Sails Over Ice by Captain Robert A. Bartlett

Author:Captain Robert A. Bartlett
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Flanker Press
Published: 2015-10-04T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER VIII

SEALING MOVIES, 1930

Even though it has no direct bearing on the Morrissey, I would like to tell here my first experience as a professional moving picture actor. The films we took up in Labrador in the summer of 1929 were amateur affairs, and don’t count. But they were, although I didn’t know it, setting the stage for my appearance on the silver screen, and it was one of the most interesting times I have ever had. It was also one of the most amusing.

It was in December 1929, that I met up again with Varick Frissel, and he was full of enthusiasm about the possibilities of making a moving picture of the north. I listened with interest, as a man would to any novel idea, but my reaction changed when he told me that he had actually made plans to go north and make a picture of the seal hunting off the Newfoundland coast in March and April. He planned to weave a plot into the film, so that it would be something more than travelogue.

My private opinion was that he was as crazy as a man who tries to lug a spinnaker to windward, but I didn’t say so. His next statement convinced me. He said he wanted me to go along and play the captain of the sealer. Me, in the movies! I started to laugh, and then I saw that he was serious. I told him first that I wouldn’t have any part in the thing, but he was a persuasive talker, and before he got through I had agreed to sign on. I was to be captain of an ill-fated sealer that lost her crew during a big blizzard that blew up while they were out on the ice after the seal.

This was a new role for me, I must say, for I had always been a high liner, never coming back without seals, always with the best ship, and with the best crew, and it was my proud boast that I had never lost a man. This being the case, it was a little hard for me to visualize myself as Captain Barker of the Viking, with bad luck holding the starboard tack on me every time I tried to come about. But I was elected. Varick Frissel said he needed my help, and I was his man. As a matter of fact, the idea interested me, once I got to thinking about it. It seemed like a good chance to record forever the life of the sealers, and that was worthwhile.

When the lecture season ended I was still solvent, I had a job lined up for the following summer, and I was in high spirits when I left New York in February, and went to St. John’s in the Red Cross liner Rosalind. The movie crowd had been there a short time when I made port, and we started right in the day after I dropped my hook in the Newfoundland Hotel, with my room and grub bill paid by someone else.

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