A veteran journalist looks back at the tumult of sealing in the 1970s

It was a tiny airfield just outside the Northern Peninsula community of St. Anthony, Newfoundland, hardly a place you’d expect to spot an international celebrity.

But there she was, on a March afternoon in the late 1970s, walking at a quick pace across the snow-covered tarmac towards a private plane. The “sex kitten” herself—as she was dubbed by the world media—Brigitte Bardot, striding arm in arm with a youthful, palpably protective, male companion, and being pursued by a horde of journalists.

Including me, a newspaper reporter in my late 20s, looking quite disheveled, sporting long hair, a scraggly beard, and enjoying this rare, close encounter with a member of the “rich and famous club.”

Although she was never confused in acting prowess with Meryl Streep, Bardot was nevertheless a household name, and had seen her public profile dramatically raised by her crusade to save the harp seals, the “baby seals” as she called them, from being clubbed to death and skinned on the Labrador ice floes north of St. Anthony—an annual slaughter considered a boost to the Newfoundland economy and a cultural rite of passage for over a century for many a Newfoundland man.

And on this cold afternoon, Bardot was heading to a rendezvous with fellow sealing protesters and talked mostly in French as she made her way to the aircraft, its engines warming up, its pilot awaiting his famous passenger.

A salty tongue?

Of the countless stories I’ve covered throughout a near 50-year career in journalism in Newfoundland, it is the seal hunt that has produced, by far, the most eclectic of characters, from hard-working fishermen to movie star protesters. It has transported me with my notepad, tape recorder or camera crew to the widest range of locations, from the blood-splattered ice fields off Labrador to opulent hotels in New York City and Washington, DC to a fishing shed in the picture post card community of Twillingate, Notre Dame Bay.

Characters like the aforementioned Bardot, whose close proximity on that March afternoon also provided me with an unexpected, memorable laugh.

An hour or so after Bardot had left, a number of us, part
of a gathering of reporters from various corners of the world, in St. Anthony to cover the protest, sat around the local motel bar. We were sipping beers, engaging in a journalistic post-mortem about our few minutes with the actress—the star, as someone noted, of the 1956 movie And God
Created Woman.

I remarked, innocently enough, that Bardot had quite the salty tongue.

 “It was f... this, and f... that, the baby f...,” I explained, as my colleagues, as least those who could speak French, roared with laughter.

Not knowing a word of French myself, I received an immediate but embarrassing language lesson when one of the reporters explained that the French word for seal was “phoque”, that it was no wonder I was hearing what I thought was incessant cursing throughout Bardot’s rant about the killing of the “baby phoque.”

 

The bronze memorial to the sealers lost from the SS Newfoundland and the SS Southern Cross. Photo credit Jodi DeLong

Memories of the sealing disaster

Seven years earlier, I had had a much more reserved afternoon working on a sealing story.

At the time, I was a rookie reporter, but lucky enough on this particular day to be given a gem of an assignment: My editor asked me to interview Cecil Mouland, one of the last living survivors of the 1914 sealing disaster in which 78 men froze to death after being stranded in a blizzard on the ice off Labrador. That terrible event has been immortalized in song and literature in Newfoundland, most notably in writer Cassie Brown’s magnificent book Death on the Ice.

What I recall vividly about that particular couple of hours with Mouland was his graciousness and modesty, and how he deliberately put me, a visibly nervous pup of a reporter, at ease with a warm greeting, the offer of a cup of a tea, and a seat in the living room of his senior’s apartment in the east end of St. John’s.

Mouland’s story of watching his many friends over a 48-hour period freeze to death was riveting, and I hung on his every soft-spoken word, especially his graphic, moving description of a father putting his arms around his son who had surrendered to the cold and slumped to the ice, no longer able to walk in a continuous circle on the patch of ice that was the sealers’ only refuge.

When rescue finally came, the bodies of the father and son were encased in ice, and that’s the way they were loaded onto a boat, frozen together, an image that stayed with Mouland forever. There’s a powerful sculpture by Morgan MacDonald in Elliston, at the memorial honouring the lost sailors of the SS Newfoundland and SS Southern Cross, that depicts that same father and son.

When I asked Mouland how he had managed to stay alive on that ice patch of death, he eagerly told me it was a woman who inspired him to keep moving, to keep breathing.

He explained that in his hometown lived a girl he had hoped to marry, but there was a young fella in the community with the same romantic aspirations. The thoughts of his sweetheart marrying another man was just too much to fathom, he said, and gave him an inexhaustible determination to survive.

With a broad smile, he told me he had, in fact, married the woman, and they had lived a long and loving life together.

 

Suffering no fools

In between those contrasting journalistic occasions with Mouland and Bardot, I was often in the company of Capt. Morrissey Johnson, at the time the best known of the sealing skippers, his vessel invariably returning to port with “bloody decks” (a commonly used expression at the time, to describe success at the hunt).

I interviewed Johnson numerous times aboard his ship, the Lady Johnson, and was always taken with the fact that he seemed to have been typecast by a Hollywood director in the role of a sealing skipper: tall and ruggedly handsome, with white, flowing hair and a white beard, a black leather jacket, an intriguing aura.

In actual fact, Johnson was the antithesis of Hollywood, with a laid back, unpretentious, earthy nature, and, not unlike Cecil Mouland, always went out of his way to ensure I felt comfortable doing my job (the couple of beers we always shared in his cabin certainly helped the comfort level, as well).

But he didn’t suffer fools gladly, as they say, and he was incensed that sealing protesters were maligning what he believed to be a legitimate industry, no different from the slaughter of cows, pigs or chickens.

And I witnessed his anger once on a spring day during the Blessing of the Fleet, a ceremony in which local clergy gathered on the St. John’s Waterfront to pray for the safe return of the sealers. A young woman attempted to chain herself to Johnson’s ship, and he grabbed her, and unceremoniously threw her down the gangplank. She wasn’t hurt, as I recall, but it appeared Johnson, a mild-mannered man by any standards, had taken out all his frustration with the anti-sealing movement on this lone protester (whose fearlessness I had to reluctantly admire).

Controversies and crusaders

Johnson was also a member of an entourage from Newfoundland, headed by Premier Frank Moores, that tried to persuade the international media in the late 1970s that the seal hunt was neither the inhumane slaughter being portrayed by the protesters, nor would it lead to the extinction of the seal herds.

The first trip had stops in New York and Washington, and I was among a group of Newfoundland reporters who covered the trip.

But it was a disaster.

In the midst of the first press conference being held by the Newfoundland contingent at a fancy New York hotel, Brian Davies, head of the International Fund for Animal Welfare, interrupted the pro-sealing presentation with repeated shouts of “you should be ashamed of yourselves!” The American media, there in droves, subsequently focused the bulk of its coverage on television that night and in newspaper reports the next day on Davies. The Newfoundland point of view was lost in the shadow of the histrionics supplied by Davies, a master of press manipulation.

It was also apparent that the film shown on television screens that evening of burly sealers clubbing harp seals superseded any attempts by the Newfoundlanders to put the images in context.

Even I, a reporter from Newfoundland, my journalistic objectivity under strain, was becoming aware that the protesters’ spin could possibly win the war for the hearts and the wallets of people outside my home province.

Several years later, when the campaign had virtually destroyed the market for seal pelts, I had to acknowledge that the anti-sealing movement had achieved its goals, even as disingenuous as I felt their methods had been.

Another anti-sealing crusader I dealt with on occasion was Patrick Moore, an early member of the environmental group Greenpeace, and gifted with the same media manipulation talents as Davies.

In April of 1978, Moore helicoptered to “The Front”, the geographical name for the ice floes where the seals congregated each spring off Labrador, with television actress Pamela Sue Martin, the star of the Nancy Drew series, and American Congressman Leo Ryan.

Reporters like me wondered how the sealers would handle any possible confrontation on the ice floes, whether they would react with anger, thus delivering for the cameras what Greenpeace was hoping for.

But the sealers didn’t bite, especially one particular man to whom Jackie Speier, an aide to Ryan, kept up a barrage of questions.

The sealer ignored Speier, and continued to skin a seal, finally remarking, without looking up: “Don’t bother me, woman, I’m trying to work.”

At the time, his coolness under pressure, his justifiable apathy, was considered a victory, albeit relatively small, for the sealers.

Less than a year later, Ryan would be murdered and Speier seriously wounded during the infamous Jonestown massacre in Guyana.

The metaphor

Twenty years after those events of the 70s, I found myself in Twilingate, sitting in a fishing shed with Jack Troak, a proud fisherman and sealer with a colourful, outgoing personality: baseball cap permanently attached to his skull, cigarette dangling from his mouth, and equipped with a delightful Newfoundland brogue, and an unambiguous, insightful defense of sealing.

I was producing a documentary at the time for the CBC program Land and Sea on the tragic death of Jack’s son, Gary, himself a well-known sealer, who had recently drowned while hauling fish nets in the waters just outside Twillingate.

What I remember most was Troak’s story of how a sealing protester had spit in his son’s face during a demonstration on the Mainland. He recalled that Gary simply wiped off the spit, and walked away, employing incredible self-control.

“It wouldn’t have been me,” Jack said angrily.

That incident, I’ve thoughts ever since, was a metaphor for the way in which the anti-sealing campaign had always treated Newfoundland, with an unwarranted spit in its face.

My time reporting on the antics of Pamela Sue Martin or pursuing Brigitte Bardot or having a beer with Morrissey Johnson is long over, retirement from daily journalism having eliminated the possibility of any sort of interviews, on any subject.

But each and every spring, I have moments of recollection of an up close and personal observation of the seal fishery, especially when my wife and I dig into a feed of seal flippers, considered a delicacy in Newfoundland.

And we do so with not an ounce of guilt.