Returning South in the fall of 1895,
business necessitated my remaining for some time in
St. John’s, where as previously the Governor,
Sir Terence O’Brien, very kindly entertained
me. It proved to be a most exciting time.
There were only two banks in the Colony, called respectively
the Union and the Commercial. These issued all
the notes used in the country and except for the savings
bank had all the deposits of the fishermen and people.
Suddenly one day I was told, though with extreme secrecy,
that the two banks were unsound and would not again
open after Monday morning. This was early on Saturday.
Business went on as usual, but among the leaders of
the country consternation was beginning to spread.
The banks closed at their usual hour three
o ’clock on Saturday, and so far as I knew no
one profited by the secret knowledge, though later
accusations were made against some people. The
serious nature of the impending disaster never really
dawned on me, not being either personally concerned
in either bank or having any experience of finance.
When the collection came around at the cathedral on
Sunday my friend whispered to me, “That silver
will be valuable to-morrow.” It so happened
that on Sunday I was dining with the Prime Minister,
who had befriended all our efforts, and his tremendously
serious view of the position of the Colony sent me
to bed full of alarms for my new friends. We
were to have sailed for England next day and I went
down after breakfast to buy my ticket. The agent
sold it, but remarked, “I am not sure if Newfoundland
money is good any longer. It is a speculation
selling you this ticket.” Before we sailed
the vessel was held up by the Government, as only a
few of the ships were taking notes at face value.
Those of the Commercial Bank were only fetching twenty
cents. Besides the banks quite a number of commercial
firms also closed. The directors of the banks
were all local merchants, and many were heavily indebted
to them for supplies given out to their “planters,”
as they call the fishermen whom they supply with goods
in advance to catch fish for them. It was a sorry
mix-up, and business was very difficult to carry on
because we had no medium of exchange. Even the
Governor to pay his gardener had to give I.O.U. orders
on shops there simply being no currency
available.
Matters have long since adjusted themselves,
though neither bank ever reopened. Larger banks
of good standing came in from Canada, and no one can
find anything of which to complain in the financial
affairs of the “oldest Colony,” even in
these days of war.
Newfoundland has a large seal as well
as cod fishery. The great sealing captains are
all aristocrats of the fishermen and certainly are
an unusually fine set of men. The work calls for
peculiar training in the hardest of schools, for great
self-reliance and resource, besides skill in handling
men and ships. In those days the doyen of the
fleet was Captain Samuel Blandford. He fired me
with tales of the hardships to be encountered and
the opportunities and needs for a doctor among three
hundred men hundreds of miles from anywhere. The
result was a decision to return early from my lecture
tour and go out with the seal hunters of the good
ship Neptune.
I look back on this as one of the
great treats of my life; though I believe it to be
an industry seriously detrimental to the welfare of
the people of the Colony and the outside world.
For no mammal bringing forth but one young a year
can stand, when their young are just born and are
entirely helpless, being attacked by huge steel-protected
steamers carrying hundreds of men with modern rifles
or even clubs. Advantage is also taken of the
maternal instinct to get the mothers as well as the
young “fat,” if the latter is not obtainable
in sufficient quantities. Meanwhile the poor
scattered people of the northern shores of Newfoundland
are being absolutely ruined and driven out. They
need the seals for clothing, boots, fresh food, and
fats. They use every portion of the few animals
which each catches, while the big steamers lose thousands
which they have killed, by not carrying them at once
to the ship and leaving them in piles to be picked
up later. Moreover, in the latter case all the
good proteid food of their carcasses is left to the
sharks and gulls.
At twelve o’clock of March 10,
1896, the good ship Neptune hauled out into the stream
at St. John’s Harbour, Newfoundland, preparatory
to weighing anchor for the seal fishery. The
law allows no vessels to sail before 2 P.M. on that
day, under a penalty of four thousand dollars fine nor
may any seals be killed from the steamers until March
14, and at no time on Sundays. The whole city
of St. John’s seemed to be engrossed in the
one absorbing topic of the seal fishery. It meant
if successful some fifty thousand pounds sterling at
least to the Colony it meant bread for
thousands of people it meant for days and
even weeks past that men from far-away outports had
been slowly collecting at the capital, till the main
street was peopled all day with anxious-looking crowds,
and all the wharves where there was any chance of
a “berth” to the ice were fairly in a state
of siege.
Now let us go down to the dock and
visit the ship before she starts. She is a large
barque-rigged vessel, with auxiliary steam, or rather
one should say a steamer with auxiliary sails.
The first point that strikes one is her massive build,
her veritable bulldog look as she sits on the water.
Her sides are some eighteen inches thick, and sheathed
and resheathed with “greenheart” to help
her in battering the ice. Inside she is ceiled
with English oak and beech, so that her portholes
look like the arrow slits of the windows of an old
feudal castle. Her bow is double-stemmed shot
with a broad band of iron, and the space of some seventeen
feet between the two stems solid with the choicest
hardwoods. Below decks every corner is adapted
to some use. There are bags of flour, hard bread,
and food for the crew of three hundred and twenty
men; five hundred tons of coal for the hungry engine
in her battle with the ice-floe. The vessel carries
only about eighteen hundred gallons of water and the
men use five hundred in a day. This, however,
is of little consequence, for a party each day brings
back plenty of ice, which is excellent drinking after
being boiled. This ice is of very different qualities.
Now it is “slob” mixed with snow born
on the Newfoundland coast. This is called “dirty
ice” by the sealers. Even it at times packs
very thick and is hard to get through. Then there
is the clearer, heavy Arctic ice with here and there
huge icebergs frozen in; and again the smoother, whiter
variety known as “whelping ice” that
is, the Arctic shore ice, born probably in Labrador,
on which the seals give birth to their pups.
The masters of watches are also called
“scunners” they go up night
and day in the forebarrel to “scun” the
ship that is, to find the way or leads
through the ice. This word comes from “con”
of the conning tower on a man-of-war.
When the morning of the 10th arrives,
all is excitement. Fortunately this year a southwest
wind had blown the ice a mile or so offshore.
Now all the men are on board. The vessels are
in the stream. The flags are up; the whistles
are blowing. The hour of two approaches at last,
and a loud cheering, renewed again and again, intimates
that the first vessel is off, and the S.S. Aurora
comes up the harbour. Cheers from the ships,
the wharves, and the town answer her whistle, and closely
followed by the S.S. Neptune and S.S. Windsor,
she gallantly goes out, the leader of the sealing
fleet for the year.
There have been two or three great
disasters at the seal fishery, where numbers of men
astray from their vessels in heavy snow blizzards
on the ice have perished miserably. Sixteen fishermen
were once out hunting for seals on the frozen ice
of Trinity Bay when the wind changed and drove the
ice offshore. When night came on they realized
their terrible position and that, with a gale of wind
blowing, they could not hope to reach land in their
small boats. Nothing but an awful death stared
them in the face, for in order to hunt over the ice
men must be lightly clad, so as to run and jump from
piece to piece. Without fire, without food, without
sufficient clothing, exposed to the pitiless storm
on the frozen sea, they endured thirty-six hours without
losing a life. Finally, they dragged their boats
ten miles over the ice to the land, where they arrived
at last more dead than alive.
It is the physical excitement of travelling
over broken loose ice on the bosom of the mighty ocean,
and the skill and athletic qualities which the work
demands, that makes one love the voyage. Jumping
from the side of the ship as she goes along, skurrying
and leaping from ice-pan to ice-pan, and then having
killed, “sculped,” and “pelted”
the seal, the exciting return to the vessel! But
it has its tragic side, for it takes its regular tribute
of fine human life.
A Mr. Thomas Green, of Greenspond,
while a boy, with his father and another man and a
’prentice lad, was tending his seal nets when
a “dwey” or snowstorm came on, and the
boat became unmanageable and drifted off to sea.
They struck a small island, but drifted off again.
That night the father and the ’prentice lad died,
and next morning the other man also. The son
dressed himself in all the clothes of the other three,
whose bodies he kept in the boat. He ate the flesh
of an old harp seal they had caught in their net.
On the third day by wonderful luck he gaffed an old
seal in the slob ice. This he hauled in and drank
the warm blood. On the fifth day he killed a white-coat,
and thinking that he saw a ship he walked five miles
over the floe, leaving his boat behind. The phantom
ship proved to be an island of ice, and in the night
he had to tramp back to his open punt. On the
seventh day he was really beginning to give up hope
when a vessel, the Flora, suddenly hove in sight.
He shouted loudly as it was dark, whereupon she immediately
tacked as if to leave him. Again he shouted,
“For God’s sake, don’t leave me with
my dead father here!” The words were plainly
heard on board, and the vessel hove to. The watch
had thought that his previous shouting was of supernatural
origin. He and his boat with its pitiful load
were picked up and sent back home by a passing vessel.
On this particular voyage we were
lucky enough to come early into the seals. From
the Conner’s barrel, in which I spent a great
deal of time, we saw one morning black dots spread
away in thousands all over the ice-floes through which
we were butting, ramming, and fighting our way.
All hands were over the side at once, and very soon
patients began needing a doctor. Here a cut,
there a wrench or sprain, and later came thirty or
forty at a time with snow-blindness or conjunctivitis very
painful and disabling, though not fatal to sight.
One morning we had been kept late
relieving these various slight ailments, and the men
being mostly out on the ice made me think that they
were among the seals; so I started out alone as soon
as I could slip over the side to join them. This,
however, I failed to do till late in the afternoon,
when the strong wind, which had kept the loose ice
packed together, dropped, and in less than no time
it was all “running abroad.” The
result naturally is that one cannot get along except
by floating on one piece to another, and that is a
slow process without oars. It came on dark and
a dozen of us who had got together decided to make
for a large pan not far distant; but were obliged to
give it up, and wait for the ship which had long gone
out of sight. To keep warm we played “leap-frog,”
“caps,” and “hop, skip, and jump” at
which some were very proficient. We ate our sugar
and oatmeal, mixed with some nice clear snow; and
then, shaving our wooden seal bat handles, and dipping
them into the fat of the animals which we had killed,
we made a big blaze periodically to attract the attention
of the ship.
It was well into the night before
we were picked up; and no sooner had we climbed over
the rail than the skipper came and gave us the best
or worst “blowing-up” I ever received
since my father spanked me. He told me afterwards
that his good heart was really so relieved by our safe
return that he was scarcely conscious of what he said.
Indeed, any words which might have been considered
as unparliamentary he asked me to construe as gratitude
to God.
Our captain was a passenger on and
prospective captain of the S.S. Tigris when she
picked up those members of the ill-fated Polaris expedition
who had been five months on the ice-pans. He had
gone below from his watch and daylight was just breaking
when the next watch came and reported a boat and some
people on a large pan, with the American flag flying.
A kayak came off and Hans, an Eskimo, came alongside
and said, “Ship lost. Captain gone.”
Boats were immediately lowered and nineteen persons,
including two women and one baby, born on the ice-pan,
came aboard amidst cheers renewed again and again.
They had to be washed and fed, cleaned and clothed.
The two officers were invited to live aft and the
remainder of the rescued party being pestered to death
by the sealing crew in the forecastle, it was decided
to abandon the sealing trip, and the brave explorers
were carried to St. John’s, the American people
eventually indemnifying the owners of the Tigris.
In hunting my patients I started round
with a book and pencil accompanied by the steward
carrying a candle and matches. The invalids were
distributed in the four holds the after,
the main, forecastle, and foretop-gallant-forecastle.
I never went round without a bottle of cocaine solution
in my pocket for the snow-blind men, who suffered the
most excruciating pain, often rolling about and moaning
as if in a kind of frenzy, and to whom the cocaine
gave wonderful relief. Very often I found that
I must miss one or even both holds on my first rounds,
for the ladders were gone and seals and coals were
exchanging places in them during the first part of
the day. Once down, however, one shouts out,
“Is there any one here?” No answer.
Louder still, “Is there any one here?”
Perhaps a distant cough answers from some dark recess,
and the steward and I begin a search. Then we
go round systematically, climbing over on the barrels,
searching under sacks, and poking into recesses, and
after all occasionally missing one or two in our search.
It seems a peculiarity about the men, that though
they will lie up, they will not always say anything
about it. The holds were very damp and dirty,
but the men seemed to improve in health and fattened
like the young seals. It must have been the pork,
doughs, and excellent fresh meat of the seal.
We had boiled or fried seal quite often with onions,
and I must say that it was excellent eating far
more palatable than the dried codfish, which, when
one has any ice work, creates an intolerable thirst.
The rats were making a huge noise
one night and a barrel man gave it as his opinion
that we should have a gale before long; but a glorious
sunshine came streaming down upon us next morning,
and we decided perforce the rats were evidently a
little previous.
On Sunday I had a good chance to watch
the seals. They came up, simply stared at the
ship; now from sheer fat rolling on their backs, and
lying for a few seconds tail and flippers beating the
air helpless. These baby seals resemble on the
ice nothing so much as the South Sea parrot fish that
is, a complete round head, with somewhere in the sphere
two huge black dots for eyes and a similar one for
a nose. These three form the corners of a small
triangle, and except for the tail one could not easily
tell which was the back and which the belly of a young
white-coat especially in stormy weather.
For it is a well-ascertained fact that Nature makes
the marvellous provision that in storm and snow they
grow fattest and fastest. I have marvelled greatly
how it is possible for any hot-blooded creature to
enjoy so immensely this terribly cold water as do
these old seals. They paddle about, throw themselves
on their backs, float and puff out their breasts,
flapping their flippers like paws over their chests.
Sunday morning we were lying off Fogo
Island when some men came aboard and reported the
wreck of the S.S. Wolf in the ice. She got
round the island, a wind offshore having cleared the
ice from the land. Three other vessels were behind
her. Hardly, however, had she got round when
the northerly wind brought the ice back. The doomed
ship now lay between the main or fixed frozen shore
ice and the immense floe which was impelled by the
north wind acting on its whole irregular surface.
The force was irresistible. The Wolf backed and
butted and got twenty yards into a nook in the main
ice, and lay there helpless as an infant. On
then swept the floe, crashed into the fixed ice, shattered
its edge, rose up out of water over it, which is called
“rafting,” forced itself on the unfortunate
ship, rose over her bulwarks, crushed in her sides,
and only by nipping her tightly avoided sinking her
immediately. Seeing that all was lost, Captain
Kean got the men and boats onto the pans, took all
they could save of food and clothes, but before he
had saved his own clothing, the ice parted enough to
let her through and she sank like a stone, her masts
catching and breaking in pieces as she went.
A sorrowful march for the shore now began over the
ice, as the three hundred men started for home, carrying
as much as they could on their backs. Many would
have to face empty cupboards and hard times; all would
have days of walking and rowing and camping before
they could get home. One hundred miles would be
the least, two and even three hundred for some, before
they could reach their own villages. Some of
these poor fellows had walked nearly two hundred miles
to get a chance of going on the lost ship, impelled
by hunger and necessity. Alas, we felt very sad
for them and for Captain Kean, who had to face almost
absolute ruin on account of this great loss.
The heaving of the great pans, like
battering-rams against the sides of the Neptune, made
a woesome noise below decks. I was often glad
of her thirty-six inches of hardwood covering.
Every now and then she steamed ahead a little and
pressed into the ice to prevent this. I tried
to climb on one of the many icebergs, but the heavy
swell made it dangerous. At every swell it rolled
over and back some eight feet, and as I watched it
I understood how an iceberg goes to wind. For
it acted exactly like a steam plough, crashing down
onto one large pan as it rolled, and then, as it rolled
back, lifting up another and smashing it from beneath.
A regular battle seemed to be going on, with weird
sounds of blows and groanings of the large masses of
ice. Sometimes as pieces fell off the water would
rush up high on the side of the berg. For some
reason or other the berg had red-and-white streaks,
and looked much like an ornamental pudding.
At latitude 50.18, about Funk Island,
is one of the last refuges of the great auk.
A few years ago, the earth, such as there is on these
lonely rocks, was sifted for the bones of that extinct
bird, and I think three perfect skeletons, worth a
hundred pounds sterling each, were put together from
the remnants discovered. One day the captain
told me that he held on there in a furious gale for
some time. Masses of ice, weighing thirty or
forty tons, were hurled high up and lodged on the
top of the island. Some men went out to “pan”
seals on a large pan. Seven hundred of the animals
had been placed on one of them, and the men had just
left it, when a furious breaking sea took hold of
the pan and threw it completely upside down.
I am never likely to forget the last
lovely Sunday. We had nearly “got our voyage”;
at least no one was anxious now for the credit of the
ship. The sunshine was blazing hot as it came
from above and below at the same time, and the blue
sky over the apparently boundless field of heaving
“floe” on which we lay made a contrast
which must be seen to be appreciated. I had brought
along a number of pocket hymn-books and in the afternoon
we lay out on the high fore-deck and sang and talked,
unworried by callers and the thousand interruptions
of the land. Then we had evening prayers together,
Catholic and Protestant alike; and for my part I felt
the nearness of God’s presence as really as I
have felt it in the mysterious environment of the
most magnificent cathedral. Eternal life seemed
so close, as if it lay just over that horizon of ice,
in the eternal blue beyond.