By Kim Ploughman
My father was there for my seventh birthday, but the next day he was gone.
Gone as in, “Gone to the ice.”
I don’t remember him leaving that early spring morning on April 8th, 1967. What ensued in the weeks ahead, however, forever snagged itself in my childhood memory net.
That day, my Dad, Edward (Ted) Ploughman and three other sealers, Martin House, Peter Hinks and Sam Spence jumped into their 35-foot boat, The Riche Point, in Little Port au Choix harbour, eager for a two-day sealing jaunt.
With the mouth of the small harbour choked with ice, they forced through and steered north. With visions of seals aplenty in their head at “the Front”, what these young men didn’t foresee was an extended and harrowing stay at sea, navigating the northern elements and fighting for their lives.
It would be eleven days later before the weary and grateful sealers made it back to home port and their worried sick families.
In outport Newfoundland, a spring sealing trip was a traditional and natural adventure after a long winter, both for household diet and income. As the old saying went, “You weren’t a proper man until you had gone to the ice.”
Back in the Gulf of St. Lawrence, the avid sealers were soon caught in the grip of wintry weather on the water. After anchoring to a sheet of ice overnight, a gale ignited, jamming them into packed ice, with nowhere to escape.
In October 1993, the Northern Pen newspaper’s story of the ordeal revealed that for the next four days, the dirty weather continued, with winds howling like a banshee, at 85 kms-per hour. As Spence recalled, their boat “was caught up in the ice and the seas were forcing it up and down. The slob was eight to ten feet thick, and there were big icebergs coming through at us. It got to a point where I remember saying ‘We got to get away from the boat while we still can!’”
Hope and prayers, however, kept the sealer’s flagging spirits afloat.
Back in Port au Choix, a search was underway for the seal hunters, including for three men in a separate boat (who later drifted ashore and were found.) My mother protected her five young children from what was happening. Still, I sensed something was awry. A steady stream of visitors, my mother’s worried face, candles burning and constant prayers with prayer beads and a statue of the Virgin Mary, all signalled life was not right.
My most potent memory was of my mother rushing out the door to the Point Riche, a rocky headland, where a lighthouse existed since 1871. Here, you could see across the ice-infested Strait of Belle Isle for any boat sightings.
Years later, when recalling the story to my sister Jackie, Mom disclosed that a close family cautioned her after a week that it was best to give up hope. Her strong spiritual side was adamant, “No! The Virgin Mary can move mountains!”
In recalling the ordeal through the years, Dad told of how one massive iceberg was heading straight at their small craft. Silently, he figured they were all gone. At the last moment, the “mountain” of ice redirected its path – some say by the power of prayer.
These four battered souls were given a reprieve when the storm, which lasted 56 hours, finally abated. The crew figured that, by this time, they had been swept near the coasts of Labrador and Quebec.
Two rays of hope appeared on the sixth day of their ordeal. A large vessel was sighted, and while they quickly burnt a tire on the ice, it was to no avail. Later, a search plane came very close, but it also failed to spot the disheartened and exhausted sealers.
Misery loves company, as they say, and for the stranded sealers, it proved to be an appropriate axiom. Their troubles were not yet over.
One of the most striking challenges for the stranded men was grub, as their two-day trip was now heading into a full week. Food was now down to rations.
As spirits sagged their bobbing and battered boat began leaking, the ballast pump having given up the ghost on the journey. Spence fiddled with it on deck, hooked up a chainsaw fan belt and it sprang into action. The crushing and grating ice ripped off the boat’s stem plate. Again, ingenuity saved the day, as the metal top of a five-gallon oil served as a makeshift plate.
Once the ice lessened its tight chokehold, Ploughman and Spence punched holes in the ice with planks to beat a quarter-mile path to open water.
While they, now, were no longer hemmed in by the ice, fuel now posed a concern. “By then, we had one chance to make it home. We didn’t have much fuel left so we made the most of the open water,“ Spence told reporter Damon Clarke, adding, “We were exhausted because we had very little sleep.”
During this daunting time, radio reports offered the sealers consolation that a search was underway. Buoyant by thoughts of reuniting with their families, the crew sheltered near an icefield before battening down for the night. The next morning, they were again trapped in ice, stranding them for the next three days.
By the 11th day, devastating news arrived by radio that the search was to be called off. Now numb, emotionally, mentally and physically, the disheartened men didn’t hear the muffled sound of a large vessel engine echoing across the desolated ice fields. It took the sealers, with their senses dulled by hunger and exhaustion, to quicken to the fact that they were being rescued, a mere hour before the search was called off.
My father and his sea mates were located not far from Port au Choix by the Coast Guard ship Sir William Alexander, which lifted their weary bodies and boat aboard.
Eleven days after departing home port, Dad and his companions were dropped off at nearby Port Saunders, where a cheering crowd welcomed them from the ice fields and into the bosom of community and family.
Dad’s brother John Ploughman, now in his 80s and living in Ontario, recalls that distressing time and when the family got the news: “What a relief! It was a terrible experience for them and we were so scared.”
Reflecting on the ordeal through the years, my father had often admitted: “I don’t know how we survived…”
In a recent article for Canadian Geographic, Newfoundland writer Michael Crummey shares a common spring lore: “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.”
Fortunately, the Point Riche boat mates survived. Dad was there for many of my birthdays until he passed away in 1997. Hinks died in 1977 and House in 2023. Still residing in the area, Spence, now 83, explained in a phone call how he doesn’t like to think about the ordeal, as it is “not a good memory.”
These intrepid souls were bonded by a traumatic trip to sea during an annual seal harvest. They would certainly concur with Newfoundland historian Shannon Ryan in his piece, “Newfoundland Spring Sealing Disaster to 1914,” “The spring seal fishery was subject to hazards above and beyond those normally associated with the sea.”