The Docks
I BEGGED MY WAY off the court beat after a few months. I convinced the publisher of the Telegram, who each year purchased several berths on the S.S. Newfoundland and sold them to sealers in exchange for a percentage of their share, to let me have a berth so that I could write about what life was like on board a sealing ship. My publisher worked out an arrangement with the Newfoundland’s captain, Westbury Kean, whereby I would file stories every day using the ship’s telegrapher. Kean, saying he had no intention of being held responsible for anything that might happen to a boy who had never been off dry land in his life, said that I would not be allowed to go out on the ice but could watch the hunt from on board through binoculars. And he would read each day’s story and convey it in person to the telegrapher to make sure nothing was published that reflected badly on him or his crew.
My family came out to see me off and to witness the annual blessing of the sealing fleet by clergy of all denominations. Miss Garrigus was the only woman among them. As the clergy, their voices magnified by megaphones, prayed God to safeguard the officers and crew of the fleet and to reward them for their labour with a bountiful harvest, I stood, imitating the crew, in the rigging of the S.S. Newfoundland, though not as high up as most of them were. There must have been ten thousand people gathered down below, jammed to the water’s edge to see the fleet, which filled the harbour. Even with the vessels moored nose in, there was not enough room at dockside for all of them, so the rest had to anchor in mid-harbour, facing every which way. The pilot boats scooted about trying to organize the fleet’s departure.
When the blessing concluded, the crowd cheered, and from where we stood we waved our hats. The first of the sealing fleet followed the pilot boats. I watched from the rigging of the Newfoundland as the crowd ran en masse along the apron to join another crowd already gathered on the heights of Signal Hill, where they would watch the fleet make its way towards the ice floes of the northeast coast. As each sealing vessel cleared the Narrows, the noon-day gun on Signal Hill was fired, a blast that echoed back and forth between the north and south side of the city. And also, each of the ships, as it cleared the Narrows, unfurled its expansive sails and was suddenly transformed to white. There came up to me from below, mixed with the old smell of the bilge-water harbour; the new smell of diesel oil from the engines of the biggest steamships. Oil and coal and sail together could barely move these boats now when they were empty of everything but men and boys. They would come back weighted down to the gunnels, inching along with their cargoes of seal pelts and whitecoats.
At an order from Captain Kean to hoist the sails, I climbed down from the rigging. The men of the Newfoundland pitched in, straining on the ropes, in some cases jumping and hanging in midair to make a sail unfurl. A light cold rain was falling but there was not much wind. Still, as the sails caught the breeze, the massive boom came swinging round and the men ducked expertly beneath it as a sealer who shouted “Low on deck” pulled me down beside him just in time. I looked up. The great soot-begrimed expanse of canvas flapped loudly overhead, black smoke billowed backwards from the stack below midship and the Newfoundland picked up speed as it bore down on the ice outside the Narrows.
The crew was divided into four groups, watches they were called. I was assigned, at my request, to the fourth watch, which I was told rose at four in the morning. I fancied that the daily routine of this watch would most nearly resemble my own. Each watch was assigned a master who supervised the men on and off the ship.
There were fathers and sons, brothers, in-laws, friends, little factions with distinctive accents, in some cases distinctively incomprehensible ones, who talked exclusively among themselves. There were a few “youngsters,” young men my age on their first voyage to the ice, eager to prove they could keep up with the older men and incredulous with scorn when they heard of my confinement to the ship.
I had been worried how I would be received among the sealers. Most of them did not begrudge me having it “easy,” as it seemed to them I did. On the contrary, one of the older men said quite sincerely that it was a credit to me that I had made something of myself. Most regarded me with a kind of shy awe when they heard what I was doing. They could not read or write and had never met someone whom they perceived to be the epitome of reading and writing, a newspaper man.
“What did ya write about us today, now?” they asked me the first few days, as we made our way through the ice to the whelping grounds. I would read them what I wrote.
“Sher if yer not goin’ over de side of ’er,” a young fellow from Catalina said, “’ow ’re ya gonna know what goes on out on dee ice?” They all laughed when I took out from beneath my pillow my binoculars and scanned the sleeping quarters as I planned to scan the ice each day.
The sealers wore thick-soled leather boots, many of which bore the name of Smallwood. These boots were studded with sharp spikes called sparables. They dressed in thick woollen underwear and trousers and put on as many tattered shirts and guernseys as they could, but no overcoats, for they would have been too much of an encumbrance. Each of them had a set of oil clothes but never wore them or even took them when they left the ship unless it looked like it might rain or snow. They tracked out to the whelping grounds with their gaffs held horizontally like staffs in case the ice gave way beneath their feet.
From as high up in the rigging as I dared to go, I watched them work, swinging their sharp-pointed gaffs like pickaxes, killing the seals and swiftly pelting them with knives that gleamed like razors in the sun. Beginning a few hundred feet from the ship and extending as far as I could see, the ice was red with blood. They dragged piles of pelts back along the same route each time, so that a single trail of gore led like a road from the blood field to the ship. Most of the carcasses were left behind and only the pelts, the fat-lined fur, brought back to the ship. An ice-field after a day’s cull was littered for miles with carcasses, which the next day were set upon by a flock of seagulls and other birds that followed us throughout the voyage.
Everywhere there were patches of open water, massive pools of green slush that the sealers crossed, “copied,” by jumping without hesitation from one floating ice pan to the next, often having to snag a pan with a gaff to pull it closer to them. The few that fell in and were hauled out hurried back to the ship, their clothing frozen stiff by the time they arrived.
My watch, which hit the ice at five in the morning, did not come back to the ship until eight at night. I was not used to a workday near that long, and so I was incredulous when I found out that they had several more hours of work to do on board before they were through.
They gathered fresh ice for drinking water, covered the pelts, shifted coal from the hold to the bunkers near the engine room, disposed of the ash from the coal already burnt, tipped great cauldrons of it over the side.
At about eleven, they were at last allowed to eat, which they did as swiftly as possible, for there was by this time barely four hours before their watch began again. They cooked seal meat over a barrel that, with its top cut off, formed a kind of spit. The only part of their meal I could not bring myself to eat was “lop scouse,” half oatmeal gruel, half seal stew, which they dipped into with rock-hard cakes of “tack” bread, washing the whole vile mixture down with tea.
The last thing before bed, they filled the ship’s lanterns with seal oil, the smoke from which smelled faintly fish-like and burned my eyes so badly that I lay face down in my pillow, coming up to breathe only when I had to.
They crawled into their makeshift wooden bunks and most of them were instantly asleep, which was a blessing, for unlike me they seemed not to notice that our sleeping quarters hung so heavy with coal dust it was barely possible to breathe. The floors, their bunks, their clothing, which they did not waste sleeping time by changing out of, were smeared with blood, fat, soot, ashes, coal dust.
While the fourth watch slept, the other watches worked. There was never a time when the ship was idle. The hatch by which the coal was raised up from the hold passed within a few feet of the bunks, which were therefore exposed to the open sky and whatever might be falling from it. By way of another hatch, which also went straight past our bunks but on the other side, seal pelts were dropped down to the second hold, some falling off the chute and straight into the bunks of the sealers, who were so deep in sleep they did not stir and often woke up in the morning covered with the bloody pelts.
All night long as I lay in my bunk, coal went up and pelts came down, the coal winch grinding loudly, the seal pelts spattering gore everywhere as they went sliding down the chute.
I went three full nights without a wink of sleep and finally decided that I would sleep during the afternoon, when all the watches overlapped, when the fourth watch was most likely to be out of range of my binoculars and when the sleeping quarters were empty and the coal crank and the pelt chute in least use.
At night, I lay awake on my bunk, as did some of the sealers who, in spite of their exhaustion or perhaps because of it, could not get to sleep. I think some of them resisted sleep just to experience the luxury of idleness, of doing nothing but lying on their bunks while others worked. They lay with their hands behind their heads as, in the darkness, they puffed reflectively on cigarettes or pipes. They cocked their heads in acknowledgment when they saw me looking at them, but that was all. Despite all the noise, talking was forbidden after midnight.
Sometimes the men were on the ice until well into the night, as long as there were enough seals to keep all the watches busy at once. I remember the eerie sight of the sealers setting out across the ice bearing lanterns and torches. On each spotlit patch of ice, one sealer, crouching, held a torch that illuminated a seal over which another sealer stood with gaff upraised.
When enough seals had been killed to sustain them, bonfires were built with carcasses doused with seal oil until the air was filled with the smell of roasting seal meat, on which the men covertly feasted while they worked. It was an elemental, soul-disturbing sight, yet I longed to somehow be a part of it, to feel something other than the planks of the S.S. Newfoundland beneath my feet. But Captain Kean was adamant that if I set foot on the ice, I would no longer have the use of his telegrapher.
It was just as well, I decided. Even if I were to forsake my purpose for coming and go over the side, I would have no idea what to do and would either soon look foolish or be dead, never having copied in my life. I might wind up on some strand of ice and have to be rescued, or have a gaff thrust in my hand and be unable to kill a seal, to raise the gaff and bring it down with the kind of resolve necessary to the task. Captain Kean was right. Better I confine myself to some pursuit where words alone would do and leave to others, like these men, the deeds that I would write about.
I sat on the gunnels, one hand on a rope lest I fall over, a puny, bespectacled spectator. And out of the lantern-lit darkness came the sound of the seals, a sound as if a hundred yelping hounds had flushed a fox.
I wrote stories that made sealing sound like hard but wholesome work. It was the only kind of story I could get by Captain Kean. But the men didn’t seem to mind. They listened intently when I read aloud and afterwards said, “That was very good, sir, very good,” as if I had described their life exactly as it was. Or, as I eventually realized, as if they believed the point of writing was to render the world in a manner so benign that to read about it would be a pleasant way to pass the time. Because I was the one writing the stories, and because I was not sure how they would take it, I did not try to set them straight.
They were too tired to pay much attention to me anyway, too caught up in the delirium of sealing, the endless hours of work, the noise and confinement of the ship, which provided only the illusion of comfort and asylum, the stark white icescape that, if not for their wooden goggles, would have blinded them. At bedtime, bottles of patent medicine were passed around, but that was all the drinking that was done. You could not drink much and hope to keep up the pace, let alone survive. They appeared to be caught up in some profound reflection as they ate and as they drank their tea, though I doubt they had the energy to sustain a line of thought.
I got to know barely a dozen of them by name before the time for learning names was over. But they all knew my name, and they still smiled when their eyes met mine. They liked to have in their midst a kind of mascot layabout from whose life of ease they could derive some vicarious relief.
I think they were whelmed into self-absorption in part from being the agents of a slaughter of such magnitude, killing constantly from sun-up past sundown. This was not like fishing, which is what most of them did the rest of the working year, not a mass capture of insensible creatures from another element. The death of each seal was individual, the result of a single act committed by a single person at close quarters, an act in which I was certain they took no joy and which they would happily have forsaken if to do so would not also have meant forsaking the few pennies that stood between their families and starvation. “Over the side,” Captain Kean roared when a patch of seals was spotted, and over the gunnels with their gaffs the sealers went. I had the feeling it was an order they would no more have refused than they would an order to attack in time of war.
The storm came up about noon, seven hours after the men of the fourth watch hit the ice. I saw it coming, a slow encroachment of white so gradual that it blended with the sky and looked like fog. The captain saw it, too, and sent out a party of six men to find the fourth watch. At first there was not much wind, just heavy snow and sleet, ice pellets clicking and gathering like rock-salt on the deck. I watched the six men as they followed the gore-trail out of sight. The storm worsened quickly, as the wind, having changed direction several times, blew with great conviction from the east. An hour later, the search party returned, without the watch. The storm was in so close, I did not see them or hear them until they were a few feet from the rail.
The first mate took me below, telling me I could stay with his watch until it was time to bunk down, when I would have to go to my own watch as there were no spare berths in any of the others. I didn’t complain that this would mean sleeping alone in quarters that could hold a hundred men, or ask him why he could not send half the men from his watch down to mine. I knew he did not want me to be with the men unless he, or one of the mates in front of whom they-would not dare speak their minds, was there as well.
We were too far from open water for the wind to cause enough turbulence beneath the ice to rock the ship, but the entire ice-field drifted west until, its far edge having hit the land that was sixty miles away, it could go no farther and it began to press together and to close about the ship, whose wooden hull groaned and creaked and at times snapped loudly as if it were giving way, though as none of the sealers looked too concerned, I pretended not to be. For the first time on the voyage, the hatch was closed and it was warm enough in the ship to wear what you would around the house. The sealers stripped down to their coveralls, drank tea, smoked cigarettes. For the first time, too, the din of the coal crank and the sound of seal pelts chuting down into the hold stopped. There was not much talking done. Everyone knew the fourth watch was not on board. There was speculation, stifled by the first mate, that they might have made it to the Stephano, a ship skippered by Captain Westbury’s father, Abe Kean. But this ship had no telegraph, so there was no way to be sure.
The first mate declared lights out at nine o’clock. If the storm let up, he said, a search might start as soon as three.
I went back to the sleeping quarters of the fourth watch, the door of which the first mate closed emphatically behind me as if to say, “Stay put.”
I sat on my bunk. At first, all I could hear was the droning of the wind, which at times rose to a shrieking whistle and stayed that way for minutes, a gust so long you forgot it was a gust until it passed. Then I was able to make out the strange noise the rigging ropes made at full vibration, a whirring that would have made it impossible to sleep even had I not been wondering where the men and boys might be.
Dear Smallwood:
You may be safer in that ship than I am in this house. You must be warmer, for a ship as drafty as this house would sink in seconds.
The electric lights are out. And it’s freezing. Because it’s not safe to light the fires, all the chimney flues are closed. With each upsurge of the wind, the lantern flickers and the papers on my desk, though weighted down, turn up at the corners.
I asked my father if he thought the sealing fleet was safe. He said that as far as he knew, the ice-field extended for a hundred miles from shore, so it was doubtful that any of the ships were riding out the storm in open water.
But so many ships have sunk because their hulls were crushed by ice. What if you were forced to abandon ship? You might as well be sheltering from fire.
There seems to be no limit to how hard the wind can blow. It’s hard to imagine a wind like this with nothing to impede it, no hills, buildings, houses, trees; hard to imagine it screaming along unresisted for a hundred miles or more before it hits your ship.
Sealing ships often batten down and wait out storms like this, my father told me. “Why are you suddenly so concerned about the sealing fleet, anyway?” he said.
He doesn’t know. I hardly know myself. I snapped at him, asked him how any decent person could be so unconcerned. “There’s nothing I can do for them,” he said.
There’s nothing I can do either. I will not be bullied into praying. Why would any God raise such a storm? Can it be that you will perish in a storm at sea before the age of twenty? Why should the wind blow so hard if all it wants to do is sink a ship?
I can’t believe you are out there.
I can’t believe anyone is out there on the ice tonight.
I spent three days like this, with the first mate’s watch from morning until nine at night and alone from nine until morning. During the day, there was a whiteness as absolute, as obliterative, as pitch-black darkness. No one was allowed on deck for even there it was possible to lose your way. The obliterations alternated, white and dark and white and dark again.
On the third day, when we looked through the porthole at mid-morning, we saw something other than the single shade of white we had become accustomed to — the many subtle shades of white that comprised the ice-field.
It was several hours more before the master watch came down and told me to go to my sleeping quarters.
I did as he said. I heard the boiler being fired up and felt the ship begin to move through the ice pack, which had loosened because the wind had changed.
About three o’clock in the afternoon, they found what they were looking for. Far off on the ice, I saw a couple of dozen men trudging about in a circle. The shout no sooner went up that the men of the Newfoundland were found than the ship’s whistle shrieked in celebration. I looked out through the porthole, but that side of the ship was at too oblique an angle to the rescue site. As the ship ploughed on through the ice, however, the stem slowly drifted starboard and I was able to see round the curvature of the hull. The men were not a hundred feet away, still tramping in a circle as if even the ship’s whistle had not roused them, each man with his hand on the shoulder of the man in front. They were so coated in snow I could not tell what they were wearing or make out their faces, which were rimed with frost. Most of them were limping badly; outside the circle was a man walking an even slower circle of his own and at the same time holding beneath the armpits another man whose feet made a feeble step now and then but otherwise dragged behind him on the ice.
As we drew closer to them, some of them at last noticed the ship and stopped walking. Some dropped to their knees or toppled over onto their backs, others stared as if they doubted that what they saw was real. The crew poured over the side and led the sealers or carried them on stretchers to the ship.
We moved on. I had counted twenty-three men. That left eighty unaccounted for. I stayed at the porthole. The ship came hard about, and for half an hour we crashed on through the ice, then stopped again.
My heart rose when I saw what looked to be the balance of the crew standing on a mile-wide ice pan in the near distance. From on deck, there were shouts of “Hurray” and footsteps thumped on the ceiling overhead as once again the ship’s whistle sounded.
Gradually we drew up close to the ice pan. Mooring lines with grapnels on the end were cast onto the ice, and the pan was slowly pulled towards the ship until it thumped against it.
For several minutes after the ship stopped, no one disembarked. I saw what I had not been able to through my binoculars: that these were not survivors but a strange statuary of the dead. I was not repulsed by what I saw. I could not take my eyes away.
Two men knelt side by side, one man with his arm around the other, whose head was resting on his shoulder in a pose of tenderness between two men that I had never seen in life.
Three men stood huddled in a circle, arms about each other’s shoulders, heads together like schoolboys conferring on a football field.
A man stood hugging himself, his hands on his arms, shoulders hunched, in the manner of someone who has momentarily stepped out of his house into the cold in shirtsleeves to bid a guest goodbye.
One man knelt, sitting back on his heels, while another stood behind him, his hands on his shoulders, as if they were posing for a photograph.
Two sealers stood in a fierce embrace, the taller man with both arms wrapped round the other, holding him against his chest, while the arms of the shorter man hung rigid at his sides.
Four men lay on their stomachs side by side, all facing the same way as if they had lain down for some purpose or agreed together that they would.
Only a few men knelt or lay alone, perhaps those who had lasted longer than the others.
One man sat by himself, his elbows resting on his drawn-up knees, his bare hands frozen to his face.
The storm had started out as freezing rain. A man who must have been among the first to fall lay encased within a mould of silver thaw.
I later learned that some who, in their delirium, thought they saw a light ran off in pursuit of it and were never found.
Joined in some manner of embrace were men who before this journey to the ice had never met, men who had outlasted those they knew best and for warmth or fellowship in death embraced some stranger.
They were all there, the boys too young and the men too old, who to get a berth had lied about their ages or agreed to half a share; boys younger than me and men older than my father.
Perhaps, too tired to walk but still standing, they had been buried in snow that had blown away when the storm let up, by which time they were rooted in the ice that lay like pedestals about their feet.
Some men lay in the lee of a low shelter they had managed to erect, a wall of ice and snow that was barely three feet high.
I recognized a few of them, but only because of some distinctive article of clothing, like the orange watch cap of the man who every morning made the tea. He lay on his side, his knees drawn up almost to his chest, his head resting on his hands, which were clasped in a prayer-like pillow, palm to palm.
They had been transformed by their passion on the ice. Each had assumed in death some posture emblematic of his life. Or else they were refined to men that no one knew, as if in each face and posture was inscrutably depicted the essence of the person they had been.
Everywhere lay evidence of futile acts of courage and self-sacrifice. A man stripped down to his undershirt and coveralls lay prone beside a boy bulked out in two sets of clothes.
In various places the snow was scorched where small fires had been lit. From each a smudge of soot trailed out, a stain left from the smoke that had been flattened by the wind.
I did not want to see them moved or see the scene disturbed. I closed the porthole and sat down on my bunk.
I heard above the wind and the droning of the ropes the sound of ice being hacked and chopped. I heard the coal crank of the hatch at the far end of the ship lurch into motion. The chopping and shouting and winching of the crank went on for hours. When it stopped, I considered opening the porthole but could not bring myself to do it.
I looked around the sleeping quarters at all the empty bunks. Not all the men had been lost. Not every bunk represented a man who would not be going home. It was impossible to tell which ones did. Three-quarters of them did, but I didn’t know which ones. Except for the bunk of the man who made the tea.
Something deep within me, which I hadn’t known was there, gave way. My body grieved but not my mind. I felt as though someone who was sitting right beside me was crying, and though I wanted to console him, I could not.
I felt the ship reach open water. The grinding of the ice against the hull ceased suddenly, the keel rocked from side to side until it balanced and we moved smoothly on. I got up and pounded on the door to be let out. As if, in all the commotion, I had been forgotten, I heard the sound of footsteps running. The hatch slid open and I saw the sky.
The wind was northerly, offshore, so we could smell the land despite the fresh fall of snow. I had never sailed beyond the smell of the land before and so had never sailed back into it like this. Six weeks we had been at sea. A week longer than it took Cabot to sail from Bristol to Cape Bonavista. I could not only smell the land but also taste it in the air, the coppery metallic taste of rock borne by the wind across the ice. And soon I could smell the city and see the blue haze of woodsmoke in the sky. The Basilica of St. John the Baptist loomed up from the cluster of the buildings on the hill. I could not believe that the city and the ice were of one world. The city looked so reasonable, so plausible, a site in which atrocities not only did not take place, but which also somehow prevented them from taking place elsewhere.
I looked up and saw the signalman waving his flags from his bunker on the hill above the Narrows, waving to the keeper of the lighthouse at Fort Amherst and to the captains of the pilot boats. The foghorn blew from then until we docked, and minutes after the foghorn started the bells of both basilicas began to ring.
Word that we had picked up the men of the S.S. Newfoundland reached St. John’s just hours before we arrived early in the afternoon. No one knew at that point how many had died. It was known only that some had survived and some had not. There were rumours, too: one that the Newfoundland alone had ridden out the storm, and that on board her were men who were saved from other ships. Women who did not know their husbands had died consoled women whose husbands had survived.
Our sails were down, our flags at half-mast as we steamed slowly through the ice, leaving behind us a wake of open water that stretched for miles. I stood by myself on deck. Above me, in the massive scaffolding of masts and spars and rigging ropes, were the small figures of men motionless and stark against the sky, a uniformly grey, after-storm sky that would persist for days. They stood on the horizontal spars as we had after the blessing of the fleet, a hundred feet at least above the ice, hands gripping the rope ladders in which other men sat as though on children’s swings. Black smoke billowed from the towering smokestack halfway between mid-ship and the stern. The ship was under full throttle but barely moving, so thick and compressed was the ice. But at last we broke through the raft ice near the Narrows. The men in the rigging, who at this point would normally have clambered down, remained aloft.
Twice as many people as had turned out for the blessing of the fleet were on the waterfront. It looked as if the entire population of the island, ordered to evacuate, were awaiting the arrival of some massive ship. They had come ill-dressed from their row houses on the heights, down hills so steep that even when the ground was bare you could hardly keep from running. On this day it was so slippery that it was better to walk up to your knees in snow than risk the streets. They had come well-dressed from the valley sides and from the homes along the city streams, and in leather aprons and overalls from the factories of Water Street and the cod-crammed stores of Harbour Drive. There were so many people that some could get no closer to the harbour than the “coves,” the little streets that from Water Street led down to the apron. They stood on rooftops, on ledges, hung out of windows in threes and fours.
We docked at the berth the pilot-boat captains had cleared when they heard the ship was coming. Even the sheltered harbour was partly clogged with ice because of the storm, but a passage had been cleared from the Narrows to the apron.
The crowd was eerily silent at first, but all at once there was an anxious babble of queries, pleas for reassurances and a murmuring of rumours and conjecture. I saw no one I recognized, though I found out later that many people who had come out to meet me were there, my family, my publisher, Fielding. All that had sustained my mother through the storm was the knowledge that I was not allowed to leave the ship.
When the gangplank was lowered, the ’Stab made room for a handful of thick-moustached men in bowler hats and heavy overcoats, officials of the company that owned the Newfoundland. First, the injured were removed. Two sealers carried a man with heavily bandaged hands and a face blistered with frostbite down the gangplank on a stretcher. He held his hands gingerly above his chest and stared at them, seemingly oblivious to the crowd through which the sealers bore him to a covered Red Cross cart. Men all but mummified in bandages were carried off on stretchers. A few were greeted by relatives weeping with relief, but most, not being from St. John’s, were merely gawked at. Only when a pair of sealers rashly took it upon themselves to roll back the tarpaulin that covered the hold did those at the front of the crowd see what the company that owned the S.S. Newfoundland had ordered that no one be allowed to see.
“Put that tarp back on, for God’s sake,” Captain Wes Kean roared. The two men hastily rolled the tarp back into place. “What is it?” people said. A man blessed himself, and along the edge of the apron men and women dropped to their knees and leaned their arms on the wooden beams along the dock.
Word of what had been seen spread through the crowd. People related to crew members of the S.S. Newfoundland fought to get closer while the constabulary at last linked arms and would not let them through. “Did Andrew Hodder make it?” an old man shouted up to the men who still stood on the cross-spars of the ship. Everyone stared up at them. I did. I expected them to know the answer to the question. They were like birds perched among the leafless branches of a tree. “Does anybody know if Andrew Hodder made it?” the old man said again, as if he could not fathom their silence.
Soon such questions were being shouted from throughout the crowd, hopefully, despairingly. The men in the rigging seemed to look beyond the crowd at the city that stretched out behind it. A member of the ’Stab climbed the first few rungs of the rigging rope on the mainmast and asked that the immediate families of the crew of the S.S. Newfoundland proceed to the Harvey, and Company warehouse. “Immediate families only,” he shouted.
The rest of us stood still and watched as, wide-eyed with bewilderment and dread, the suddenly conspicuous relatives slowly made their way eastward down the apron, the onlookers parting to let them through and to see them better. The man who had blessed himself wandered off with his hand on the near shoulder of a woman who walked, head down, beside him.
I rushed off the ship, ran down the gangplank into the crowd, who clutched at me, begging me for news. The earth was so suddenly solid and motionless beneath my feet that my legs buckled. I would have fallen had I not been so hemmed in. When I was deep enough into the crowd that none of the people I was passing had seen me leave the ship, I slowed down, tried to catch my breath and, when I couldn’t, began to run again. My ability to suspend belief in my own mortality was for the moment gone. Death, who I had thought would stay on board, who I had thought was on the ship only because the sealers were, was right behind me.
Once I was out of the crowd, a spell of dizziness hit me like a gust of wind. I stumbled backwards and almost fell, lurched against the side of a warehouse, hands on the wall, head hung, shoulders heaving. I turned my back to the sea and the ship and looked up at the stunted, wind-levelled spruce trees of the Brow.
In the days to come, I and all the newspaper reporters of St. John’s pieced together the story of the men of the S.S. Newfoundland. They were caught out on the ice because they had had been sent away from the Stephano, the ship that was nearest to them when the storm began, sent back to their own vessel by Captain Abram Kean, father of the Newfoundland’s skipper, Westbury. They had no hope of finding their ship and must have known it, but they had uncomplainingly set off in search of it anyway, with snow and darkness coming on. They had left the Newfoundland lightly dressed, for the plan was that they would be back on board before the sun went down. They were fifty-eight hours on the ice without fuel, food or shelter.
I thought often of the men of the S.S. Newfoundland. I was haunted by the image of them turning compliantly about when Kean told them to, preferring to risk the blizzard than defy him, setting out on their doomed walk across the ice.
I thought of the second mate, George Tuff, the leader of the ice party who, though he knew the storm would soon be at full force, did not dare to even ask Kean to let them come aboard, let alone demand it. But I thought mostly of old man Kean, who was too miserly to offer those men the safety of his ship and sent them off to find his son’s ship rather than have them sit on his, eating his provisions and using up his oil and coal.
Aside from the above story, which we pieced together from the survivors, I wrote two stories, one about the living and working conditions of the sealers and the other about the last days of the few men whose names I knew. I could not write about the men I had seen on the ice. I tried to but could not.
Neither of the stories was published. The incident was officially investigated and petitions were circulated calling for the arrest of Abram Kean, but little came of it. The seal hunt continued and Kean went on to become the first sealing captain to cull a million seals.
Many people asked me about the S.S. Newfoundland, but the only person I spoke to about it was Fielding, who did not ask. My brothers and sisters asked. I knew my mother would have listened, but I could see she was praying that I would keep to myself whatever I had seen.
So I told Fielding, one night in my boarding-house. Told her as much as I could bear to tell her or find words for.
When I was finished, I shook my head, my mind reeling. “I don’t know,” I said.
“I don’t know either;” Fielding said. “Things happen to you, or you see things, and you change. And soon you can’t remember how things were before you changed. That’s the strangest part, I think. You know things used to be different, but you can’t remember how. I don’t think it happens to everyone. Some people stay the same no matter what. Or maybe they just seem to. I don’t know.”
For months after my return from the seal hunt, I had the feeling of having awoken from some unremembered dream. At night I lay awake as I had on the Newfoundland while the sealers slept through the ceaseless racket of the coal crank and the pelt chute. One night I had got up and removed from beside a sealer a pelt that had landed in his bunk. I had never touched a pelt before. The fat beneath the fur was inches thick, thicker and more unwieldy than the sod we ripped up from the field behind the house to plant a few potatoes. It was so heavy and so slippery I could barely move it. I had intended to throw it back in the chute but had to leave it on the floor. I remembered the feel of the pelt in my hands, my thumb on the fur, my fingers slick on the blubber underneath. My hands were bloodsoaked when I dropped the pelt; I wiped the palms flat on my thighs and on my shirt as I had seen the sealers do.
The dead of the Newfoundland were not even in the ground when the seal skinners, standing shoulder to shoulder along the waterfront, were skinning pelts on sloping tables at the foot of which lay tubs into which tumbled the hunks of blubber they hacked off with their knives. Once the sealskins were scraped clean, they would be sent to hide houses the world over, including a few in St. John’s. Someone somewhere would wear a sealskin hat made from a seal killed by a man from the S.S. Newfoundland.
It was while I was watching the skinners that Grimes approached me. He was so well-dressed that I took him for a merchant until I saw the little wooden wheelbarrow beside him. It was piled with blue pocket-sized books. He raised his bowler hat in greeting. “George Grimes,” he said. “Member of the House of Assembly.” He reached into the wheelbarrow and handed me a book.
“I am giving you this book,” he said, his tone formal, the words sounding rehearsed. “It is specially designed so that you can carry it with you anywhere you go. I want you to read it, and if, after doing so, you want to be a socialist, I want you to come see me at this address.” He handed me his card. Then he moved on and repeated his spiel to the person next in line.
“Who corrupted the Senate? The capitalists. Who fixes congressmen? The capitalists. Who purchased the Illinois state legislature? The capitalists. Who bought the St. Louis aldermen? The capitalists.”
So the Illinois state legislature and the St. Louis aldermen had been bought. I was outraged, though I could not have found either Illinois or St. Louis on a map. For years afterwards, whenever I heard the word capitalist, what came to mind was the St. Louis aldermen as I had pictured them when I was sixteen, a couple of dozen burgomasters sitting around in a circle, rubbing their hands together with glee at the prospect of being bought.
Then there were the counter-questions: “Who can stop corruption? The socialist. Who believes that all men really are created equal? The socialist. Who cares about the working man? The socialist.” After I read the closing paragraph of What’s So and What Isn’t, I believed that I had found my calling, a way to ensure that the deaths of the men of the S.S. Newfoundland might be redeemed: “A socialist is a man of destiny. He is the only man who has read the signs of the time. He is therefore invulnerable. He draws his shining lance and challenges the champions of every other economic thought to meet him in the arena of debate. And they slink away like whipped curs.”
That seemed like something worth being, a man someone like Abe Kean would slink away from like a whipped cur, an invulnerable, lance-wielding master of debate. It was all very well to want to be a journalist, but whose life could you save or even improve by writing for a newspaper?
I put this question to Fielding the next time she came to my boarding-house.
“To the best of my knowledge,” Fielding said, “I have never saved anyone’s life by writing for the Telegram, though I might save my own if I stopped.”
I showed her What’s So and What Isn’t, and she browsed through it, every so often drinking from her silver flask. “Well?” I said. “What do you think?” She drew breath as if to say something, looked at me, looked down at the book, shrugged.
“I suppose there might be something to it,” she said.
We went straight to Grimes’s house, and on his doorstep I earnestly declared to him our desire to become socialists. Fielding stood wordlessly beside me. “I want to be a socialist,” I said — “like you,” I would have added, except I didn’t want to sound presumptuous. I don’t know what I expected; I suppose to be welcomed into the fold with equal ardour.
“Step into the porch,” said Grimes. “I’ll be right back.” He closed the front door, opened the door to the hallway, stepped hastily inside, then closed the door.
Judging from its façade and what I had glimpsed of it when he opened the door, his house was as large and as well-appointed as my uncle Fred’s, which surprised me. As Fielding and I stood waiting in the porch, we heard voices inside, Grimes’s and that of a woman, his wife we presumed, with whom he seemed to be arguing, though the only word I could make out was the one with which she began every reply in a kind of “I will brook no dispute” tone, which was George.
Soon, the door to the hallway opened again and Grimes backed out, holding in his arms a box of books, fifty copies, he said, of What’s So and What Isn’t. As he was handing me the box, his wife poked her head out of the nearest room. I tipped my hat to her and Fielding said hello. She gave a grudging nod. She looked at me, as Fielding later put it, “as if she hoped you were not a measure of her husband’s standing in the world.” It would be a long time before I cut the kind of figure that would reassure the wives of my associates.
We never did get past the porch of Grimes’s house, though we spent a lot of time with him over the next few months. I started pressing copies of What’s So and What Isn’t on everyone I knew or met, and one week we joined Grimes in what he called his Sunday walkabout. It was his habit on Sundays to go from door to door, pitching socialism to the citizens of St. John’s. Fielding and I stood mute at his side like the socialist trainees that we were. At each house, he introduced us before reciting his speech, which mostly consisted of phrases pulled straight from John M. Work. Grimes stood on doorsteps and calmly and reasonably explained how the current economic system would be overthrown and another put in its place. And how would this come about? “Preferably by the ballot box,” Grimes said. “If necessary, by revolution. Do you have any questions? Very well, then. Good day to you, now.”
His manner and his message were so completely at odds that I don’t think people understood what he was advocating. It was hard to square Grimes with the picture of the socialist put forward by Work. “Any revolution,” Fielding said, “that depends upon Grimes drawing his shining lance will be a long time coming.”
It was true. He was the least ardent, most phlegmatic, deferential socialist I have ever met. No one would be put out or inconvenienced by Grimes’s revolution, let alone disenfranchised. I wondered if the Cause knew what its man in Newfoundland was like. In his arena of debate, the House of Assembly, where he ought to have been challenging the champions of other economic thought, he made speeches about the need for more jobs and better roads.
Mind you, I didn’t come off too well in comparison with John M. Work’s man of destiny either, in my tattered overcoat and hat and horn-rimmed glasses. We made quite a sight for a while, George Grimes and his post-adolescent aides-de-camp, Joe Small-wood and Sheilagh Fielding. There is a photograph of us from that time, standing on the waterfront with a group of grinning dock-workers we were trying to unionize behind us: the stolid Grimes in his bowler hat and tweed overcoat striking a statesman-like pose with both hands behind his back; me on one side of him like some bespectacled scarecrow, hawk-nosed, owl-eyed, Fielding incongruous on the other, smiling, one eye half-closed as though she is winking at the camera.
We succeeded in starting up a few locals of the international unions that Grimes was affiliated with, but inevitably, there was a falling out between us. I told him one day I was not content, as he was, to lay the groundwork for a revolution that I would never live to see. “Our day will come,” Grimes said, sounding like some preacher consoling his congregation with the promise that in some nebulous next life, things would be better. If I had known my Marx, I would have warned him against making a religion of socialism.
“But don’t you want to be there when it happens?” I said. “Don’t you want to be part of it?”
“I’m part of it now,” Grimes said.
“We’ll never get anywhere the way you’re going about it,” I said. Grimes looked at me with a kind of wistful fondness, as if I was just the latest in a long line of protégés who had become impatient with him and moved on; as if he had known all along that this would happen. “We’ll have to agree to disagree,” he said, holding out his hand to me and smiling. I fancied there was some principle at stake that was more important than friendship or politeness and refused to shake his hand, keeping both of mine in my pockets. On the verge of tears, blinking rapidly, I half turned away from him. Grimes, as if he assumed I had spoken for her, too, extended his hand to Fielding, who took it.
“We’ll meet and talk again,” he said, as if he was telling me that I should not let this refusal to shake his hand keep me from contacting him once I realized how foolish I had been.
“I’m sure we will,” said Fielding.
The docks, I decided, were where a true socialist should be, not canvassing from door to door.
All along the waterfront were the fish-merchant warehouses, where the salt cod was brought ashore, dried and stored and later stacked in the holds of ships bound for England, where it was consumed at ten times the rate per person that it was in Newfoundland. Barge cranes moved back and forth all day, loading, unloading stacks of salt cod the size of houses. The technology of preserving fish had not changed in five hundred years. Soak it in brine until its every fibre was so salt-saturated it would be safe from rot for years, then dry it in the open air.
Salt cod lay drying everywhere within several hundred feet of the harbour. The Battery, the fishing village within the city at the base of Signal Hill, where the rock was so solid that not even holes for outhouses could be dug, was paved with yellow cod. It lay on the rocks in backyards and on elevated fish-flakes near the water, raised up as though in some primitive funeral rite, cod split and cured in brine and set out to dry in arrowhead-like Vs. When it rained, everyone rushed out to turn the cod over so that the side with the rain-impervious, leather-like skin faced upward. Otherwise, the cod was spread out to the sky and whatever flew there, including gulls and crows who, as if to spite the fishermen for salting the cod past what even their palates could endure, shat on it from great heights. Not that it mattered, for you could not eat the cod anyway without soaking it for days in water and then boiling it for hours, after which it was still so salty that the least of the complaints that were brought against it was that once it had been smeared with birdshit. Still, though he brought it home for the others to eat, my father would not stoop to eating food treated so disdainfully by birds and dogs and everything that flew above or walked upon the earth.
All along the harbour, outside the white warehouses of the fish merchants, cod was spread out on the ground to dry. It was on every spare square inch of ground of what the merchants liked to call their premises. It was even spread on steps, with just enough room between the cod for men to walk toe to heel as though on two-by-fours. It was leaned slantwise against the buildings, spread on roofs that themselves were spread with tarp or old sails.
The cod lay airing on the ground through days of overcast and fog. On the rare sunny days, it was covered with flies that would rise up and settle down as you walked along, a single wave passing through this pool of flies, keeping perfect time with you. Inside the warehouses, the salt cod was stacked storeys high. To walk into a warehouse was to walk into a city of salt fish, columns of cod rising up like buildings between which there was barely room for a man to walk.
The docks reeked of the hybrid smell of fish and brine. The wind off the cod was so salty that it made me sneeze and my eyes run with water. Sometimes when I breathed the air, my throat turned to fire, and when I tried to speak, I had no voice, could get out only a rasping, rattling cough as if I had inhaled a chestful of smoke. I never did acquire the ability to tolerate the omnipresent smell of cod. Walking among it always made me long for the clean-aired elevation of the Brow.
Backing onto Water Street were the massive, all-white warehouses of the merchant families, warehouses that bore the names of their owners in huge block letters that you could read from the Brow. Also named after the merchants were the little side-streets that led from Water Street to Harbour Drive, the “coves,” inlets between the palisade of buildings. Gower’s Cove, Job’s Cove, Baird’s Cove, Harvey’s Cove, Crosby’s Cove. When you emerged from one of these coves, a gust of wind would hit you in the face as if you had just stepped outside from the cabin of a ship at sea.
The sealers, the fishermen, the barge-boat crews: it was workers such as these that could most benefit from socialism. I began making speeches on the waterfront. Fielding rounded up my audiences for me while I stood atop a crate, strode up and down the waterfront and gestured with her cane at sailors and stevedores who lined the rails of ships that were moored with hawser ropes thicker than my legs.
“Joseph Smallwood,” Fielding said, barker-fashion, reciting a pitch I had composed for her, “registered member of the International Socialist Party, will give a speech at three o’clock in Baird’s Cove, the likes of which you have never heard before and will never hear again and which none of you will soon forget.” Curious, bored, incredulous, they came down from the ships to hear me speak. Even at the age of sixteen, I could hold an audience, for a while at least.
“I am here,” I said, to the men two and three times my age who gathered round me while I stood atop an empty crate, “to tell you how to start a union and to explain to you the principles of socialism. I am here to tell you why your children never have enough to eat; why the men you work for pay you next to nothing; why some of you are risking your lives to keep rich men like the owners of the S.S. Newfoundland in smoking-jackets….” I had never seen a smoking-jacket in my life, but the heroes of Horatio Alger’s novels, which I read avidly, were always getting their first big break from men who wore them and afterwards aspired to wear one themselves, so I figured I was on safe ground. (I took to heart a curiously amended version of the Algeresque myth; I wanted to rise not from rags to riches, but from obscurity to world renown, and had chosen socialism as my best means of accomplishing this, thereby establishing as my mortal enemies the very characters who had inspired me to self-betterment in the first place.)
I always told the men that they were working to keep the rich in something; if Alger did not provide me with some item of frivolous affluence, then Fielding did. If it was not smoking-jackets, it was silver spittoons, gold cigarette cases, snifters of brandy, snuffboxes, satin slippers, Persian rugs. I got a roar of indignation from a crowd of stevedores by referring to some man’s “heirloom-laden house,” having no more idea than my listeners apparently had of what an heirloom was.
I once, at Fielding’s urging, denounced men whose “lives were spent in the acquisition of gewgaws and gimcracks.” This did not elicit any sort of response. “It was a good speech,” Fielding told me afterwards. “The rich of St. John’s will not be so quick to gather gewgaws and gimcracks in the future.”
One day, a man who was standing at the rail of a ship shouted down to Fielding as she made her way along the waterfront, drumming up an audience for me. “What are you doing down here, now, my dear?” He was a burly, balding redhead whose stomach stuck out between the rails as if his shirt and pants concealed a boulder. “Prohibitionist, are ya?” he said.
“Imbibitionist,” said Fielding.
He raised his eyebrows. “What’s that?” he said.
“I have come to release you from the shackles of ignorance,” said Fielding, “of which you seem to be burdened with more than your share.”
“Oh, I’ve got more than my share all right,” he said, rubbing his crotch to a chorus of guffaws from the other men along the rail. Fielding looked quickly away so they would not see her smile, which I was shocked to see her do. I ran along the dock towards her.
“That’s quite a cane,” I heard the man saying. “Big knob on it like that. Ya like big knobs, now, do ya?”
“Your wife must miss you terribly while you’re away,” Fielding shouted. “Still, I’m sure some kind soul helps her fill the void you leave behind.” The men laughed.
“That’s enough of that,” I said, shaking my fist at the redhead. He threw back his head and laughed.
“Fielding,” I said, “you shouldn’t carry on with them like that. Perhaps you shouldn’t be down here on the waterfront at all.”
“Is that your fella?” the redhead said. “That explains the cane —”
“I’ll explain something to you,” I shouted. Fielding put her hand on my shoulder and turned me away from the ship.
“Thank God you showed up when you did, Smallwood,” she said. “I think that man was on the verge of turning coarse. I don’t know what I would have done.”
“Very funny,” I said and, as if in retaliation, turned and shook my fist at the redhead. “Come down here and you’ll get your explanation.”
“No offence,” she said, turning me about with one hand, “but I think he’s had more experience with giving explanations than you have. Let’s just get out of here and let him think he scared us off.”
I was twenty when I told Fielding I was going to New York. I had got nowhere promoting socialism and, after reading John Reed’s Ten Days That Shook the World and finding out that he had once worked for the Call, the New World socialist newspaper that was located in New York, I received what Fielding described as “my call to the Call”
“It would mean a great deal to me if you came along,” I said. It was the closest to declaring affection for her I had ever come.
“New York?” she said.
“Yes,” I said. “New York.”
“I’m not sure — I’m not sure that I’m ready for New York,” said Fielding.
“Do you mean because your mother lives there?” I said. Almost imperceptibly, she shook her head.
“Then there’s only one way to find out if you’re ready for it,” I said. She looked more troubled by my invitation than it seemed to me she should have been, even if she meant to decline it.
“Are you worried about leaving your father alone?” I said.
“My father has been alone all his life,” said Fielding.
“Don’t tell me you’re afraid to quit your job,” I said. “It’s not like we’re making any money. That’s why there’ll always be newspaper jobs. No one else wants them.”
Fielding nodded distractedly. “You’re going for certain?” she said. “You didn’t tell me you were thinking about it.” I shrugged. So that was it, I thought, flattered. She was sad that I was leaving. I felt a pleasant hurt of fondness for her in my throat. It surprised me. That fleeting look of tenderness was in her eyes, that wistfulness I had seen the day we met at Bishop Feild. It was as if, for an instant, she had stepped outside her life and was seeing everyone in it from a perspective that in a few moments, she would be unable to recall. I wondered how, in those few moments, she regarded me. And I wondered if this feeling that I had for her, this curious affection, might be love.
She blinked rapidly, and for an awkward few moments I thought she was going to cry. Now she looked panicked, as she had at the Feild when I alluded to her estranged parents and when Slogger Anderson taunted Prowse into proving he was not afraid to flog her.
“When are you leaving?” she said at last. I told her in two weeks; I had given notice at the Telegram that day.
She shook her head. “I couldn’t — you see, I couldn’t make it by then,” she said. “Maybe sometime after that, I’m not sure. I’d have to be sure before I —”
“Is there something you need help with here?” I said. “I could stay —”
“No, no,” Fielding said, “there’s nothing. Really. I’d have to be sure in my mind, that’s all, you see. In my mind. I’d have to think about it for a while.”
“All right, then,” I said. “But I bet you’ll decide in time to go with me.”
She extended her hand to me, awkwardly, formally. I was gratified to see that there were tears in her eyes.
“I don’t expect I’ll see you before you go.”
I forced a laugh. “I’m not going for another two weeks,” I said.
“No,” she said. “I know. But from now until then New York is all you’ll talk about, you’ll keep trying to convince me, and I don’t want to feel pressured.”
“Well —” I said, trying to laugh again, “if that’s the way you want it. I’ll see you in New York.”
“You really want me to go?” she said. I nodded. “What are we, Smallwood?” she said. “You and I. What are we?”
“What do you mean?” I said, though I knew what she meant.
I was about to tell her I would write her from New York as soon as I got there when she turned around and walked quickly away from me, her cane thudding in the gravel.