Sealing

"Tis jest a dog's work while it lasts, but somehow there's an excitement in it, that sets young fellers kind o' restless in the spring. ... a man, 'll go for swile where gold won't drag 'un." A quote by fishermen John Saunders in Newfoundland and Her Un-trodden Ways 1907.

The industry itself was known as swilling (sealing) and between the 1830s and 1930s it occupied the minds and bodies of 20 thousand or more Newfoundland sealer/fishermen and 400 vessels, usually half the male population between Notre Dame Bay and Trepassy Bay. During the peak years of the 1840s an astonishing 500,000 seal pelts would be taken annually. For comparison, during the same period, fur seals in the north east pacific were hunted to near extinction. The business of sculping (flensing) the seal pelts took place there on the ice floe. Here, if the herds were plentiful, a large mound of pelts would soon be built up, to be picked up later by the sealer's mother ship. Sealers habitually risked their lives but accepted it without question. The experience of a trip 'to the ice' (usually understood to mean 'the front', a large area lying off the North East coast of the Island but also to a lesser degree the Gulf of St Lawrence), was not to be missed, rough and dangerous, it became to be regarded as a rite-of-passage for young outport Newfoundlanders. All one needed for the hunt was a gaff, (a wooden pole about 6 ft. in length, with an iron spike and hook attached at the end, a suitable flensing knife and a 10 to 12 ft. length of sturdy hemp rope for towing seal pelts along the ice. All aspired to get 'a berth' aboard a sealing vessel, be it schooner in early days or later larger barks ("wooden walls") or in modern times, large steamers, ("ironclads"), built for maneuvering in ice. Crew sizes might vary anywhere from 40 to 275, (when men would be packed in like sardines) depending on vessel size and construction. Grub tended to be sparse, even meager, generally not much more than bread and butter, duff, brewis and tea, and seldom even potatoes. Protein only came when the vessel was actually 'in the fat' and men were permitted to return to their ship with their own seal flippers which were then cooked up by the ship's cook for a "good scoff" all around. Most sealers made a few extra dollars by selling these flippers to St. John's town folk at dockside at voyage's end, which could be anything from a few weeks to a couple of months in length. Flippers were usually the only seal body parts, (along with the pelts) taken aboard for personal sale and use. The flippers were cut off at the time of flensing (sculping) and put aside for later pick up. The rest of the carcass was left on the ice. I can only surmise that polar bear populations were healthy in those days.

In the 19th century before the days of steam and iron, the ships (schooners and barks primarily), were referred to as "wooden-walls" whereas, after the turn of the 20th century, and after most sealing vessels were constructed of iron they came to be called "iron-clads".

The merchant vessel owners charged the sealer for a berth, a "signing-on" charge to go to 'the ice' until 1902, when there was a 'sealer's riot' in St. John's. Although it was squashed, it did lead before long to the elimination of a number of exploitative practices in the sealing industry, of which charging for a berth to the ice certainly was one. Sealing was a hard currency earner for poor inshore fishermen of Newfoundland's outports where cash was very hard to come by in the oppressive medieval "Truck" system of fish trade.

In modern times many reforms were introduced by the Canadian Government, of which, most importantly, was the highly controversial white coat hunt which was banned in 1984. Just a few years later, in 1987, the 'large vessel' hunt to the ice fields itself was also banned. Of course the EU's banning of the importation of all seal products in 1984 had a huge impact on the industry, practically obliterating it, with only a modest land based hunt for local hunters now existing.

Molasses Bread and Tea was the memoir book I put out many years ago, that dealt almost exclusively with highlights of my employment with the Fisheries Research Board of Canada, Arctic Unit, from 1961 to 1965. It included in some detail, the traditional Newfoundland seal hunt as I experienced it aboard the Canadian-Norwegian sealer and arctic research vessel M V Theron under Capt.

Harald Maro during the 1961 and 1962 seasons. As well, it detailed a couple of summers I spent camped out on the tundra when collecting beluga whales for the FRB at Whale Cove, District of Keewatin, now in present day Nunavut.

FRB, was then an arm's length, quasi – independent and world renowned research facility. [It has been defunct since 1974, when it was closed down by the government of the day for being perhaps a little too critical of what had been up to then official government policy. Its staff was then absorbed into a newly revamped Department of Fisheries and Oceans].

But by this time we can assume that the government knew full well that just around the corner lay its enactment of the 200 mile EEZ also in 1974, (Exclusive Economic Zone), which would ban foreign vessels i.e. the large modern factory trawlers of these nations, from fishing on most of the Grand Banks, thereby ostensibly eliminating overfishing of the cod stocks from that foreign source. But the reality was what followed. Overfishing of the cod stocks simply continued as before, by even larger and more modern trawlers than before, the only difference being that they were now Canadian owned. Perhaps the thinking simply was, better we get rid of the FRB critics in advance. Molasses Bread for the most part, covers my years as a collector of marine mammal specimens for the FRB's Arctic Unit in Montreal.

I spent several summers (1962-1964) in the company of Inuit hunters on the west...