by Gary Collins
Cecil grew silent again, remembering. His eyes filled with tears once more, thinking, I was sure, of the woman who was no longer a part of his aging years. I sensed his story was done and didn’t ask him any more questions.
Cecil and I off-loaded his belongings at his modest apartment in St. John’s. He gave Rose a hug as well as a wall ornament he had made. Turning to me, he shook my hand, and when I told him I wanted only gas money for the trip, he grasped my hand warmly in both of his and said simply, “Thank you, my boy, and may God bless you.”
“Thanks for the tale,” I said.
“Oh, I will forever tell it, my boy. I would to God there was no tale to tell!”
We left him then, and he stood waving with one hand and drying his eyes with the other until I turned out onto the busy street and lost him in the truck mirrors.
It would be more than forty years before I would come to realize the true value of what I had heard. Luckily, when I sat down to try and retell, in my own way, the story of that horrific sealing disaster, the voice of the old gentleman huddled with emotion in the cab of my truck came back to me with astounding clarity.
When I was a boy, there was another man who lived in our town who had also survived that same disaster. His name was Jesse Collins, the man considered by many—especially Cecil Mouland—as one of the heroes of the Newfoundland sealing disaster. He moved to Hare Bay from Newport, one of the de-settled fishing communities eighteen miles or so north by the coast. I use de-settled because I know of few that were forced to leave their birthplaces who were ever truly resettled.
Jesse died on February 7, 1959, at seventy-four, when I was ten years old. He lived just two houses up the gravel road from mine. I remember him as an old man who often walked down the road pulling on a curved pipe with a stream of tobacco smoke trailing over his left shoulder. He was always well-groomed and wore a tie, even on weekdays. I don’t remember speaking to him, but I remember the day he was carried along the gravel road of our town to his grave. It was cold and snowing and the road was snow-packed and slippery. His coffin was sticking out of the back of a truck. There were chains strapped to the back tires, clicking and rattling as the truck slowly drove by. Dark-clad mourners walked behind in silence. The blinds and curtains at every window were drawn as the funeral procession passed. Horses drawing sleds laden with logs were whoaed, their reins sawed tight until the cortège passed.
When I asked my mother, who was peering out the window, she whispered, “Hush! They are burying the ol’ ice hunter Uncle Jesse Collins today.” Jesse and his wife, Alice, had five children. Today many of his descendants still live in Hare Bay, and his name lives on in the same garden where he spent his last days.
The night I received the call from Garry Cranford, the president of Flanker Press, asking me to consider telling the story of the Newfoundland sealing disaster of the spring of 1914, is a memorable one. I was stunned. That night has been recorded in my private journals along with my first reaction to his request. My editor, Jerry Cranford, part of the executive of Flanker Press, felt that after 100 years, the story should be told again. The only real, authoritative story on that event, Death on the Ice, had been written by Cassie Brown. Margo Cranford, also on the executive board of Flanker Press, is the niece of the late Cassie. Margo agreed that it was time for those events to be retold. I was humbled to be asked to take on such a story. I was also flattered, but mostly I was frightened. How could I dare disturb the unique work of the late Cassie Brown?
But the truth of it was that I had for some time secretly wanted to retell the story in my own way. After considerable thought I agreed to write it. During the initial course of my research for this book, I refused to read Death on the Ice. I didn’t want to be influenced by Cassie’s work. I am fiercely independent—well, as independent as a writer can be when he bears in mind that with a historical, fact-based work he has to rely on information from others.
But no matter the avenue I pursued, all roads seemed to lead back to Death on the Ice. It was the only thorough account written about the event. There was no alternative. I read it again and I gleaned from the pages of Cassie Brown’s stellar book many facts and accounts of real events that were to be found nowhere else, but as far as it was in my power to do so, I have left her work undisturbed. With the first draft of my manuscript written, its framework describing many scenes of ice and seals and men, I started to feel my way toward the climactic conclusion of the book. I was actually afraid of it! Again, I felt as if I were intruding in some way upon Cassie’s great masterpiece. After all, Death on the Ice is iconic in Newfoundland and Labrador and can be found in nearly as many homes as the Bible.
I was bolstered and reassured by my family in this endeavour. With every page my wife read, and after searching my own memory of that long-ago day in the cab of my truck with Uncle Cecil Mouland, I finally came to realize that the story I would tell was to be mine alone and no one else’s. I continued with a free mind, then, and completed the story in great earnest.
Though the story you are about to read is a dramatic retelling of the events surrounding the Great Newfoundland Sealing Disaster of 1914, with new information and new sources interviewed, I respectfully acknowledge the writings of Cassie Brown, Newfoundland and Labrador’s First Lady of Literature, and her book Death on the Ice.
1
There is a place beyond the edge of winter daylight where for weeks at a time the sun does not appear. It leaves for a dismal time on the barren northlands an inactive, lethargic existence for the dark-skinned humans who live there; but away from the rim of this sunless land and on the frosty, thickening sea where no human dares, there is an even bleaker, more forbidding place. The warmth of the greatest light in the heavens barely creases the line between Arctic day and night.
The night is infinite, immeasurable, absolute, and sterile. No living thing is here. No living thing can survive here. Surface-dwelling and pelagic fishes have gone into the nether depths to escape the death sentence of freezing gills. Air-breathing mammals, with warm, four-chambered hearts, have left for open water or have long since hidden elsewhere on the distant land. The might of the rolling ocean is at last humbled, quelled, and arrested. Conquered and defeated, the ocean is claimed and frozen by the most formidable of Earth’s winter spells—the long polar night.
A polar rigor mortis has stolen silently through the Arctic night. Waves are frozen in motion, their undulations captured and painted on the ocean’s surface. Ice crystals form and burst open before thickening. The Arctic night has transformed the water into a crystalline solid, which only a warming sun will release hundreds of miles to the south. The dark time is as silent and still as it is black; there is no sky, there is no earth, just an unfeeling, depthless, interminable night. With no definition between dark and light, it is as if the daytime has never been. The mindless polar night defies even the Christian god, who on His first day of creation commanded light to be upon the dark wastes of all the earth. Now even His omnipresence does not come up over the northern slope of the sea.
Then, beaded lights appear in the dense, black heavens. It is as if they are being lit by a swift, invisible lamplighter, and subtly they are placed in the inky sky. The stars glitter and gleam. They look like silver streams twisting and shimmering down the length of the night sky. The firmament is in its starry glory. There is no moon. The sky is eternal, as if the passage of time has been halted. Now the sky is flecked with countless silvery eyes that wink and tremble, until the whole is like a mantle of glittering, haloed diamonds.
But there is no one below to admire the scene. The Big Dipper of the north sky is upright, holding all of its wondrous mysteries inside its seven stars. Directly below that downward-curving handle of the Great Bear constellation, a shimmer of light suddenly appears on the horizon.
A lip of moon appears slowly, as if wondering whether or not it should shed its light on the barren plain. T
he giant, steel-silver orb rises steadily, a creeping, searching light where before there had been only darkness. Its glow gives shape and creates shadows where none has been. A frozen, snow-humped plain appears. Clearing its earthly bonds, the moon, which now has assumed a whitish glow, hangs silently and unmoving just over the rim of the northern world. Now the scene is complete, and still there is no one to admire the artistry. Nothing moves in that show of light. There is no sound. The movement of night air is a rustle as it bears over the sea of frozen runnels and dusty snow. This coming together of ice and an all-enveloping sky could have taken a millennium to create—or just one polar night.
* * * * *
He was christened Phillip Holloway, which in Newfoundland meant everyone shortened his name to Phil. Everyone, that is, but his mother, who always called him by his full name—especially when she was mad at him. His mother was a churchgoer and had heard the name Phillip from the Church of England minister who came periodically to their outport fishing village of Newport on the north side of Bonavista Bay. She liked the name Phillip and, according to the minister, who spoke in monotone from the pulpit, Phillip of the Bible was brother to King Herod. He was a preacher and healer and had much wisdom, and for that reason she gave her son his name. She knew it was also the name of one of Christ’s lesser-known apostles. He wouldn’t tell his mother, but Phillip preferred to be called Phil.
Months after his birth, which she told him had been an easy one, with him eager to enter the world, the circuit-sailing preacher came flushing in through the narrow harbour entrance. The schooner’s stained-brown sails clattered down the masts as the sheets were let go. Phillip had screamed like a bugger when he was anointed with holy water. In his defence, she added the water was so cold the minister had to break the ice in the stone font before dipping his fingers in and fairly dousing the water over her sleeping son. Now at forty-five, Phil smiled as he remembered the story while hammering the last few nails into a new spire for that church near the landwash high above the sea. It was dangerous work, but he wasn’t afraid of heights.
Phil heard his name. It was twenty-nine-year-old Jesse Collins. The two men were good friends despite their ages.
“The ’arbour froze over last night, Phil b’y. Won’t be long now before we’ll be scunnin’ across from side to side on the ice. I loves it!”
“Me too,” Phil said as he climbed down the ladder.
“You’ll be headin’ in the woods again this fine marnin’, I s’pose?”
“Well, you knows now, Jess b’y, tomorrow is Sunday an’ I won’t be tendin’ to me trapline. It’s been two days since I’ve been in, so I’ll be a bit late this day, I’m thinkin’.”
“Well, ’ave a care on the trail, Phil. I’ll be seein’ you this evenin’ in the twine loft, I s’pose? We’ll talk more about gettin’ that berth to the ice fer you this spring.”
“Well, you knows now we will! Though I’ll be bringin’ dark on me shoulder, I ’lows. ’Specially if I stands here all day jawin’ with you!”
Jesse grinned as he always did and turned away down the footpath to his wharf at the sea edge, smoke from his pipe curling behind his neck, his feet crunching in the new snow.
Leaving the path where the harbour bent around itself, Phil made his way up through the drung to the hills overlooking the settlement. Here he paused and looked back. He never tired of the view from the hills above the hamlet of Newport. Jesse was right about the ice. Though without wind, last night’s deep cold had frozen their harbour all the way out to its narrow entrance. Woodsmoke curled out of every black funnel below him and hung motionless like a grey pallor over the village. A few dogs barked, the ones on the opposite side of the harbour answering the yelps of those on the near side. The morning was so calm Phil could hear the rattle of a chain that held one of the dogs.
The sun was up out of the sea and the west side of the harbour was brightening while the east side still lay in shadows. The north end of the harbour ended in a rocky canyon called “the rattle.” The ebb and flow of the daily tides surged in and out of Salt Water Pond, which turned perpendicular to the rattle in an east-west direction. It was little more than a mile long and less than a mile wide. Fat sea trout came up through the rattle in season, and even codfish swam from the sea into the brackish pond. Leaving the edge of the community, its forested rim long since denuded by the community’s need for wood, Phil headed for the pond. On the other side of it, green stands of spruce and fir stretched toward the northwest. Twisted brooks and streams ran from every hill and marshland, and in each valley lay secluded ponds and steadies. All of them had their complement of soft-skinned otter, beaver, and muskrat, which were Phil’s only source of ready cash. Snowshoe hares abounded—the locals called them rabbits—and where there were hares there were fox. This was Phillip Holloway’s area for trapping and he was good at it. At forty-six years old he was known all over the area for his ability at “furrin’.”
When he had set his traps and snares just two days ago, Phillip had crossed the pond in a dory. He had rowed the dory up through the rattle at high tide and left it on the community side of the pond. This morning, however, after two nights and days of freezing, he expected he would be able to cross the pond on the ice.
Stepping gingerly out onto the new ice, Phil tested its thickness with his axe. Just over an inch, he figured. It took his weight well enough, though a water ripple went ahead of him as he walked out. Phil was a true woodsman, stepping lightly and keeping his lungs filled with air as he walked on the thin ice.
Nearing the centre of the pond, where he knew the current was strongest and the ice at its thinnest, it started to buckle. It was the way of young saltwater ice. It bent in warning before it broke, unlike freshwater ice, which would break away under a man’s weight without any warning at all. Not standing in place long enough to break through, Phil chopped holes and rapidly splashed water ahead and behind him as he walked. The temperature was well below freezing, so the water would quickly freeze and strengthen the ice for his return trip, which would be in the dark. Passing the centre without incident, he continued on and reached the north side of Salt Water Pond. Looking back, he took a mark on the pond’s far side to guide his return trip. Then he headed up through the forest on an ancient path, his footsteps silent on the virgin snow.
* * * * *
Back in Newport, Jesse Collins shaved splinters from a plug of tobacco, crushed and worried the plug between his calloused hands, and pressed it into a short-stemmed clay pipe. He snicked a match head against a jagged thumbnail, and when the stick flared he cupped the flame against the pipe’s bowl. He sucked until his cheeks collapsed and the tobacco glowed and he was finally rewarded with a plume of greyish blue smoke which escaped through the thin crease on the right side of his mouth.
Jesse had spent most of his day mending torn salmon nets. He wished he had enough twine to make new ones, but the last fishing season had not been kind and he couldn’t afford to buy the materials he needed. Fishing for the silvery salmon was his passion. He loved nothing better than leaving the sheltered harbour in the pre-dawn summer mornings, seated alone in his punt, and with drawing sail heading for the salmon berths to haul his nets.
Atlantic salmon, pressed in salt for three days and then slow-cured by the smoke of the native blackberry bush, was considered a delicacy. Only a few fishermen around the area would take the time and had patience to smoke the salmon. Most of them salted the fish away in barrels and shipped it along with their summer’s catch of cod in the fall. Jesse knew one man who was firm in his curing method. They had to be in salt three days, and three days in smoke, no more and no less.
Jesse had a different way, though. He cut his salmon down the back and splayed them open, held under salt with weights, or in press, until they were firm. Then he placed them in his smoker until they passed his taste test. He even had a method for that. After a few days—usually mor
e than three—he would open the smoker door, allow most of the smoke to baffle out through the door, and then, bending down, he would enter. With his knife he would slice into the thickest part of one of the salmon. Squeezing the fish, he would watch the juices running out the cut he had made. Too much juice and the fish were not done to his liking; too little juice and they were overcooked. When their natural juices oozed just right and their flesh was golden brown outside and had a pinkish hue inside, then they were ready.
Now the sun was down among the hills and the evening shadows were in the harbour, and Jesse’s thoughts turned toward cod fishing. He fished for cod each year after the salmon run was done; he handlined for them as did many others. It was a common practice. Even with his catch of salmon and cod, Jesse rarely saw any money for his work. Like all the others, he slaved under a truck system. The merchants merely exchanged his entire catch for provisions. No matter how plentiful the year’s catch, it was never enough for him to make a profit. The fishermen were always in debt to the merchants and chandlers. The only hard cash money Jesse Collins ever received came from the spring seal hunt, something he excelled at.
Several trap crews worked from Newport, and this past summer one of the crews had suffered a great loss during the capelin scull. The trap fishing was at its peak. With the capelin came hundreds of humpback whales. They had feasted on the schools of capelin for weeks. Often the leviathans would follow their prey right up to the shoreline. One such daring whale had become tangled in one of the cod traps fastened to the shore. For three days the fishermen watched helplessly as the huge mammal tried to free itself from miles of twine. Early the fourth morning the anxious fishermen returned to find the whale had finally freed itself, but of their precious trap there remained a mass of useless netting. They hauled it aboard their trap skiff and pulled it up on the land. When Jesse inquired about the trap, he was told that if he had guts enough to repair it, he could have it. Knowing it was too much work for one man to take on, he approached his friend Phil and Phil’s brother Joshua.
