by Gary Collins
Grasping the arm of one of the sealers who was nearly buried among the dead, the rescuer jumped back in alarm. The arm was soft and pliant in his hand—and it moved! Recovering from shock, he approached the still figure and gingerly touched it again. The arm twitched in response and the near-dead man opened his eyes and groaned. A shout brought help, and the survivor was hurried across the ice and up over the waiting gangway. He recovered within the warmth of the ship. It was Charlie Martin. Sheltered among his dead comrades, he had survived.
None of the dead had the pallor of men who had been laid out for days. Those who had not suffered from frostbite had wind-browned faces and looked as if they would soon awaken.
The bodies of the two Crewes and the three Tippetts posed a temporary problem for the men, but they soon came up with a simple solution. They brought out a piece of ship’s canvas around which they gathered the Tippetts, then the Crewes. The dead bodies were lifted up and carried aboard the Bellaventure.
Some of the sealers who were watching had to turn away while others did not. One man, who was a churchgoer, voiced aloud the sentiments of many.
“Whit’er Thou goest I will go.” And then, “Greater love hath no man than dis, who lays down his life for a friend.”
* * * * *
Wes Kean went through the motions that day like a man who had just lost all of his best friends. The Newfoundland was stuck and could not help. He watched in frustration as the other ships rescued his men. He stared through his binoculars until his eyes were red and swollen.
No ship was able to get near the Newfoundland all day. Runners were required to bring news and updates to her. The day finally ended, and Charles Green’s log read, in part:
1:pm—distress signals were hoisted and S/S Stephano and Bellaventure began searching the ice for men. 4:pm—Bellaventure reports having picked up sixty of our crew at noon and Stephano one. Ice close and heavy. Ship not making any headway. 8:pm—Light breeze from SE. Clear weather and overcast sky. Lat -48.32N. Long -52.1W.
The three ships burned down for the night, the Newfoundland cloaked in her usual shadowy darkness. The Stephano was aglow with bright lights. The softer lights of the Bellaventure, which men watched from the deck of the Newfoundland, made her look like a funeral pyre.
* * * * *
Later that night, the wind shifted from southeast to north-northeast. The ice slackened, and at 8:00 a.m. both the Bellaventure and the Stephano steamed up alongside the Newfoundland. Abram Kean crossed the ice and came aboard, as did Captain Randell. The two Newfoundland men he had on board walked across with him and the two dead were carried aboard the Bellaventure. Those sealers of the Newfoundland who were ill and crippled with frostbite were carried aboard the Bellaventure for the trip home with the dead. On the bridge of the Newfoundland the ship’s roll was called, and when a man didn’t answer to his name, Abram Kean ticked it off the ship’s articles. With the Newfoundland’s dead now aboard the Bellaventure, Randell walked back to his ship. She powered up with a smear of smoke across the sky, veered away, and headed south for St. John’s. Wes Kean signalled to the Florizel that he was leaving and swung the old Newfoundland—empty of seals and filled with grief—into the Bellaventure’s wake. Old man Kean turned the Stephano’s broad stern to it all and went back hunting seals.
The body of trapper Phil Holloway, who had a wife and six children waiting in Newport, was never found. Likewise the bodies of Henry Dowding and James Howell of Templeman. And somewhere beneath that Great White Plain were Henry Jordon of Pouch Cove, David Locke of St. John’s, Michael Murray of Carbonear, and Art Mouland (not Arthur) of Bonavista harbour. The body of the old ice hunter Uncle Ezra Melindy, the quiet man from Cat Harbour, Notre Dame Bay, who had survived the Greenland disaster, had disappeared. In life he was loved by all. He had refused to talk of his first sealing disaster, and now he would never get the chance to talk of his second.
The skipper of the Bellaventure had wired Harvey and Company of the tragedy and to let them know that he was sailing home with the victims at full speed. His ship made good time, and at 5:00 p.m. on Saturday, April 4, he slipped through The Notch with the red ensign at half-staff. And the city was waiting.
It was customary for the city of St. John’s to greet the first ship returning from the seal hunt with great fanfare. Ships in port would repeatedly blow their whistles. People lining the docks celebrated with shouts and cheers. Church bells rang over it all. The Beothic, captained by Billy Winsor, steamed through The Narrows with all her flags aloft and her whistle blowing. The citizens crowding the docks and the shoreline had been waiting for the Bellaventure to enter, but the Beothic was the first ship back. Although he knew about the Newfoundland disaster, Winsor expected a hero’s welcome on account of the full load of pelts he carried on board his ship. He was mistaken. Instead, he was met with total silence and disdain for entering the harbour so gaily in a time of such loss and grieving.
Shortly after, the flag on Signal Hill was raised again in preparation for the entry of another ship, the long-awaited Bellaventure. When she steamed slowly up the harbour to Harvey’s Wharf, a large crowd of people came and watched her approach. No one cheered and not one church bell rang out to greet her. The people of St. John’s were in mourning, the city black and silent.
The Bellaventure closed the north side of the harbour and nudged up against the pier, where her bowsers forward and aft were fastened to the bollards. Thus secured, the ice hunters, cold and dead on her deck, awaited the next indignity.
* * * * *
While the Bellaventure tied up to the land, the Newfoundland was stuck in ice again many miles abeam of Baccalieu Island. The old ship wasn’t the only vessel having a hard time getting through. Hull up on the ice behind her were the SS Eagle, the SS Diana, and the Adventure. The Newfoundland would be tormented by the ice for three more days and as many nights while the other ships passed her. Many bunks in her hold were empty. The remaining sealers were quiet. No yarns were spun of disasters at sea; they were living through one of their own. The ship finally slipped away from the ice edge into open water on Tuesday.
Charles Green’s log:
3:pm, left the ice. Weather fine and clear. 5:pm, Cape Spear bore NW by W. Distance 14 miles. 8:pm, entered the narrows and proceeded to quarantine station.
The Newfoundland edged into the old harbour without the city’s knowledge. The sealers stood mutely at her gunnels, and above them, framed in her bridge windows, her young captain was silent, too. She slunk to her moorings under the shadows of evening. The last of the ice hunters had come home.
The city of St. John’s went out of its way to take care of the surviving sealers. Doctors and nurses scurried about. Men were bandaged, given medicines, and consoled. Hospitals and clinics worked steady to aid the sick. Local citizens opened their homes and their hearts to the returning sealers awaiting passage back to the outports. Busiest by far were the city’s morgues. The morticians ran out of caskets and more had to be built. Pine coffins were hauled to the harbourfront on horse-drawn drays and sleds and the off-loading of the dead began. People turned their faces in horror or watched in mute fascination at the sight of so many bodies. Many of the corpses had limbs so constricted in death they would not fit into the coffins. These were carried off on draped stretchers, with legs and arms sticking out. Men, women, and the children standing at their side wept. As coffins draped in black were carried down the Bellaventure’s gangway, the clutter and whine of the Beothic’s winch off-loading her cargo went on. The crowd paying homage to the dead glared at the ship, but the work continued.
The dead were taken into the basement of the Seamen’s Institute, where medical personnel began the grisly work of thawing them out, of thawing them apart. Eventually the bodies were identified and transportation arranged to take them home. John Keels of Bonavista was given the best of medical help in hospital, but he could not recove
r from his trial by cold. He died on April 18. His death brought the death toll to seventy-eight.
In death, many of the sealers returned home aboard the trains they could not afford to ride in life.
The work of preparing the Newfoundland for her future life at sea went on after a time. Hundreds of pounds of leftover provisions were taken off and Harvey’s employees removed the crude bunks of lumber. On one of the bunks, under the filthy curvies, someone found a red scarf. Rolled neatly inside the scarf, wrapped in brown paper and tied with a seaman’s knot of twine, was a set of hair combs inlaid with pearl.
Under another bunk, looking as if it had been forgotten, was a dented harmonica. The worker blew through it once. It sounded cowed. Neither of the items was ever claimed.
* * * * *
In St. John’s, north by the coast to the barren bill of Cape Freels, and beyond to Elliston by the sea, men wept and women cried a thousand tears. They cried in sorrow for the loss. They cried in fear for their children.
Some of the survivors told their stories and some never would. The dead have been covered and now lie beneath the sod.
Our tale of adventure, heroism, agony, pain, misery, and defeat has just about ended, but for those who wonder about such things, we must return to the sea again, so that our tale will end where it began: on the ice.
Nights are shorter now. Days are longer and warmer. The bright spring sun shines its sweet benediction as if to atone for the agonies of winter. The sea is warming and the ice is melting. Dissolving, shrivelling, weakening, foundering, and wasting away, the Great White Plain is dying.
The seals now swim in the widening blue lakes of open water. Then, on a warm night without a moon, they leave, almost without a sound. The new day reveals nothing but a watery plain, its surface bereft of all life. And the seals are wending their way north, toward that long polar night where the Arctic sages are already spinning a new tale.
Epilogue
Stories abound of all the sealing captains. The sealers who sailed with them gave them glory or vilified them as was befitting, but the tales told of Abram Kean surpass them all. Few were endeared to this most famous of all the sealing skippers. Berths aboard Abram Kean’s ship were still the most coveted, yet he was the most hated of all the skippers. Sealers fought for berths aboard any ship on which he was captain, yet few liked him. He earned the respect of the sealers for one reason only: Abram Kean had an instinct for finding seals. Few men could face the icy blue stare of his eyes or the lash of his tongue, but there were other ways to vent frustrations, as this story handed down through the years relates.
John Hounsell was a hardened fisherman from Paul’s Island, on the north side of Bonavista Bay. Hounsell, like so many others, continued sealing for many springs. A good hunt meant the only sure cash money in his pocket for the entire year. One of the captains John Hounsell sailed with was Abram Kean. The old man was eager to have Hounsell with him; although Hounsell was short, he was powerfully built, quick on his feet, and a fearless hunter besides. Although Hounsell was just as eager to sail with Kean each spring, he hated the man’s arrogant, domineering attitude toward his men.
John Hounsell was also well-known as a trickster, a real sleeveen.
Late one evening, the sealers from Abe Kean’s ship returned from a hard day’s hunt. They were wet, dead tired, and very hungry. They had complained all day about the food handed out to them each morning. It was always cakes of hard bread with jars of water and little else. They were tired of crushing hardtack between their teeth. They also complained about the salt fish—most of which was smatchy—served them every day for supper. They all knew about the cases of sweet jams and other delicacies that had been brought aboard the ship. Some of them had helped with the loading of it. All of it was stowed forward and never seen again. The sealers chose John Hounsell to speak to someone about their concerns.
Hounsell told the master watch that he and the others had heard the officers were eating fresh beef smeared with sweet sauces between thick slices of bread. They heard it was called “san’wiches.” The master watch said he would pass their concerns along to the second hand. He also added that he had no idea what a san’wich was.
The next morning the sealers were served their usual cakes of hard bread. When they returned that evening, weary and hungry, Abe Kean was waiting for them on deck. The sun was going down and the brilliant winter twilight above the ice illuminated the sealers as they climbed up the side sticks to gather before their skipper. They were a hard-looking bunch of men. Few of them had shaved or washed for days. Their faces and hands were smeared with dried blood, and around their feet were hundreds of bloody pelts reeking of heavy fat. Abe Kean looked down at them like a stern schoolmaster.
Dressed in rich fur from head to boots and carrying a tall gaff in his right hand, he dressed them down without preamble. He called them buggers and a bunch of complainers. They’d be lookin’ fer a bert’ in another ship next spring, by Christ. Chewin’ ’ard bread was the very thing that kept a man’s brain from freezin’—every sealer knew that! And as fer salt fish, “’twas what most of ye was reared on.” Kean finished his tirade without interruption. His clear eyes glistened like frost in the dying light as he stormed towards the forepeak. He yanked open the scuttle door and proceeded to descend the stairs.
When leaving deck to go below, most seamen will turn and descend the stairs backwards, their hands sliding along the polished handrails, but Abe Kean did not turn around this evening. He began climbing down the companionway facing forward, further dismissing his men with the broad of his back.
John Hounsell saw his chance and sprang into action. Around Fair Islands, of which Paul’s Island was one, John Hounsell was known as a champion rock-slinger, acquiring the skill as a boy. Hounsell would take rocks aboard his punt while hunting bull birds and, instead of wasting expensive lead shot, he would kill them with rocks. Granted, the birds had to be quiet and the seas steady, but Hounsell always managed to kill a good meal of seabirds this way.
John’s pockets were filled with rock-hard cakes of bread, just right for throwing. He dug his hand into his coat and pulled one out. Gripping one end with his index finger and forefinger, he threw the cake with all his might toward the scuttle opening.
It flew straight, turning over and over, its brown and white colours flashing in the evening light. It made contact with the back of Kean’s head and shattered on impact. There was a sound like a wooden mallet hammering home a short thole-pin, just before Kean disappeared from view. Then the sound of Kean clattering head over heels down the companionway arose from the dark stairway. Not one sealer spoke or moved to their skipper’s aid as he unleashed a storm of curses. John Hounsell rushed forward and clambered down the stairs. Kean lay sprawled on the floor at the bottom of the stairs.
“What’s wrong wit’ ’e, Skipper?” Hounsell yelled innocently. “I ’eard ye bawlin’ out. Tripped an’ fell down the stairs, did ’e?”
“Tripped? Tripped? And that I did not, John Hounsell! I was poleaxed, sir! Poleaxed, I tell ’e! By one of me own men! Did ya see the bugger who done it to me, John? I’ll reeve me gaff t’rough his gizzard, by God!”
Abe Kean reached for his gaff on the floor and struggled to stand. John helped his captain to his feet.
“I t’ink you was felled be a cake of ’ard bread, Skipper,” he ventured.
“’Ard bread? Why, you must be daft, man! ’Twas a blow from a maul, fer sure, John. Brought the blood from me pate, it did!”
Sure enough, Kean’s hand came away from the sore spot at the back of his head with blood on it. There were pieces of bread scattered over the floor beneath the steps. John noticed that a few of them were flecked with blood. He was about to bring this fact to Kean’s attention but decided not to tempt fate.
Kean was not over his fury. He glared at Hounsell without blinking, his eyes narrowed to slits
that bored into John’s very soul. Hounsell looked away.
“Find ’im fer me, John. Surely someone seen the bugger who did it. Find the bastard who felled me and you’ll never have to look fer a bert’ on any ship of mine ever again, sir!” With that, the captain walked to a chair and sat down.
Hounsell stepped quickly to the companionway. With his face as straight as he could manage, he said as he ascended the steps strewn with bread crumbs, “An’ dat I will, sir. An’ what will I tell the men, sir? Struck wit’ a cake of ’ard bread or no. Jest to be sure of finding the bugger, sir!”
“A maul, sir! A sledgehammer blow, it was! Wielded be a coward! Tell ’em that, sir!” yelled an indignant Kean.
Hounsell stepped lightly out on deck, slammed the scuttle door behind him, and burst into laughter. When he went below deck to the sealers’ quarters, they were all waiting for him. Several of them had cakes of hard bread in their hands and were laughing.
The only time anyone ever knew Abe Kean had been knocked down was the spring when John Hounsell of Paul’s Island let fly with a well-aimed cake of hard bread.
Author’s Note
I have come to the end of yet another tale, this one about Newfoundland’s most valiant of men—her sealers. I have written the story as much for myself as for my readers. Of all the myriad stories told about our past, this is the one that resonates most in our communities. Because of this, I feel I owe you, the reader, a further explanation as to how the events in my story came to be.
Given that 100 years have passed since the SS Newfoundland disaster took place and there is no one left alive who could give a first-hand account, I had to do some extensive research. I was aided in this endeavour by my faithful friend and wife, Rose. We scoured cloudy, scratchy microfilms in the different museums and archives in our province. We read faded, 100-year-old newspapers and collected thousands of pages of information I would need to tell the story. My heart pines when I think of the many questions I could have asked Cecil Mouland on that long-ago day aboard my old truck. I will forever cherish what I did learn from the old man, who eagerly shared his incredible tale of surviving against man’s greatest obstacle—despair. I am pleased his tale is now bound here forever. I thank Cecil Mouland posthumously.
