how come
DEATH ON THE ICE IMPORTANT INFORMATION FOR FINAL ☺ all the details of this story are true ☺ more than a thousand of them died when their ships sank, crushed like eggshells by colliding ice fields, or exploded, or failed to pick them up from drifting floes, when boats were driven away in blizzards, or when those on foot were caught by storms. Survivors often lost fingers and toes, or sometimes feet or legs from freezing or other injuries. ☺ the hardships they endured were compounded by the greed by the shipowners, who refused to provide clothing or safety equipment. The men had no meals to cook or anyway to cook them: for weeks and months they lived on hard tack and tea. Even their drinking water was polluted with blood and seal fat until it stank. They slept like cattle in ships’ holds without bedding. As the pelts and fat piled up, they simply lived on top of the cargo in utter filth. Injured men recovered as best they could, or died without medical help. ☺ “like all the rest of them, he was afraid of Abram Kean,” (Sam Horwood) my father replied. “ the mutinies happened---- but only after the men were already dead.” ☺ Albert John Crewe had talked his father into letting him make the voyage. The father, Reuben Crewe, now forty-nine, had sworn off seal hunting three years before after a harrowing experience at the ice. ☺ John Howlett, a well-set-up young man from The Goulds, ten miles south of St. John’s, had suffered a chilling nightmare weeks before. In his dream he was on a mountain of ice, lost and freezing. He was alone, terribly and frighteningly alone, but everywhere he wandered there were vague, undefinable “things” on the ice around him---- things with no particular shape that he could make out. ☺ in his dream he was counting. He was still counting the white mounds when he awoke, shivering and terribly depressed. ☺ Wes Kean was not exactly in love with his ship. But by this year the ice was not loose. It was already giving him trouble as he maneuvered northward from St. John’s towards Cape St. Francis. This stuff he was butting was mostly “slob,” small, roundish pans. Newfoundlanders distinguish between “local slob,” usually too small to bear a man’s weight, even when he is “coppying,” or jumping from pan to pan, and “northern slob,” formed off Labrador. Northern slob still consists of rounded pans, but larger, thicker ones that you can safely cross by coppying, provided you are careful to jump from each pan as it begins to sink under your weight. ☺ Abram Kean ( the Old Man) , as a strict Methodist, he campaigned against liquor and advocated prohibition.