The sun rose in a blood-red sky. It was the last day of March, and the air was soft with spring. There was a light southerly breeze with a tendency to back to the east, bringing the barest hint of rawness. The barometer on the Stephano at 5 A.M. stood at 29.60.
The Florizel, Bonaventure, and Stephano already had men killing seals, and Frededrick Yetman, second hand to Captain Abram Kean, on duty in the barrel, noted that the Newfoundland was in the same place as yesterday, obviously jammed, five or six miles to the south-east. The Florizel and Bonaventure were to the east in the heavy ice, almost within gunshot of each other. Their men were working the same patches. Further south, beyond the Newfoundland, the Bellaventure was steaming through loose ice.
Whitecoats were bawling all around, and it was barely light when the Stephano began working north-west through the small ice as the Old Man dropped his men in patches of seals with an encouraging bellow, “Go on, me sons!” By 7 A.M., the last watch had been dropped, and the Stephano turned about, heading for the seals she had panned the day before.
As they steamed among their crimson flags to the west of the bulge of heavy ice, Yetman could see the flag they had left in the heavy ice the day before, bearing east-south-east a couple of miles. They were now much nearer to the Newfoundland, which lay about four miles away, he thought. She showed no signs of activity.
Having reached his most southerly pan, Captain Kean now turned the Stephano about and steamed slowly north-west picking up panned seals. It was at this time that they saw to the southwest, off her port beam, another patch of seals, a mile or two away—fourteen hundred to fifteen hundred the Old Man estimated, but since his crews were working to the northward, he decided to leave them until later.
Gradually, they worked to the north-west, stowing down their pelts. Yetman was sure they had not missed any pans and that all their flags were back on board, with the exception of the single flag left inside the edge of the heavy ice the day before, marking the single pan of pelts taken just before they had discovered the Main Patch. He was wrong. There was at least one other flag that they had missed, and it seems likely that there were two.
By 8 A.M. the barometer had fallen to 29.50.
Before sun-up Wes had been in the barrel scanning the horizon for the position of the other ships. The Florizel and Bonaventure were, he estimated, seven or eight miles northward; the Stephano was nearer—four or five miles; the Bellaventure was well to the south, heading northward through loose ice beyond the edge of the Arctic pack. She would have no trouble getting into the fat, he thought enviously.
It promised to be a soft morning, spring-like, but he had no time to admire the weather. The barometer outside his cabin was standing far above 30, and that was enough for him. Quickly, he reviewed his plan of the night before. He wondered about the younger master watches, how well they could be trusted at such a distance from the ship. Now if George Tuff were in charge of the hunt …
As second hand, Tuff was in charge of the ship’s operation and did not have to go on the ice with the men. Wes had no right to ask him to do it. Tuff now had his eye glued to the spy-glass, trained on the ships to the north. The ice between them, he noted, was swarming with men, a sure sign that they were into a big patch of seals. He did not notice the disc of the sun rising above the glittering white rim of the ice-field behind him or the small patch of cloud gathered there.
As Wes took the glass from his second hand for another survey of the ice, he noted uncomfortably that the men were going to have rough going before they could reach the seals. He had never seen ice more ragged and rafted than that lying to the north-west of his ship. After half a mile or so they would be clambering over pressure ridges all the way. Still, they could do it, though it might slow them for an hour or two.
“It’s hard to see the other ships right in the thick o’ the swiles, and us not able to reach ’em, George,” he said to the second hand.
“No trouble to walk to ’em, Cap’n,” Tuff said. “I’ve walked farthern than that many a time.”
“You mean you’d go, and lead the men?”
“Gladly, Cap’n.”
“It’s a good distance.”
Tuff scoffed. “We’ve walked at least twice as far as that fer seals.”
Wes breathed a sigh of relief. He had not asked Tuff to go. Tuff had volunteered.
“All right, George. You go down and lead the men.”
Charles Green was in the cabin when Wes and Tuff entered. On deck the common hands were busy preparing for the hunt, coiling tow ropes over their shoulders, testing the edges of knives, filling sacks with hard tack, rolled oats and raisins. In the cabin Green listened as Wes and Tuff made their plans.
“Make straight fer the Stephano, George. From there ye’ll be able to find out exactly where the seals are. Father will send ye to them. I can’t give you any orders as to what ye’ll do when ye get there. I’ll leave it all with ye. Once ye’re away from the ship ye’ll have to work out yer own plans.”
It was a grave responsibility, but Tuff accepted it lightly, and the three men went topside into the bustle and noise of the deck.
“In case ye get into the seals, and are panning for any length o’ time, ye reckon on the Stephano for the night,” Wes cautioned. This remark was heard by Green, but Tuff’s attention was already with the men now going over the side, and apparently he did not hear the captain.
By 6 A.M. the sun was veiled, and to Captain Charles Green the sky looked threatening, in spite of the balmy air. The soft breeze was still blowing from the south, but he privately thought that it was not going to be a fine day for long.
A few old hands who knew the weather signs squinted at the hazy sun and noted with distaste twin reflections of yellowish light, like minor suns, one on either side. Stephen Jordan remarked on it. “Sun hounds,” he said. “Never boded no good, sun hounds …” But most sealers thought the slight haze in the sky of no significance. They had more important things to think about.
John Howlett had been on duty all that night hauling coal out of the hold for the stokers. Now at 6 A.M. he was eating breakfast, listening to the bustle of men preparing for the hunt, and wondering whether he should join them. He soon made up his mind. He wanted seals as badly as anyone; he was young, and lack of sleep hardly bothered him; he would go. When he went on deck he, too, noted the sun hounds. By this time they had changed formation, looking rather like a skein of knotted wool, one knot on either side of the sun.
Some of the sealers, he noted, were removing heavy jackets and extra guernseys, and ducking below to tuck them into their bunks. Walking in this weather was going to be warm work and most of them were dressed for it in short jackets and woollen caps. A few more were taking bearings on the Stephano with cheap pocket compasses. Tuff, seeing to it that they carried enough ropes and flagpoles, was hustling them over the side. He himself did not have a compass, since his duties were supposed to be confined to the ship, but the four master watches were each supposed to carry one from the ship’s stores. Master Watch Arthur Mouland discovered, too late, that he had left his compass on board ship. It was the first time in his life he had gone on the ice without one.
The wooden deck of the Newfoundland had begun to steam in the warmth of the sun when Wes Kean ordered them away from the ship at 7 A.M.
“Get ready to follow your master watch,” he bellowed from the bridge. “The master watches will follow the second hand.”
Tuff, complete with snow goggles (he had been ice-blind before), led off, and soon the bustle and confusion died away as the men fell in, one behind the other, for their winding trek across the floes.
From the bridge Wes Kean watched his men heading for the heavy ice, and let his gaze wander around the horizon to the Bellaventure working easily to the south. She was enveloped, he noted, in a kind of dancing heat haze, and suddenly he had second thoughts about the weather. He rushed down to consult the barometer, and it reassured him, registering “fair weather.” The old glass had not been checked for years, but it had served him well, and he had no worries about its accuracy.
Green also checked the glass, then went to the cabin to write up the log. The glass had fallen by 20 tenths, he noted, since he had last logged it, at noon the day before. That did not necessarily mean any drastic change—milder weather, perhaps. Nevertheless, the early morning signs, in his estimation, had all the earmarks of a storm coming up. It might come slowly, of course—perhaps not until the seals were already panned.
At St. John’s in the shop of Roper, the nautical optician, the barograph at 4 A.M. that day had registered 29.60. By 8 A.M. it was 29.50. Though the weather was still mild and hazy at St. John’s, the outer fringes of the storm had already reached the south coast of Newfoundland, where an inch of snow had fallen, and the weather was closing in rapidly. It was the ice crystals, flying far ahead of this storm and far above it, that had created the sun hounds over the ice-field at dawn, refracting the sun’s rays, and displacing false images of it to left and right.
Tuff was a careful man. He had never forgotten his experience in the Greenland, and had no intention of taking chances. Once into the rough ice, he charted his course by a compass passed to him by one of the master watches. He also ordered the men who had been working in the bunkers to take their mitts, blackened with coal dust, and use them to mark the ice pinnacles as they passed. The blackened peaks stood out like beacons, marking the trail, back to within half a mile of the ship.
Some of the young men, exhilarated at the prospect of action after all the days trapped in the ice-fields, climbed the pressure ridges, using their hooked gaffs like mountaineers’ picks. The exertion made them sweat, and they paused to remove guernseys and bare their chests. It was so warm that some of them even stripped to the waist. But the wind, now blowing from the southeast, kept backing a little easterly, bringing a touch of rawness and making some of them uneasy.
“If the wind comes from the east, ’tis good for neither man nor beast,” somebody quoted.
They laughed, and trudged on.
To Cecil Mouland, his cousin Ralph, their friends Bill and Dave Cuff, young Art Mouland, Phil and Dave Abbott, the excursion seemed wonderfully exciting. Through the grapevine they had learned that they were to stay that night on the Stephano, the newest and finest ice-breaker in the world. To lads from a little cove in Notre Dame Bay the prospect was almost overwhelming.
“She’s a beauty, that one is,” said Cecil, who had sailed on many a schooner, but never on anything like the Stephano.
Their master watch was Jacob Bungay, and they were in the middle of the long line of sealers snaking among the floes. Not far ahead in the line was Albert John Crewe and his father, Reuben. Not far behind came Edward Tippett with his three sons, Abel, Norman, and William.
There was little water to be seen among the floes, but plenty of snow, and their hobnailed boots beat a path in it. It was the roughest, toughest ice they had ever seen, and behind them, here and there along the path, heavy flagpoles had been surreptitiously dropped. They had a long way to go; the ice was rough, the air too warm to burden themselves unnecessarily. Their gaffs they kept, of course. No man would walk the length of himself over the ice without his gaff, but the flag-poles seemed like a lot of useless lumber.
The first to see the Newfoundland’s crew on the ice was Second Hand Nathan Kean of the Florizel. He spotted them at 8 A.M. and informed Captain Joe. Joe took one look, then turned back to his own crew, who were busy killing seals. The Newfoundland’s men were still some miles away.
Southward of the Florizel the Stephano eased along, her winches clattering as deck hands hauled seals aboard and stowed them away. Her decks were slippery with oil as the mild weather thawed pelts that had frozen the night before.
In the barrel, Second Hand Yetman was relieved by the Old Man and went down for breakfast. He took his time over tea and a smoke. His brother George was the officers’ cook, and both enjoyed the privilege of being brothers-in-law to Abram Kean, their sister Caroline having been the Old Man’s wife for more than forty years.
It was getting nearer 9 A.M. when Yetman returned to the barrel. Almost at once he spotted the men from the Newfoundland still far away and directly in line with their shp.
“The Newfoundland’s crew is on the ice, Skipper,” he called to the Old Man. “It seems they’m headed this way.”
The Old Man, more interested in picking up seals than in what other crews were doing, promptly made the mistake of assuming that the Newfoundland’s crew were just then leaving their ship, instead of having been on the ice for the past two hours. It was the first of many mistakes that he was to make that day.
“Ahl rate!” he called in his flat, Bonavista Bay dialect, and turned back to getting every possible bit of speed out of the crew that was stowing down. By now there were more panned seals than he was likely to pick up that day, and he was anxious to get them aboard. It was an hour later before he thought again of the Newfoundland’s men, and went to have a look from the barrel on the mast. They seemed to be headed for his ship, sure enough, but were still a fair distance south of the bulge in the heavy ice, while he was a fair distance north of it. For the first time, too, he noted the overcast (it had now thickened) and decided that rain and fog were coming—typical April weather. He turned back to the boarding and stowing of seals.
By 10 A.M. the sealers were well strung out, with Tuff in the lead, and a trail of blackened pinnacles and discarded flagpoles behind them. The going was difficult, the worst ice ever experienced by George Tuff in his eighteen years on the floes. Now, after three hours, a small family of seals was spotted, and the line of men slowed to a crawl.
“A couple men go after them,” Tuff ordered, “and haul ’em back to the path. We’ll pick up the pelts later.”
Four men from Hant’s Harbour, Joe Francis, Roland Critch, Ed Short, Charlie Evans, and a Trinity man, Alpheus John Harris, left the line and took off for the seals. They killed and sculpted them while Tuff took another bearing. It was thick to the eastward, and the sky was now obscured by haze. The low pressure depressed them. There was less bantering now, and someone voiced the opinion that bad weather was in the air. Tuff agreed: “There’ll be weather ere long. Rain, I ’low.”
Joshua Hollo way, casting an uneasy eye around, saw with dismay that there was a reddish tinge in the overcast near the sun. Along the line the murmur arose about the sun hounds seen earlier. The uneasiness that had dogged some of them from the beginning was now out in the open. Ice Master Stephen Jordan remarked to his friend Jim Evans that he had seen the sun hounds and a dark cloudbank on the horizon at dawn. “Sun hounds never brought no good, an’ the cloudbank says fer an easterly wind,” he declared.
Evans agreed. “Let’s go back to the ship,” he suggested.
“Go back?” Stephen privately thought it a good idea, but he was an ice master, after all, and somewhere ahead in the line he had a young brother, Tom, and two nephews, Henry and Bernard. “I don’t know,” he said dubiously.
But soon the idea of returning to the ship was tossed around openly. They had walked about four miles over the world’s worst ice, and were still miles from the Stephano, which was slowly moving off north-westward. Chasing a retreating ship might take all day. Besides, there seemed to be no seals.
“What in hell are we doin’ here?” they asked each other.
Up front, Tuff gave the signal to move on, but some of those at the rear of the column did not move. The Hant’s Harbour men had got back to the path and stowed their pelts, and were preparing to hurry to catch up when they were met by a column of men returning. A Bonavista Bay fisherman, Tobias Cooper, had been the first actually to turn around and head back for the Newfoundland. He was prepared to go alone if necessary. Jim Evans quickly joined him. Then Jordan made his decision. His brother and nephews would have to take their chances. He too turned his face towards their own ship. He noted uneasily that she was enveloped in a dancing haze that played tricks on the eyes.
There were catcalls and shouts of “Cowards,” as they began their retreat, but common sense prevailed, and more than twenty men turned back, joining the five men with their small catch of seals.
Alpheus John Harris, at fifty-two the oldest in the group of five, spoke up:
“I’m going back to the Newfoundland.”
“Shouldn’t we ask our master watch?”
“I don’t need Tom Dawson to tell me what to do,” Harris said. “There’s a starm comin’ up, an’ ’e should be here right now t’ lead us back to the ship, but I can get there without ’e’s help.”
Still towing his seal pelt, he began the return journey to the Newfoundland. The other four followed, taking the small catch of pelts with them. In all, thirty-four men turned back.
As the break between the two parties widened, many others in the column wavered. Even the youngest were beginning to lose their nerve, seeing their weather-wise elders so uneasy. But Cecil Mouland was astonished that they should even think of turning back. “A cowardly thing to do!” he declared, and firmly believed that it was.
Still murmuring about the weather, they went on. They were nearer the Stephano now than to their own ship, and this kept them going.
Two Bonavista Bay men, fifty-one-year-old Alfred Maidment and his thirty-one-year-old brother, Bob, were predicting dire things.
“Remember the Greenland,” Alfred sid.
“Them men warn’t so far from their ship as we be now,” Bob agreed. “’Twill be all right if we can get aboard the Stephano.”
Joshua Holloway, who had a brother, Philip, in the line ahead, felt they ought to turn back. All the signs spoke of an impending storm.
“We should’ve gone back with the first crowd,” Joshua said to his companion, Jesse Collins.
“We can still go,” Jesse said.
But Joshua couldn’t bring himself to leave without his brother, and of course there was no way to pass word ahead to him. Just the same, he stopped: “We should go back. I know it.”
A group, including the two Maidments, collected around Holloway and Collins. They were all experienced sealers, aware of the danger they were in.
Jesse Collins said, “If ye go back, I’ll go with you. If ye go on, I’ll follow.”
The final decision lay with Joshua Holloway. He turned to Alfred Maidment. “What do you think?”
He considered. “The Stephano is handier,” he pointed out. “It’ll take us longer to get to the Newfoundland” This was undeniable, so he made the decision for them all: “If the rest of the fellers can do it, we can.” They went forward under the gathering storm.
Nearer the front of the column John Howlett was walking with Master Watch Dawson and Lemuel Squires. Though Howlett was in Sidney Jones’s watch, he had formed a close friendship with Dawson. Now Howlett, regretting his decision to go out on the ice instead of crawling into his bunk early that morning, suggested to Dawson that they ought to go back to the ship. Dawson wouldn’t even consider it, and Howlett wouldn’t go back without him.
Some miles to the north-north-west, the Stephano’s crew had done a hard morning’s work killing and panning seals, keeping an eye, now and then, on the threatening signs in the sky. There was not a live seal left in their vicinity, which was a relief to Sam Horwood, an experienced fishing skipper from Carbonear, who knew a gathering storm when he saw it. He wasted no time in going to the ice master, David Dove. “We got all the swiles scraped together; we can do no more around here; let’s get back to the ship,” he urged.
But David Dove did not have the authority to return to the ship unless their master watch, John Kelloway, gave the order. Kelloway was with another party, farther north.
“That’s where we’ve got to head for,” Dove argued. “North to Skipper John.”
“If that gale ye can see brewin’ to the south-east comes on as quick as I expect it will, and the ice stretches abroad, as it most likely will, we’re liable to be out here for the night,” Horwood warned.
“If we was to go back and Kelloway was to find more seals, an’ us not there to lend a hand, ye know we’d catch hell from the Old Man,” Dove argued.
The thought of catching hell from the Old Man made even such a tough nut as Skipper Sam Horwood pause.
“There’s no denyin’ that,” he agreed. “All right, b’y, let’s go find Kelloway.”
“If it comes too bad to get to the Stephano, we’re not so far from the Florizel,” Dove pointed out.
The thought was not much comfort to Sam Horwood. The Florizel and the Bonaventure were closer, true, but the ice between the men and the ships was rough.
Farther north-west another small group of sealers brought their last tow of pelts to a pan and stopped for a blow, wiping their bloodied, greasy faces with bloodied, greasy hands.
“That’s the lot, Skipper,” Mark Sheppard said.
Mark was a St. John’s man, in his fourth year at the hunt, but serving for the first time with Abram Kean. They had been on the ice since dawn, had cleaned up their patch, and now were ready for more.
“Lots of ’em up-along, boys.” James Morgan, the ice master waved north-west, where whitecoats still lay in profusion. Mark, Dan Foley, Ambrose Conway, and Stan Samson needed no further encouragement. They were exhausted, but this was what they had come to the ice for. Coiling their greasy tow ropes they headed north-north-west.
The storm was now tearing across the centre of the Grand Banks, sucking in furious winds as it came. Near the eye of the storm a deluge of rain was falling, but all around its edges, where the air mass had lost some of its heat by sucking in cold winds from the flanking high pressure regions, the moisture was drifting down in blinding curtains of snow. The snow was caught by the cool winds being sucked into the coil, and driven in blinding gusts. Cape Breton and the entire south coast of Newfoundland were numbed by the blizzard. The first flakes of snow were falling over St. John’s.
Down around the south-east corner of Newfoundland, well to the west of Cape Race, a heavy sea was running, and the air was thick with snow.
The S.S. Portia was about five miles west-south-west of Cape Pine, carrying mail and passengers, bound eastward for Trepassey. But since a blizzard was coming on, and it was not safe to round Cape Pine without plenty of sea room in such conditions, Captain Thomas Conners had decided to run up St. Mary’s Bay for shelter. There was shoal ground seaward from the cape, and treacherous Freels Rock lay two miles off shore. With a swell heaving in like this the seas would be dangerous a long way from shore, building up over the shallow ocean bed to short, steep waves that might cause a ship to founder.
As he and his chief officer stood on the bridge discussing the probable course of the wind (it was “backing” from south to east, and would be northerly later, before coming east again), they were startled by an apparition that came looming out of the snow. It was a big ship, making “heavy weather” with her scuppers rolling into the swells, and she barely missed cutting the Portia in two, passing within a cable-length of her stern.
“It’s the Southern Cross!” Captain Conners exclaimed. He saluted with a blast of his whistle. The sealing ship sounded her siren in reply. She was racing east-north-east towards Cape Race.
At 10:30 A.M. Navigator Charles Green on the Newfoundland noted that the barometer was still falling.
At 10:40 Captian Abram Kean on the Stephano saw that the Newfoundland’s crew was trying to reach him, so he ordered his ship to turn about. Shouting for the chief cook, who appeared promptly, he told him to get on kettles of tea. He had already made the decisions on behalf of the men from the Newfoundland:
“We’ll pick ’em up, give ’em some grub, an’ take ’em back to that patch of swiles we left on our port side,” he told Yetman.
Meanwhile the cooks had disappeared below to put out bags of hard tack and boil kettles of tea.
At eleven o’clock the crew of the Florizel had just about cleaned up the patch of seals they were working in the heavy ice, when Joe and his brother Nathan noticed that whitecoats lay to the westward of the Stephano. They rightly concluded that seals must be even more plentiful to the north-west, where the Stephano’s men were working. Joe ordered his crews aboard, but left six men finishing up a patch of seals eastward from his ship.
“They’ll be safe. Father’ll be around for some considerable time,” he told his brother.
Both had noticed that the Newfoundland’s men were now about a mile from the Stephano, and that she was slowly working towards them. They went off north-west, finally passing the last of the Stephano’s men, and putting their own men on the ice beyond them. There were plenty of seals in that direction, and it was still perfectly safe for men to work on the ice so long as there was a ship near by.
The Bonaventure, having made a good kill by following the Florizel the day before, got up steam and headed off in her wake.
At this time, too, some of the Stephano’s men, taking warning from the lowering sky, shifting wind and loosening ice, began to head south-east in her direction. It was obvious, now, that weather was coming on fast.
The storm, drawing tremendous energy from its own condensing moisture, had raced with terrific speed across the Avalon Peninsula of Newfoundland. A few short flurries had fallen over St. John’s, and then, with amazing suddenness, the city was wrapped in a raging blizzard. Within half an hour everything had come to a stop, and the city was “snowed in” while the drifts began to pile up to the eaves of the houses.
Over the ice-field, a hundred miles north of St. John’s, the first flakes began to fall.