The New Founde Land by Farley Mowat

Author:Farley Mowat
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 0-7704-2419-8
Publisher: Seal Books
Published: 2013-12-19T05:00:00+00:00

Old die-hard ships—commanded by die-hard skippers of a vanished era, for no one else would have dared take those ancient relics to sea, to risk the submarines and, what was far more dangerous, to risk the northern ice once more.

In command of the Ranger was Captain Llewelyn Kean. Although born in 1889, Skipper Lew was still in his prime after thirty-five years at the sealing game. Here is his own story of that final voyage—the period that marked the end.

The Ranger: Yes . . . she was a grand old boat, you know. Took thousands and thousands of seals in her time. Built in Dundee in 1871—white oak, greenheart and Australian ironbark. She was only a little bit of a thing, not much bigger than a good-sized tugboat of today, with a 70-horsepower reciprocating engine, and fully rigged when she was young. Towards the end she still could carry sail, and there were times we needed it.

In 1938 I was second hand to Captain Sid Hill in the new Beothic owned by Bowrings. They owned the Ranger too, and that spring she’d gone to the Gulf with Captain Moses Clarke and got into a devil of a jam, was nipped and pretty near sunk. Clarke got her back to St. John’s somehow. Clean she was, with nary a seal on board, and all broke up. He stepped ashore swearing he was finished with the seal fishery, and he meant it. Never did go back. Most people thought the Ranger was finished too, and not before time, but when Bowrings asked me if I’d take her out to the front the next spring and try and make some kind of a voyage with her, why I said, “Fair enough, sorr.” I doubt they cared if I got many seals. The thing was that if no one took her, she’d have had to be condemned.

It was well on in the season by then. The other ships had been at the ice for near two weeks. All I could get was about twenty-five men to go along of me, with old Skipper Ben Kean as second hand. We run into tight ice off the Funks, but I cut to the eastward and fooled around until I got a line on the other boats by listening in on the Marconi. After that it was all luck. We got into a corner of the main patch and took twelve thousand seals, and that was better than some of the other boats did that year. But we was in such heavy ice and had so little power we couldn’t get clear again and was carried along for ten days until we was a hundred and twenty miles south of St. John’s. Then the ice went slack and I straightened her out, nor-nor’east for the Notch: That night she began to leak like a salt basket. It looked like it was going to be a bad job, and I had a mind to go back into the ice so if we had to take to the boats we would have some chance.

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