Canada and Newfoundland

by Frank G. Carpenter

Some years ago a farmer-fisherman-mechanic named William Coaker organized the Fishermen’s Protective Union, with local councils in the outports. The union organized coöperative companies that now buy and sell fish, build ships, and handle supplies of all kinds. It even built a water-power plant to furnish electricity at cost to light the men’s homes. A new town, called Port Union, was developed on the northeast coast. This has become the centre of the Union activities, and there its organizer, now Sir William Coaker, spends his time. The Union publishes a daily paper in St. John’s. Its editor tells me that in the last ten years the dividend rate paid by the F. P. U. companies was ten per cent. for eight years, eight per cent. for one year, and none at all for only one year. The Union went into politics, and for three elections has had eleven members in the lower house. By combination with other groups this bloc has held the balance of power. While the Union has a strong voice in the government, the conservative business houses seem to be the dominant influence here in St. John’s, where, quite naturally, the fishermen’s organization finds little favour.

St. John’s is the centre for the Newfoundland sealing industry. This is not the seal that yields my lady’s fine furs, but the hair seal, which is killed chiefly for its fat, although the skin is used to make bags, pocketbooks, and other articles of leather. The oil made from the fat is used as an illuminant, a lubricant, and also for some grades of margarine.

The annual seal hunt starts from St. John’s on March 13th. The sealing steamers carry from two hundred to three hundred and fifty men each, packed aboard like sardines in a can. The vessels make for the great ice floes off the northeast coast, and it is on the ice that the seals are taken. The animals spend the winter in waters farther south, but assemble in enormous herds each January and start north toward the ice. Within forty-eight hours after reaching the ice-field, some three hundred thousand mother seals give birth to as many babies. The baby seals gain weight at the rate of four pounds a day, and rapidly take on a coating of fat about two and a half inches thick. When they are six weeks old, they leave their parents and start swimming north. It is a matter of record that the parents reach the ice and the young are born in almost the same spot in the ocean, and on almost the same day, year after year.

I visited one of the sealers. It happened to be the Terra Nova, the ship in which Captain Scott explored the Antarctic. It was a black craft, designed to work in the ice-fields and carry the maximum number of men and seals. I held in my hands one of the six-foot poles, called “bats,” with which the seals are clubbed to death on the ice. Once the ship reaches the ice-pack, the hunting parties scramble overboard and make a strike for the seals. The ice is usually rough and broken, and a man must make sure that he can get back to his ship. Each hunter kills as many seals as he can, strips off the skin and layer of fat, and leaves the carcass on the ice. The skins and fat are brought back to the ship. The baby seals are the ones that are preferred, for since they feed only on their mothers’ milk, the oil from their fat is the best. Seal hunting is exciting and dangerous work while it lasts, though from a sporting standpoint baby seals can hardly be considered big game.

During the winter season the red iron ore from the Wabana mines is stored in huge piles. In the summer it is shipped by steamer to the company’s steel mills in Nova Scotia.

The annual race between schooners of the rival fleets from Nova Scotia and Gloucester, Massachusetts, is a unique sporting event. Every other year the contenders meet on a course off Halifax harbour.

The start of the annual seal hunt is a great occasion for St. John’s. Two thirds of the proceeds of each catch are divided among the crew, the steamer owner taking the balance. It is an old saying in Newfoundland that “a man will go hunting seals when gold will not draw him.” The ships usually return by the middle of April. In a good year each man may get about one hundred and fifty dollars as his share.

From one hundred and fifty to three hundred thousand seals are brought into St. John’s every year. At the factories gangs of skinners strip off the fat from the hides as fast as they are landed. Sometimes one man will strip as many as six hundred and forty skins in a day. The fat is chopped up and steam cooked, and the oil drawn off into casks. The skins are salt dressed.