Flanker Press, St. John’s, N.L., 2013
343 pp., illus., $26.95 hardcover
It was a cold April night in 1914 when Mary Crewe awoke from her sleep to see a ghostly image of her husband and son kneeling by her bed in an embrace. She knew immediately that the worst had happened — her men had perished at sea on the annual seal hunt.
Reuben and Albert John Crewe were just two of the seventy-eight sealers from the SS Newfoundland who died after being unnecessarily stranded for two days on the ice floes of the North Atlantic. One hundred years later, Gary Collins revisits that fateful trip in his latest book, Left to Die: The Story of the SS Newfoundland Sealing Disaster.
Collins builds on Cassie Brown’s seminal work, Death on the Ice, first published in 1972, by retracing events through the eyes of the sealers, the ship captains, and their family members waiting at home. But, unlike Brown, Collins had no survivors or witnesses to provide first-hand accounts of the events. Instead, he spoke to their descendants, gathering stories passed on to the next generation and exploring how the tragedy is remembered by Newfoundlanders a century later.
Collins spends a good deal of time setting the scene for readers, and he paints a vivid picture of the hardships these families endured simply to survive. Most of the sealers were fisherman needing to supplement their income, so the possibility of earning some real cash far outweighed the dangers of sealing. Droves of men made the trek to St. John’s, Newfoundland, each spring, many of them coming on foot from distant outport communities, for the mere chance of securing a berth on a sealing ship.
Once on board sealing vessels, the men faced inadequate food and equipment and poor living conditions. Worker safety was not a priority for the greedy ship owners — the owners of the SS Newfoundland even removed the wireless communication system a week before their hunt because they felt it cut into their profits.
Gary Collins delivers a powerful reminder that the 1914 sealing disaster shouldn’t be dismissed as an act of God or a freak tragedy. The men on the SS Newfoundland, and their fathers and grandfathers before them, faced treacherous working conditions and risked their lives every year just to get by. Left to Die helps to ensure that their struggles and stories will be remembered. — Joanna Dawson
— Joanna Dawson (Read bio)
Joanna Dawson is Canada's History Society's Acting Director of Programs.