by Gary Collins
Abram Kean had better luck than his youngest son. The holds of the Stephano were well soaked with the blood and fat of seals. But, despite all his efforts, the old man had not found what he was looking for. Kean was well aware of the advantage of having a wireless set aboard. Not for any reasons regarding safety, but for finding seals. His wireless officer was ordered to stand by the set day and night for as long as he could keep awake. Kean would have the worth of the man’s dead wages, by God! The man was also under strict orders to keep him informed of any messages from the other ships regarding open water, and especially seal sightings. He was further told not to return the same courtesy to any other ship.
Then his wireless operator, paper in hand, came bursting through the bridge door and reported the news he had just received from the operator in Twillingate. Kean roared out his orders almost before the man had finished reading his report.
“The main patch, by God! Nart’, by Chris’! Nart’ be the wheel!” He continued bellowing to the helmsman.
“Full steam a’ead,” he roared down the pipe that connected him to the engine room. “Give ’er all she will bear, sir! Melt the boilers! Never mind yer bloody gauges! Tell the stokers to bare their bloody buffs, my man! The main patch is mine!”
“What will I send to the rest of the fleet, sir?” asked the wireless operator.
Kean hauled his face away from the pipe and turned on him as if he were insane.
“Send, sir? Nutting, sir, dat’s what you’ll send! Back to your post, sir. And report to me any more clackin’s you ’ear from your machine!”
The wireless operator trembled as he left the bridge.
A great rumbling sound came from deep in the Stephano’s bosom, accompanied by a vibration throughout the ship as her energy was released. Valves were spun wide open and pent-up steam startled her mighty engine into life. Black smoke shot out of her stack and billowed skyward. From beneath her stern came a violent roil of white water and ice churned to powder by her massive bronze screw. The pride of the steel fleet went plunging away through the ice in search of the main patch.
Far astern of the mighty Stephano, smoke appeared like the bluster from cannons. Others of the sealing fleet had heard the news and they came charging. The huge seal herd would not be Abe Kean’s alone. When they came upon the seals, the ships found the animals had drifted farther south than they had anticipated. As far as the barrelmen could see, the Great White Plain was delivering the lambs and the slaughter began.
The killing went on by day and far into the night. Framed by torches, the pelts were hoisted aboard. The ice was streaked with trails of blood leading to the ships as the men dragged their harvest behind them. Windlasses hissed and clattered as their long cables hefted strings of bloody seal pelts onto the vessels. The men were in their glee. They worked until they could barely stand on their feet. They tripped and fell as they sprang among the little ice hills, they fell through the ice in their haste to kill the seals, and still they laughed and some of them sang ditties.
The work was far from easy, a back-breaking hunt on an unforgiving sea of ice. They had to leap over treacherous pans and navigate over and around pressure ridges. Their feet were seldom dry. But the harp pups were prime and plentiful. A single blow with a heavy gaff was all it took.
Far away from these fields of plenty, Wes Kean was unaware of the success of the rest of the sealing fleet. The Newfoundland was still marling its way through heavy ice with not a seal in sight. There were no ships to be seen, either, and he wondered where they had gone. North and a bit west, he figured. He was held back as much by the lack of modern technology aboard his ship as he was by the restraints of the tired old vessel.
* * * * *
The Newfoundland had been out of her home port for twenty-one days with barely 400 seal pelts aboard. The harp seal pups would be taking to the water any day now and the time for prime hunting nearly done. The sealers crowded the deck daily, searching in vain for their quarry. They were restless and all too aware that they were losing time at the hunt; they still made little headway, stuck in the ice as they were.
In the wheelhouse of the ship, Wes Kean paced the deck as he had done for days. Never had he seen ice conditions so severe nor the seals so scarce. His men hadn’t taken enough pelts to pay for their grub, but it wasn’t their fault. Any failure in the hunt would be blamed on the skipper, and he knew it. The reputation he was trying to make for himself was at stake. Then at 8:00 a.m. on March 30, he saw the Stephano and the Florizel rise up, black and smoking, on the distant white swells. As if by some homing skill, some ability that even he wasn’t aware of, the young skipper had found his father and brother. Despite his lack of success with the hunt, Wes took some comfort in the sure knowledge that his hunting instincts had been right. Without any form of communication in all that expanse of white ocean, he had found the fleet, and with them would surely be seals. Maybe there was still time for a successful hunt.
On the starboard rail of the Newfoundland, Cecil Mouland stood with many of the other sealers. The ship lifted ponderously with the might of unseen water. One of the young sealers was starting to feel the results of the rolling deck. He was seasick and embarrassed. The others laughed at him.
Mouland had heard the excited shout from the barrelman who had spotted the two ships. The news ran through the ship like electricity. Skipper Wes had found the fleet, by God! Not only that, he had come upon the old man himself. Their luck was about to change, for sure. Mouland was not a complaining man, but after days of searching the seas without result, the feelings of his fellow sealers were beginning to wear on him. He had listened to their disgruntled talk for days, mostly without comment:
“What’s fer supper t’day, b’ys? Fousty beef er smatchy fish? Lumpy bread an’ fatback! Not flipper pie, fer damn sure.”
“The next time we spots one of the fleet, we’ll dart across to ’er and carry back a load o’ flippers and a few young carcasses!”
“Raisin duff wit’ currant jam smothered in custard fer the skipper’s table, I ’ear.”
“The young crackie can’t smell the swiles like the ol’ dog.”
“Why don’t ’e run far’d an’ tell that to the skipper’s face, b’y?”
“’Tis the stowaway’s fault! Bad luck, the lot of ’em.”
“The bloody stowaway’s got nothin’ to do wit’ it, b’ys. ’Tis the ungodly ice dis spring. Dere’s never been such a spring! ’Tis riftered up like rocks below a cliff.”
“The skipper’s tried to bore ’er t’rough, God knows. We’ve all seen ’im ram ’er bows into the ice so ’ard, at times she’s trembled all over like a flattie on a prong wit’ the strain of it.”
“More like a horny bobby sheep butting against a barn door, if you ask me.”
And so the talk among the sealers had gone on for days. The men, who had come to hunt seals and found none, vented their frustration the only way they knew how. Then the two ships hove in view and the past days were forgotten. The sight of the ships bolstered their spirits anew. They had another chance to make a go of it.
Before noon the Florizel came boring through the ice toward the Newfoundland, her steel bows pushing the ice aside in thunderous roars. She stopped within easy speaking distance and Wes Kean talked to his brother, Joe. The sealers lining the rails of both ships shouted across to each other, too. Despite the power of his steel ship, Joe Kean had not had much luck, either. He had only a few hundred seal pelts on board. Joe had heard the news of the gigantic herd of seals on his own wireless and had gone steaming after them in his father’s wake, but neither he nor the old man had found them. But Billy Winsor, skipper of the Beothic, had. Joe told Wes that the seals had scattered, and with the gale of wind and snow out of the north on Saturday night, they had moved farther south than anyone had anticipated. They were now well south and east of The Funks again and closer to Cape Bon
avista.
Billy Winsor had been broadcasting to the fleet that he had over 25,000 sealskins in his holds. Heading for St. John’s in a couple of days, he would be getting all the glory for being the first ship through The Notch with a full load this year. Abe Kean was fuming. He would not be head jowler this year.
“There’s a good lot o’ seals around here, though, Wes b’y,” Joe told his brother. “If you can get t’rough! ’Tis the worst ice conditions I’ve witnessed. Over towards the Stephano now, there’s a string o’ lighter ice. That’s where the seals are, seems like.”
Wes told Joe of his trouble dealing with his aged ship and his inability to contact the rest of the fleet. Joe reminded his brother that he had found some seals without help from anyone.
“Well, yes, dere’s that, I s’pose!” agreed Wes, his spirits lifted.
Joe waved goodbye to his younger brother and shouted an order through the open bridge door. The Florizel was smoking his command out of her stack and moving away slowly when Joe shouted back to his brother again.
“Don’t ferget Father’s signal, Wes b’y!”
Wes waved to his brother without comment. He had heard and knew what his brother meant. The parting shout was plainly heard by some of the sealers, too, though few of them knew its meaning. Wes Kean ordered the Newfoundland hard over into the cleared wake of the Florizel. He followed close in his brother’s trail until it closed solid behind him and his ship was mired in the ice again.
* * * * *
The rolling seas of the open Atlantic Ocean come in contact with the outer edges of the Great White Plain and steal under it, making the ice floe ripple like a quilt spread out to dry on a grassy meadow. It raises the ice in powerful swells and brings it gently down without breaking it, moving on into its white heart. Restless mistrals, winds of the north, bear across the width of the plain and steal snow away in streaming white drifts. As far as the eye can see, the ice is spotted with forms of life, both new and old. The largest population of nomads in the world has finally come to rest. The harp seal herds had come into their own in nature’s greatest display of reproduction.
Unlike desert vultures, which circle high and wait for carrion, ravens fly out from the land in a straight line, pitch near the herd, and wait. They are drawn here by the scent of blood of birth and of death, for these legions of seals leave their spoor to the winds.
On rare evenings when the winds have died and the sea air is calm, the warm breath from millions of mammals rises above. It creates a pall-like mist that follows them and hangs just over them, stagnant. The ice and seals are now combined and the hunters are afield.
Soon there will be another presence among them. The fiercest storm of the century is coming and bringing with it a time of great challenge.
Nowhere in the Northern Hemisphere is a place more situated to attract the storms of winter than the ragged east coast of Newfoundland. Jutting out into the Atlantic Sea, its shores mark the farthest reach of the Americas toward the European continent. Far below these rugged shores and spreading away from its watery foundation, hidden canyons fall into vast depths between mountain ranges that rise up. They are responsible for changing, turning, and otherwise mixing two of the ocean’s greatest currents. From up out of the Gulf of Mexico comes the world’s largest and warmest current, and spawned from the Greenland glaciers and pouring down from the polar seas comes the Labrador Current. Their confluence is off the east coast of Newfoundland.
So powerful are the reach and pull and influence of these immense currents, they dwarf the earth’s mightiest rivers. High above and forever following are created other currents which are the cause of terrible atmospheric upheavals.
But there is more. Away from the winter Atlantic and far to the balmy south, unbearable heat waves rise above the world’s most barren and hottest deserts. Borne south out of the Dark Continent and flowing seaward past the bulge of Africa, the heat from the Sahara is carried on the Northeast Trades. South from the Cape Verde Islands they are deflected at the imaginary line at the earth’s waist, the equator, and turned west to South America. North from that land, which ancient cartographers called the “Great Leg O’ Mutton,” and up past Hispaniola and the slave islands, the warm expanse of tropic air finally forms over the swiftly flowing Gulf Stream. Now it is carried north and east to its death. It will not die easy.
The northlands of the entire American continent are covered in winter. Every stream, pond, lake, and river is frozen solid. Air masses from the continent’s greatest mountain range, the Rockies, pour down across the winter lands. Like the Gulf Stream, they too are headed northeast. And not to be outdone, down from the frozen regions come sweeping blasts clothed with winter.
The warm air coming north will not go unchallenged. A winter gale of unbelievable proportions is in the womb. The end of its gestation is at hand. Without cold it cannot survive, and it will suckle on the breast of the Great White Plain. Like all great events, timing is everything for it to reach its full effect.
And now its time is at hand.
14
Until now, charles green had never been on a vessel that didn’t carry a thermometer. The Newfoundland had an aneroid barometer on board, but that was it. He checked it every four hours, tapped the glass with his finger, and recorded its reading in his log, in accordance with the Board of Trade regulations. Thermometer readings were also required, but there was nothing he could do about that. Even so, the barometer was far from modern.
The aneroid barometer was designed in 1842 by Lucien Vidi, a French scientist. It was little more than a small box beneath a glass face with a hidden cell, or aneroid, holding metal alloys of beryllium and copper that expanded or contracted when it came in contact with external air pressure. It was designed to be stiff so that a slight tapping on the outer glass would cause the needle to jump, thus indicating barometric pressure. But for accurate forecast of impending weather, Green knew it had to be used in conjunction with a thermometer. With a thermometer reading high and barometric pressure dropping, a hard wind from the south or east could be expected; with both barometer and thermometer dropping at the same time, especially during the winter, hard, cold winds were feared from a northerly point along with freezing conditions.
On March 30, Green recorded:
Begins with fine clear weather and heavy swell, moderate breeze from N.W. Ship steaming to W.N.W. 8: am the Florizel and Stephano in sight: 10am spoke to Florizel: noon, fresh breeze and dull sky: 4: pm, fine clear weather, wind light from the n. two more steamers in sight: 6pm ice very tight and heavy swell, wind light and variable. Barometer 30.60. standing. Funks bore N45W. Dist. 42 miles. So ends this day.
The barometer was at the highest point Green had seen for the year, but he had no way of telling the temperature. Neither could he consult with Captain Kean. They barely spoke to each other. Wes spent almost as much time aloft in the barrel as did the scunners. The young captain was desperate to find seals. Late that evening, Green heard him shout from the mast.
“The Stephano’s in the seals, b’ys!”
His voice sounded hopeful yet frustrated. The Newfoundland was working very slowly toward the distant Stephano through some of the heaviest ice she had encountered. Even with powerful glasses, the Stephano was too far away for Wes Kean to see seals around her. Green stood on the bridge and raised his own binoculars, training them on the Stephano. There were no seals or men to be seen. He knew all about the signal pre-arranged between Abe Kean and his son to let him know when he had found seals. He had heard Wes and George Tuff talking about it in the wheelhouse.
Green adjusted his glasses to better see the Stephano’s rigging. The ship was broadside and looked grand against the evening sky. He started at the bow and slowly worked his vision aft. The forward derrick was raised vertically against the foremast. Slowly, he trained the powerful glasses toward the ship’s stern. Past the fat stack e
ncircled with the white border and the red cross of St. Andrew, her company’s logo stood out. The stack was emitting little smoke; the ship was stopped. Her white superstructure was framed against the grey sky, her high castle, or bridge, rising over it.
Then he saw it. Standing obliquely from the Stephano’s mizzen-mast, her after derrick was pointed over the ship’s stern. Green kept his glasses on the derrick for a while to make sure the boom wasn’t just halted in the process of working. The grappling hook was tight against the tip of the spar. It was not in use. Wes had his father’s signal. Now, if he could just get his old ship through the ice!
Despite the tension between them, Green pitied the young skipper. No one aboard had worked as hard to find the seals as Kean. Green had watched him pore over the charts day and night. He had ordered the barrelman down and had climbed up the ratlines himself again and again. Several times Green had seen Kean suddenly dash out onto the windward side of the bridge and sniff the breeze.
And again, Green, who was a reader, likened him to Captain Ahab.
Knowing his quarry was within his reach, Kean ordered the Newfoundland even harder into the ice. He rammed her bows up against it until the sealers who were watching thought they would break. The heavy greenheart fastened to her bows and strapped at intervals with steel plating gave her reinforcement, but Wes Kean was pushing her limits.
Wes knew very well the tried-and-true method of two men rallying a punt through heavy slob ice. While a man in the stern warped as hard as he could against the long sculling oar, the other man threw his weight from gunnel to gunnel. The violent motion caused the punt to roll from side to side, creating a lateral wave that separated the slob. This allowed the punt’s bows to ride up over the grey mess and her weight to open up her own channel. He tried this now with the Newfoundland.
