by Gary Collins
“She might have stood farder to sea. She could be makin’ her way in open water farder nort’ an’ be comin’ around that way,” Jesse stated, ever the optimist, answering the others’ unspoken question.
“You could be right, though it appears to be jammed solid in that direction, too,” Fred added.
“There are always open leads to be seen from a ship’s barrel as can never be seen from the land, an’ Skipper Wes is the man to find ’em,” Jesse commented, sounding more hopeful than convinced.
“I don’t know, b’ys,” said Joshua. “The ice is jammed right up the bay as far as it can go, be the looks of it. Sure, ’tis no wonder with all the in winds we’ve been ’avin’.” Still an’ all, we must go to Wesleyville. She could come in the night after the wind drops or the tide slacks and loosens the ice. Wes Kean won’t wait fer no man when ’e’s ready to go.”
“Better get on the trail, then,” said Phil Holloway in his practical, no-nonsense manner. “We’ve a ways to go.”
He and the others from Newport were wearing snowshoes that clacked on their feet as they moved away from the hills and entered the forest heading north. The two from Fair Island followed behind, grateful for their newly beaten trail. They stayed on trackless trails inland until they came down out of the hills among the scattered houses at Shamblers Cove, where they walked out on the frozen bay at Greenspond Tickle. They crossed the ice inside Pool’s Island, where friends waved at them as they passed. Leaving the bay at Valleyfield, they removed their snowshoes.
Late that evening, just before dark, they walked into Wesleyville. They were the last of the ice hunters to arrive. The wind had not dropped as they had expected. In fact, it blew harder out of the northeast, and with the dark came more snow, but no ships came into the frozen harbour.
9
In open water and free of ice, the Newfoundland could have made Wesleyville in ten hours or so. But by 8:00 a.m. she was slowed as she entered heavy pack ice. The wind was a force three out of the northeast. All day her captain twisted and turned his vessel into open leads of water, trying to claw his way northward. He was losing valuable time, but he was powerless to do more. Later that evening the wind dropped, the ice slacked, it started to rain, and the ship was making slow progress north. But by midnight of her first day at sea the wind had increased to force-five out of the northeast again and brought with it a plaster mix of snow and rain. The press of ice on her bows was impossible to get past. The Newfoundland was jammed solid and surrounded by a white, tumbled sea of ice. She was going nowhere. The engine was burned down for the night.
On the edge of the northern sea roads, Wesleyville was dressed in its winter glory. It is a flat land for the most part, with many outcroppings of granite rising bleakly out of the landscape. Its harbour approach from the open sea is a formidable one and not to be taken lightly. This coast to Cape Freels and points farther north is plagued with a sailor’s dread: shallow water and reefs. Dozens of rocks mar the coast for miles. Small islands of all shapes, some of them inhabited, rise above the sea without rhyme nor reason. When wind and sea are in full spate, there appears to be no entrance to such a place. The ocean all around is a seething roil of foaming white water.
As fearsome as it looks, it is one of the better times to enter, for now the reefs and dangers of shallow water are exposed by the breaking seas. For those who know, there are deep, safe channels that pass between the angry-looking breakers.
But for the most part the Arctic ice floes hide it all. They calm the seas, smooth the breakers, and cover the heaving grey-green shoals. After a night of drifting ice, people awaken to silence. The ice has silenced the rote of the sea. For a huge ship tacking from one place to another looking for leads of open water, it is a dangerous time. The dangers, though hidden, are still there.
* * * * *
Charles Green had been watching Wes Kean covertly, half hoping for the young skipper to make a mistake. But he had made none. It was one thing to clear harbour in the dead of night and lay down a course for hours on end, but one needed a different set of skills entirely when confronted with ice. Charles knew this all too well. During the day, two barrelmen shouted down the sightings from their lofty view in both masts of the Newfoundland. Their findings were passed to the captain.
“There’s a long lead to the nar’west, sir! I’ll see more when we gets there, I speck.”
“The only one I can see is off to the south’ard, sir! Big swatches to the east of that, and black water, looks like.”
“A rent—bit narry—off to the east! She’ll wedge t’rough, though, I ’lows, sir.”
But most dreaded of all to come from the barrelmen: “Nar drop o’ water to be seen, sir! Tighter’n a water gully, she is!”
At times like these, Wes Kean climbed the rigging like a cat and entered the barrel himself. He ordered someone else to take his place as wheelman in his absence, but not the experienced navigator, Charles Green.
One of the most feared places at sea when sailing from St. John’s is northeast of Cape Bonavista, where deadly rocks lie in wait miles out to sea. Standing farthest to sea in this chain of shoal water is a rocky area the local fishermen call Young Harry. The closest obstruction is called Branchy Rock and in the centre is Old Harry. At ebb spring tide, less than two fathoms of water cover its spine. Collectively, the rocks are called Harry’s Ground, but to seafarers who know them, they are called The Old Harrys.
Green, ever methodical, had carried charts of his own aboard the Newfoundland and plotted the course taken by Kean all the way. When they had encountered the ice floes there was little use for a direct course. A way had to be found through ice by knowledge and experience and not by compass or chart. Grudgingly, Charles Green had to give Wes Kean his respect. The man had skilfully tacked his ship back and forth across the icebound ocean, following the shouts of the barrelmen for hours trying to beat north to the seals. And the heaviest ice had been off The Old Harrys. Once, Green was about to warn Kean that he was too close to the rocks, but Kean was in full control. He heaved the wheel over, the ship turned toward a lake of black water, and they moved slowly away from the reef.
They were punching and weaving midway across Bonavista Bay. The morning had begun with thick snow and a force-five wind still out of the northeast. The Offer Gooseberry Islands were in sight. Seabirds by the thousands rose up from hidden leads as they passed. Eider ducks and old squaws—called hounds by the locals—flew over the ice in long, rapidly twisting formations. Their numbers showed as pale ribbons winging across the sky until they suddenly veered down and disappeared below the ice edge into some unseen swatch of water.
Just past noon the wind dropped and the weather cleared. The ice was heavy and tight and the ship was still barely making headway. Then they saw smoke rising astern. A ship standing to sea from them was making good way through the ice. It was the steel ship Sagona. She came on steadily, weaving her way through the ice, until she loomed up less than a mile to the starboard of the Newfoundland. As she passed, the booming and pounding of the loose ice beneath her steel hull rang out to the anxious sealers lining the rail of the Newfoundland.
Wes Kean silently cursed the old ship under his feet. He wished he could give the order to plough through the ice, but he knew his ship was incapable of such a thing. He watched in envy as the new ship made her way past him. The Newfoundland could not withstand anywhere near the beating the captain was giving the Sagona. By 10:00 p.m. Wes was jammed solid again and he had the engine stopped and the boilers burned down for their second night in the ice. The lights of distant islands twinkled, most notably those of the island of Greenspond, just south of Wesleyville, his final port before he would leave for the hunt. The lights mocked him. He was painfully aware that his wooden vessel no longer had an edge in this new age of steel.
* * * * *
The sealers who poured into Wesleyville from communitie
s near and far had doubled its population. Some of them occupied the same houses they had stayed in the year before. There were no hotels and only one boarding house. After a few days with the ships delayed by heavy ice conditions, these people with simple means found it hard to provide for the hungry sealers. Nevertheless, the ice hunters were welcome at every door for as long as it took.
The long and hungry month of March was the most dreaded of all months in outport Newfoundland. Provisions gathered in the fall from land and sea were rapidly depleted. Fish, berries, and game, the staples of these hunter-gatherers, were dwindling. Store-bought foods were the hardest to replace. The flour barrel got deeper with each mixing of bread. Most of the fishermen lived by the truck system, organized by the merchants, and it was little better than indentured servitude. An entire summer’s catch of fish was never large enough for them to receive money. The merchants and chandlers carried the fishermen and their families through the fishing season on their ledgers, but when it came time to settle accounts, the businessmen were the only ones who seemed to make a profit.
If in the rare event a few dollars were due, the fisherman was reminded, “The long and hungry month of March will come and then you’ll need the credit. I’ll keep a count on me books fer ya.” But the counts were not always accurate. For example, a merchant in Wesleyville once credited a Cape Ann hat to one of his customers. Unsure as to whom it was, he pencilled on all of his customers’ bills: One Cape Ann—not sure.
The sealers were well aware of these trying times and did what they could to help. Few of them had any cash, but while they waited for their ships they offered their labour. They grabbed bucksaws and cut junks of firewood, they carried buckets of water from wells and poured them into pork barrel water gullies, and helped with the fashioning of killicks (sometimes called old grannies). Sections of torn nets hung in every twine loft. With nimble fingers and needles flying, the sealers helped with the mending. While they worked they talked and gossiped about news from other communities: who had married, or into which family a child had been born, and who had died. Yarns were spun and great stories were told. Amazingly the most popular yarns were the ones involving disasters at the seal hunt.
Then, at 8:00 a.m. on the morning of March 11, the SS Newfoundland pushed her way into Wesleyville harbour with a force-four wind from the north-northeast astern and with snow falling all around her. At 4:00 p.m., another wooden sealer, the SS Eagle, entered port through the swirling snow. That night the winds roared out of the northeast, bringing even more snow and jamming the ice more tightly against the land, blocking the way to open water.
Aboard the Newfoundland, the sealers were talking about this “winter of starms” and the terrible ice conditions. Crewmen from the Eagle came aboard visiting and the two skippers discussed their options with their officers. Charles Green was not asked to take part in the discussion, nor did he offer his opinion. While the men talked, he stood in the background on the bridge and stared at the scarred wood from which the wireless apparatus had been removed. Wes Kean pointed to a chart of Bonavista Bay. His fingernails needed trimming.
“Dere lies the problem!” he began, indicating the long finger of the Bonavista Peninsula. “With the constant winds from the northerly point, the ice is fillin’ Bonavist’ Bay, as is plain fer any man to see.” The other men nodded their heads and murmured their agreement. “The ’arder the ice is pressed ag’in the souther’ part of the bay, it only stands to reason that the more the bloody stuff as keeps comin’ is spewed back ag’in the nort’ side of the bay. We must get away from the strain of the lan’. The open sea, ice or no, is our best bet.”
Again the others agreed with the young captain. As soon as the weather broke, day or night, they would make for the outer reaches, where they expected great lakes of open water would carry them to the seals. Time was not on their side. Someone pointed out that the official date for the killing of seals was March 15, only a couple of days away. To that Wes Kean said, “When a man’s at sea aboard his own ship, the laws made on the land seldom apply!” For a moment the brash young Kean sounded like his father, who followed no rule but his own when at sea.
The story had been told for years of an incident involving old man Kean and the theft of sealskins at the ice. It was during the spring of 1898. The crew of the SS Greenland had been killing a large herd of seals for days. The crew panned the seals, thousands of them, flagged them with their ship’s own distinctive flag, and moved on. But when their ship returned to pick them up, they were all gone! Abram Kean’s Aurora, loaded down with sealskins was the only ship near, and he was blamed for the missing pelts. He was confronted by an angry Captain George Barbour of the Greenland. George Barbour had no fear of Kean. But Kean merely shrugged his shoulders, stroked his steely beard, and with ice in his blue eyes said, “My men ’ave arders to take seals. I’ve no control over where they finds ’em.” The matter was closed.
The Greenland’s crew were now hard-pressed to find and kill seals to replace the ones that were stolen. They worked by day and at night under the smoky light of torches. With their guard down, the sealers got caught away from their ship in the most horrific of storms and forty-eight of them died. Twenty-three of them were never found.
* * * * *
The Eagle led the Newfoundland out of Wesleyville harbour at eight o’clock the next morning. The winds had settled down to a fresh breeze, the snow stopped with the ebb tide, and the ice slacked enough from the land for them to get away. The two vessels sounded their steam whistles as they made their way out the harbour. The people who had gathered to see them off cheered and waved as the sound echoed around the cliffs of the snug little harbour. Fishermen who watched the ships lumbering out through the ice thought their chances of getting to open water were slim. The black smoke that came from the struggling ships clung to their wake, and when the day ended, it could still be seen by everyone on the coast, from Greenspond to Newtown, who were looking out their kitchen windows.
Cabot Island and Little Cabot are two islands rising out of the sea just under seven miles southeast of Newtown. The larger of the two islands was dominated by a magnificent white lighthouse. Built like a fortress, of wood, brick, and cast iron, it had nine rooms and was designed to house two separate lighthouse keepers and their families. It boasted a bright light and was equipped with a kerosene engine steam-driven foghorn. But during the winter months, which was considered the close of shipping, the lighthouse was as barren of life as the granite rock on which it stood.
The two ships made it to the relative protection of the tickle between the two islands. The ice, under the force-five northeast wind, was moving through the tickle itself at an alarming speed. They were presently joined in the tickle by the SS Sagona, which, despite her icebreaking capabilities, had been unable to push through the heavy ice.
She was a fairly new ship, 175 feet long, built in 1912 in Scotland by the Dundee Shipbuilding Company. Her hull was of thick pitch pine overlaid with steel. The Sagona was owned by Crosbies of St. John’s. She had first arrived in that harbour two years previous, on March 14, 1912, and the very next day had steamed back out of the harbour to her very first seal hunt. She was captained by Sam Barbour.
The three ships reconnoitred with each other in the tickle. They had to use signals to communicate with the Newfoundland. It was obvious to all three skippers, even with the icebreaking power of the Sagona, that they could not proceed north. The ice was surging through the Cabot Islands tickle like a white river. They could not stay here. The decision was made, and all three ships turned around. And with the wind now coming force-five out of the north-northwest, they steamed south with the ice floes to Flowers Island, where Wes Kean had been born twenty-nine years before. Swinging on their hooks in the Flowers Island tickle, they burned down for another night, miles from where they wanted to be.
Charles W. Green’s log:
From Wesleyville towards Seal
Fishery. March 12th 1914. Left Wesleyville at 8 AM. Ice running strong. 4:30 PM (Cabot Island) hove up anchor and steamed to Flowers Island in company with Eagle and Sagona and anchored. Lanterns out—sunset to sunrise. So ends this day.
The two islands that make up Flowers Island looked even blacker than usual and appeared to be sitting on top of the ice as the three ships approached. All around the bleak islands and far out to sea was a plain of white. The two wooden vessels keeping close in the Sagona’s wake looked to be under tow as they entered the tickle between the two islands.
At the time of Westbury Kean’s birth here on April 29, 1886, on Kean’s Island—smaller than the other, Sturge’s Island—the population of Flowers Island had been just shy of 100 people. In 1911, the last time Wes had entered this harbour, there were only eight people left. Looking from the bridge of the Newfoundland as he steamed below the land of his ancestors, he saw the few scattered homes that remained. Despite their harsh look, the islands sprout colourful flowers in summer which some say are so fragrant their scent is carried to the mainland more than five miles away. Abram Kean, who always boasted of his birth island, claimed, “It has provided a place for wildflowers to grow and birds to build their nests and hatch their young as nature and grace intended.”
Wes Kean allowed the Newfoundland to drift close before ordering the anchor away. The chain rattled and clanked in the still harbour when it was released from its chocks. He gave strict orders to the watch to keep him informed of any change in the wind, no matter how slight. Then he called his master watches to the bridge along with his second hand, George Tuff. Kean decided to use the time to divide the sealers into groups called watches. He was scheduled to stop for more seal hunters farther north at the fishing villages of Fogo and Seldom on Fogo Island. These men would be added to the watches as they came aboard.