belongs to my grandson, and I wouldn’t let it go in the berth that I slept in for all the world.

I’ll never forget the first day we were “burnt down” with seals in the Sagona and we had a crowd of young fellows who had never been to the seal fishery before. And the captain said to one of the older fellows now, “You better take out those young fellows and give them the idea of pelting the seal.” I went out with an old uncle, Piercy Winsor, and he got me out and started, showing me how to pelt the seal. I thought it was awful bad when the blood came. When you pelt the seal, you stick the knife in and the blood will come out.

That looked pretty tough. But it didn’t take me very long after to get the idea of it. I’d been there a couple of days before you had it. Now, some people could pelt more, sculp, some people says sculp, others say pelt; some people could sculp a seal a lot quicker than others. Maybe where I could pelt 10, another fellow could pelt 15, or where I pelt 15, another fellow would only pelt 5. But that was only just like everything.

I took a couple of days to get it all sized up. But we were running and jumping and going. We were hardened into it because we young fellows home would be hauling firewood with dogs, we had to go 7 to 8 miles to get a load of firewood [at home]; we were all muscled up, there was no mistake about that, we were really in shape.

But boy, it was a tough, tough old life, although everybody used to try and get there, because some years you’d make some money—not very much—you went out and make $40 or $50. It was a good help. It wasn’t no money, but it was good in that time. But it was a struggle.

Nineteen forty-one was the last spring I went out for a while; and the war on then so we didn’t go to the seal fishery at all. I didn’t, because we were in the coasting trade and time wouldn’t allow you to do it.

Until one spring Captain Stanley Barbour called me and said he wanted me to go to the seal fishery with him again. Boy, I can’t remember that year now, but it was after the war. I think probably in the late ’40s or early ’50s. I went up there with him in the Lady Cecil. Well now, that was the beginning of improvement in the living conditions of the seal fishery. All the crew members had a good place to stay then, and you had your individual berths away from the seals.

Then the next spring I went with Captain Stanley again in the North Voyager—that was an old passenger boat from the North Shore, Quebec. She was something like the Kyle and she had good living conditions as well. She was one of those diesel boats, diesel engines—now that was a lovely boat, and we didn’t shovel any coal.

The captains were all good men, but I’m going to speak my mind, and Captain Sidney Hill was my favourite. He had great ideas, and he was a man who could almost read your mind. And he was a great old fellow for getting seals aboard. Some of the skippers would kill the seals, but Captain Sid was more interested in getting aboard what you had killed. He often said to me, “Now,” he said, he never called me my name while I worked with him two springs; he always called me by my father’s name—Harry. He’d always say, “Harry, boy, two seals aboard is better than a dozen on the ice. You’re sure of those.” He was my favourite captain.

The latter years I used to go with Trinity Bay fellows. They were all big men. By God, I was too afraid to say anything to them. One of the first years I was with Captain Stanley Barbour up in the Gulf, I was only about 18. I didn’t know a man aboard of her, only the captain. I knew Captain Stanley because he came from down around Newtown and was connected with the Barbour’s.

The rest of me buddies was all old big men, boy—Trinity Bay people, big men at that time. They’d wear those big moustaches all coiled up. I got used to them after the first of it. Old fellows like Bill Spurrell and Jack Hayter—all those fellows from Trinity Bay were good men. I remember out with Allan Miller and Sandy Randall—that was the two fellows stands out in my mind above all men that I knocked around with. Those two men stand out in my memory. They were about 6 foot 6 [inches] I suppose. Boy, they may not be 6 foot 6 inches but they were really tall men, and they were big men. Oh, I guess Uncle Sandy and Uncle Allan Miller were 260-270 pounds. Sometimes we’d have to tow seals to the ship because she’d be jammed. You’d go up and get up to the pan and take the seals, and Uncle Sandy and Uncle Allan would be the two leading men. I used to say “My God, sure they’ll be aboard before we get halfways.” But them two men knew exactly the step to take, that another fellow would keep up with them. Although they were big and strong, they would never take any more seals than I would take because they did not want the other men to try and take as many as they could take.

We would have men from all parts, almost every bay. We’d have fellows from St. John’s, Conception Bay, Trinity Bay, and Bonavista Bay. Captain Stan had a lot of men from Trinity Bay. Captain Les Winsor and Captain Sid would have men from here [Bonavista North] and the Twillingate area. I don’t know of anybody from further north than Twillingate. We’d have a lot of people from St. John’s or the St. John’s area, Conception Bay and St. Phillips. There were not too many from the real St. John’s.

The best ship of all was the Imogene. She was never jammed; she had good power, but a fellow had to know how to use her. Captain Al Blackwood had her for years and years. He had her when she came out new, and he never had her jammed. She was always going, and unless the ice was loose, she’d never burn down. The Imogene was everybody’s favourite; everybody tried to get a berth in the Imogene. You’d never get a berth there; someone had to die to get a berth there.

The whitecoats usually take to the water around the 21st or 22nd, 23rd of March. But if a big rain came before these dates, it would hurry them into the water. Rain would make them used to the water. They won’t go in the water before they got to, those whitecoats.

The coal pounds were all washed down. Then we had those longers, sticks of wood, 2 to 3 inches thick, and we’d lay them down on the bottom of the pounds and that would give the water a place to run.

Every Sunday evening when it would get dark—7 or 8 o’clock then, in the night—some old fellow would hold a church service. We’d have some Roman Catholic people having the rosary on the other side, or they’d have theirs first and we’d have ours afterwards. There was an old fellow from Trinity Bay that we used to call “the minister.”

But some fellows didn’t want to go on the ice Sundays. One spring I was master watch and I had eight men in my watch who were professing men and didn’t like to work on Sundays. So this morning, Captain Sid says, “Andrews, where’s your men to?” I said, “Boy, I got all good religious men, don’t work Sunday.” So, the captain says, “all you can do about it, suppose boy, all you can do about it.” Captain Sid had a quick way of talking.

I was on the ice all day until we came aboard. By and by dark came. Now, after dark, in the nighttime, you stowed down those seals that you put aboard in the day. You stowed them down away in the night. So we went to supper and my watch came on 12 o’clock in the nighttime, and we had to go start stowing seals.

The eight men walked up to me and said, “Now, Les, tell the boys to all go and lie down, and we’ll stow away the seals. We didn’t work today boy; we don’t like working on Sundays but we’ll do the work from now.” I said, “Good enough, boy.” So the eight men went and they stowed more seals than all the watches aboard. I was telling Captain Sid about it the next day and he said, “All good men, boy,” he said. “Poor buggers,” he said, “they couldn’t work, didn’t feel like working Sundays. What can you do about it—can’t force a man to do something he doesn’t want to do.” But they were good workers; they were good men.

The only bad experience I had at the seal fishery was the year that two men died. It was some kind of bowel disease, and the crew got upset and wanted to go in; they went on strike, so the old skipper abandoned the voyage because a couple of other men got pretty sick as well.

I served as a master watch a couple of springs. That paid a little better. A bridgemaster got a little bonus, the second master watch a little bigger bonus, and the master watches split a share. Sometimes the second master watch worked as a scunner, but it really depended on the skipper. Captain Sid Hill’s master watches could look after the men, stowing the seals, hoisting the coal, and moving ballast. But Captain Stanley Barbour’s master watches did the scunning, and the second master watch looked after the men [the second master watch was often referred to as the deck router].

My father spent a lifetime sealing. He never gave it up until he was too old to go. My uncle did not go sealing. He would always build a boat in the spring and make $60 or $70. I liked sealing, and I went as often as I could. I’ll never forget the first [kitchen] range that I had—it was what we called a range—we used to have the old-fashioned stove. I bought the range from the seal fishery and I bought it with flippers. It was not taken out of my share but out of the flippers that I brought in. I’ll never forget. I paid $150 for it. Boy, that was a big deal when I came home with that range.

The seal fishery is gone. It doesn’t mean too much to me personally now, but there was a lot of people, boy, lost a lot of money by the seal fishery being downgraded by the Greenpeace organization. Because actually that’s what killed the seal fishery. The Greenpeace came here and they spoiled the markets. So there was a lot of poor devils with those longliners that used to make two-thirds of their living or probably more. I think that was bad, and there was no shortage of seals. I knew that the last spring I was to the seal fishery, because we covered patches of seals, my God they were uncountable.

Wilfred Andrews, b.1903, Int.1986

George Tuff had so many berths to give out, and we had to haul two loads of wood for our berths, and this was my first time to the icefields. The first thing we had to do was to make sleighs, small sleighs for our packs. Then we had to walk 60 miles to Gambo, where we got on the train. When we got into St. John’s, we went down on Bowring’s wharf. Wesley [Westbury] Kean was our captain, captain of the Terra Nova.

Kean was a good man, perfect man, couldn’t get no better. He was good to his crowd and we could get along pretty good with him. I was out with Captain Kean for four springs. But now Captain Stan Barbour was the best captain that I sailed with. I was out with Captain Bill Winsor, too, and he would swear on the crowd over nothing, he didn’t care what he said. I was out with Captain Sid Hill, and we were jammed for 16 days and he was a good captain. I was also out on the Ranger, the Ungava, the Sylvia, the Eagle, the Viking, and the Neptune.

I was on the Ungava with Captain Billy Winsor when the Viking exploded in 1931. When she exploded, we were up on the Straits, and we left and came down. The Imogene was the first steamer that got to the shipwreck. Captain Abe Kean, young Abe, was captain of the Viking when she exploded. They were carrying a lot of gunpowder, and when she exploded, she blew half her stern off.

I was out on the Sylvia with Captain Wesley Kean in 1938. She was big ship; she had five decks. We slept down on the third deck. She could carry a lot. She was 1,913 tons. She belonged to Furness-Withy and was used on the Gulf for passengers. Her captain was Ern Kean when she worked on the Gulf.

Now, the worst ship was the old Viking. The hatches were above us where we slept between decks. And when we were lying in our bunks the seal pelts used to fall on our bunks sometimes. And the old Ranger was pretty bad. She was worn out when we went on her. The Terra Nova was good and the Ungava.

The Ungava had a separate place for eating. You didn’t have to sit on your bunk and eat, like pigs, or no better than pigs. We all looked very dirty when we would come in to St. John’s. We used to go to this street and get our wash before we could go to the barber shop to get a shave. We used to sell flippers, and I bought a brown serge suit of clothes and a pair of glasses.

When I came aboard, the first thing some men asked me was, did I want to buy some flippers—they didn’t know me with my glasses and new suit. It was great sport. I loved it. I loved when the time came to go out. And we came home more times on a free pass than with money.

I was on the Ungava in 1930 when they made the movie [Varick Frissell]. Sometimes they would get us to put our rubber clothes on and get us to jump in the water so they could take pictures. Then they would throw artificial snow. They had big propellers around, and it would look like a big storm. We would run through this snow, and we would haul pelts along the deck and on the ice in this snow while they were making pictures. Captain Bob Bartlett was aboard and he was all dressed up and all powdered up and he used to roar and shout.

When we were jammed in the ice, there wasn’t much to do. Some fellows would make molasses beer—they would get yeast and molasses from the cooks—and we would fry up flippers or bake them in the oven and drink beer at night. And the cooks used to help drink the beer, too.

Another time we were short of tobacco; we were out a long time. One fellow from here, from Musgrave, bet me a stick of tobacco that I couldn’t lift a barrel of flour, and I lifted it and put it on top of another barrel.

Some Sundays were rough if there were seals around because some fellows wouldn’t go on the ice to kill seals on a Sunday and other fellows would.

I fell in the water once. I was quintering for seals, a couple of us were, and I slipped and fell in. One fellow from Twillingate saw me and thought I was an old seal, and he was going to bat me. After I shouted, he got out on the pan, got me, and hauled me in. I must of been in the water about a half hour. I was shrivelled right up. They had to hoist me aboard. Captain Wes went and got a mug of rum and gave me.

One old man I knew was Tom Carroll, a bo’sun. He must of been 80 years old then. He gave you your rope and gaff handle. But then you had to splice the rope and lash the iron gaff to the gaff handle.

Captain Wesley was a great captain, but he always felt blame for the Newfoundland disaster. But the disaster wasn’t Wesley’s fault: that was the old man’s fault, old Abram. That disaster made Wesley very careful. He’d always say, “Boys, if you see anything of a storm working up, come aboard.” He always seemed to dread sending his crew on the ice.

It was a hard life, but we all wanted something to do in the spring.

Fred Badcock, b.1916, Int.1987

My first trip to the ice was on the Imogene. We were on the Labrador coast collecting salmon for Monroe’s business, and Monroe’s got me the berth that year. I could’ve gone with my uncle, Richard Badcock, on the Ranger before that but my father and two brothers were on the Ranger. So as a rule you wouldn’t want too many of one family on one boat in case anything happened. And also I had to stay home because we had cattle to look after and there was always work to do at home.

In fact, I had to cancel my berth one year because my mother heard that the Ranger was in trouble in St. Mary’s Bay and nobody knew if she was going to make it. We knew about the Ranger’s trouble because the ships that go in the Gulf always sail from St. John’s a few days earlier than those going to the Front. So we knew before the fleet for the Front left that the Ranger was in trouble. In fact, the Imogene had to tow the Ranger to [St. John’s] harbour.

It was hard work, but everyone was used to work then. We didn’t notice that the work was hard. Also, the men from Conception Bay and the northern men all got along. In fact, Stan Barbour’s head gunner, Ikie Parsons, was from here, and I was one of his dogs. We had to paunch the seal and cut off the tip of the tail. The sculpers coming behind would sculp and haul the pelts to a pan.

We dogs would have 10 boxes of shells, 500 shells each, in a satchel. You’d carry the shells on your back if the ice was hard and safe, or you’d carry them in your hands if the ice looked dangerous. Ikie Parsons’s family were always using guns. They went birding along the beach, and when they were fishing on the Labrador in the summertime, they were always after geese and other birds and seals for their dinner. On the ice the gunners used a 44-40. It was a heavy rifle, but the shell was only about an inch and a half long.

We had lots of food and in the night sometimes we would fry up liver and hearts. And just about everybody would get a barrel of seal. The year that I was in the Beothic, my brother was in the Ungava, and Father and Will were in the Terra Nova up in the Gulf. We had four barrels of seal at the house at the one time. There were people here who had just as much as we had because we gave it all away, just about.

My Uncle Richard was second hand to Captain John Parsons from here. After that he got his own ship. He was in the Viking, the Ranger, and the last year he was in the Terra Nova.

Sometimes was worked side by side with the Norwegians. They used smaller and a different type boat, and although I was never aboard their boats, they seemed to be cleaner than us fellows. There were lice aboard our boats. One fellow, Coady, was so lousy we stripped him off, took his clothes, and hove it overboard, and then we took him and coated him over with kerosene. Me and the fellow I slept with used to take kerosene and sprinkle it around the bunk and around our boxes.

One fellow, Roland Batten from Bareneed, had the mumps in the Imogene one spring. He was laid up for a week or two. The doctor on board looked after him. He wasn’t a real doctor; he was a druggist or something.

No matter what the condition, we got through.

Harold Badcock, b.1914, Int.1987

In order to get my first berth, I went down to Bay Roberts and went to see my uncle, Esau Badcock. He lived next door to the captain, and I went over and asked the captain for a berth. He told me to go home and cut up wood for my mother, and my uncle got the berth for me.

We went out in the Ranger and went to Port aux Basques, where we got clearance for the Gulf. When we got nearly to the Magdalen Islands, we got stuck in the ice. We were jammed 17 days. We used to leave the ship at daylight to go looking for seals, and we would get back at dinnertime [lunchtime] with a tow of seals. Then we’d go back again for another tow, and get back about dark. We killed and towed 7,000 pelts to the ship. We managed to blast our way out of the ice. Captain Badcock was in charge.

One time when I was on the Ranger, she went adrift off Placentia Bay and we drove out to sea [1939]. The Newfoundland came up and took off some of the men and the crowd of us who were left kept the pumps going. The Newfoundland was going to come back again, but she wasn’t able to make it. A crowd of men went in the galley and gave up, and that’s where they stayed. The ship rolled back and forth.

Uncle Bob Dale from Bay Roberts was the man who kept us going. He had more experience than us young fellows. We never saw the master watches, the second hand, or the bo’sun. I don’t know whether they gave up or whether they were seasick. I know we didn’t see them.

One of the boys went down and asked the skipper for something to eat, and he gave us a part of a cheese and a big pan of square biscuits, but nothing to drink. But now, Skipper Badcock was in the bridge nearly all the time. The Ranger used to roll down 45 degrees, and you’d say for sure she was never coming back.

The Newfoundland got a line on us but the line burst. All our boats and dories were swept overboard. And we managed to get into St. Mary’s Bay. The Imogene took us in tow and hauled us into Trepassey. Then the cooks came out when we were safe and cooked a big boiler of soup.

If she had gone down, every man would have gone with her. The boats were beaten up and the life jackets were no good. They were old and soggy, and when we threw them over, they all sank. We came back to St. John’s. Captain Badcock was old, almost as old as the Ranger, so he gave it up and another crew went out, but I wasn’t aboard.

Another year, the boats that went in the Gulf found no seals, and we all came up the west coast and there was no seals; and we came up through the Straits and still no seals. We got nothing that year, but some people said that there were seals in the Gulf but they were inside the Magdalen Islands.

One year [1933], we struck old seals not far from the Narrows. They got stranded on the ice when the wind changed. But the skins were no good because there were so many holes in them. When we got to St. John’s, they saved the fat which wasn’t that valuable, because the seals were old, but they threw the skins out over the wharf.

One year, a man went right off his head. We got him down and the doctor gave him some pills. That got him quiet, and they got a straightjacket on him. George Porter from Port de Grave and Gordon Dawe from Clarke’s Beach looked after him. He was really sick. When we came in, they took him to the asylum up by Bowring Park.

It was a hard life. You’d get your rations when you went aboard. You’d get a mug and a half of white sugar, a pound and a half of butter, and a bun of bread. That was besides your meals. You’ll get this every week then. Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Sundays were duff days. They used to take the beef out of the barrel and put it in the boiler; it was as salty as the Bay of Biscay.

We were supposed to have fresh beef on Sundays, but we’d only have that for a few Sundays and it would be gone. Sunday evenings we’d probably have rice and prunes, or different kinds of jam. In the mornings, we would have beans one day and lopscouse the next. That had some meat, potato, turnip, and carrot and flour doughboys.

Dinnertime on Wednesdays we had fish and pork fat and onions and thickening. Now, that was for the crew. The master watches and the scunners had separate cooks, and they’d have fresh meat every Thursdays and Fridays—they’d have something different. They ate back aft. The quarters of beef were hung up in the rigging and sometimes we would climb up and cut off a piece.

If we got a lot of seals, we had to take the coal out of the pounds below deck, pass it up, and throw it overboard to make room. There were probably five pounds on either side, and three or four or five up the middle of the hold. They used the pounds to separate the seal pelts. If the pelts were put down in one bulk, they could move to one side and tip the ship over.

For every tier of fat there was a tier of ice, but the ice wouldn’t last. And if the ship was out too long, the fat would start to render out and run down in the bilge water. That’s why we couldn’t stay out too long.

In St. John’s we would sell our flippers and any carcass we had, and we would go in the London Café on Water Street. It was a Chinese restaurant. We could go in there and get fish and chips, a piece of pie, and a coffee for 25 cents. And when we’d go in there, everybody there would leave because of the smell. Now, you’d have a half-decent pair of overalls on, but the seal smell was still on you.

Now, sometimes it would take two or three or four days to unload the seal pelts. A lot depended on whether there was another ship before you. And every night you would sell your flippers, and blow the money. A bottle of Screech was $1.50 and a flask was 75 cents. I’d always have a barrel of seal to take home; one year I had two barrels—a barrel of carcass and a barrel of flippers.

There were food controllers on board. Some of them were no good. They didn’t stick to the rules. They were with the merchants. But Phillip Snow, from Bay Roberts, was a good Food Controller. He made sure the crew got what was written on the paper. If there was fresh meat due to them, and there was no fresh meat, they would get flippers. And if there was rice one evening and prunes another and jam another, you’d always get it. The only year we had a good Food Controller was the year Phillip Snow was with us. He was a good man, and he made the trip much more pleasant.

Robert Badcock, b.1910, Int.1987

I got my first berth in 1930 because Jack Littlejohn encouraged me, and we went over to see Captain John Parsons. He was captain of the Terra Nova that year. Captain Parsons asked me how old I was, and I told him 19. And then he asked me if I was ever fishing before, and I told him I was codfishing and salmon fishing and stuff like that.

Then he asked me who my father was, and I told him, and he said, “That’s enough, you come the 26th or 27th of February, and I’ll give you your tickets to go.” We were supposed to go to St. John’s by train, but there was an awful lot of snow and the train couldn’t get through, so the Terra Nova came into Coley’s Point, where I lived at the time. (Three or four years before that the men from here had to walk over to Bell Island on the ice and then walk along Bell Island and went on the ice again and went to Portugal Cove and then St. John’s.)

We got our crop from Captain John’s store. It was just up there [pointing in the direction]. Captain John’s store was up there, and he lived right across the street from it. It’s a tavern now [1987], and his house was the next house above the library right on the corner [pointing again].

It was a pretty miserable trip. We had a bunk down in the dungeon—that was underneath the forecastle. And that’s where they kept the beef and pork barrels. You’d have to take away the ladder and take the cat-hook down. The cat-hook was used to hoist up the barrels. There were about 32 men sleeping down there—three or four hands in a bunk.

I was in a bunk with Jim Gosse from Tilton and Ed Gosse. We got a barrel of seal cocks between us, a full barrel. They were all between 8 and 10 inches long. You’d sculp the seal, and if there were large male seals, you’d cut the cock out and stick a hole through the slack skin and put it on your belt. Sometimes the belt was full of cocks. But you only got them when you found old seals. The young were no good for that.

Most of the older seals were shot by the gunners, and then the gunners’ dogs who carried the cartridges paunched the seals. When the sculpers came up, they’d go for the old ones because they were after the cocks, although the fat of the old ones was not worth as much as the fat of the young ones. The cocks were your own, and the flippers you brought aboard for your barrel. But you had to keep an eye on the cocks, because others might try and swipe them. We had a government food controller. He got his share of fat, but he would take any cocks or flippers he could find. The most we ever got was 28 dozen in our barrel, and that was the year we sold them for 75 cents a dozen.

And sometimes we would take a bottle to collect the galls of the liver, and the Chinese would also buy these. They would pay $35 for a rum bottle full of gall, but you wouldn’t take a rum bottle on the ice—you might take a little liniment bottle or a Redways bottle. A lot of people took bottles of Redways [a popular medicinal drink] to the ice because you could drink that mixed with water to go with your hard bread. The best year for cocks was 1933 on the Ungava.

And the Chinamen were waiting for us, and we got 75 cents a dozen. We took the head out of the barrel and we showed them the cocks, all iced in. At first they offered us 50 cents a dozen, but we held out for 75 cents. But we had to bring them over to the Newfoundland Laundry behind Springdale Street. They washed them, cleaned them, and skivered them up from a needle and twine, and hung them over the stove, and let them dry. They would buy whatever you had. But the Chinamen counted them out themselves.

One year, I was a dog for Gordon Tucker, a gunner, and we went after the hoods, but we couldn’t kill them with the guns. So Uncle Ned Badcock from Shearstown said, “If I had someone I could depend on, I’d go bat them.” You see, the old hood could blow his cap up and bullets would bounce off the cap, which would protect his eyes. Uncle Ned told me to come with him and told me to hit the hood’s hind daddles [the hind flippers]. So I did, and when the old hood swung around, Uncle Ned hit him on the throat under the jaw. When you killed an old dog hood, you had to shove the gaff handle down this throat as far as you could in case he wasn’t completely dead. If he wasn’t completely dead, he could raise his head and even break the gaff off, but he couldn’t bite you with the gaff down his throat. The hood pelts were awfully heavy, and you were lucky if you could haul one, and they had cocks nearly as big as your arm, about 11 and 12 inches long.

Captain John Parsons was a fine man, but he was rough. We were out one year and were up in White Bay after the old seals. We had all our coal burned, and the ice was all small, so we couldn’t walk on it. That was a tough year.

The worst storm I saw was in the Ranger [1939]. We were going to St. Lawrence but the snow came on so thick and the wind was blowing so hard we had to heave off. We were adrift four days, I think. The Kyle was on the inside of us. She was making her regular run in the Gulf. They were talking on the Marconi when the wires came down on our ship. You could hear the Marconi, but we couldn’t send a message out.

On the third day, the Newfoundland came up to us and the lops were so high you couldn’t see her at times. She was coming towards us, and when we broke out on top, the wave must have been 50 feet high. The bowsprit of the old Ranger [Newfoundland?] went into our stern. The bowsprit broke off and damaged the foremast.

The Newfoundland tried to get a line to us. They put a barrel overboard with a big rope, and we hooked the line and hauled the cable aboard. We shackled the cable fast to the chain, and that broke. I think had we been towed towards Trepassey we might have got there because about two days afterwards the Imogene took us in tow and towed us to port in Trepassey.

Some people claim that the firemen and the engineers had got drunk, because there were three fires and the water douted them. We were at the mercy of God at the time, and you wouldn’t get 5 cents for your life. And the pumps were hard to handle. They had two big wheels on them, about the size of a cartwheel, and it took seven or eight hands on each side, but the coal used to clog them, so we had to hoist the water up. There was a lot of talk about it, and old Abram Kean wrote letters to Skipper Dick Badcock in the newspapers.

One year I got a berth when I went in St. John’s on spec [without a ticket]. So we went aboard and asked, and he [captain] asked if we’d been out before. We both said yes and he said to Curlew, “I though I saw you somewhere before, weren’t you out?” “Yes,” Curlew said, “I was out on this one last spring, but I was too late when I sent for my berth, so you said.”

“Well, boy,” he said, “there’s three men who haven’t arrived yet, and if they don’t arrive by 8 tomorrow morning, come down and you’ll get your berth.” So of course we were there about 4, waiting, two of us, and he gave us the berths. Anyway, this was the old Ungava. She was just like a train going from station to station. You didn’t have to go to starboard, nor port, you could go straight on along through solid ice. She would steam about 9 knots because she was big and heavy.

But the Imogene had all of them beat, because she was powerful. She’d go past us at about 18 knots. Once she picked us up off the Funk Islands through heavy ice. We hauled the pelts up to her and put them in a strap. When we got aboard, he said, “The Ranger’s jammed in the ice about 25 miles to the west of us.”

And she went around and picked up our crews, and when she got them all aboard and all the pelts aboard, she was right full on deck. Then he straightened her to where the Ranger was to and there was the Ranger and the Eagle and the Thetis. They were all jammed and so close together they could sing out to one another. Then he went in and made a whirl right around and put them in a bay of water. That Imogene was just like a hotel.

The old steamers like the Ranger, Eagle, and Thetis were rough, and the cooks were just like blacksmiths. They’d knock the head off a barrel of beef or ham-butt pork and they’d have a dip net, dip it out and put it in the boilers in the galley. After it was in the boiler for so long they’d take it out and cut it up. And that would be served with duff on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Sundays.

We had a bit of fresh meat the first month out because they’d have three or four cows strung up in the riggings. This fresh meat was like smoked ham from the smoke in the galley and it was frozen as hard as cement.

They would take it down and saw it up and then cut it into pieces and boil it. On the last of it, when I was out, you’d get some cooked seal carcass or flipper. We also used to get soft bread, a bun or a small loaf, every second day, I think it was. And out on the ice hard bread and rolled oats and sometimes a drink of Redways mixed with water would be our midday meal.

Sometimes life was really hard, but other times we did very good, and we always had lots of food, even if it wasn’t the tastiest.

William Badcock, b.1912, Int.1987

My uncle, Captain Badcock, got me a ticket on the Ranger and he was her captain. I signed up at Bowring’s in St. John’s. On our first trip, we left St. John’s and went to Port aux Basques, and were there one day, one Sunday, and the next evening we got up to Bird Rocks. We were there four or five days waiting for the seals to come down out of the Gulf and we got 7,000 or 8,000 that year—that was the first year I was out.

The next year we left St. John’s and we went right up into the Gulf, way inside the Bird Rocks. We were jammed up there a short while, but there were lots of seals. In fact, we were up there before they pupped. Then we got in a storm of wind, and we blowed outside the Bird Rocks and missed the rest of the seals.

Then the next year [his third trip], we went on up there and we got in heavy ice. We came down off Cape St. George and got in heavy ice. In fact, most of my trips to the ice were in the Gulf. We did a lot of towing in the Gulf. You’d go overboard in the morning and you couldn’t see the steamer and you’d get your tow of seals and come back. One tow of seals a day.

One spring, I was down on the Front, down to Belle Isle. We got jammed there and we got almost up to the Funks. We got a few seals there, and we got jammed again, and we never got free until we got up to Bay Bulls. That’s the year when they had the big seal catches [1933].

You had to watch the weather going up to the Gulf. One year, we spent two days in St. Lawrence because we could not take a chance with the stormy weather because there were two big piles of coal on deck, one on each side.

Not all days could you go on the ice. We’d get up in the morning, and if the weather was satisfactory, we’d go out on the ice. If weather came on, we had to go back to the steamer. Now, sometimes you’d have a couple of good days, and 50 to 150 men could kill a lot of seals. I have seen them out there where you had to haul the seals clear of each other in order to sculp them. I saw three or four years like that.

One year we got nothing, 7,000 or 8,000 and we were 12 or 14 days and never got overboard. Times like that some fellows would be down in the hold playing an accordion, playing cards, and making buckets. To make buckets they’d take an end of the gaff and cut two buckets, one on each side. And some fellows brought them home and put them in their houses. There were a lot of days wasted at the ice. And that’s what happened in those disasters. Men would be forced to go overboard because they had no seals, and once overboard sometimes they couldn’t get back.

My living conditions were a bit better most times because I was master watch for six years. We lived right up forward, but there was a cook for the engineers, skipper, wireless operator, and the navigator. He’d cook for us master watches as well. And the steward would bring our grub to us. We ate separate from the ordinary sealers.

When I was on the Ranger, we had three master watches, and each master watch appointed a scunner. The scunner would go up in the barrel and direct the ship through the ice. In the old Ranger, there were bunks on each side and a table in the centre. I found the food good enough. We’d have fresh beef twice a week, and brewis, and we had potatoes and turnips.

Down in the hold, the crowd would have fresh beef every Sunday. And we fellows would probably have a bit of brewis in the morning, maybe an egg, maybe a bit of bacon, beans, and things like that—regular grub. Now, when we went on the ice, everybody carried something in a grub satchel. And most people carried a bit of rolled oats with a few raisins in it, and we’d mix that in water and that would be our lunch for the middle of the day.

But the men in the hold got their food from the galley, and each bunk’s crew would send one man to get the food. A bunk’s crew were the men who slept together in the one bunk. There might be two, or three, or four men in a bunk. And if the seals were plentiful and we needed more space for the pelts, there might be four or five men in a bunk. The old Ranger was one of those old wooden boats, little power, and she couldn’t go through the ice too well.

Now, the sealers’ job in the Gulf was different from the job at the Front. At the Front the watches would be dropped off in different places by the steamers and one watch might find very few seals, while the other watch would find a bigger patch and get more.

But in the Gulf pretty well everybody was more equal because the ice was flat and it was sheet ice and the men towed most of their pelts to the ship, if the ship couldn’t get through the ice. But if you got stuck in the Gulf, you could be there for a while because the ice didn’t move. On the Front, the ice was breaking up more.

Now, Captain Badcock always had a barrelman. My father, Elijah, was a barrelman for a few years, and Bobby Bradbury was another for one year, and Arthur Menchions was one as well. Now, my father became a second hand for a while and he was in charge of everything on deck.

The big boats like the Ungava and the Nascopie had quartermasters as well. They would look after deck work also and make sure those big boats didn’t back into a big pinnacle of ice or anything that would take the blades off. Also on the Ranger we didn’t kill seals on Sundays, but on some ships they did kill on Sundays.

When we came ashore, each watch would be split in two. I’d take half my watch and the other fellow [assistant master watch?] would take the other half. So the three watches would be divided into two groups of men. One group would land the fat the first day, and the second group the second day; you’d be on today and off tomorrow.

It might take three or four days to unload the fat, and as the fat was being unloaded, the flippers were cut off, and there was a fellow tallying them. And everybody got a share of the flippers to sell for themselves or to take home, for that matter. Also, there were two shares of the seal pelts set aside for the three master watches. Now, that would be in addition to the master watches’ regular share. So we master watches got one and two-thirds shares of the seal pelts.

The year that we were the first to arrive in St. John’s [1937], we got $12 a dozen for the flippers. The last ships to arrive would get much less. And besides that, we would try to get a barrel of carcass. In fact, we had two barrels between us. Myself and Uncle Dick had a barrel, and George and Father had a barrel.

One year, we left St. John’s in the Ranger heading for the Gulf. We ran into a storm and got driven into Placentia Bay [1939]. The wind was easterly. Then the wind came from the northwest in heavy gales and drove us off the land, and water came in and put the fires out.

Then we had no power, and everybody was trying to survive. We had to use buckets to get the water up, and we were at it day and night. The Newfoundland came and took one boatload of men, I think about 14. Then she stood by until the Imogene came. It was hard to keep from going overboard. We got wet of course, but we all had sparables and chisels in our boots, so we didn’t slip. And then the Imogene came and towed us to port.

I went sealing between 1932 and 1941. Mostly on the Ranger with Uncle Dick, and once on the Terra Nova also with Uncle Dick. My father and uncle were also sealers.

Miss Elsie Barbour, b.1900, Int.1986

[Captain Carl (b.1900) and Mrs. Dorothy Barbour were also present]

[Martha Drake speaking] This interview was set up with Miss Elsie Barbour, who lives with her brother, Captain Carl Barbour, and his wife, Dorothy. However, as Captain Barbour was home at the time, Miss Barbour kept calling to her brother to confirm or clarify certain events. He eventually sat down and joined the conversation. I call Miss Barbour Aunt Elsie because Captain Barbour is my brother’s father-in-law. Therefore, a number of years ago this is how she was introduced to me. During the interview, one of her cousins, Ted, was visiting and joined in the conversation occasionally.

Aunt Elsie: The Barbour family owned a firm in Newtown, Bonavista Bay, and the firm’s name was J.E. & S. Barbour, named for the three brothers: James, Edward, and Samuel. Edward was my father and Carl’s. When James left the business, it became E. & S. Barbour. The family dealt in the fish business and supplies. And over the history of the firm, it owned 37 vessels in all. The firm also opened a branch in St. John’s. Captain Carl was master of various vessels with the firm, and I worked at the firm as bookkeeper beginning in 1918. [Captain Stanley Barbour was a cousin.] I was born in 1900, and Carl was born in 1908. And when Carl was four, our father died.

Carl went to the ice once in 1934 on the Terra Nova under Captain Stanley Barbour. And he was bridgemaster that year, but broke his leg and didn’t go back to the ice.

Capt. Barbour: So many people from Newtown went to the ice, and my mother used to say if there was a fire in Newtown, there wouldn’t be a man available to put it out. We generally had a duck supper the night before the men left for the ice. The next day the men would leave to walk to Gambo, hauling their few belongings with them. The food was usually plentiful on the ships but the flour duffs were very hard. Captain Wilf Barbour brought home two duffs on one occasion and nailed them on his gateposts, where they stayed for years. The year I was out we had a lot of ice blindness and sometimes men had to fumble their way to the toilet in the stern of the ship. The ice blindness was caused by the glare from the sun coming off the ice.

Before we went into business my father and all my uncles went to the ice, but then the business kept them home. Only Uncle Lester didn’t go to the ice.

Aunt Elsie: When the men were at the ice, the women would take the opportunity to hook mats. Everybody had their patterns to go by. There were wonderful patterns: Newfoundland dog, ships, and sceneries. The women made all the hats, mitts, and sweaters for the men. They needed warm clothes. The men would go to the Labrador coast in the summertime, down around the Straits of Belle Isle, and bring back maybe 1,000 quintals of codfish. They would unload it, and go back to the Labrador while the women made the fish. The women made all the fish in those days. They had to put it in salt, wash it out, and spread it on the flakes. Also, we used to buy fish from different places, and some of it would be damp, and we had to put that on the flakes to dry. Sometimes it would start to rain, and we would have to run, take up the fish, and cover it. And we had to help saw the wood and cleave it.

Dorothy: I like Newtown because you can go and open the door of any house and walk in. And you’d certainly be entertained with a lovely social cup of tea and a nice chat. Getting the news. Not backbiting, but some do, you know, backbite. But I never did backbite. I don’t like that word backbiting anyway. And we would have lots of company come to the house. Mother would entertain them. Some were our workers—what we’d call our servants. And when they would visit us, you see. In the same place. And Mother would say, now get a cup of tea all ready because he couldn’t go away without a cup of tea. Oh, no. Very hospitable in that way. And we enjoyed their conversation and they enjoyed an evening off from their family and children. So that was the life, my dear, in the outports. But now, if you want to go to a person’s home, you’ll have to ring—phone. Will you be at home tonight? Oh sorry, I have an engagement. I have to be out. That’s how it goes in the city. In the outports—nothing like that you know. There was no telephones, you see. You’d just go to their door and walk in. Yes. And you would be received royally, my dear. Royally. The best they had, they’d give you. And you couldn’t come away without a social cup of tea and a nice chat. And the chat would be about their work, how they were getting on.

Some had pitiful stories to hear. [This was during the Depression.] Because their families were growing up, and they were on the dole—in need of this and that. Many’s a time a rap would come to our porch door. We’d go out. Of course we’d always invite them in. “Mrs. Barbour, would you have a such and such to give me?” A such and such—food, you know. “We haven’t got this” and “We haven’t got that.” And Mother was such a tender-hearted woman; of course she couldn’t say no. And she’d always pity those people who were in want and in need. And we had a lady that lived in Newtown; she was our servant once. But she married and lived in Newtown. She came from Bonavista. And they became very poor. Well now. Pack up a parcel now and send it over to Mrs. Collins. You know, she’s in need of food.

And every Sunday there was a sick man. He was sick on his bed for 20 years. Every Sunday she would cut out his dinner and dessert, and our servant would have to go to that home to deliver it. The wife of the man who was sick was certainly glad to see a woman coming in with a parcel, I tell you. My dear, pitiful, very pitiful. But what can we do without friends, eh? Yes. That woman was so clean. They had no canvas on their floor but you could eat off their floor because she had it scrubbed white, my dear. White. The floor was white. Wooden floor, you know. It was scrubbed white. So clean.

And the stoves—you’d see your face in them. And they used to use this old stove polish. They put it on and then they’d have to shine the stove. My dear. And all the dust that would come from the stove polish that they would have to take down their curtains and wash them up. That happened in Newtown with lots of women. They wanted their stove to shine, to see your face in them. In the meantime, it would soil all the curtains. And only give her extra work. Oh my dear. Such is life, my dear.

Such is life. But they all come through it. Some way or another, it was very good. They grew their vegetables, turnip and potatoes, and their cabbage. And some had carrots. We always had carrots growing, and parsnip. My sister would see to that. And she loved to be outdoors working, especially in the garden. And there wouldn’t be a weed in her carrot beds or turnip beds. She’d go out every day, pick out every weed she’d see. There wouldn’t be a weed to be seen. And we had a little dog, and she lived with my sister who looked after the garden. And she would go out and sit down in the garden and wait until Sybby would be finished with her work before she’d move. The dog was devoted to Sybby. And Sybby was devoted to her. I can see her garden now. Not a weed to be seen. She loved out of doors. I used to see to the flowers. We had nice flowers growing, too. Some of them still come up. And we had lots of lilac trees. I always used to go down to Newtown, but we don’t go much anymore.

Martha Drake: This was the end of the tape and we all went over to the table to have tea and cookies.

Nath Barrett, b.?, Int.1987 [Mrs. Barrett was also present]

I was fishing on the Labrador and shipping my fish with G & M Gosse. Captain Peter Carter and Stan Mullett were down there fishing as well, and I got a berth to the ice from Captain Peter. So I went to the ice in 1933 on the Ungava. That was the year of the big trips.

The Beothic and the Ungava were old cargo boats. They couldn’t go up on the ice. They had to butt it, but the Imogene was a real icebreaker. She’d go up on the ice and break it down under her. One year in the Ranger we got jammed just off Cape Norman [western tip of the Northern Peninsula]. The seals were scattered everywhere, and we spent most of our time walking. Once we found a number of komatiks or slides and we figured that landsmen with their dog teams were stealing some of our pelts. I guess the ice broke away from the shore, and they had to abandon their komatiks.

When I was with Captain Wesley [Westbury] Kean, he always lectured us before we went out on the ice. He was concerned that we be very careful. I guess he never forgot when he lost the men in the Newfoundland disaster.

Mrs. Barrett: I remember when Nath sent me a message. They had been out in a storm, and he sent a message to let me know that they were safe. Walter Crane was the wireless operator, so he brought the message to me.

Nath: One year I had to get a medical. I went to Dr. Drover in Bay Roberts and I told him I would pay him the dollar when I came back from the seal hunt, but I never got around to it, and this was during the Depression. Then my wife and I had to go to see Dr. Drover later.

When I saw him, I told him that I owed him a dollar. Well, he said not to worry about it—that he wasn’t going to take it. I put the dollar on his desk, and when we were leaving, he came out with us, and when I got home, the dollar was in my pocket. He must have slipped it there while he was talking to me.

Now, on the big steel ships you had your sleeping quarters and your mess hall. But on the older wooden boats like the Ranger, you had to take your food in a small bucket that we called a boat’s kettle. However many men were together, one of them would go and get the pork and the duff and bring it back to the bunk, and everybody would share it. Now, on the ice most of us had a little bag of rolled oats and raisins and we put that in our grub bag and ate it during the day.

One thing I don’t agree with, and that’s the way they condemn the gaff these days, because a man’s life often depended on a gaff. Once I was towing seals on loose ice, and I fell backwards into the water. The man behind me stuck his gaff in my coat and helped haul me out. I had to take off every stitch of clothes right there on the ice and wring it out. I had extra socks and somebody gave me a sweater.

The worst thing down in the hold of the old Ranger was the lice. I remember myself and Eric Smith and Ern Gosse and Uncle Jim Tucker were sleeping together. Arthur Gosse and Clem Flynn were sleeping below us. The lice were so bad that they took off their clothes and changed into other clothes; they put elastic bands around the bottom of their rubber pants and around their wrists and necks and that’s how they had to sleep.

“Uncle Jim,” I said. “Take off your shirt.” “Nothing on me,” he said, “boy.” “Well,” I said, “take off your shirt and give us a look.” He took off his shirt and you talk about the lice. I said, “Uncle Jim, nothing I can do with this. Throw it overboard.” “Aye, my boy,” he said, “throw it overboard.” We were burned down in the ice and the only drop of water that was around the steamer that’s where I threw Uncle Jim’s shirt.

When I came down in the hold, Uncle Jim said, “Where’s my $5?” I said, “What $5?” He said, “The $5 in the pocket.” But the shirt was gone.

In the Ungava there was a fellow from the lumber woods who had a lot of lice. Now, there was so much space between the steel bunks in the Ungava and fellows would have a piece of spun yarn strung from one bunk to the next for hanging socks and cuffs on. We picked off 14 lice that were crossing on this piece of spun yarn.

We always brought home a barrel of seal and gave it away to our friends. The younger fellows would stand on the sidesticks (the big boats had sidesticks) and you could kill a seal as you passed by, haul it aboard for your barrel.

Oh yes. It was a good life—good life—but it was a hard life.

Clarence Bartlett, b.1909, Int.1987

When I got my first berth to the ice in 1926, I was in school at that time, and I had signed on for exams—the intermediate exams. Anyway, I didn’t have much time for school. So I said to my mother, “I’m going to the ice this spring.” My mother says, “You’re not going to no ice. Anyway, I’m not going to fit you out to go to any seal fishery.” “Whatever,” I said, “I don’t want much fitting out anyway.” After being to the Labrador the summer before now on my own, you understand, I had everything else. I only wanted something or other. “Give me a pair of mitts, that’s all I want.”

So anyway, I went up Saturday. Left school, and Saturday I started to walk from Bareneed to Brigus, which I suppose was about 9 miles. Anyway, I went in and saw the old man, old man Bartlett—that’s old Captain Will Bartlett. He was sitting behind his desk in his office. He looked at me like I was bad, you know. So whatever, he said, “What are you looking for?” I said, “Looking for a berth to the ice, sir.”

To the ice. There was no such thing as seal fishery then. It was the hunt to the ice. He looked at me, sized me up, you know. I was about 6 foot 1 [inch], I suppose, then at that time. But anyway, “How many,” he said, “do you think you could sculp in the run of a day?” “Well, I suppose, sir,” I said, “I could do as good as anybody starting off. Everybody has to learn.” I was bent on getting the berth, you know. I wasn’t going to come out of that office without a berth. Of course, I think my mother kind of forewarned him. She didn’t want me to go to the seal fishery anyway. Anyway, I ended up with the berth.

I came home. My mother said, “How did you get on?” “I got the ticket,” I said. They gave you a ticket, you know. I said, “I got the ticket to go to the seal fishery.” She says, “You haven’t?” I said, “Yes.” I can see her now. So anyway, all right, she was determined she wasn’t going to do anything for me to get ready. But I didn’t mind that.

So I came into St. John’s. I signed on. In the meantime you’d take up $9 worth of crop, they used to call it. And when you came back from the ice, you were charged $12. So I only got $6 worth of crop, and we got aboard.

We were jammed the whole spring up in the Gulf, and Captain Bartlett was really upset. He was as wicked as they came, and yet his father was so good. We got into the Gulf, and we got in St. John’s around the 4th or 5th of May. The Canadian icebreaker managed to get us out of the ice a couple of times. So we got in here, and we were paid off $12.28.

The guys who had the full crop, they had 28 cents. But anyone didn’t have the whole crop was paid off $3.28. The ones who had 28 cents had to be paid their fare home by the government. The fare at that time was 90 cents. A sealer’s ticket was 90 cents to go around the bay, from St. John’s to Carbonear.

So of course I had $3.28. I wasn’t able to get a government ticket. However, I went up to the station and I pushed in $2 for a ticket. I was only going to get $1.10 back out of a $2 bill for a 90-cent ticket. But the guy there pushed me out $4.10.

So I looked at him—his name was Batten. Buddy now, this fellow Batten I was telling about. I think he’s dead now. Batten give me the nudge, you know, to take the money and go on, see. You know there was a lineup, naturally, a bunch of sealers in the old station down there. I pushed back the money—$3—and kept the $1.10. “What’s that?” he said. I said, “I only gave you a $2 bill. I only gave you a $2 bill. I’m only entitled to $1.10.” He hauled it in. He never said thank you, nothing at all.

So, anyway, my friend Batten says, “You bloody fool—that was the price of a fine bottle of rum for going around the bay on the train.” I said, “Boy, look, when I was going to school, we used to have a copybook at that time, and you’d have to write down the full line in the copybook. One of those copies was honesty is the best policy. I never forgot it.” That year I celebrated my 17th birthday at the ice, March 16th.

We were so poisoned that spring with everything we could hardly speak to one another. In the ship we were jammed up there for a month sometimes. You’d get up in the morning and you’d start to walk. And you’d walk down till you couldn’t see the tops of the spars, and then we would turn around and walk back. Then the next day you’d walk in a different direction, and that’s what we did all the time. And that’s how we got the 3,000 seals.

We didn’t run out of food and we didn’t run out of coal. There was plenty of hard bread, and we’d get soft bread twice a week and milky tea. The first four Sundays we had fresh meat, but after that it was all salt pork, salt beef, beans, fish and brewis, and molasses duff. We had four cooks and sometimes they would cook seal meat for us.

We made water from the ice on the high pinnacles. We’d cut the ice and passed it along from man to man and then it was thrown in an iron tank. Then they put the steam on that and melted it. Now, the water was greasy and dirty because the men kept their mitts on, and they handled the ice, coal, and the few seal pelts we got.

We all slept down in the hold on what was the second deck. The deep hole was for the coal and the fat. You’d get your dinner in a pan or your soup in a boat’s kettle, which held about a gallon. And you brought that down to your bunk and you sat on your box and your bunk and you ate it.

The only services that were on board that spring was held by the RCs when they said the rosary on board and everybody usually went to that. There was really nothing to do because we weren’t allowed to go hunting seals on Sundays anyway.

A number of men got snow-blind. My friend Batten had to be led aboard one day, and we had to put used tea on his eyes. One thing I never had any trouble with was ice-blindness. In fact, I never even had to wear goggles. See, you notice my brows? If you got full eyes, you know, your eyes are out, poppy, you’d be blind in no time. But anybody with a high brow, with your eyes kind of back, recessed like, you’d never get [ice- or snow-]blind.

Another problem was seal finger and that happens when the grease gets in the joint. If you had a nick or little cut and you use your fingers to haul the pelts along or to turn them over, it was easy to put your finger in the eye of the seal, and that’s what they used to say caused seal finger or swile finger [and sometimes that finger would be permanently damaged].

Water Street was covered with snow when we would get to St. John’s. And there would be horses and slides the whole length hauling our bags and boxes down to the wharf. The only bit of Water Street that was clear was the streetcar track. The truck men would charge us 10 or 15 cents to haul our box and bag.

Now, my father went to the ice all his life, but when I went he was getting tired of it. And that fall coming home from the Labrador fishery, my father was drowned. Father was gone and I had a sister five years old and a young brother and my grandmother to look after. So I had to go back to the seal hunt the next year. I was looking after the family, and I was only 17 or 18 years old.

And I went on the Neptune. We went up in the Gulf again, and we got a big load. But we were killing too many seals, and we knew we couldn’t take them all, and some of the men began to question what we were doing because we didn’t want to become another Southern Cross. Captain Will Bartlett wanted to kill, kill, kill.

We got jammed in the ice again because two big sheets swung around together and one went over the other and raftered. The sheet that went under, went under us, and we had to pump. We had to get out on the ice in case she sank, but then the pressure eased up a bit. We got into Port aux Basques and got some more coal.

Meanwhile, the heat from the engine and the propeller shaft was heating up the pounds, and the fat was running, melting down in the bilge water. We got into St. John’s in early May, and the first man who went down in the hold to start loading the pounds, he went down to his waist in nothing but blubber oil.

Some of the pelts had no fat left on them, and Job’s, who had hired the ship, they said they would charge us for damaged skins. We said if we were charged for damaged skins we were going to throw them over in St. John’s harbour. If they were no good to us, they were no good to them. I can see the crowd now, Morris Job Taylor. He was in charge of Job’s at the time. He came up there and, I tell you, fellows made for him. They were going to have his scalp if he hadn’t changed his mind.

After being jammed for so long, what we all went through, we should have been out of the Gulf with 28,000 or 29,000 good seals without having been told to kill more and more and more. We could have had a good load of good fat, because the seals were averaging 50 and 60 pounds. They were big whitecoats, and the whitecoats are always bigger in the Gulf. And we couldn’t even bring home any seal meat because everything spoiled because we were out so long.

Well, my first spring in the Ungava was good. This man, Mr. Bowring, who used to work down to the Lighthouse Department, he got the berth for me that spring with Captain Billy Winsor. That was a good spring and we made a good bill. That was the spring we had some of the movie crowd with us [Varick Frissell, 1930]. We’d drop them off in the morning with all the equipment and we’d go on. Anyway, we’d go on and kill and pan. When we would finish up killing and panning all day, Frissell used to put a man or a couple of men out to haul pans.

They would take the equipment out with them and sometimes they used to do some work on the ship. I remember one time they had a great big aeroplane propeller. It was like a motor, like a large fan. They had that set up on deck on a stand, and we’d be on deck with our oilclothes on, and they used to spray us with water. Then, there was somebody with—it looked like cornflakes only it was white. They used to scatter this, and it used to blow around. You didn’t know but you were in a blizzard of snow. That would all stick on to your oilclothes and make it look like there was a real storm. This was where they were taking the pictures. They gave us $5 for that, in the spring when we got in.

The next year, 1931, I got a ticket to go on the Viking, but I didn’t like the Viking, and I was hoping to get a ticket on the Ungava. So when I didn’t get a ticket on the Ungava, I gave my ticket for the Viking to my friend, Bill. And that was the spring that the Viking blew up.

But you know the talk was around. The talk was around all the time they were taking those pictures. Some people thought there was going to be a wreck. And I think that is what they planned for the old Viking. The only thing about that was that there wasn’t going to be too many aboard of her. There wasn’t going to be anyone aboard of her when she went up, to my mind. They had enough powder and dynamite to blow her to kingdom come.

That was all stored in the stern in big cans. That was for blasting—blasting the ice. I know it must have been a terrible time. I was talking to some of them after. Bill Boone came out of it all right but he had an awful time trying to get to the Grey [Horse] Islands.

My last trip was on the Ungava. That was the year that we killed all the old seals, 1933. I also remember coming home on the train after we got back from the ice. They had really rough coaches for us, and many would be drunk, and then the rackets would start. Some fellow would be accused of spending half his time in the bunk out to the ice and he would start to fight, and sometimes in Brigus Junction the conductor would throw off the real troublemakers and make them catch a train the next day. From Brigus Junction we would go to Port de Grave to Carbonear. After that I served on the police force for 25 years.

Roland Batten, b.1916, Int.1987

I got my first berth to the ice from A.A. French, who had a wholesale and retail business in Clarke’s Beach, and the four times I was out to the ice, I always got my ticket from A.A. French. The first year I think, 1935, I was on the Imogene with Captain Al Blackwood. Billy Beecham, Bill Christopher, and me, we slept in the one bunk, and another friend, Harold Martin, was in another bunk.

The first time we met the seals we all went overboard and I didn’t have the heart to kill the first seal I saw, but Billy Beecham said to me, “Kill them, Batten. The captain is looking at you.” I killed one and brought it over to him and he showed me how to sculp it. We spent a couple or three hours and Billy Beecham sculped 35 and I sculped 25. We had over 33,000 all together in that trip.

I remember being out in the Eagle with Captain Charlie Kean and in the Ungava with Captain Billy Winsor. The Eagle was a pretty old boat and not as good as the others. I was in the Eagle when she struck a big piece of ice which punched a hole in her. So we had to get the emergency pumps and the hand pumps to keep the water down while the bo’sun and some men went down and fixed the leak temporarily with canvas and cement.

She was rolling a lot and Pete Barbour and myself took the first watch for the night up on barrackhead. Steward Gaulton from Bonavista Bay was the master watch, and he came up and said, “Boys, you got to stay here. I can’t get any man to come up, because they are all seasick.” He stood on watch while we got a coffee and came back.

The spring I was with Charlie Kean, we saw our first seal, which was a small whitecoat. The captain sang out, ordering someone to get it. Two of us jumped overboard, and I got it, killed it, and somebody threw me the seal dog hook and pulled it about. I brought the seal and the carcass up to the captain. That was what he always wanted. The first seal brought aboard was his and was to be cooked for him.

I liked all the captains I sailed with, all four of them. Captain Al Blackwood was a soft-spoken man never known to swear, and Charlie Kean was practically the same. They’d always say “me darlin’ boys.” But Billy Winsor was a rough man who swore a lot. Now, Billy Winsor was also a great captain, a darn good captain.

There was a doctor aboard all the ships, but I never saw him do much. Mostly you carried your own remedies. A lot of men carried a mickey of whiskey or rum, and you never opened it until you got a cold. But you always carried it in your grub bag, and you also carried a bottle of Redways.

In order to get drinking water, we had to get pinnacle ice and put it in the fiddly [pinnacle tank]. But we never brought water on the ice with us. We would put a little molasses in our grub bag, and when we were thirsty, we put some in the snow and eat it. A lot of fellows would panch [paunch] a seal and kick a little bit of snow in the carcass and drink the blood.

The snow would cool the blood off, because the blood of a seal is very hot. Now, they would only drink a couple of mouthfuls. They wouldn’t [drink] any big amount. The blood is so hot that I have seen men with cold feet opening up a seal and standing in it. You’d get your feet warm in a hurry.

We always had lots of food, and most everybody would have a cake or two baked by their mothers or sisters. Now, in the Imogene and Ungava there were mess rooms where we could sit at the table, but in the old Eagle we had to bring the food to our bunk and eat it there.

On Sundays we didn’t draw any blood, but we could go on the ice and haul pelts to different pans. That meant doubling them up so each pan would have more seal pelts and they’d be in more of a straight line for the steamer to pick them up, which saved time. And somebody would generally lead prayers in the mess room and down in the hold, if there was no mess room.

We had lots of food: beans, [lop]scouse, turnips, potatoes, and we would have three duff days—raisin duffs with molasses in them. We had hunks of salt beef and salt pork, and sometimes on Sunday nights we had rice and prunes. On the big boats there was lots of bread, but on the wooden ones you’d only a small amount, maybe a bun.

But in the night you could cook a feed of seal, flippers, a piece of carcass, liver, or whatever you wanted. You’d get pork and onion from the food controller. The food controller was the supervisor over the food, and it was his job to make sure that everybody got a fair share of what was required.

Lots of times we would get crawlers in our bunks—that’s lice. What we used to do was get burlap and put it around the bunk and grease it with kerosene oil. That would keep them away. And you wouldn’t let anybody strange sit on your bunk, because you didn’t know who had lice. Once a fellow who wanted a top bunk over me had lice, and we made him clean himself up.

After we got back to St. John’s, we unloaded the pelts and threw away our old sealing clothes. We always sold our share of flippers and a lot of men would get a bottle of liquor. Sometimes we came home by train and sometimes there would be a truck in from around the bay.

I remember when we put our barrels of seal and our boxes and bags in the back of the truck and came home ourselves in the back of the truck. We always had a bag for our rubber boats and oilclothes, and we had what we used to call a Labrador Box. When we’d get home, we would give every neighbour a piece of seal carcass, depending on how big the family was.

Jack-Allan Beecham, b.1903, Int.1987

I was on the dole in 1930 when I got a berth to the ice on the Viking with Captain Badcock. The Viking came into Bay Roberts and that’s where we signed on and boarded. Captain John Bishop had a general store where we got our supplies. The store was over there where the Belmont Hotel is now. [According to Mr. Eric Jerrett, Mr. Beecham was probably referring to the store owned by Captain John Parsons, because John Bishop had a lumber business and a mill. The Belmont was originally owned by Captain Fradsham, and it was later acquired by the Bradburys.] The Belmont Hotel is run by the Bradburys. That was a good year [$43.24 per man]. Captain Badcock gave me a berth the following year on the Ranger, and we went in the Gulf. That was much different from on the Front. The Front was covered with pans of ice, but the Gulf was one big sheet of ice.

You always had a doctor, a sheep doctor or a dog doctor or some kind of doctor. If you fell sick, he hauled down your shirt collar, threw talcum powder around your neck and rubbed it in. Now, you’re all right. I don’t know if he carried any medicines, I suppose he did. There was a lot of ice blindness. Men would be ice blind every day or two.

After we unloaded our pelts and sold our flippers, we would get the train home to Clarke’s Beach and we would walk from there. I always tried to bring home a meal of flippers.

Jacob Best, b.1900, Int.1986 [Mrs. Agnes Best was also present]

I got my first berth with Captain Abram Kean on the Terra Nova in 1918. My uncle got the berth for me. He used to have three or four berths. There were certain men that the captains knew that had the privilege of getting three or four tickets. I made 17 or 18 trips in her, and in all I was out about 30 times. And I was out six springs in the Imogene. She was the fastest and the best ship of all. And I was out in the Eagle as well.

We’d leave here from Brookfield about the 2nd or 3rd of March and walk to Gambo. Sometimes we would do it in a day, more times it would take two to do it. Then we had to wait in Gambo a day or two or three for the train. The old trains had special cars for the sealers. There was a stove in the car where you could boil your kettle. I survived the seal hunt but my father died out there. He was second hand for Captain Jacob Kean on the Sagona. He had a bad ear and he went to the ship’s doctor and got the medicine and went up in the barrel. Somebody said, “Where’s Davy to?” and the cook said “He’s up in the barrel. Go up if you want to see him.” So, he went up and found my father dead. The ship brought him back to Brookfield. He was about 60 years old.

I was out with a lot of the old captains. Billy Winsor would cuss on you, “Oh you bloods of bitches!” And he would swear all the time. Captain Wes, he was very good. I liked him. Captain Abram was a good man and he would never swear, most he would say is, “What in the devil is you fellows at there?” Captain Abram was good with the stowaways, too. Sometimes we had as many as eight or nine. He would put some with the firemen, and sometimes they would help stow the seals, and Captain Kean would sign on a scattered fellow as a sealer. I was also out with Les Kean.

Nineteen thirty-three was a great year. Nearly everybody got a great load. I was in the Imogene that year and we got over 55,000 seals.

Mrs. Best: When they would get into St. John’s, almost the first thing they’d have to do is go down to Riverhead [West End]. There used to be a mill there and that’s where they would get shavings to stuff in their bunk cases or brin bags to put on their bunks for sleeping on. Then they would get their crop, $9. If they made money, they paid back their crop at $12. Sometimes they only made enough to pay their crop and probably get a bottle of rum. Whether they made a good voyage or not, they had to have their bottle of whiskey or rum.

Now, when he went with Les Winsor in the Linda May [Ed.: after our period] he used to make $100-$200, and he used to make extra tallying the pelts. But usually in the older ships he would be a master watch. Once we bought an old-fashioned wood range, the ones with the warmer on top, but the money was very important because it would buy food for supper and if we didn’t have it we had to get everything on credit and depend on fishing.

The seal fishery was really important in our day because if he made a poor voyage the children would have to go without. It was hard on the women, too, because you never knew what minute there was going to be a storm and we worried all the time when they were out. We never knew what time we were going to get bad news. There was always a bit of a fuss when they got back; we were all glad to see them. They would get a good welcome home.

Now, when they came home the women would have to scrub the grease and blood and everything out of the clothes. Jacob always took a clean set of clothes, underwear and that, and nine times out of ten he would bring that back in the bag untouched. But the clothes he was wearing were dirty. They were dirty, just like dogs they were. And they had to work like dogs and the merchants got all the benefit. Very little money for the men, especially in the olden days, very little benefit.

Now, before he went out, I had to knit socks and vamps and mitts. They would always carry a fair share of these, eight or nine pairs of socks and three or four pairs of vamps and probably a half-dozen pairs of mitts. And in later years, we used to make rubber caps out of old rubber clothes. We would line them with flannelette and these would keep their ears from getting cold and keep the rain off them. And we would have to line their underwear with fleece lining. We would line that at the knees and the backside and put an extra piece in the front part.

We had a lot to do and before they went we had to help them prepare enough wood for the spring and stow it up in our porches or stores, and that had to last while the men were gone. Many times I have been out sawing wood and my fingertips would be numb. He would haul the firewood out from the woods and the two of us would have to saw it up because the children were all small.

Jacob: We always sold flippers in St. John’s but we didn’t bring many home with us. My buddy and I would bring back a barrel of salted seal between the two of us and everybody would come by for a meal of seal.

Now, Agnes had an uncle who was lost in the Greenland disaster. He was nearsighted and they never found his body so they figured he must have walked over the edge of the ice and drowned. And there was a man from Templeman, Wesley Collins, he was out in the two disasters [Newfoundland and Greenland]. He survived both of them, but he lost one of his legs in the second. I don’t remember the first, of course, because I wasn’t born, but I remember the second. It was a very sad time. There must have been ten or 15 from around home.

Sundays were special days mostly. Some of us would work and the others wouldn’t. I used to work. But now the fellows who didn’t work they could be sleeping or reading or whatever, but come 12 o’clock midnight the master watches would be up and get them to work. They would have to work all night, stowing seals, and whatnot, until the next morning.

Agnes: My father often talked about sealing. He told me how lousy they were out there with all kinds of dirt. He used to say that they were actually like dogs, and if they got overloaded with seals, they had to sleep on top of them. Naturally, the captain was going to fill the ship as much as he could, and the men had to throw their bunks down on top of the seal fat and sleep. Now, if that’s not like a crowd of dogs, what is? Now, Jake was fortunate enough to get work on the deck. He was usually a bo’sun’s mate or scunner or master watch and he would usually eat in the tophouse.

Jacob: Like I said, all the captains knew their stuff, but the man who stayed at it most was old Captain Abram. He stayed at it until they wouldn’t give him a ship anymore. And he always wanted to be up in the barrel as much as possible looking for the seal, not scunning—the scunner would be in a lower barrel. Because he was the man who directed the ship through the ice. It was the barrelman who was on—who always looked out for the seals in every direction. Old Kean wore a big fur coat and when he got too old he would take off the fur coat, climb up in the barrel, and some of the men would hoist his fur coat up to him.

I was at it so long that I lived to see better times in the ’40s.

Thomas Best, b.1920, Int.1986

I was probably 15 years of age the first time I went to the ice. We walked from Wesleyville to Gambo with 75 to 80 pounds of luggage on a sled that we pulled behind. The train car had an old Dixie stove, and we could boil the kettle on that. It cost $3 then from Gambo to St. John’s.

I got my ticket on a Bowring’s boat from a skipper man at home by the name of Kean. There were four men in each bunk that time, and we were on the Eagle and had to eat our meals in the hold. I went out to the seal hunt about 25 years and I had every job on the ship over that length of time. I was an ordinary sealer, quartermaster, bridgemaster, barrelman, a first mate, and finally a captain. I started in the mid-1930s and it must be about 1970 when I gave it up. I had to go as navigator with Captain Bill Moss, who didn’t have a navigator’s ticket.

I was nine years of age when I went to the fishing business, and as I was walking up the steps in the Labrador schooner, my father said, “You’re like a sucking bear. Your size is yet to come.” And from then on, you had to look after yourself, from the day I was nine years old up to today. No one would look after you, because people were too plentiful. That’s the way it was up there. And the first one you’d give a back answer to, you were finished for eight or 10 years without getting off the land.

Even going fishing with anyone or getting to the seal fishery. Because where I came from, the merchants had control of the place. There were two or three merchants. They owned the schooners that were going to the Labrador, and they used to run them for companies in St. John’s. And whatever they said was law. They were the people that supplied you with goods and whatever you needed. And the first word, and you’re finished. You’d be cut off from everything. But that’s the way it was when I was going to the seal fishery. It’s a hard life, yes.

One year when I came in from Wesleyville, I went aboard the ship and put my clothes bag on the bunk that I was going to take. I went back on the street, and when I came aboard that evening my clothes bag was gone. They said that a couple of corner boys had taken it. I had nothing to wear out to the seal fishery except for the dress clothes that I had on. So, I went down to the courthouse and told them my problems. Finally, a policeman came in with two fellows, and one of the fellows had one of my shirts on.

Between the two of them they had all my clothes, but it was half lousy because they used to sleep around here and there. The judge asked me if I wanted the clothes, but I said no, it was too dirty. So, anyway, I went out to the seal fishery and I used to steal the skipper’s clothes. The skipper used to miss his clothes every now and then and didn’t know who the hell took them. On the way in from the seal fishery he found out that I stole the clothes, and he was going to dock me $25.

It happened he came to my home and was a good sport. He said, “I would probably have done the same thing if I was in that predicament.” The captain was a big man [probably Captain Bill Winsor], and he was a heavy built man. I used to wear his clothes with strings around my body to keep it up. He was a good man when we were getting seals. But when we weren’t getting seals, you couldn’t look at him. He would curse you up and down.

One spring we were up around the Magdalen Islands and we had what young seals we could get, and there were no old seals at all. But the skipper wanted to stay and get some old seals. We were getting short of coal, and the crew went on strike. If anyone as much as put their fingers on the rail to jump overboard, their fingers were in danger of being broken by somebody with a gaff. The strikers would not allow anybody to go overboard. I was in the bridge when one fellow came up with a gun.

I said to Captain Billy Winsor, “They’re coming up on the bridge now.” And then he said, “Take the gun,” he said, “and any man that puts his foot on the step to come up on that bridge, shoot him.” He said, “Don’t shoot to kill, but it don’t make no damned different if you kills them or not.” And you had to do it, regardless. And we shot off a few rounds of bullets, and that kept them from coming up in the bridge. If they got up, they would have taken over, you know. And we had them guns until we got in Corner Brook. Now, this happened after the war.

The first spring I was out, I think I made around $80 or $90, including the money I got for my share of flippers. My father took all my money. He might give me a quarter now and then if I wanted to go to a dance. Where we lived, there were no dances allowed. I used to have to walk 3 miles to go to a dance once or twice a year, and Father would give me a quarter. Most fellows would be 18 or 19 before they went to the ice. But I was lucky that I managed to go so young. And when I got home, everybody wanted to know how I got my ticket, but I didn’t let them know because the next year there would be too many others looking for their ticket.

Jacob Bishop, b.1903, Int.1987

The first time I went to the ice was in 1929. I joined the Beothic under Captain William Winsor [it must have been the Ungava]. He was the sealing captain. Captain Faulk, a Norwegian, was the navigational captain and the year-round captain for the company. I came to St. John’s with the rest of the fishermen and joined the ship. I was appointed mess boy and my job was to bring the food to the captain’s room and serve the officers. Then I had to clean up after them. I was very handy with cooking. When we got back to St. John’s, I was one of the ones hired to clean up the passenger accommodations. We had to clean out the mess of the sealers and wash and paint and get the ship ready for his trip down north in the summer.

When the time came to go down to the Arctic, I went down as second cook. That summer we went to Greenland, Baffin Island, and all over the Hudson Bay. We carried the missionaries; the Bishop of the Church of England and the Bishop of the Catholic Church and young missionaries as well. I came to their attention because I was always a good singer, and sometimes they would stop to listen to me singing in the galley while I was cooking.

When we came back, we went to Sydney to take a load of coal back to Newfoundland. The captain was going to have a party the next day for the government people and the Mounties that were leaving the ship. When I got up in the morning, there was no cook in the kitchen, so I got the key from the chief steward and went in and prepared breakfast for the crew and officers. I tried to get the cook out of the bunk but couldn’t because he was ashore drinking all night and got drunk.

So, I started working on dinner. There were some eggs left over from the summer voyage, so I got some eggs and I made some mayonnaise, then I got potatoes and made a potato salad; I made a beet salad and I had three or four different kinds of coleslaw. Captain Faulk came into the saloon after I had the table set. When he saw the food, he asked the chief steward if there was something special going on. The chief steward said “Oh, that’s that young fellow in the pantry. He did that.”

The captain came in and said, “Why don’t you get that chap to go with us the summer? There’s a job for him here. We could use him.” So the chief steward offered me a job cooking on the summer voyage. I said, “Yes, sir.” Then the cook got fired and I became the chief cook. We took a load of coal to St. John’s and from there we went to Spain, Italy, and Sicily with codfish. That was the fall when many schooners were driven out to sea, most of them on their way to Bonavista North with supplies. Job Barbour in his schooner Neptune II was driven off and spent 48 days drifting and ended up in Scotland.

The second spring I went out on the Ungava again and Frissell was with us. His movie men had a big plane engine and they would throw white stuff into it like small bits of paper to make it look like a storm. They would dress up some men and get them to walk through this storm, where they used a plane propeller to create the wind. The men would have rubber suits on, and the bits of paper would stick to them so it would look like it was a real blizzard.

I was the chief cook, but I had a couple of assistance cooks, and one was my uncle. We did the regular sealing and then came back and did our regular trip to the North. Then I joined the Nascopie. I spent 10 years as the chief cook on the Nascopie, and in 1942 I left the Nascopie and became chief steward. I was a chief steward until I retired.

While I served on the sealing ships, we would cook the regular food for the sealers but we also cooked for the fireman and the captain and the officers. The officers ate in their quarters, the firemen ate in their quarters, and the sealers had their separate place as well. I used to help the sealers with the lunch they took on the ice but the only cooked meals were for breakfast and supper.

Now, I can’t say I was a real sealer because I didn’t go on the ice very much, but I cooked and served the crews for four or five years at least. And I was always paid a wage whether we got seals or not. I was on the go day and night because everybody ate at different times. Now, we had a pretty good life, but before my day things were much harder. My father told me many times that he would get shavings at the cooperages in St. John’s and put them in a brin bag, go down below, and scoop out a hole in the coal for his brin bag, and that’s where he slept. They had hard times.

Jesse Codner, b.1910, Int.1986/87

Well, I was 16 years old the first spring I went to the ice. I fished with my father here [Torbay], and we had merchants down to Job’s. Every fisherman had a merchant then. They’d get their supply of salt and such stuff, see, and I got a berth in the Ungava with Billy Winsor.

We sailed off for the icefields the 6th of March, and going down the Shore it was breakfast. You had an old boat’s kettle then and went up for breakfast. I was a first time young fellow in the bunk. I was sent to the galley to get the food. This old fellow was cook. There were two or three of them. And he dipped down with a goddamned great big long-handled dipper and he dipped up this stuff and he hove it into the boat’s kettle and I shoved in my kettle for tea and I got a kettle of switchel, perhaps it was three or four days old. I brought it down and I said, “Boys, what is this? What is this?” I asked the old fellows.

“Oh,” he said, “that’s [lop]scouse.” There were four or five pieces of old turnip floating around like pieces of cork. You couldn’t eat it. And little bits of salt meat. That was breakfast. A little pan of hard bread I brought down with me. Get that into you and get on the ice.

We were down off of the Funk Islands. We got seals there; we got about 22,000. It was two days of young fat. From there on after, the young were killed, we went after the old.

Well, I was only a young boy. I wish I was as smart today, though. I had a toothache all the spring. I got lousy. I went on deck and I used to curse and cry, do it all! I thought if I got in again I’d never come again anymore. Oh my God Almighty. We got in on the 28th of April. We had 42,000 pelts. Well, after the end of a week, that was all of it. I was ready to go again. Well then, that was that spring.

Another spring—I’ll tell you the story. Captain John Whelan was a navigator. Now, Jacob Kean was an ice captain, and he was sailing without a navigator. I knew Whelan. He sent me in to Jacob with a note—a letter to get a berth. Now, he wasn’t going into her. I went in and knocked on Jacob’s door, in there by Bannerman Park. He was a drunkard, you know, drank like a fish.

Front door was beat open, the glass out of it. “Come in, boy.” I went in. He took the letter and looked at it, walked back and forth the room four or five times. He said, “Boy, hard world, ain’t it?” And I said, “I don’t know, Skipper. Perhaps people into it is hard, not the world.” He said, “Yeah, boy, yeah.” He said, “Tell Captain Whelan I’m sorry. Can’t get him nar berth, cause all the berths [are] gone. Took them down to the office.”

I left. By the Jesus, wicked, couldn’t get a berth. That was it. I was out in St. John’s the day they sailed, and when I went down the cove here the Beothic was hung up. Jacob Kean was only an ice captain and he couldn’t go without a navigator, and Captain Johnny Whelan was a navigator and decided to go with him.

So anyway, when he saw me, he told me to come aboard. Now, I had a horse on Pleasant Street and no one to drive her home, and my mother had to be taken home. Gordon Thorne was standing on the wharf, and I sung out to him, “The horse is in the cove, drive up to Pleasant Street, and pick up my mother and take her home.” I went down below and I was three days down there. There was 33 Torbay fellows aboard of her. There was 32; I made it 33. Now, I had nothing to wear but what I stood in.

So we went down the shore. Be gar, she broke down, down off Baccalieu or somewhere. Something wrong with the engine room. She drifted off, be gar. Whelan sent down for me. Someone come to the hold, he said, “Is Codner down there? A fellow by the name of Jesse Codner.” “Geez,” I said, “What is it? They’re going to put me ashore.” And I went up, he said, “Go in to Jacob. He’s going to sign you on.” I went in. He said, “Well boy, how’s ye feeling?” I said, “All right.” He said, “A good night and a clear conscience and a few miles away we’ll be into them.”

So I came out, and Captain Whelan said, “What have you got to put on?” I said, “I stands right in the centre of my clothes bag.” “Well,” he said, “I have a spare pair of skin boots there that I used to use years ago.” So he gave them to me. Blessed Jesus! There were about 10 years old and perhaps nine lying up. They were dried right up. They gave me a crop: a suit of oil clothing, a pound of tobacco, a knife and sheath and steel, and a belt—that was my crop. All right. So that was all right.

Be gar, we got under way again and we did get into them. We killed about 21,000 seals. We picked up after the first day killing. Young harps. Now, the spring before he was up in White Bay. The Eagle or something got a whole load up there. So [now in 1933] he picked up the previous day’s kill and beat off for White Bay. He run down, run inside of Patrick’s Point, the other side of the Horse Islands. She got jammed. She was 33 days there jammed.

Now, Baird sent her out. He had her chartered for one month. There was only a month’s grub aboard of her, that was it. Be gar, we were a week there, and we went on allowance. Go up and sign your hand in the morning for a cake and a half of bread. That was it.

Boys, oh boys! We were jammed there solid. They started blasting her out. Just as well to try to get that hill out of it over there. Then she listed, and the ice started coming in over the rail, and we were all night cutting it up and heaving it off on the other side. Come in over this side and heave it down the other side. It put a hole in her side like a puncheon. If it was a wooden vessel, she was gone then. That was all. That died away then and she filled right in there.

Well, that was it. They were going to get the crew to travel across to Patrick’s Point and go travel up the country. That was something then. You’d never make it. You’d never make it. So anyway, we had to settle down for it, anyway.

Cake and a half of bread a day. Sleep all day. You wouldn’t find a man on deck in the middle of the day, no more than a white bull. But all night long we were up acting the buck, anyone strong enough to do that. So anyway, another steamer, maybe the Northern Ranger or maybe the Kyle, she came down with some grub. She never got in to us.

That evening a fellow went on deck and said there was a crack in the ice. An hour after that, you wouldn’t know where the ice went. Went apart everywhere. We steamed out and got a bit of grub. That was the 29th day of April, and Jacob came on the bridge that evening and said, “I got orders from Bairds—could have three or four more days on the ice.”

So half the crew struck. Went down below. That was it. Billy Bowe was the ringleader of that strike. Billy was dressed up pretty, he was on the barrackhead with a white shirt, collar, and tie on. Some fellow was playing the accordion, just ribbing Jacob, I suppose.

I said to my buddy, I said, “Christ, we were 33 days here, it won’t matter much for the other couple of days, the hell with it, I’ll go.” So we went on the ice, and Jacob was going to give nar cent to the fellows that struck. Well anyhow, we went on the ice. We got, oh, I’d say 700 or 800 old pelts and came aboard.

But anyway, we were on the last pan picking them up when they run up to the pan. He sung out from the bridge: “There’s a swile over there in a swatch,” he said. “Can either man get over to get that?” There were four or five of us on the pan, and I jumped and ran, and broke the pan in two. The other fellows coming behind couldn’t get across, see. So they come up and picked up their pan, the pan we had there. Then they pulled up for me. Now, during the time we were on the ice, Jacob asked Captain Whelan, he said, “Where’s the fellow you brought aboard on your back when you come? Where’s he to? Is he down below, too?”

Captain Whelan spied me. He said, “Jacob, come over. There’s the man I brought aboard on my back when I come. If you’re going out next spring, I’ll pick a crew for you.” That killed him; he never spoke. So that was that trip. We got in the 3rd day of May. We made it to Bay Bulls, steamed down the shore. Yeah, that was that trip.

Oh my God, was there ever hard feelings between the men and the captain. Now, Jacob was nothing, and his son was a Catholic, see. So Good Friday, I think it was, we were having a little something back into the little hospital on the Beothic. The crowd of men were going up and down, going in kissing the cross and walking out again.

So Jacob came and Ron Shanahan [a coal trimmer, and the present editor’s great uncle] was up on the bridge and he said, “Ron, what’s going ahead? Lord Jesus, what’s going ahead this morning?” Ron said, “The boys are having a few prayers back there.” “Oh the Lord Jesus,” he said. “Go back and tell them to give us a few prayers to get this one out of here.”

Oh my, oh my, Jacob Kean. We came in on the 4th of May, and his wife came down. “Well,” she said, “Jacob. You made an awful shag of it, didn’t you?” “Plugged her up in the bay and jammed her up. And everything else came in loaded down.” The biggest trips ever brought in. The Imogene had 52,000—the most that was brought in the country. The Ungava had 48,000—the heaviest trip was ever brought in. We come in with 21,000 on the 4th of May.

I was out over 14 years and I served with a good few captains. I didn’t like Billy Winsor, but Peter Carter was the loveliest old man ever you see the like of, and he brought in just as many seals as the other fellows. And he looked after his men.

Old Abram Kean was an old bastard, God forgive me. He should have been shot years ago. That old son of a . . . He came down to the hold on a Sunday morning with his fur coat on, shoved his head down, “Get out and double up them pans. If I had men like youse, I wouldn’t have nar seal to my credit.” No, I didn’t like that dirty old thing. He drowned men, sure, and everything. He drowned them there in the Narrows, hauling them out through on the line, left the blood on the ice where the fellows went and got you in the blades. All blood on the water and ice and everything. He got away with that. He got away with the crowd froze up on the ice [Newfoundland disaster]. He got away with that. He wouldn’t get away with it over in Russia though. He thought he was God. He’d sooner have the seal than the man. He was after seals. He wasn’t bothering about the men’s welfare. Now, old Jacob was saucy, you know what I mean, but he was all right, you know. Now, Charlie Kean was another lovely man, and I think Jacob was his uncle.

It was a great life.

Andy Short, b.1900, Int.1973, 1976, 1986

The first spring I went to the ice was in 1925. I went with old Captain William Bartlett from Brigus in the Viking; she was blowed up after, down there off the Horse Islands. My father always went with Captain Bartlett, mostly in the Gulf, and he always could get a few berths from Captain Bartlett. So I made up my mind to go to the ice, and my father got me a berth.

We left St. John’s around the first of March because a ship going to the Gulf would always leave a few days ahead of the northern fleet. We passed up around Channel and we sighted the Burnt Islands and there was a neck of water. The captain put her in the neck of water, and we went on and followed that neck of water right in through the Gulf, and we never stopped until we stopped in the patch of seals. I heard the old sealers that were aboard say that it was the first time they had ever seen it happen so easily.

My father was the food controller that spring, so he wouldn’t go on the ice. But when everyone come up on deck, my father had his gaff and all. You see, there were four of us our first spring out; three from Brigus.

The captain says to him, “Bill, boy, where’re you going?” He said, “I’m going on the ice.” “No,” he said, “you’re not going on the ice. You’re going to stay aboard this one and look after your job.” “No, sir,” he says, “I’m not. I’m going on the ice. The cooks got their orders what to do.” “Oh,” the captain says, “all right. Take the four of them with you and show them how to sculp.” So he took us and showed us what to do. There was nothing to the job.

On the first it was all right, the seals were nearby, but then we had to go a good ways from the ship and haul the seals a long piece. On Sunday morning the captain came on deck and said, “Now, boys, anyone who wants to go on the ice can go, and anyone who doesn’t want to go, need not go. You don’t know how quick we are going to get caught in the ice and we could be here till the first of May. Through all hands going today, although it’s Sunday, we could make quick work of it.”

So everyone went on the ice. We had an awful lot of seals panned. Now, three seals were as many as you could haul any distance on dry ice, but if the ice was watery you could haul more because they would float along. So anyhow, everybody went and everybody used to take four or five, because it was good hauling. But they were big; whitecoats in the Gulf are heavier then to the Front. We hauled a lot that day, and Monday was the same. Soon we had the load hauled alongside and some stowed down. We didn’t take all we had panned; we couldn’t take them, because the way it was in days gone by you would kill a lot in case you lost some.

We got enough and we got up steam and we came down and we passed along by St. Lawrence. Captain Forward was the navigator, and I was appointed wheel master in the watch. When we got down off St. Lawrence, Captain Forward went down to Captain Bartlett, and he said, “I believe we are going to have a dirty night. I don’t like the look of it.” Captain Bartlett came up and looked around, “We will let her go on,” he said.

I was to the wheel all the ways down. I took it just up from Cape St. Lawrence. So we went on and by dark it was getting worse. The wind came right from the eastward, and we had a heavy load of fat. In fact we had two big pounds on deck, and the Viking was an old slow ship and she was not making too much headway. Now the watch I was in went off and the other watch took over.

Captain Bartlett came up and looked. It was snowing pretty thick now and the wind was in from the eastward and breezing up. He said, “If I had my time back again, we would have gone into St. Lawrence.” Captain Forward said, “It’s not too late yet.” We were about 15 or 20 miles below St. Lawrence and you couldn’t see very far; dark was setting in on us. Captain Bartlett said to Captain Forward, “Do you think that you can make St. Lawrence if we did turn back?” “Yes,” says Captain Forward. “I’ll make St. Lawrence.” “So all right,” he says, “if you think we will make St. Lawrence, we’ll go back. It’s a poor night to follow on.”

So Captain Forward turned her around and when he turned her around he came down in the hold to me. I was with my watch off. “Andy,” he says, “would you come up and take the wheel.” I said, “What’s the trouble?” He said, “You were to the wheel all the way down since we left St. Lawrence, and you made no mistakes. I was watching you all the time. We are going back and I’d like for you to come and take the wheel. If you can make the same steerage going back as you made going down, I got no worry about making St. Lawrence.” I said, “Yes, if that’s the way it is with you, but I don’t profess to be any better to the wheel than the man who is to the wheel now. What will they say—for me to go up and take the wheel from him?” “That’s no matter,” he said, “about the man to the wheel now. I’m asking you to do this for me. There’s 170 lives aboard this ship, and if we miss St. Lawrence, it will be bad.” I said, “Yes.” So I went and took the wheel and I took my own wheel crew.

There were two wheels, one aft and one forward, but the two of them were fast to one another. He told me the course to steer. It was gradually getting worse, worse, worse, all the time. By and by there was a big sea heaving in, coming kind of quick. The fellows to the after wheel had no compass, I was watching them, I had the compass. Sometimes it would be hard on me, because they didn’t know which way I was heaving her. So I said, “Now, boys, don’t touch the wheel till I tell you. Stand there but don’t touch the wheel. If I want to give me a hand starboard or port, I’ll tell you.” So I steered, and we went on and on.

Captain Forward was in the bridge, and he had his compass in the bridge. Every now and again he used to look down on me and see how I was doing, and then he would go and watch his compass. It was impossible to keep her right straight; you couldn’t do that. Sometimes she’d take a yaw, perhaps she’d go two points to starboard; when she’s come back the two points, I’d give her two points on the port, and then I’d steady her up. One time he came down, “Andy,” he says, “you’re giving her too much to the starboard.” “Well captain,” I said, “I’m also giving her the same thing to port.” “Remember,” he said, “we are going right for the light.” “Captain,” I said, “if you don’t make the light, don’t blame me.” That’s all he said. He went on.

By and by, Gushue, my master watch, came up. He walked back and forth and then went up in the bridge and had a look around. He said to Forward, “Is that a light just off there?” Forward said, “It could be.” They watched and watched and by God they saw it again and she was going right straight for the light. But they were not sure it was the light. You know you keep looking for something and you think you see it. It must be 10 or 15 minutes and by God they were sure it was the light. When Forward came down, “Andy,” he said, “that’s as good steering as ever I saw done. That light is as straight as you could draw it. I got no worries now. You’re going to make it.” So we went into St. Lawrence and dropped anchors. But blessed God, what a night we had. We had to give out our two anchors. It was a hard, hard place. It was a hard place to get in, in the night, I’ll tell you that, but we did it.

I went down in the hold. Then young Bill Bartlett, the captain’s son and second hand with him, came down. He said, “Andy you got to go up, the captain wants you.” I went up to where Captain Bartlett and Captain Forward were. They were talking, and Captain Forward said, “Now, there’s the man that steered down and steered her back. I doubt if there is another man in this ship could steer the course and be so correct as he did it tonight. I blocked him a couple of times on his course. I told him he was going too much to starboard, but he said he was taking just as much to port as he was to starboard. Don’t thank me: here’s the man you can thank for putting the ship here tonight.” And that’s what Forward said. Anyhow, we had a few drinks there together and I went and turned in.

That was Saturday and we were there all day Sunday. It was an awful hard time—a really bad night—and it was said we were lucky to get into St. Lawrence. They said if the Viking had to be out that night, she would never do it. She couldn’t do it with a load of fat, because fat wasn’t like anything else—there was a big sag to it. Monday morning we left and came to St. John’s and discharged our seals. [Int.1976]The Spring of the big trips: 1933

In 1933, I got a berth with Peter Carter on the Ungava from Monsignor O’Brien. At that time, there were so many going to sea it was an awful job to get a berth. And everybody had the one crew, all the time. But Monsignor O’Brien—he was Father O’Brien then—got me a berth. The Ungava was chartered by Crosbie and Captain Olsen—I think he was a foreigner. I think there were couple of St. John’s businessmen with Crosbie. They chartered the Ungava for 18 days. There were 231 men on board, including Willy Rielly from Torbay. We always went out on the ice together.

We all left St. John’s handy about the same time. We went down the same old course as the year before. We came across a few seals all right, and then we came across a good patch of seals where the Imogene was. The Imogene was into the seals three or four days before either other ship got into them because she had a crate on her propeller to protect it and she could go astern just as good as she go ahead. Anyway, after a while we punched into the seals towards the Imogene and we got 18,000 out of it. That was what they called the main patch.

Captain Blackwood had the Imogene and Captain Hill had the Eagle. The Eagle was the nicest boat for going out there because she was so short and she had good power. The Eagle got a load and was the first to dump its coal to make room for the pelts. In those days, the boats took a load of coal, but when they struck the patch, they had to dump it. I wish I had what coal what was dumped down in White Bay.

Anyway, we started in picking up scattered ones. I suppose Peter Carter wired in and told them that the patch was cut and seals were scarce. And they wired him back and told him to come on in with what he had. So we left to come in and we struck heavy ice—very heavy ice, rafting ice. When we got between Baccalieu and the Funks, but closer to the Funks, we got jammed.

We were there all that day and all that night and part of the next day. The master watch went to the bridge to have a look. Peter Carter told him to go up to the barrel to see if there was a lake of water we could get to. He looked out to the westward, in towards the land. And he saw everything black, and he thought that it was all water. So he came down and he told the captain, “Captain,” he said, “if you could get in there,” he says, “about 4 or 5 miles, there’s a big lake of water.”

The captain told the crowd in the engine room to start her up, and they did. But we couldn’t clear her. We put down powder cans and blasted, blasted, blasted, but couldn’t clear her. The master watch went into the barrel again, and this time he could see better because the snow had stopped. He came down and said to the captain, “Captain, I believe there’s seals in there.”

Now, it was all hands overboard, gunners and all the watches. The gunners started to fire at the seals and that patch went into the water. The gunners called for us to come back and get behind them because some of us could get shot. We didn’t mind them and went on, and according as we went the ice got tighter. I got so tight that you could walk along with your eyes closed in regards of falling in the water. Well, there were seals as far as you could see, as far as you could see with the naked eye—a body of seals.

So, all of the batsmen got in a line and started killing them with their gaffs and we killed up till 11 o’clock, just before noon. They were old seals, bedlamers and old harps. They were all on the ice. Seals get up on the ice in hot weather and they rest. We killed, and killed, and killed so much we put the flags everywhere. Captain Carter sent the cooks out, and the second hand with coffee. It was late in the evening so we had time to sculp only a few.

So the next morning we started sculping, and we were sculping for just about a week. They were hard to sculp because those were heavy pelts and it was tough to find strong pans of ice. Finally the Ungava got to us; she got into where we were and we started picking the pelts up. And when we got the last pan picked up, we were up off Western Bay Point, up in Conception Bay. There were eight winches on the Ungava and the eight winches were going. I’ll tell you the seals were coming aboard of her.

Now, there had been a lot of sun and many men were ice-blind. Willy Rielly and myself and a few others were all right. I say we didn’t have 30 men to go on the ice by now; the rest were ice-blind. When you went down in the hold, you wouldn’t know but it was a crowd of children crying, with the pain in their eyes. I know there was one man from Bonavista Bay—he was an oldish man—and he was sitting on the bunk with his pipe in his mouth.

I went down in the hold to get a bit of tobacco, and this oldish man said, he was gone for a smoke, and he says, “My son, for God’s sake, will you come and light my pipe for me?” The heat of the match used to make his eyes worse and he couldn’t light his pipe. I lighted the pipe for him and myself and Willy went back to work—we went and got the last pan. The Ungava she was overloaded and we had two pounds on deck. We had a pound on each quarter of old fat.

We left. We put the flags on her and away to go for St. John’s. The captain hauled her in towards Pouch Cove slowly because the ship was down in the water and her iron plates were covered. She was very heavy, and if she touched any kind of an old growler it could push a hole in her. So, we got in anyway. When we got in, Bowring’s wharf was lined off with loaded ships and so was Job’s wharf, too. We had to tie up and wait till some discharged. It was two, three or four days waiting.

We started to unload. We had to unload the old fat first because it was on top of the young. Then we started taking out the young. We thought we were going to make a wonderful lot of money. Everyone was sure they were going to make nothing under $100. But when it come out in the paper that night, it said the Ungava’s crew was going to make $40.

When I went down in the morning, we were told we were going to paid $40, and we said there must be something wrong. One master watch went in to get it, to take his money. And there was one old man, he jumped up on the head of a barrel, and he said, “If you goes in there, and takes that you’ll never reach home. You won’t get off of this wharf. I’m going to tell you; you be very careful what you’re about.” They were getting dirty [angry] and arguing with each other. The next thing we saw a couple of policemen coming down. But no one paid any attention to them at all. Then we seen here comes Olsen, and he went over to Job’s, and when he came back, “Boys,” he says, “I can’t do any better than $40, Job’s won’t pay any more.” You see, Job was buying the fat from him. “And I can’t do any better than $40 a man.” Some people said, “We’re not standing for that.”

So he left again and must be gone a half hour or more. While he was gone, the chief of police—and I suppose he must have had what force was in St. John’s. Well, we got a force, too. See, we had around 260 batsmen right there. And they were fit to do anything that morning, I’ll tell you. So this old man, he was speaking for the crowd. So he told the chief of police, “Now, sir,” he said to him, “Mr. Chief of Police,” he said, “the best that you can do is take yourself and your force and go up and control Water Street.” He said, “You’re not controlling us. We’re a crowd of men that’s looking for our rights. And we’re not causing any trouble. But,” he said, “we will. If you interferes, there’s going to be big trouble. So the best thing,” he said, “I can tell you, sir, is go up and control Water Street. Look out for the public up there. Not us! Don’t bother us at all.” And so the police chief and the policemen left.

Then Crosbie came down and went over to Job’s office. He came back with Olson and says, “Now, boys, I’m only proud you didn’t take the $40, but the best we can do is $80. All the old fat is over there on the wharf. The ship is over there and it’ll come over and take what they’ve got hove out—damaged skins. The ship can dump them out wherever they like. They don’t want them.”

You see, the seals were up on the ice and they got sunburnt, and we knew that ourselves when we hoisted them aboard because the skin used to break in the flipper holes. They were no good. So we considered it all over and took the $80, and they did what they liked with the fat. That was the only way we could do it.

That was the spring of the big trips, but the other ships got their fat in the main patch. The only one, I think who didn’t do much with it that spring was Jacob Kean in the Beothic. He got tangled up in Patrick’s Point, White Bay. He thought that the seals were up in White Bay. And when he got in, the ice packed in on the land on Patrick’s Point, rafted ice. And they had a hard time of it. That was unusual in my day because ships would hardly ever go into White Bay. It was a very queer thing to do. But, the man just made the mistake.

It’s hard to say who of any captain was better than another. Old Captain Kean had a wonderful name, but he always had the best ship, or one of the best, and that is why he got all the seals. It’s like me fishing out of here [Harbour Grace]. If I got a big boat to go to, we’ll say, Cape St. Francis fishing and you got a small one, you can’t go as far and before you get to Bell Island I’m off Cape St. Francis fishing. But that would not mean I’m a better fisherman. The captain I liked sailing with was Captain Isaac Barbour. Isaac Barbour was a good man and he was a quiet man, you heard no nonsense out of him. Isaac Barbour was a fine man, that’d be my man.

But the year [1929] we went with him in the Viking to the Gulf we made nothing [$9.46 a man] because the old ship was too slow and we were the last to reach the seals. And it was worse the following year in the Thetis, also in the Gulf, with Captain Samuel Wilcox [$4.49 a man]. That year we met the Terra Nova in the Gulf under Captain John Parsons. He was close to us. When it came on dark, we heard this screeching. We were ahead of the Terra Nova so Wilcox says, “Captain Parsons, I think there’s ever so many seals here.” That’s the words he said. “Yes,” said Parsons, “according to the screeching there’s no trouble to get a load of fat here come daylight.”

And when it came daylight, there wasn’t a thing to be seen, only a screecher [a whitecoat that has lost its mother]. Well, there were no oaths on that screecher that day. When you hear a screecher at night, you’d swear there were billions of seals there. There wasn’t one. So, anyhow, we got nothing, only got 40 pelts or something.

My best year was the first year I was out with Captain William Bartlett in the Viking. I made almost $100 that year. That year we must have killed two loads of seals. At that time, there was no such thing as kill your load. It was kill, kill, kill, kill. Everything was destroyed.

My father always went sealing with old Captain Bartlett, Bill Bartlett, Bob’s father, and mostly Conception Bay men went with Captain Bill. Sometimes he barely made enough to pay his passage home. But when they went to the Gulf, they always got bigger pelts. I don’t know why but there were always bigger pelts in the Gulf. My father was hard working and experienced, and Captain Bill always talked to my father and he would get my father to show the new hands how to sculp the seals. My father was a good man at that. He kept going to the ice until he had a heart attack and had to give it up.

I know he went out a few springs with Arthur Jackman and he said he was a rough man, a hard man but he was a good man to get seals. Well, he wasn’t a hard man on a man that was doing his work, but a man that wasn’t doing his work or was lagging in his work or anything, he was hard. You see Sunday was an awful day out there. Some of the people wouldn’t work. The Methodist people thought more about their religion than we did, the Catholic people. They were Sunday men. A few would work but a good many would be aboard because that was their religion. Jackman didn’t want none of that.

One time Captain Abram Kean went down to Bowring’s office and Bowring asked “Captain Kean, where are you going to hit the seals to this time?” And he had a big map there, one of them great big Newfoundland maps so he took the stick and said, “There is where I’m going to hit the main patch.” After Captain Kean left, Captain Jackman went in and Bowring asked him the same question and “I don’t know, sir, not yet.” “Well I’m going to show you,” he said, “where Captain Kean is going, right there”—and then he pointed.

And Jackman looked at it. “Mr. Bowring,” he says, “if Captain Kean hits the seals there,” and he was an awful man to swear. “If Captain Kean goes, there you can look out for the Terra Nova coming in clean, she’ll get nothing.”

Captain Kean left the next morning in the Aurora. When it came dark, Jackman was a good piece behind them. He put barrel of coal on the ice, a pan of ice, and he put a torch off it. He cut off east of them, put out all his lights, and went on. By and by the others saw the lights and thought that Jackman was broke down. Next morning, there was no sign of Jackman; no one knew where he went. So they all went down [north], took their cut, no seals. Went here, went there, went the other place; got no seals.

By and by they started to move southern again to see what was up in the bays, and when they got up around south of the Grey Islands, the barrelman says, “God,” he said, “sir,” to Captain Kean—“Captain, there’s smoke out there. She’s coming in this way and that’s Jackman and he got a log-load of fat.” “He have?” Captain Kean said.

Jackman was good. I’d say that Jackman was about the best of them at that time, according to what I used to hear the men talking. A wonderful man. He came from the Southern Shore. He was brought up, I think, in Fermeuse.

Now, the Barbours and the Keans and the Blackwoods were from the Bonavista area, and they were in the fish business with the Bowring’s. So they sold Bowring their fish, and they were in charge of his sealing steamers. I went with old Captain Abram. In fact, I was with him in the Beothic when he reached his million seal mark. Old Abram used to like to go up in the barrel, even when he was an old man. He had sealskin clothes and a big coat that came down to the tops of his boots. He looked like an old dog hood.

He was a wonderful man. He was a good man, there’s no doubt about that. But he wasn’t a man to take any mercy on men. He thought that the men were animals. He had no mercy on them whatever. No matter what the weather was or what it was like you had to go. Yes, sir, that’s what you did. And he’d get up in the morning say when you first start, struck the seals there, and he’d want every man on the ice to wait until he finished his talk. He’d make a speech then about this, that and the other thing, your master watches and all this kind of stuff. I was a master watch with old Kean.

I was in the Viking with Captain Isaac Barbour when she sprang a leak [1929?]. She sprang a leak, and we had to come to St. John’s. There was an old Spracklin from Brigus; he was a wonderful man [maybe second hand?]. The water was just about up to the fires, and you couldn’t get a man to go in the stoke hold. And old Spracklin said to Captain Barbour, “There’s one man I’ll get.” So I was bridgemaster then. I was sleeping in the hold, but I was eating aft. He came down, and he told me: “I can’t get a man out of all the watch.” I said, “Boy, I’ll go and do what I can.” I got down in the stoke hold and pulled the bucket up full of water, hoisted it up, and we kept the water down. Anyway, we saved her.

We got to St. John’s and he told me I should be a master watch and to go and have the test. Isaac Barbour must have had it in his mind to give me master watch because he told me to go and get my papers. Captain Abram and his son, Wes, and another son tested me.

Another time Ben Evely, a master watch, asked me to go icemaster. I said, “Yes.” So I went with him icemaster. When we got so far going, we saw there wasn’t a seal to be seen. And it was blowing and the snow drifting, and frosty. We went on and on and by and by Evely says, “Andy, you can stop here, boy. I can’t go, but you can go if you like.” Now, I was icemaster and I had a good fellow from Brigus and two fellows from Gull Island, two Stockwoods, and when they went on I went out to the westward. And I walked, and when we got so far, one of the Stockwoods got a galled heel so he had to go back and myself and George went on.

Well, we kept on walking and, by God, we walked into as clever a little patch of seals as ever you saw in your life. There were 215 seals and every one was in sight. And we started to kill them, and we killed them. When we got them all killed and panned, we started to look around. There wasn’t a sign of a man, not a man on the ice. So I said to George, “Boy, there’s nothing left for us only to go aboard.”

It wasn’t very late in the day either. But you see you finish quick because the seals were right thick. You could kill six or seven within the length of your gaff handle. We weren’t long slaughtering them. George was a good hand sculping, too. We sculped them and panned them and then we went back.

Now, we didn’t want to go aboard, I hated to go aboard before the day was out. But it was getting dark anyway, time to go aboard anyhow. And she was jammed. So Charlie Kean was second hand and Wes was navigator. When we got up so handy, old Abram sang out, “Do you see them men, Charlie?” There were only two of us.

“Yes, sir,” he said, “I see them. They’re a good piece yet.” Then there was a lake of water between us and the ship and we had to walk about 3 miles extra. And it was just after dark. By and by he shouted: “Charlie,” he says, “do you see them men?” “Yes, sir,” he said. “They’re here alongside.” So we got aboard and when we got aboard we went down in the hold.

Someone came along, and he said, “The two men that’s just come aboard got to go up. The captain wants them.” George was in an awful way, see. I said, “We’re going to get it now.” Figured we were going to get the calling down for not coming aboard with our watch. So we went up and he was up in the bridge. He came down. He said, “What’s your name?” I said, “My name is Andy Short, sir.” Now, my uncle Pat Short went with Kean a good many springs. He said, “Who gave you the berth?” I said, “Father O’Brien.” “Oh yes,” he said, “I know him.”

And he said, “What’s your name?” he said to George. And George got frightened to death, but he told him the clergyman gave him his. “Oh,” he said, “you’re two clergymen!” (laughing). “It must be that he didn’t let you come aboard, when the rest of the men come aboard. If not you gave me a tormented mind but you should have been aboard the ship.”

I said, “Captain,” George wouldn’t speak at all. I had to do all the talking. “You know, Captain, you look at my boots I’ve got on, probably you’ll see the reason why.” He looked down and the snow was all blood, frozen on the boots. He said, “What’s that? Blood?” I said, “Yes. We were killing seals all day.” He said, “What?” I said, “We were killing seals all day.” “You tell me,” he said, “that you killed.” “Well, sir,” I says, “I sculped 101 and me buddy there, he must have sculped 105 or six.” “Is that so,” he said. I said, “Yes.” “And what happened to all the rest of the men,” he said, “they never got there?” “Well, I don’t know, sir.” Now, see, the crew, all hands were talking like it was a goddamned lie I was trying to get on with. “Where are the seals to?” I said, “Out there on a pan about 5 miles east of this.” Anyhow, after a while he got the steamer clear. Now he said, “Did you have any supper?”

I said, “No, sir.” John Rose of Salmon Cove, he was the cook and the dishes were all put away, the galley closed up for the night. “No, sir,” I said, “we had no supper but I’ll guarantee you I could eat me supper now.” He said, “You’re going to get your supper.” So he called the cook to get it for us. He said, “Wes, take the men to my cabin, my table and see they got their supper and it’s a good one.” And he said, “Give them a drop of hot stuff that you got.” So we had two or three drinks of rum. He said, “You’re telling me the truth.” I said, “I’m telling the truth as this is the Thetis [1931], I told you the way to go.” Anyway, we got our supper, we got about two or three drinks of rum with this. And when we picked up the seal pelts that we panned they all believed us.

There was one fault—one thing I didn’t like about Captain Kean. He’d go off and leave you, be gone all day. Picked up pans that you panned probably last week some time. Only for the Imogene we would have been on the ice all one night, and a bad night, too. He went out picking up pans we panned about a week before. He got stuck. All the master watches got together and got all their men together. Kean wired the Imogene and it was the Imogene came and got us. Got aboard 12 o’clock in the night.

There was a lot of stealing, stealing seal pelts that belonged to other ships. Well, we would shove their flags down through the ice and up in the Gulf was the worst place of all, an awful place, up there. See the way it was when you’d sculp the seal and if you’re in the Viking, you’d cut a “V” in the fat. In the Imogene you could cut an “IM” or just an “I,” see and that would stay there.

Men from around St. John’s would take a box for their stuff and a barrel for seal if they could get on. The men from the north had a bag and a little slide that they hauled to the railway station in Gambo or Clarenville. They had a long way to go.

You know the way it was going to the ice, everyone on the ship would get something; would have something, a barrel of seal, a 10-pound tub of fat, a box of hard bread, butter. You see you’d get your allowance, and you ate what you wanted and brought home the rest. Butter, tea, and all that stuff. What you didn’t eat, you’d keep.

Sometimes we had long tows. Sometimes you’d have to make two tows a day. There was a lot of towing done in the Gulf, a lot of towing done there. See it was dry ice and it was very hard. Hard towing. The best time to tow, you know, is on watery ice. You can haul three times as many on watery ice as you could on dry ice. Sometimes there’d be a crowd of men in a long tow and the leader had to tow slowly so everybody could keep up. I’ve often seen men leave their tow and go ahead and cut the tow rope of the leading man. I remember Uncle Jim Fry was ahead once in the Gulf and Uncle Bill Coady told him to slack up, not to go so fast. Uncle Jim said he didn’t know he was doing it. Uncle Jim didn’t know until he was face on the ice. Uncle Bill let go and cut his tow rope. We always got an old man to lead the tow. A young man would kill the others. But towing in the Gulf was easier, far easier, than on front because the ice sheets were smooth while the ice on the Front was rough and raftered.

Whenever we got old seals, we always had a chance to get the seal cocks. And 1933 was a good year for that because, like I told you, we killed a lot of old seals. The gunners would shoot the old seals and the gunners’ dogs would cut off a piece of the tail. This was because each gunner had to bring aboard a piece of tail from the old seals to let the master watch or the second master watch, whoever was in charge of it, let them know for sure how many were shot.

Before that gunners often pretended to shoot more than they said and then when it came time for the ship to pick the pelts, there were fewer pelts than they reported. The gunners didn’t have time to cut out the cocks and neither did their dogs. Each dog was carrying 160 and 170 cartridges on their backs and they had to keep up with the gunners. It was the sculpers coming behind that got them.

When you sculped an old seal, when you ripped it down, you cut out the cock and you drove a hole between the grizzle [gristle] and the bone and then strung it on your belt. Every day you might get one or two but now not everyone would be at that, only some of the ship’s crew. When you took them aboard the ship, you put them in your box and you’d keep them in ice all the spring up on the barrackhead. The cock from the harp seal was about 6 to 8 inches long, and the hood seals was about 8 to 10 inches, and a good 1 inch thick. Now, we wouldn’t take the testicles, just the cock. But you never got them in the Gulf because in the Gulf all we used to get were the whitecoats. But on the Front there were always older seals to be got.

My father never got cocks because he always sealed in the Gulf. Now, the sealers around St. John’s knew more about this than the sealers from the outports and they knew that the Chinese laundrymen wanted the seal cocks and we didn’t know why. But they said that it made the starch whiter and stiffer. And there might be something in that because when I got a shirt from the laundry the collar would be as stiff, it would almost cut my neck. And this is how I learnt about it.

The first time I came into St. John’s on the ship there was this fellow Gerry Joy. He got the money for his cocks and he bought a bottle of rum. I got in [con]tact with him. He used to like his drink and the next spring I went out and I got a few, only about ten or twelve, but he got a lot. Now, other men thought that the Chinese made handles for walking canes from the cocks, but I always thought that they used the cocks for medicine.

Now, most of the St. John’s fellows had their cocks sold before they went out because they knew the Chinese laundrymen but the rest of us would be on the deck when the ship came in and right away the Chinese would come aboard. They couldn’t speak English very well but we all knew what they meant. They’d say, “You cock, you cock?” And you’d say, “Yes, I got cocks.” Then, “Let me see them. Let me see your cock.” And then you say, “Yes, I’ll show you the cocks. I’ll show you the cocks.” So he’d look at them and say, “What you want? What you want for cock?” Supposed you’d day, “Twenty-five cents a cock.” Then he’d say, “All right, me have. How many you got?” The big cocks from the hoods could be worth 35 cents. And there’s some would have a lot. I’d get $10 or $12 but I saw sealers making $25. There were people who made $100 on cocks but mostly we didn’t have time for it.

You see the main problem was to get them because mostly we got old seals while the ship was steaming slow through the ice. Every time we’d see them the gunners would go over the side, and their dogs, shoot the seals and then they had to keep going. So, we sculpers had to jump out, sculp the seal, cut off the cock, and have the pelt ready for the ship to winch aboard. Sometimes we just didn’t have time to cut off the cock. But it was a nice bit of extra money. And we all needed the money.

Mrs. Martha Andrews, b.1916, Int.1987 [wife of Cater Andrews]

[Josephine McGrath speaking.] Mrs. Andrews, your father, Captain Sid Hill, was a famous sealing captain, and I was wondering could you give me what you remember about your father going to the ice? I don’t remember too much but Dad was born on November 4th, 1885, in Wesleyville, and my mother was born in 1890, in Wesleyville, and from Dad’s boyhood he was always a seafaring man. He went fishing and, soon as he was old enough to go to the seal fishery, he went. I think with Captain Edward Bishop, and that was his mother’s brother.

Mrs. Andrews: Dad’s first time going as a captain to the seal fishery was in 1932 [1933] in the Eagle. And I remember that day quite well because there was a wedding in Newtown [BB]. Now, we had walked to Newtown the day before, and after the wedding we walked back and we got home around 3 o’clock in the afternoon. When we did get home, there was a telegram there from Bowring’s telling Dad he had been accepted for the Eagle, for that spring, to go to the seal fishery.

And our house that day was some bustle. Men from all over were coming to get a berth, and that’s something that I’ve never forgotten. He went captain of the Eagle for four years, and then the Beothic for three years—the Imogene in 1940 and the Eagle again in 1941. He was in the Imogene the spring before she was lost in the summer. She was lost off Canso, Nova Scotia; she was bringing home a load of freight or something.

I remember when Dad used to go to the seal fishery. It would be such an exciting time. Even before they went there would be some sort of a supper where they would all get together and celebrate. Dad always had a dog team that took him to Hare Bay, and from Hare Bay there was somebody always met him there and took him to Gambo.

But all of the other men would leave quite early in the morning, and each one had his sled, made to pull their belongings. I heard Dad say so many times that in Gambo the men would have all of those sleds, and before they’d get on the train, they’d leave their sleds, and all the children would try to get one; everyone wanted a sled. All the sealers carried pork toutons, also called pork buns, that’s like sorta biscuit with cut-up pork instead of raisins. They were delicious—they were really good.

All the men in Dad’s family went sealing. His brother was a sealing captain, Tom Hill, and his brother Samuel always went to the seal fishery and he had another brother James, who always cooked on the sealing boats. And there was another brother Edward, who went sealing as well. They were all involved in it. It was that and the cod fishery in the summer. And when he gave up the cod fishery in the fall he was lighthouse supervisor for Labrador. And if you didn’t go to the seal fishery, you just stayed home in the winter, and the men occupied themselves by getting wood for the fires.

They always brought home flippers and liver. And the first day they got back we would always look forward to that meal in the afternoon—of fried liver. That was delicious, but I haven’t had any for a long, long time.

Sometimes a whitecoat was born dead, and that whitecoat did not shed its fur. Dad and others always tried to get a [stillborn] whitecoat and have it mounted in St. John’s. My mother always had one. Also, my mother had a sealskin coat that was made at Ewing’s, I think in England. Right now I have that coat made into a mat, and it’s beautiful. It’s a rug, a large rug. Mr. Leslie Green, the furrier from Mitchell Furs, made it into a rug for me. Dad had a fur coat and a fur hat and he always wore these when he was captain. He always wore them on the bridge.

When the sealing boats were out for a few weeks, we would get reports on the radio. There were only one or two radios in Wesleyville then, and around 11 o’clock we’d go to a house or somebody would come to your house and tell you the news of the day. Every vessel [and] their catch for the day would be recorded, what they had on board, and what was on the ice. The ships sent wireless messages to the firms and the firms reported it to the radio stations.

[Josephine: A lot of people called him a gentleman.]

Hmm, hmm. He was. I shouldn’t say it because he was my father, but he was. He was a calm, peaceful man. He wasn’t one of those who would drive men out on the ice. And he went to the seal fishery for more than 50 springs.

His favourite ship was the Imogene, but the Eagle was sort of a pet ship. We were sad to see her being towed out through the Narrows and sunk in 1950 by her owners, Bowring’s.

In 1933, the first spring that Dad went out, they really had a big trip and Captain Blackwood brought in over 55,000 seals. The men made up a song that was almost 20 verses. Here are two verses from my scrapbook:

Come all of you seal hunters and listen unto me

While I’ll tell of the spring now in 1933

And hark just for one moment

I’m quite sure that you will

To hear then of the Eagle’s crew

And the brave young Captain Hill.

Now the Eagle is loaded it’s homeward we’ll steer

We must give credit to all of those three engineers

Who are down there in the engine room

The throttle in their hand

And doing their very utmost

To keep her from being jammed.

Dad was a most unassuming man. He was an expert seal hunter and he gave every consideration to the men who sailed with him. His shipmates of the 17 springs that he was in command of sealing ships—his memory has been cherished by them. He died in 1961; he was 73 years old. He was a wonderful father; we had a good family. Mom and Dad were married 28th January 1913 in the Jubilee Church. There were seven of us: Shirley Madelaine, Martha Iona, Gerald Irving, Oston Newman, Molly Minerva, Olga Bernice, and Julie Lane. And of that family there’s two left: my brother Gerald and myself. All died young—53 and 54 years old.

My husband, Cater [Dr. Cater Andrews, Department of Biology], passed away in 1978. He was really interested in the seal fishery, and he had quite a collection [of papers]. He had letters from the most important people, like Lord Shackleton. And I gave the material to the University. Dr. Fred Aldrich, Dr. Les Harris, and Dr. George Story [since deceased] are the executors of the collection, and they have given Dr. Shannon Ryan exclusive access to it now. Dr. Aldrich always keeps in touch with me and everybody appreciates the collection that Cater gathered.