Exploration
Finding Quest
Inside the expedition that found famed explorer Sir Ernest Shackleton’s famed last ship
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- 15 minutes
History
The harsh realities of sealing life at “the Front”
When Quest sank, she had 5,200 seal pelts in the hold. A look at the intersecting worlds of polar exploration and sealing.
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To a casual observer, it might seem a peculiar quirk that Ernest Shackleton’s last ship, Quest, ended its life as a Norwegian sealing vessel off the coast of Newfoundland and Labrador. But the worlds of early polar exploration and the hunting of seals and whales were deeply intertwined.
Norway had been sending ships into the White Sea in northern Russia alongside Danish and Russian sealers for decades by the time Shackleton’s last ship, Quest, was launched in 1917. Originally christened Foca 1 — the Latin word for seal — she was built for work in Arctic conditions, including the White Sea seal hunt, but was purchased by Shackleton for his Antarctic expedition in 1921 (the ship would come back into Norwegian hands after Shackleton’s death in 1922 and made its first sealing foray into the White Sea in 1924).
Many sealing vessels spent part of their careers in Arctic and Antarctic expeditions. Polar expeditions and the seal hunts on both the European and North American sides of the Atlantic were notable for facing brutally mercurial weather and murderous ice conditions. The ships used in Newfoundland’s industrial-scale hunt at the time (many of which were built in Norway) were constructed to withstand the enormous pressure of the Labrador ice floes at what was known as “the Front,” where each spring massive harp seal herds whelped their pups.
Seal hunting on both the Labrador and Newfoundland coasts is a practice as old as human settlement in this part of the world. Seals were a central staple in the life of Beothuk and Inuit communities. At the end of a long winter that stretched stores to their limits, the animals were also an essential source of food for early European settlers in Newfoundland outports.
In the 18th century, seals became a significant mercantile good. Exports of Newfoundland seal pelts and oil to Britain rose dramatically after 1800. That growth continued through the first half of the 19th century. By 1869, over 200 vessels and almost 10,000 Newfoundlanders were “prosecuting” — that is, taking part in — the seal fishery, sailing into the ice fields on the northern coast of the island and off Labrador. Even as the use of animal oils for light, heating and machinery was displaced by fossil fuels, seal pelts remained a popular form of “light leather” throughout Europe, used for upholstery, hats, jackets, breeches and saddle covers.
Even by the standards of the time, the hunt was a fierce and bloody and remarkably dangerous undertaking. When ships jammed in the ice, sealers were sent overboard to chop, push and lever the vessel free. Once a vessel drew handy to a patch of swiles (a Newfoundland term for seals), the sealers were sent onto the ice in “watches” of 10 to 30 men, killing and skinning the seals by hand. Every sealer carried a gaff — a long pole topped with an iron hook or spike — which was used as a walking stick on the endlessly shifting ice pans. The gaff was also used as a club to kill the seals with a forehead strike before the pelt and its thick layer of fat was flensed from the carcass.
Where the seals were plentiful, the men were at the slaughter for hours at a time, their coat sleeves soaked in blood. When the swiles were scattered in smaller groups, they walked miles over ice to reach them, jumping stretches of open water, the pans rising and falling on the swells beneath their feet.
Newfoundland sealers were paid according to their vessel’s catch at season’s end, and the pressure to take as many seals as quickly as possible was enormous. They were housed in temporary bunks in the ship’s hold. During a bumper year, the wooden bunks were removed as the catch increased, and the crew slept on the bloody pelts of the animals they’d harvested.
In a poor year, sealers could end up owing money to the ship’s owners for the cost of their berth. But for Newfoundland fishermen, who worked under a system of mercantile credit called “truck,” the seal hunt was their only real opportunity to make cash money. The competition to get and keep a berth was cutthroat.
The opportunities for mishap and injury in these circumstances were legion. Men suffered cuts and infections, broken bones, sprains and bruises, ice blindness. “Swile finger” or “swile hand” was a common, painful swelling of a sealer’s hand and arm, known in Norway as “speck (blubber) finger.” Men fell through the ice and soaked themselves and were struck down with palsies or pneumonia or other afflictions.
The watches always returned to their ship before dark, or when a day turned too dirty to carry on working. But the famously unpredictable and sudden weather made being caught on the ice in a storm a very real, and deadly, possibility.
Stories of men who died in accidents or of sickness or who froze to death at the Front are a part of most Newfoundland community histories. The largest disasters are woven into the fabric of Newfoundland culture. The Newfoundland sealing disaster of 1914, a tragedy immortalized in Cassie Brown’s Death on the Ice, saw a party of 132 sealers caught on the ice for 54 hours. Seventy-seven men perished before the end of the ordeal. The Southern Cross was lost in the same sudden storm, all 173 sealers disappearing without a trace.
The NorwEgIan White Sea seal hunt was as unpredictable and as dangerous as the Front in the Labrador Sea. In 1917, seven ships and 88 men were lost to the ice there. Eleven vessels sank in the White Sea in 1927 alone.
Quest was regularly jammed in pack ice and adrift during these hunts. At times, dynamite charges attached to bamboo poles had to be fired between the ship side and the ice to keep the propeller free. In one instance, the ice pressure on the hull caused the railing to let go and the deck bulged upward. The sound of wood cracking was so ominous that the crew prepared to abandon ship. It was only an unexpected shift in the wind that relieved the pressure and prevented the ship from sinking.
Quest was often called upon to help other ships in trouble in the ice or to rescue crews who had suffered a total loss. In 1933, Kvitoy was caught in heavy ice that stove in the hull, the ship and its cargo of 9,000 pelts sinking within five minutes. Twenty-five of its crew were picked up by Quest and brought home to Norway.
Quest was often called upon to help other ships in trouble in the ice or to rescue crews who had suffered a total loss.
Smaller than most Newfoundland sealing vessels and with a crew of only 25, Quest still managed impressive takes at the hunt. Using both rifles and the Norwegian hakapik — a club about the length of an axe handle with an iron spike at the head — the Quest sealers put up 8,560 pelts and 1,500 barrels of blubber in 1932, the largest catch taken in the White Sea in many years.
By 1936, however, circumstances had changed dramatically. Quest brought home only 4,300 pelts, which was the largest catch among the fleet that year. In 1938, Quest made two unsuccessful sealing trips that resulted in large operating losses.
As the White Sea hunt became increasingly marginal, Norwegians began sailing beyond Greenland and into the Labrador Sea in search of seals, a journey of 2,500 nautical miles. After an upgrade to a semi-diesel engine to make the long voyage possible, Quest joined a fleet of eight Norwegian sealers at the Labrador Front in 1939. The ship returned with 7,000 pelts and 2,250 barrels of blubber.
The Second World War interrupted Quest’s life as a sealer, but after a complete postwar rebuild the vessel sailed for the Front once again in February 1949. It would return to the Newfoundland seal hunt during each of the next dozen years, often alternating work as a sealing ship with employment in the fall fishery in Norway.
In February 1962, Quest departed for the Front for the last time. The years in crushing ice and heavy weather were taking their toll. The entire vessel shifted at the joints. Onlookers at the dock in Bodø, Norway, reported the movements could be seen with the naked eye. There were leaks in the hull as well, but pumps managed to clear the bilge during the voyage across the North Atlantic.
On April 1, with the hunt well underway, Quest was brought up in heavy, screwing ice. The jolt skewed the ship so severely that cabin doors no longer closed in their jambs. Larger, deeper leaks in the hull required both pumps working to keep the vessel afloat, but by April 29, it became clear that the damage was too severe to save the ship. The crew was evacuated, and at 5:40 p.m. on May 5, Quest sank with its cargo of 5,200 seal pelts still aboard.
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This story is from the November/December 2024 Issue
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