When men were of steel, and their boats were of wood!
The history of Norwegian seal hunting and how Northern and Western Norway men have been active in the trade for generations.
The following pages strive to explain a partial history of hunting seals in frigid seas congested with ice and how men from northern and western Norway, including my father’s direct family and relatives, have been active in the trade for generations. I personally have encountered and worked at sea during hurricane-force winds and mountainous seas. However, I worked aboard modern steel ships, much larger and equipped with reliable engines, not on board small wooden boats with either sail or a single motor. The hardships and challenges those brave hardened men of earlier generations suffered to provide a living for their families are difficult, if not impossible, to comprehend, let alone imagine.
From the earliest days, Norway’s population turned to the sea for a living. The distance as the crow flies from Nordkapp in the north to Lindesnes in the south is 2,544 kilometres. When including the fjords that cut deep into the mountainous mainland, Norway has a total coastline of 28,953 kilometres. If one includes the 239,057 island coastlines, this length increases to 100,915 kilometres.
Norwegians have hunted seals and whales in the Arctic Ocean for centuries and later in the Antarctic Ocean. The first chronicled Norwegian history of seal hunting and trade is from around the year 862, depicting Ottar, a Northern Norwegian chieftain from Troms County, “Norðmanna land” or “Norðweg” as Norway was then named. Ottar was a merchant who traded with and taxed the Sami indigenous populations who hunted for aeons in the far northern hemisphere. He was a seafarer and hunter who dealt with fur from otters, martens, bears and reindeer, bird feathers, whale bones, walrus teeth and ropes made from skins off seals, whales and walruses.
Ottar travelled extensively over three decades from the 860s through the 890s, conducting trade and discovery expeditions north and east to the White Sea (Kvitsjøen) and the surrounding areas (Bjarmeland), south along the coast of Norway to the Skiringssal (Kaupang) trading posts in Vestfold and Hedeby (Slesvig) in what was then Denmark, now Germany, and onwards further south to England. Around 890, Ottar visited King Alfred the Great of Essex and brought seal skins with him as gifts and for trade.
The Dutch had a large-scale seal operation in the Arctic Ocean in the seventeenth century. Norway joined the seal hunt in 1795 when the first schooner left Hammerfest. However, there was no annual catch until the 1820s. The first organised Norwegian wind-driven seal-hunting expeditions were provisioned and dispatched from Hammerfest and Tromsø. These tentative explorations were a century before several families, along with the Eilevsen, Hartviksen, Jakobsen, Nilssen, Mikalsen, and Lundberg families living in old (Greater) Ibestad, invested in sea-going seal-hunting vessels in the Is Havet (Arctic Ocean). The first vessel from Trømso was the (Slupp) Sloop Necolai, which returned in 1822 from (Bjørnøya) Bear Island with twenty (Hvalross) walrus skins.
In 1844 Svend Foyn, a Norwegian whaler, shipping magnate and philanthropist from Tønsberg Vestfold, introduced seal-hunting to Vestfold County and joined in the seal catch. Foyn, the pioneer, would later introduce the modern grenade-tipped harpoon cannon and ushered in revolutionary methods for hunting and processing whales that brought the good and evil of industrial whaling into the modern age. One could compare Svend Foyn with the Swedish engineer, inventor and philanthropist Alfred Nobel. Foyn subsequently, in 1845, built the two hundred and thirty gross ton Brig Haabet I with two masts, both square-rigged, which, for a long time, became the model for later schooners. In 1846 she spent her first season catching seals in the western ice floe. Haabet I sank in 1871 in a storm close to Jan Mayen Island with fifty men on board.
From 1860-1890, Norwegian hunt boats, mainly from the northern towns of Trømso and Hammerfest, sailed to East Greenland, Svalbard, the Kara Sea, the East and West Ice floes, and Spitsbergen on hunting expeditions.
Numerous seamen from Gratangen forged a rich sailing history as crew members aboard sealing and whaling vessels dating back to the earliest days of the 1820s when the first boats sailed from Hammerfest and Tromsø. These tentative expeditions marked the start of northern Norway’s industrial sealing and whaling in the ice-filled seas. Arctic hunting operations displayed remarkable diversity over the years. (Polarbjørn) polar bears (Ursus maritimus) and (Hvalros) walrus (Odobenus rosmarus) were the primary catch until 1876. Later, (Klappmyssel) hooded seals (Cystophora cristata), (Storkobbe) bearded seals (Erignathus barbatus), several types of whales, and (Grønlandsel) harp seals (Pagophilus groenlandicus) became the primary catch along with other seal species. The ascendancy of sealing on an industrial scale only emerged toward the end of the nineteenth century. The fleet increased in size, despite northern Norway having little financial capital for investment in new larger vessels.
It was a challenging life for the coastal population in the latter half of the nineteenth century as Norwegian seafarers and fishermen struggled to survive. From Bømlo in the north to Kvitsøy in the south along western Norway, winter herring travelled to the coast to spawn. This abundance of herring allowed people to survive, but it was a dire undertaking. In the 1860s, a young fisherman from Karmøy in western Norway chronicled his work on rugged crews setting and pulling herring nets to bring in their catch. The source of his story was eighty years old when his experiences were written down for posterity. Fortunately, great care has been taken to preserve his observations, which can be reproduced as it was. Here is an abridged version:
There were small open boats at the time. The spring herring fishing, as it was called, began in January and could last until well into March. The herring always appeared first at Utsira. Furthermore, it entered both sides of Karmøy. Then further west of Røvær, Sletta west of Haugesund, Tjernagel and north towards Brandasund, Stolmen and Glesvær. Those who worked with yarn were called “garnfanter”. There could be four to six men on board each boat. The boats with four to six men crew could have up to twenty nets on board. The nets were set in the evening and were pulled in the morning the next day. When the fishing was at its best, these boats were fully loaded with herring. Yes, up to twenty hectolitres. Then the fishermen sailed or rowed to the nearest buyer. The buyers were most often larger sailing ships that received the herring. The herring salteries were not big buyers of herring at the time. They came later. There were no cabins on board the small fishing boats – and the men often had to look for shelter for the night with local people. But it wasn’t always that simple. The last resort was to drag the boats ashore and lie under these small crafts. Many a fisherman from that time slept under the open sky when there was no room elsewhere. They tried to gather strength for the next day. Laying in snowdrifts and gales or pouring rain with southerly solid or northerly winds. Later one got “logifartøy” boats with an accommodation partition. There were small schooners that had fitted cargo spaces, and you could spend the night on board. The cleanliness was so-so. In the middle of the “lodging boat”, there was a “tiled stove” as a fire. Everyone used this oven to cook their own food. All wet clothes were also dried here, and the fish steam and stench hung like a thick cloud in the cramped cabin, where up to thirty fishermen could spend the night.
Fishermen who had many small children to feed at home received their payment in something called a “lott”. In the 1860s, they were paid up to twenty “Specidalers” for good fishing. In 1875, the “Specidaler” was converted into the Norwegian Kroner (one “Specidaler” became four Norwegian Kroner). So then a “lott” payment for over two months of hard fishing in all kinds of weather in open boats resulted in approximately eighty Norwegian Kroner. There was no payment for poor or no catch, as the individual “lott” was based on a percentage of the combined catch yield. At the time, Norway was one of Europe’s poorest countries. There was no form of social security or a health fund department. Instead, there was a “fattigkasse” (poor man’s chest), a minuscule poor man’s fund passed into law in 1845. The funds were collected from a poor man’s tax paid by those with means.
Social economist Torkel Halvorsen Aschehoug (1822–1909), a political elite born with a silver spoon in his mouth, was a member of several poor man’s commissions in the 1850s. He incomprehensibly believed that poor people should, in principle, not receive any help. Aschehoug advocated a dissuasive system of poverty, pervertedly designed to be so cosmetic and pathetic that the poor suffering and desolate preferred to stay away. Aschehoug’s distasteful and heart-wrenching influence can be seen, amongst other derogative historical influences, in that the Poor Law passed in 1863 was significantly stricter regarding who received poverty care than what the Poor Law passed in 1845 was.
People had to fend for themselves as best they could; one can only imagine the suffering of infants and small children. The first oil boom (whale oil) was from 1904-1930. The second oil boom (fossil oil) started in 1969 and is still booming, ensuring Norway’s present population does not even remotely suffer such hardships and deprivations as their coastal fishing, seafaring and hunting ancestors. Norwegians should be grateful to these earlier men and women who built the country through toil, hard work and much loss of life.
Hunting grew in significance as a commercial operation following the introduction of reliable reinforced ice boats, engines, modern hunting techniques and better weapons. Similar to the whaling fleet, the sealing fleet increased almost eightfold, from a meagre six in 1859 to forty-six vessels in 1909, while the annual harvest of seals increased from less than fifteen hundred to over thirty thousand animals over the same period. The geographical range of the hunting grounds expanded correspondingly from a limited area around Jan Mayen Island and the west coast of Spitsbergen to incorporate a vast area, which included the (Vestisen) western ice (north and south of Jan Mayen Island), the northern ice (Svalbard), the eastern ice (the Kola Peninsula to Novaya Zemlya, Kara Sea), the White Sea, Zemlya Frantsa-Isoifa (Franz Joseph Land), the Denmark Strait (southeast of Greenland/northwest of Iceland) and northeast Greenland.
The species composition of the harvest underwent remarkable transitions over the decades, one species being replaced by another as local stocks became successively depleted from the relentless slaughter. Thus, it was dominated numerically first by (Reinsdyr) Svalbard Reindeer (Rangifer tarandus platyrhynchus) and (Hvalross) walrus (Odobenus rosmarus) and followed by (Hvithval) beluga whale (Delphinapterus leucas) and (Torsk) cod (Gadus morhua), before consisting primarily of (Isbjørn) polar bears (Ursus maritimus), (Nebbhval) northern bottlenose whale (Hyperoodon ampullatus) and several seal species. Vessel owners and skippers responded to reductions in numbers by searching for new hunting grounds. In doing so, they sailed further north, then easterly and westerly than ever before, coincidentally making a series of historical voyages of discovery. Ketch-rigged diesel-driven sealers, an assortment of new, salvaged and second-hand foreign ships, primarily replaced sloops and brigs.
Norway’s first oil boom was not crude but whale oil and blubber. Initially, there were nineteen coastal whaling stations along the Finnmark coast, which from 1877 to 1904, processed 17,825 whales. In 1903 whaling was banned in Norwegian waters due to the species’ decline. New areas for hunting had to be found. The North Atlantic from Norway to Newfoundland and south to Antarctica became the new hunting grounds. The bonanza then started in Antarctica. From a tentative start in 1904, the hunt grew until 1930. During the industry’s peak year of slaughter, ten thousand Norwegians were involved in the whaling and sealing industry, primarily in Antarctic waters, where up to seventy per cent of the catch was by Norwegian vessels and crews primarily from the three towns, Tønsberg, Sandefjord and Larvik in southern Norway.
This was an enormously important income for Norway before, during, and post-WWI. It would be incorrect to say that Norway depended on the whaling industry as a nation during those decades, albeit without it, there would have been much more poverty. The slaughter was dangerous and deadly. By some accounts, around two thousand Norwegian whalers and sealers perished on the seas and in the ice over just twenty years from 1903-1923, while killing hundreds of thousands of whales and, in earlier years, millions of seals. Such loss of life, both of adequate mammals and humans during peacetime, is challenging to comprehend.
Individual pelagic whaling fleets comprised fourteen to twenty vessels, a large mother factory ship, two or three fast corvettes (towboats), two or three buoy boats and nine or more hunting boats (gunboats/catchers). The combined crews would number between eight hundred and twelve hundred men. The fast-hunting boats with their explosive harpoons in the bow were what started the industrial age of whaling. They made it possible to catch fast-swimming large rorquals, such as blue and fin whales, to harpoon them and then pump them with compressed air so they didn’t sink. The entire boat would function as a giant fishing rod and reel, with the line running out when the whale was struck, with onboard winch mechanisms to take the strain and start winding in the caught whale. Such boats were notoriously uncomfortable at sea, and the work arduous and relentless. The hunting crews at the pointed end were the best-paid of the whalers, with the harpooner being the best-paid of all, as the success of the whole enterprise was based on his expertise and skill. The harpooner would usually be the captain of the whale catcher. He would quickly get from the bridge to the harpoon by a flying bridge (a walkway), avoiding the delay of going down on deck first. The buoy boats would gather the floating carcases and prepare them for the tow, and the corvettes would tow the carcasses back to the mother ship for processing.
I personally am more than pleased that the despicable evil of whaling is a bygone era. However, I can’t help but admire the men who placed themselves at the forefront, succeeding with their skill and wits in arduous, life-threatening conditions.
Because of the shrinking whale population, the last season of organised Norwegian-led Antarctic whaling was in 1967. Whale oil was no longer viewed as critically important since the oil from herring was being processed and used to a greater extent.
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Who are these men who listen intently and become enchanted, captivated by the call of the wild unknown?
I can characterise and epitomise naval/offshore divers and offshore pipeliners, but I fall short when trying to portray and elucidate the mindsets of Arctic Ocean huntsmen. Do those huntsmen of old who faced the North and South Polar Sea ice floes differ from today’s sat divers and pipeliners, or are they cut from the same cloth? Ågaard, my grandfather, prudently stated, “Sailors and ice sea huntsmen were Norsemen’s backbone.”
Established, self-perceived, invulnerable members of society living their mundane lives use numerous words to describe the adamantine men who spent much of their lives on the high seas. Many of those descriptions are not flattering, and most have derogative undertones.”
…the Outsider is a man who cannot live in the comfortable, insulated world of the bourgeois, accepting what he sees and touches as reality. `He sees too deep and too much,’ and what he sees is essentially chaos…he is the one man who knows he is sick in a civilisation that doesn’t know it is sick.” — Colin Wilson
Below is an erudite, eloquent and sagacious synopsis of seafaring huntsmen and explorers wonderfully penned by Dr R. B. Robertson, the senior medical officer on a whaling expedition to Antarctica in the 1950-1951 season. Excerpt from “Of Whales and Men”, published in 1954:
“… the motorboat that had brought Davison around from the other station had long since departed, so we had no option but to spend the night with our hosts or walk back again across the trackless hill. We elected the latter, for there is a time during a night of good fellowship when the risk of a broken leg or a pitch down a hundred-foot rock seems a minor thing. We set off in the darkness — the Norwegian bosun, of course, accompanying us ‘to show us the way.’
I am glad we made this stupid and rather reckless decision because halfway back to our harbour, none of us being very sure of our direction, we stopped to rest and finish the remainder of Gyle’s flask, and I shall remember that halt for the span of my life. We sat down on the tussock grass on a high promontory sticking into a ghostly bay. There was a faint light, I know not whether from moon or star or ‘ice-blink,’ but sufficient for us to see the narrow entrance of the bay, which a huge tabular iceberg was threatening to block, and to see the towering unnamed mountains all around us. We were a Scottish doctor, recently a psychiatrist; An English naval officer Commander Gyle the senior whaling inspector; Davidson the Boson, a Shetland seaman, the finest seaman I had yet met; A Norwegian whaleman-station Boson who had spent more than half his life in the Polar seas; and Mansell “Queenueg reincarnated”, the production manager, believed by some to be a Norwegian.
…We sat silent for a time while the flask passed around twice. Then began a conversation which changed many of the bitter, angry thoughts which that day had begun to form in my mind regarding this island.
It was Gyle who opened the conversation (and do not think from the way I reproduce his words as I remember them that he was talking over the heads of the seamen who listened — for old whalemen are not as other seamen).
‘It’s a strange thing,’ he began. ‘There’s a huge literature of whaling in prose, but there’s little or no poetry about us or our job. I wonder why. Think what Byron might have written if he’d gone a-whaling instead of to Greece; or if Coleridge’s wedding guest had been stopped by an ancient harpooneer instead of by a retired merchant-navy man. Think what William Blake might have written of the whale, had he known it; or think what wonderful doggerel Kipling’s unwritten “Master Flenser” would have been!’
Davison was tickled by this idea. ‘Aye!’ he said. ‘Or Robert Service’s (maybe Bret Harte’s) unwritten poem called “Blue Whale Mansell”; or “The Voice of the Antarctic.”‘
Mansell had a suggestion — probably, alas, a vain one: ‘Maybe we persuade John Masefield, if he be not too old, sign on whalecatcher for one trip and write great whaling poem before long trick’s over!’
‘It is strange,’ I mused. ‘There’s no whaling poetry I know, except one stanza of Kipling’s which is actually about a master flenser from Dundee . . . but there’s some mighty prose. Same with the Antarctic Sea and continent — there’s been some fine prose written about them, mainly by seamen with no literary education or pretension; but not a word of verse that I know.’ ‘Nor music neither,’ added the Norwegian bosun. ‘Except one piece written last year — a symphony called The Albatross written by an Italian who had read Moby Dick but never been in Southern Ocean. It was no good!’
Then I remembered the only part of the poetical lecture given me by the old gunner’s daughter in Tønsberg which had interested me: ‘But there have been a few lines of poetry written about this island, though the man who wrote them didn’t realise that it was about a place a few miles from here that he was writing. . . I was very cross when Gyle stole my effect and quoted the lines entire:
Who is the third who walks always beside you?
When I count there are only you and I together
But when I look ahead up the white road
There is always another one walking beside you
Gliding wrapt in a brown mantle, hooded…
‘Who wrote that?’ asked Davison. ‘And why d’you say it’s about South Georgia?’ ‘T. S. Eliot wrote it,’ Gyle told him, ‘in a poem called “The Waste Land.” And he wrote a footnote to explain it.’ (Gyle could not, of course, quote Mr Eliot’s footnote accurately, but I do so for him now:
The lines were stimulated by the account of one of the Antarctic expeditions—I forget which, but I think one of Shackleton’s; it was related that the party of explorers, at the extremity of their strength, had the constant delusion that there was one more member than could actually be counted.
Mansell took up, at this point, this strange conversation between half-inebriated whaling men sitting on a frozen headland at night on the fringe of the Antarctic seas. ‘I am not very well-read man,’ he confessed. ‘I never read anything except about whaling and the Sea, so I not know this, Mr Eliot. But I knew Ernest Shackleton, explorer about who this Mr Eliot write. I know about this other man, too — this strange, queer one more member who accompany Shackleton and his two men when they march across South Georgia. I was here — so was Davison — the day Shackleton walk into whaling station over the mountains, when we and all the world think he and his men lost down in ice. Shackleton dead twenty years now — I go to his funeral when he die down here, and his wife, who know her man well and where he want to lie, say: “Bury him in South Georgia, not in Westminster Abbey like government want” — and maybe most people in North forget even his name, but we not forget him down here. I tell the story of Shackleton to Rubbersen here, u-u-u-gh?’
Gyle, Davison, and the Norwegian bosun had heard the story at source, and a thousand times since, and I had been reading and re-reading it since this most inspiring of Antarctic explorers had started on his last quest into the white South when I was nine years old. But we all nodded, and, sitting there on the lonely cliff, Mansell told the story again. I wish I could convey the drama and feeling with which the old whaleman retold South Georgia’s most inspiring tale, and I wish I could reproduce the atmosphere in which Shackleton, hero of the Southern Ocean whalemen, though a forgotten man in England and America today, was brought to life again on that lonely foreland of the island he loved so well.
The tale that Mansell told was this:
The year was 1915. The South Pole had been reached by Amundsen and Scott three years before, but the continent of Antarctica was still almost entirely unknown, and Shackleton was aiming to lead some scientific men across the continent from the Weddell Sea to the Ross Sea to get a general picture of its formation. The Antarctic continent is bigger than the U.S.A., and most of it is lying beneath hundreds — often thousands — of feet of solid __Ice, so this journey was no light undertaking.
Shackleton had sailed from Britain the very day the First World War was declared on Germany, and from their first port of call, he and his men had offered to abandon their projected expedition and place themselves and their ship at the disposal of their country. In answer, Shackleton received a cable from a statesman who, even in the fury of war, could see the value and overriding if not immediate, the importance of a venture such as they proposed to make. The cable was a single word: ‘PROCEED’; and it was signed by the First Lord of the Admiralty — Winston Churchill.
So Shackleton sailed into the ice of the Weddell Sea, but before his transcontinental journey could start, he met disaster. His ship was crushed and totally lost in the pack ice, and he and twenty-seven of his men found themselves sitting with three tiny whaleboats in the middle of the most remote frozen Sea on earth, with no radio and no means of telling the world of their disaster.
‘So what they do?’ Mansell asked, pausing in his story. ‘They sit down and pray to God? Or start writing dramatic diaries about all is lost, same like Captain Scott? Na-a-a-w! Shackleton just say: “O.K., boys! We go home!” — and he bring ’em all home, safe and well. And how he do it, u-u-gh?’
The way he did it was to trek, part sledding, part sailing, with his three boats to the nearest point of solid land — the fearful and hitherto unvisited rock called Elephant Island at the mouth of the Weddell Sea. There he left twenty-two of his men to support life precariously on seal and penguin meat, with upturned boats as shelter, until he could return with aid. With five companions, Shackleton set out on as fantastic a journey as has been undertaken through the ages by any leader to save his crew: a journey in an open twenty-foot whaleboat across nearly a thousand miles of Antarctic Ocean, on the remote chance of reaching that tiny inhabited speck in the far South Atlantic, the whaling island of South Georgia.
‘And you know what his men and everybody in Zuther Notion call Shackleton?’ Mansell went on. ‘They call him “Cautious Jack” — “Canny Jack,” the Scots boys say — because he never took unnecessary risk. Now you think, Rubbersen! When we leave the island, we sail down to mouth of Weddell Sea in twenty-five-thousand-ton ship — and maybe that is difficult and dangerous at times. You think what a risk Canny Jack and his five men take crossing same ocean in tiny whaleboat!’ But against all the currents and terrifying gales of the Southern Ocean, and against all the laws of chance as mathematicians work them out, the tiny cockleshell hit South Georgia but on the wrong side. They landed on the Southern coast of the island where no man had ever attempted to land, never mind support life, before, and there was not a hope under the prevailing weather conditions of sailing round the island. So Shackleton made another cautious move. ‘Right!’ he said. ‘We’ll walk across the island to Strømness whaling station.’
You think that not a very exciting tiling?’ Mansell asked me and I could see his eyes gleaming in the dim light as he talked. ‘Maybe you scoff and say it is only few miles across island from where Shackleton land to here, u-u-gh? But I tell you, no man — not even all the crazy British, American, and Norwegian men who come to this island before and since Shackleton ever try to climb to top of the ridge, never mind walk across island. You look up there behind you…. You see what I mean!’
But Cautious Jack Shackleton, with Worsley and Crean (these names are not remembered anywhere in the world today except on South Georgia Island), fixed screwnails into the soles of their boots, and, seamen as they were, with not a mountaineer among them, began a climb and a descent across a nine-thousand- foot unexplored range. They had no map, for such a tiling does not exist for the interior of the island even today, and they had only a schoolboy’s pocket compass to guide them as they pushed into the mountains, hoping to find a pass of some sort through the range before one of the South Georgia blizzards, the most fiendish known on earth, should destroy them.
They reached the top of the ridge — to find themselves trapped. There was no way down the other side. They began painfully cutting steps in the ice slopes, but soon realised that this offered no hope, for night was on them, along with it die certainty of freezing to death, and no man would hear of them again, or of their twenty-two shipmates a thousand miles behind them down in the Weddell Sea.
So: ‘We’ll slide!’ That was Cautious Jack’s suggestion in this predicament! And the three of them coiled up their rope, sat down upon it, and grasped one another round the waist. Cautious Jack kicked off.
This is what Worsley, the man in the middle position on the rope, wrote about it afterwards:
Slide down what was practically a precipice, in the darkness, to meet — what?…. It seemed to me a most impossible project. The slope was well nigh precipitous, and a rock in our path- we could never have seen it in the darkness in time to avoid it — would mean certain disaster…
But Canny Jack, their leader, said: ‘We’ll slide!’ and the other two did not demur, so whe-e-e-e! Off they went. ‘It’s not good to do that kind of thing too often’ was Shackleton’s comment when they found themselves at the bottom and, to their astonishment, safe. And next morning they heard in the distance the steam whistle at Strømness whaling station calling the men to work.
Their tribulations were not yet over. On their walk towards Strømsness whaling station Tom Crean apparently fell through the ice-covered lake and was rescued by Shackleton and Wordsley (hence its name Crean Lake). Shortly after this, they knocked on the Whaling Station managers office.
Mansell concluded his yarn: ‘I was in manager’s office at Stromness that day. Everybody at Strømness knew Shackleton well, and we very sorry he is lost in ice with all hands. But we not know three terrible-looking bearded men who walk into the office off the mountainside that morning. Manager say: “Who the hell are you?” and terrible bearded man in the centre of the three say very quietly: “My name is Shackleton.” Me — I turn away and weep. I think manager weep, too.’
We sat a while in silence when the old whaleman had finished the often-told yarn; but each of us occasionally turned round and looked up at the awful mass of jagged black rock and immense glaciers towering away behind us into the gloom toward the interior of the island, and we did silent homage to South Georgia’s greatest spirit.
‘Tomorrow, Rubbersen,’ Mansell whispered to me, ashamed of his sentiment, ‘I take you round to Grytviken visit Canny Jack’s grave. Maybe Old Burnett give us some of his daffodils to lay there. Every year we leave some.’ (As, in fact, the whalemen do; and they tend that grave as well as it would be tended in Westminster Abbey, or better, though they come out of their stinking, grax-polluted dwellings to do so.)
We made a move back to the ship, and during the next hour or so, as we stumbled over rock and snow slope and worked our way slowly round the headland, we talked of Antarctic explorers and the motives that take men down to that terrifying white desert, not once, but time and time again, to dedicate a large part of their lives to its ghastly wastes, often to die there.
‘The motives of some of them are only too painfully obvious,’ Gyle said. ‘Personal glory, kudos, or even material gain. Most of the big expeditions which go today with prefabricated, centrally heated palaces, airplanes — and, of course, accompanying journalists and radio commentators — come into this category. Even some of the heroes of the past, such as Amundsen, brave men though they undoubtedly were, had motives which were suspect. Some others are real scientists who reckon that the knowledge they gain of the last unknown part of the earth is worth the agony of getting it. But, besides those two types, there’s always a handful of men like Shackleton who keep coming down here as it were for the fun of it. My explanation of them is that they find something down here which is an absolute necessity here if men are to survive but is rarely met with in other places and conditions — namely, real comradeship. That’s a human relationship second only to sexual love, and a thousand times rarer. You find it in war, but war’s a filthy business, and the comradeship of war are tainted as a result. But down here, where it’s not man against man, but man backed by his comrades against the worst that elemental nature can do — against God, if you like — then you find a real comradeship such as you will find nowhere else on earth, and men like Shackleton keep coming back again and again to experience it.
‘Davison was not satisfied with this explanation. ‘Aye! But there’s more to it than that,’ he said. ‘It’s the old urge to see what’s over the next hill; Antarctica’s the only part of the world left where it’s still possible to look over a hill without knowing for a certainty what you’re going to find on the other side. Of course, it will probably be more ice and snow; but it might not be — and it’s that “might” that brings the Shackletons down here time after time.’
The Norwegian bosun had another theory: ‘It is not because they want to come down here — it is because they want get away from up there. Some like us whalemen — they not fit up there in your country and mine, and people up there not want queer folk around like Shackleton and whalemen And we no can write poetry or paint pictures or get away from silly world which want no part of us, same like artists do. So we come here because we not at home — and we no damn use — anywhere else.’
Mansell stopped and gestured complete disagreement with the other three. ‘I think you all talk nonsense, and you know it. Shackletons, and best kind of explorers, and maybe old whalemen, too, come here because they know there is something else, that man can feel but not quite understand in this world. And they get closer to that thing — that fourth man who march with Shackleton across South Georgia — when they are down here than anywhere else in world. This island, Zuther Notion, Antarctic continent — all haunted places. Not many haunted places left in modern world, and, when man like Shackleton find one, he keep coming back to discover — haunted by what? C’mon! Time we get back to ship!’
For the remainder of that walk through the night I speculated on these things. I saw the world divided into two types of men: on the one side, the pitiful little men wasting their lives in their armchairs, or grabbing goods and gear and meaningless money from one another; and, as the epitome of this type, I saw the businessmen responsible for the squalor and sordidness I had passed by that morning. And, on the other side, I saw the old whalemen, the misfits of this world, and the men who are engaged in an endless quest for they know not quite what, but who — like their magnificent prototype, Ernest Shackleton — are above and perhaps do not even notice the discomforts and difficulties they encounter in that quest, whether these be laid by nature or by other, lesser men.
And I wondered if some deep, unexpressed, and inexpressible religious urge was in fact, as Mansell suggested, the motivating force that urged such men — sneered at by their civilised fellows as ‘psychopaths’ and misfits — on their endless, useless, unproductive quest.
When we got back to the ship, I was tired, more tired than I had been since I took up whaling — but not so tired that I did not get out Ernest Shackleton’s book and read his own comment about the mysterious ‘fourth man’ who accompanied him on the adventure which Mansell had so vividly described.
After that night on the lonely coast with the old whalemen and with the spirit of Shackleton as the ‘other man’ among us, I looked on South Georgia in a very different way. It was no longer merely the ‘slum of the Southern Ocean,’ but had become, as it is to Mansell and many others who choose to make their home there, a mystical and inspiring isle.”
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In 1914 greater Ibestad, then an amalgamation of the provinces of Gratangen, Ibestad and Andørja, started to send ships west and north. In 1915 Mikal Nilssen’s family from Foldvik acquired the Harpun T-44-I. In 1918 the Lundberg family bought into the boat and, in cooperation with Nilssen, started to hunt seals with their and Foldvik’s first ice-reinforced boat. The family has run a fleet of seal-hunting and fishing boats out of Foldvik ever since.
Two of Lundberg’s seal-hunting boats were sunk over the years, entering local maritime history. The Harpun T-44-I was built-in 1915 from wood at Johan Bakkes Båtbyggeri, Rognan, length of sixteen point three metres, a width of five point four metres, and a gross weight of thirty-five tons. A forty-horsepower Bolinder diesel engine provided her propulsion. In 1924 the vessel was lengthened to twenty metres and re-named Harpunen, maintaining the registration number T-44-I. The ident was made mandatory for boats by the Norwegian fishing registry in 1920, depicting: T=Troms (Fylke) county (F is Finnmark, M is Møre and so on), -44 is the chronological number by date of the fishing boat registered in the municipality, -I denotes the (kommune) municipality of Ibestad, a T is Tromsø and so on. If a vessel is lost, condemned, impounded by a foreign state, scrapped or divested, its existing identification number can be transferred along with licences and fishing quota concessions to a new replacement vessel, christened with the same name; the boat would then unofficially have the number II, III or IV added. The earlier sail-driven Brigs and schooners prior to 1920 did not have Norwegian hunt vessel registration numbers.
On 25 April 1924, the Hapunen T-44-I, skippered by Ågard Dinessen’s brother-in-law Lundberg Sørensen, became locked in the White Sea’s treacherous ice off Russia’s northern coast. The vessel was crushed, and the entire crew saved themselves by evacuating onto the ice. After a cold night huddled on the ice floe, they were seen and picked up by another sealing vessel in the vicinity. There were no casualties.
On 26 February 1939, sixteen years later, Ågard’s brother-in-law Lundberg Sørensen skippered the Saltdalingen T-6-G. The vessel was built in 1918 from wood by Rognan Båtbyggeri, measuring twenty-one metres in length, with a width of six metres, a gross weight of eighty-nine tons, with a sixty-horsepower two-cylinder Avance RM engine. Saltdalingen T-6-G floundered and sank off the North Atlantic’s Newfoundland coast during a terrible storm while sailing on a hunting expedition to Newfoundland. They had set sail from Harstad, northern Norway, via Greenland to the hunting grounds of Newfoundland’s ice. The entire crew of eighteen men were miraculously rescued by the heroic efforts of the men on board Polarbjørn M-12-HD with a length of thirty-seven point three metres and the men of Polaris M-10-HD measuring thirty-three-metres bow to stern. Blessedly, the two much larger Norwegian sealing ships from Brandal village, Møre in Western Norway, were within hail when disaster struck.
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Bertheus Norman Eilev(w)sen or Ellev(f)sen (Øyløfsa) was born in Gratangen on 27 May 1867 and passed away at age seventy on 07 September 1937. He purchased his first fishing boat in the early 1890s. Bertheus was a daredevil and highly driven. A telling example of his aspiring aggressive ambition is elucidated by an expedition from Troms to the cod fishing areas in Finnmark over open water. The sail was so rough and dangerous that the entire crew, including his brother, walked off the boat in the small coastal fishing port of Mehamn (northern Sami: Donjevuotna; Kven: Meehamina) situated in a bay off the Barents Sea in Gamvik Municipality, Troms of Finnmark county. The village is located on the small Vedvik Peninsula, part of the greater Nordkinn Peninsula, at the southern end of Mehamnfjorden.
His first hunting expedition to the Ishavet (Ice Sea – Norway’s name for the Arctic Ocean) was in 1894 aboard the famous vessel Gjøa, a forty-seven gross ton square-sterned sloop with a length of twenty-one point three metres and a breadth of six point one meter. Gjøa was Designed by Colin Archer and built by Knut Johannesson Skaale at his shipyard in Rosendal in 1872, the same year Roald Engelbregt Gravning Amundsen was born. (Amundsen purchased the vessel in 1901.) The Gjøa was piloted by Tromsø Skipper Hans Cristian Johannesen, born in Balsfjord Troms. Hans Cristian Johannesen was the renowned Arctic Ocean skipper Fritjof Wedel-Jarlsberg Nansen frequently corresponded with during his years of exploration in the latter years of the nineteenth century.
On his first Ishavet (Ice Sea) hunting trip as a crew member of the Gjøa to the Kara Sea, one of Bertheus’s shipmates was then twenty-one-year-old Roald Engelbregt Gravning Amundsen, who was also on his first trip to the far north. Roald left behind medical studies when his mother died and travelled north from Oslo. His father passed away when he was fourteen years old. Roald was among the rare breed of men with a relentless drive and audacity that could not bear to live a safe, mundane homely life. His hunger and desire to live close to the edge, confront and defy mother nature’s challenges, and push his limits were overriding.
I have been blessed to have met several men and some women with the same restless mindset throughout my life. They are a rare breed that does not function well in an organised general society void of or with little stimuli of danger, challenge and hardship. However, these exceptional individuals excel where others dare not venture; sadly, many pass away at a young age, whether from daring feats or akin to the fates of American Captain Joshua Slocum, who, like Amundsen, disappeared or vanished in the unknown. Some ended their days from darker causes, like Norwegian explorer, Infantry Captain Fredrik Hjalmar Johansen and Frenchman free diver Jacques Mayol.
Others become self-destructive, battling personal demons, as did American frontiersman and founder of Rogers Rangers, Lieutenant Colonel Robert “Wobomagonda, White Devil” Rodgers (born to Ulster-Scots settlers James and Mary McFatridge Rogers), who served with distinction as an officer in the British Army during the French and Indian War, and during the American Revolution.
From 1755-1764 Robert Rogers served with valour and was a tireless leader, and from 1764-1967, he continued performing his administrative duties with considerable zest. Rogers dispatched expeditions to search for the fabled Northwest Passage under Jonathan Carver and James Tute, but they were unsuccessful, and the path to the Pacific Ocean remained undiscovered until the expedition led by Alexander MacKenzie in 1793.
Following 1767, Robert Rogers appointed many strange officers to his command, including taverns and whore-house owners, which infuriated the British. Although he was responsible for the capture of Nathan Hale, he was defeated in his only action. He and most of his officers were sacked. He returned to England suffering from poor mental health. After a brief sojourn in England, he returned in 1779 to raise the King’s Rangers in Nova Scotia, Canada, for General Sir Henry Clinton. By then, his alcoholism was full-blown, and he was sacked again, replaced by his brother James.
New Hampshire legislature passed two decrees regarding Rogers: a proscription (decree of condemnation to death or banishment) and a divorce from his wife on the grounds of abandonment and infidelity. She could not afford any friendship or mercy toward Robert if she expected to remain in New Hampshire. Later, Elizabeth married John Roche, an American naval officer. She died in 1811.
He was of no further use to the British army. Accidentally snared by an American privateer, he spent some time in a prison in New York, escaping in 1782. In 1783, he was evacuated with other British troops to England. There, he was unable to earn a living or defeat his disease. He died in obscurity and debt. What little money he had went to pay arrears in rent.
These historically fascinating men, amongst numerous more significant and lesser giants throughout history, suffered similar ends while trying but failing to live or reintegrate into normal civilised societies.
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Below is a description by Johannes Bjarne Alme of what (Vesterisen) West Ice was typically like in the 1950s and 1960s; the ice flow varies slightly from year to year and decade to decade, but the passage below gives an enlightening description of the ice.
“The Western Ice Sheet is the mass of ice that has broken free from the ice in the North Pole Basin, drifting south with the current. This current, which runs along the east coast of Greenland, is called the East Greenland Current. The (polisen) polar ice it carries is many years old, and the largest (flaka) floes stick up above the water at the height of a man or more. This is what is called the (polarbaksen/drivis) or drift-ice. The sea area between Greenland and Svalbard freezes over every winter. This ice is called (vinter-is) winter ice and can stick up to half a meter above sea level. The drift ice floes to the East Greenland mainland, where it meets rock and is crushed under a deafening cacophony and spectacle. From East Greenland, the mighty belt of drifting (polarbaks) polar ice spreads eastwards – and forms the (Vesterisen) West Ice floe. The most considerable extent of the West Ice floe is during the month of March. On extra cold days, the water also freezes in the area surrounding the winter ice and the (polarbaksen). First, a mush with a consistency similar to ice syrup forms, evolving into (pannekake-is) pancake ice that freezes together into larger (flak) floes. This ice is then named (ny-is) new ice. All this ice disappears on the drift South, and most of it has melted by the time it has passed the Denmark Strait. Only (isbrear) icebergs are found further south; icebergs are pieces of glaciers that have formed on land and then calved into the sea.
After cold and calm days, when the (Vesterisen) West Ice is exposed to rough seas, the new ice is broken up, and (Sørpe-is) mush ice is formed, a kind of ice gruel that can be up to one meter thick. Over time the winter ice’s turn to be decimated arrives. This ice is also broken up – furthest periphery into small flakes, further inwards into more significant floes. In conjunction with storms that come across the current, the heavy (polarbaksen) Arctic Ice is also affected, and the vast ice masses are smashed and broken against each other and pressed upwards into the air. These formations that then arise are called (scrwgarder) screw ice gardens or screw ice farms.
The eastern width of the (Vesterisen) West Ice floe, where the edge faces and extends towards the Norwegian Sea, is jagged around the extremities. The most extensive protruding jagged, irregular edges are called (oddar) forelands. They can extend ten (Norske landmil) Norwegian land miles (one hundred kilometres) out from the polarbaksen and can be up to three Norwegian land miles (thirty kilometres) wide at the root. But they are usually smaller. The small and loosely torn tags are called (strimlar) strips. They are often formed outside the forelands or in the bay between two forelands.
Usually, the forelands and strips consist of broken-up winter ice, but the root of the forelands is often formed by (polarbaks) polar ice. The floes that form forelands are covered over with snow – except those on the far side where the seas wash away the snow. Furthermore, it is not just the snow that disappears. Some of the ice is also eaten away by the relentless sea. Therefore, only parts of the outermost forelands are visible. The sections of these floes that lie under the water are called Isføtter (ice feet). An (is-fot) ice foot is an underwater protrusion that sticks out like a finger or a foot blade – hence the name.
The Western Ice Sheet, with its (polarbaks) polar ice, forelands and the strips that drift southerly, is not constant in its structure. When the onshore wind sets in from the east, the drifting ice masses are pressed together. The forelands and strips become a single continuous white carpet that extends all the way inwards to the (polarbaks) polar ice, and a straightened edge is created towards the sea. This ice edge is called a (tett stråkant) dense straw edge. Headlands and strips are reformed when the wind direction changes to blow from East Greenland again. If this wind lasts for a long time, it quickly drives the ice outwards and (fordelt is) distributed ice occurs, which can stray far out to sea.
The wind that the seal hunter crews like best are either with or against the current. Under such conditions, the build-up of strips and oddballs is reasonably stable. When ice drifts, it is the largest and heaviest ice that drifts fastest. An iceberg is always unstoppable, and the (råka) wake that trails behind the iceberg reveals which way the current is going. Gales and storms set the sea in motion, but the rough sea with huge waves and the spray of foam never reaches the ice.
When the rough sea meets ice, the wildness is immediately tamed because ice has the same effect on rough seas as oil has. In the ice, one only notices the swell of the inferno outside, strongest near the open sea and weaker the further you penetrate, until you are so far into the ice that you don’t notice anything. No matter how powerful the sea swells are, they are always just a gentle accompaniment, and the Arctic Ocean swells have the same peace about them as a sleeping giant that draws its breath with long, quiet breaths.
You only hear a crackling whistle from ice grinding against ice. Whether catching or looking for the catch, you are always observant of the wind and barometric pressure. Wind from the northeast means that the forelands can clap together, and if the ship is inside such a bay, you can be stuck in the densely packed back and freeze inside. The northeast wind is cold; it goes with the current, and the drift ice gains great speed. The northeast creates a sharp edge and is the strongest, and also the most dangerous, wind in this field of slaughter. Despite all the aids available today, all the skippers have an almost heroic relationship with the barometer.
It reacts immediately, and it was said earlier what it doesn’t show, you can see from the clouds. When a storm came, it was essential to find a hold, i.e. a place where there is little swell; at the same time, care had to be taken that the hold was not so far into the ice that you risked getting stuck. The Easter storms in the (Vesterisen) West Ice were more or less year-specific; Easter had not arrived until there had been a storm.”
The schooner Gjøa was nearly locked into the ice floe and lost during the 1894 seasonal hunt, but they managed to evade harm. Eilevsen and Amundsen became lifelong friends and corresponded by letter for the remainder of their lives. Amundsen started his exploration career in 1897 on a two-year-long Belgian expedition to Antarctica. Gjøa was sold to Amundsen on 28 March 1901 for ten thousand five hundred Norwegian Kroner and became the vessel that Amundsen and his crew sailed through the Northwest Passage between 1903 and 1906 in the footsteps of Sir John Franklin’s fatal 1845-1847 expedition that disappeared with a total of one hundred and twenty-nine men on Her Majesties two ships, HMS Erebus and HMS Terror.
Following a victorious, acclaimed life of exploration, Amundsen disappeared in June 1928 while flying over the Arctic ice on a rescue mission, searching for the lost airship Italia. The seal hunter Brandal M-7-HD, built-in 1911, was sent out on an expedition to search for Roald Amundsen. Officially, the ship was on a walrus hunt, but Peter S. Brandal, a friend of Amundsen, paid for the search mission with personal funds, sadly to no avail. The search was called off in September of that year. No remnants of Amundsen’s mission have ever been found.
Brandal M-7-HD deserves to be mentioned in more detail as she has a fascinating history. In an incident in the Danish Straits ice floe in 1918, Brandal M-7-HD narrowly avoided sinking after having her propeller axle bent and broken off. Løftingen M-11-HD rescued her from the ice and thereafter proceeded back into the floe to continue the catch. Brandal M-7-HD then transited to Iceland under sail power alone.
Løftingen M-11-HD also sank in the Danish straits on 06 July 1925. On Saturday, 20 June, they had become screwed into the ice. The situation became critical on Sunday night as the schooner damaged her rudder, and leaks arose. Despite losing the use of their rudder, the crew fought to keep the ship afloat. In the days leading up to 01 July, there were changing ice conditions, and they still had significant leaks, so the crew had their hands full just keeping the boat afloat.
On 03 July, a Friday, the ice became looser. Vesterhavet M-157-A, which had been nearby all along, shot a hawser line over to tow Løftingen M-11-HD out from the ice floe. On Sunday, 05 July, Lysningen M-24-HD also arrived, and the skipper of Løftingen M-11-HD negotiated with the two boats for a tow to Iceland as he thought it would be too dangerous to cross the sea alone. Repairing the ship on-site was out of the question. The skippers of Vesterhavet M-157-A and Lysningen M-24-HD believed it would be impossible to keep Løftingen M-11-HD afloat in the open sea with the extensive damage she had sustained and were unwilling to try. A ship’s general council was held on board Løftingen M-11-HD, where they all agreed to abandon the distressed boat. The crew then crossed over to Lysningen (M-24-HD). Løftingen M-11-HD sank on Monday, 6 July 1925.
On 28/29 April 1949, Brandal M-7-HD, along with Flemsøy M-44-HD, were on their way home from Vesterisen when they received word that Herøyfjord (Fætenfjord) (Aker Build no 501) was in distress at sea and listing precariously just off the coast of Sundmøre on their way home from Newfoundland. Also on board was the crew from Polarbjørn M-12-HD, wrecked on Newfoundland’s ice floes during the hunt on 16 April. The two ships immediately set course for the wreck and showed outstanding seamanship in the rough seas, rescuing all sixty-six souls from Herøyfjord (Fætenfjord) (Aker Build no 501). The tug Draugen arrived and took Herøyfjord (Fæntenfjord) (Aker Build no 501) in tow, but she filled with sea and sank.
It also deserves mention that the historic vessel Brandal M-7-HD is likely the smallest mothership historically ever used for bell diving deeper than one hundred metres. In mid-September 1972, Norwegian 3X Divers were contracted to blow up a wellhead at one hundred and six metres depth for Norske Shell in the North Sea. The divers used Yokohama Gas helmets and an OSI diving bell launched from the Seal Hunter Brandal M-7-HD. (This fascinating story is elaborated on in chapter 25.5). In 1976, Brandal M-7-HD rescued the crew of Kari, which was shipwrecked in Hjeltefjorden outside Bergen. In 1977, Brandal M-7-HD saved the Flemsøy M-44-HD crew, which was wrecked and lost in the western ice floe.
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Bertheus Eilevsen moved to Lavangen in 1895 and married Anne Kirstina Eilevsen (Pedersdatter), a widow residing there. His cutter sank in 1898. He then acquired a cutter named Bjarne, built around the turn of the century. In 1904/1905, Bertheus purchased his first sail-driven seal hunting vessel (made in England in 1872) named Excelsior T-112-I, measuring twenty-two metres in length.
On 26 June 1926, as the schooner Excelsior T-112-I hunted in the northern ice floe, disaster struck. Although the sea was calm and flat, thick ice shoals made it dangerous to maneuver in amongst the floes. Suddenly the propeller hit a foot of ice, creating a leak through the axle shaft sleeve. Even though the crew worked the pumps for several days, the level increased no matter how hard they fought to evacuate the water. Ultimately, they had to give up and escape into their small hunting boats, which became their refuge for several more days before another seal-hunting vessel rescued them from their dire predicament.
Bertheus relocated to Gratangen in 1909 and acquired three additional ships over time. His fleet crews mainly came from Gratangen and Ibestad as a whole. He can rightly be called the father of Ibestad’s Is Havet (Arctic Ocean) hunting fleet. In 1917, the son of Dines Pedersen, my Great Grandfather Johan Peder Kristian Dinessen, from Foldvik Gratangen, who was born in 1866, purchased along with Bertheus Ebergsen and Erling Berteusen from Åstein on the island of Andørja the seal-hunting boat Vaarglimt T-2-I later re-numbered T-44-B.
On 01 April 1927, Vaarglimt T-44-B rescued the crew of Johanne Karoline T-53-T when she floundered in the White Sea’s ice. In 1928 Vaarglimt T-44-B was leased with her crew of fifteen men by the French state to search for Roald Amundsen, of Arctic and Antarctic fame. However, she was wrecked in the ice drift on 05 March 1934 during a catch in the White Sea. The Polaric M-13-HD crew from Brandal, Møre coast, came to their rescue. Her sailors returned to Norway with Heimland I T-165-TD from Tromsdalen. (The Heimland I’s T-165-TD first owner in 1917 was Roald Amundsen, she was lost and sank in the western ice in 1939, but her crew was saved by Venus F-2-H from Hammerfest.)
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In 1898 The first three sail-driven seal hunt boats from Brandal and Sunnmøre, eastern Norway, were:
Minna, from Brandal with skipper and owner Peter S. Brandal (Minna was crushed by the ice on 05 June 1918).
Nils Liaaen, from Ålesund with skipper Severin Brandal (Nils Liaaen, was shipwrecked during sand transport at Repvåg in July 1971).
Sleipner T-73-K, from Ålesund with skipper Jonas Fuglevik. (Sleipner T-73-K was wrecked by the ice at Biscayerhuken on Svalbard on 03 June 1926. After a hard month spent in a small fishing boat and various fishing cabins, the crew was picked up by a steamship named D/S Jan Mayen (LEET) and brought to Ny-Ålesund, Svalbard. A cargo boat transported them home to Norway.)
Peter Thomas Sandborg, born in 1838 (died in 1912 at age seventy-four), was a wealthy industrial magnate from Ålesund who, by several accounts at the time, owned Norway’s largest fishing fleet. Sandborg began trading by land and sea, built fishing vessels and stood at the forefront of herring and cod fishing.
The first hunt expeditions from Sunnmøre were built on the experiences of fishermen and huntsmen in Finnmark. Severin Brandal was the driving force for this first trip undertaken by boats from western Norway. In 1897 he fished off Finnmark in northern Norway as the skipper of Sandborg, one of Peter Thomas Sandborg’s boats, along with his son Peter S. Brandal as skipper on the Minna.
Severin got to see and hear from boat crews who sailed to and hunted seals at the edge of the ice pack. Upon returning to Brandal in Møre, he decided to quit his fishing job, obtain a boat and go seal hunting the following year. He persuaded Sandborg to equip the schooner Nils Liaaen from Ålesund for this trip.
With persistent effort and relentless drive, Severin Brandal and his pioneer son Peter S. Brandal persevered and turned the enterprise into a thriving business, rapidly building expertise in this peculiar, unique trade.
From 1898, Brandal schooners were sent annually on seal hunts. This was six years before large sections of the town of Ålesund burned to the ground in the great fire of 1904 when around eight hundred and fifty houses were scorched into smouldering piles of debris during fifteen gruelling, hellish hours. Between ten and twelve thousand people were made homeless and lost almost everything they owned. Somehow, approximately two hundred and thirty houses were unscathed and saved.
When the fire broke out, a ferocious storm with hurricane-force winds howled so powerful that roofs blew off and made standing upright near impossible. The wind came from the southwest but later turned west and northwest. This is a normal weather development in northwest Norway when a substantial low pressure moves into the Norwegian Sea and further to the northeast.
Malicious rumours circulated without evidence indicating that the fire was caused by arson and that Sandborg was behind it, as the fire started in the Ålesund Preservation (Aalesund Preserving) Co.’s factory, where he was a part owner. Sandborg was thereafter notoriously named Brandborg (Brann=Fire, Borg=Fort). The devastated town of Ålesund was beautifully rebuilt from granite and other stone three years later.
From 1898-1910, fishing/hunting boats braved the dangerous conditions without ice reinforcement and with only sails as propulsion. In 1904 mechanised propulsion was installed in Sleipner T-73-K (a glow plug ten horsepower Advance engine). In 1908, Minna, Union, and Isrypen were fitted with steam engines. In 1914 Gunhild M-79-HD from Brandal was the last active sail-driven seal hunting schooner working in amongst the ice floes. In 1907 the men of Gunhild M-79-HD rescued the entire seal-hunting crew of Prins Olaf at 73 degrees north. All the saved ship’s hands were set ashore in Iceland.
During the winter of 1908, huntsmen spent their first full winter in Greenland. By 1908, most of the twenty Arctic Sea schooners of thirty to eighty gross tons from Sunnmøre had engines instead of sails. From 1911, steam-powered boats measuring twenty-four to thirty-one metres in length were designed and built specifically for Arctic Sea operations. The first three were Jopeter M-6-HD, built 1911/1912, named after Josefine and Peter S. Brandal (she was lost to the ice on 05 July 1932), and Brandal M-7-HD, built 1911 (scuttled in Gangstøvika in 1979) and Aarvak M-8-HD built 1912 (protected by the Norwegian Ishavsmuseet (Arctic Sea Museum) in 1981, lifted on land and housed at Brandal in 1998).
In 1911 the Arctic Schooner Helga, built in1875, and captained by Sigvald Brandal, ventured out for the first hunting expedition to (Kvitesjøen) the White Sea. This trailblazing venture marked the onset of Norwegian seal-hunting in that vast area when Sigvald broke through the ice and reached the inner ice floe where the seals were casting.
After delivering the skins ashore in northern Norway, following the successful trip to the White Sea in 1911, the Helga transited to the (Danmarksstrædet) Greenland Strait between Greenland and Iceland, where there was also a good catch. On 02 July 1911, the schooner sailed from the edge of the ice floe and encountered rough seas. As large parts of the seal catch, around eight hundred out of eighteen hundred skins remained on deck awaiting fat removal; they turned back into the ice floe for the night to work on the skins and pack them securely into the hold.
The wind picked up the next day, and the ice began to move. The crew put oil barrels and wooden planks along the ship’s side when the ice started to turn and screw. The following day, the ice pressure screwed into the boat, damaging the port side.
On 05 July, the rudder broke at the screw, but they repaired the damage. The ice screwing continued, puncturing through the starboard side bow planking. But luckily, the penetration was high up the side, above the waterline, so they didn’t take in water. In the afternoon, the ice suddenly loosened, and they managed to turn the boat towards safety beyond the ice, and slowly but surely, they managed to press outwards towards open water.
With only three hundred meters left to the ice edge, ice chunks sheared off the propeller shaft at the sleeve. At that moment, they no longer had control over Helga, and she became easy prey for the vigorous ice in the strong swell at the transition from ice to open water.
There was no hope of salvaging the ship at this stage. They signalled to Brandal M-7-HD, which lay beyond the ice edge, that Helga was lost and must be abandoned. Small hunting boats were launched, and the crew disembarked. They rowed toward the edge while the huge swell topped with ice floes battered their small boats.
On the night of 06 July, help arrived, and they were picked up by Brandal M-7-HD. The crew from the cutter Union, built in 1883 and shipwrecked two days earlier by the ice, was also on board.
By 1915, most schooners were steam-powered. The boats needed coal, which led to the start of the Kings Bay Coal Company, Ny-Ålesund-Svalbard. In the first years of the settlement, the town was named Brandal City after Peter S. Brandal.
From the diary of Knut B. Brandal 1915
In those days, there was no question of doing anything else for a living other than Arctic Ocean sailing. That is why I went on board the Admiralen and spoke to Kristoffer Marø, the skipper. He hired me right away. Shooters that year were Benjamin B. Brandal and Paulus Røren. I didn’t keep a diary on that trip. We signed up as usual and sailed north out into the blue deep. Before departing, we painted the Norwegian flag instead of the typical Russian star on the ship’s sides, which was necessary when entering Russian-controlled waters. There was war in the world, so it was essential to show the national emblem. It was a very snowy winter. We had a gale from the northwest when we got off the coast. A breakwater filled the boat with water on one of the first nights at sea.
The green sea smashed into and broke sections of the wooded covering, enabling the sea to rush into the forward cabins. This occurred during the watch change. I was designated to take over the helm and had just come up into the wheelhouse when the enormous wave broke over us. It shattered several windows in the wheelhouse—a window with the frame came down on Paulus Røren’s head. Only the ship’s bow could be glimpsed in the boiling inferno. The rest was underwater.
After a while, the boat slowly came up again. It lay like a dead herring. We nailed canvas over everything that was damaged and sailed onwards. Several boats were in the same gale, but miraculously everyone managed to sail through. I think it was on this trip that we dragged Isrypen out of the ice floe. She had lost her propeller. We probably made two trips that year. I remember we went to Siglufjördur, the northernmost town of Iceland, to bunker coal.
In Siglufjördur, the ice had lain so long that year that the people there could not go to sea to fish. Therefore there was little food. Many people came aboard begging for blubber to eat. They got to scrape the meat from the seal skins on the deck. We also stripped off skins while lying there. Some people ate the meat raw as they were starving. We spoke to a man named Tynes from Sykkylven. He lived there in Siglufjördur and could tell that the people cooked a møjle (broth) from the fat that they then ate. It would probably also have been a matter of taste.
After the Arctic Ocean seal catch trip, we went to Iceland with nets for herring. Many boats from Norway participated in this seasonal herring fishing. On this trip, I travelled as a cook. One day, while sailing outside Siglufjördur, a fire broke out on a fishing boat named Veavåg. The vessel came from Vedavåg, a small community on the island of Karmøy south of Haugesund. There was a fresh gale howling. My brother Benjamin Brandal was the first mate on this trip. He and two other fellows rowed to the stricken vessel with a rope.
He threw the line over the anchor, and it hooked at once. So we took the boat in tow towards Siglufjörður. We had taken the stricken crew on board earlier. I had cooked a large pot of herring grits that day, and it came in handy. The surveillance ship Islands Falk arrived and moored alongside Veavåg inside the fjord arm. The Veavåg crew then cut a hole in the deck plank, put water hoses down through the hole, and extinguished the fire. We towed the boat into town and set it up on the shore there.” – By Knut B. Brandal
During WWI, eight northern Norwegian seal hunting boats sank, several by grenades and machine gun fire from German U-boats, as did numerous other Norwegian ships. SS Laly av Kristiania (Oslo), a cargo ship built in 1894, sank on 31 March 1917. The vessel was bound from Fredrikstad with a cargo of timber to London with eighteen men. The barque Najade from Oslo was lost on 01 April 1917. The barque was en route with oil casks from Galveston to Denmark when it disappeared with the entire crew of twenty-one men.
“Going to Sea is like going to prison with the chance of being drowned” – Dr Johnson.
The North Atlantic, Arctic and Antarctic Seas are the world’s most dangerous and treacherous waters. The list of perilous hazards constantly lurking in these waters reads like seasonal catalogues from hell. Biting cold, fog, ice, howling winds, ice floes and bergs, swell, waves, currents, coastal visual and hidden sea stacks and sea stumps, all potentially fatal.
Much tragedy occurred in the waters between Greenland and Jan Mayen Island over the decades of seal-hunting expeditions. The absolute worst year in living memory arose from a ferocious storm around 07-09 April 1917. Seven steam engine-driven boats from Norway’s western and southern coastlines with eighty-eight souls on board did not return from Greenland’s (Vestisen) West Ice. Six of the seven lost vessels participated in the annual April/May seal catch in the (Vestisen) West Ice with a combined seventy-four men on board. These six vessels likely sank northeast of Jan Mayen.
There were no radios on board then, and nobody could be sure what had happened. Most historians who have written about the disaster say that seven schooners sank in the West Ice that year and that eighty-eight men lost their lives. That is not quite right. The explanation is that they also included Hercules II, built-in 1913 from Ålesund, which departed from Møre on 03 April 1917 on its way to the west coast of Greenland to catch walrus with a crew of fourteen. That is the last we know of that ship. The same storm probably destroyed Hercules II and sank her.
Specific details of what occurred in the West Ice during the Easter of 1917 are unknown. But it is known that the Admiralen, built-in 1906 from Bergen, departed Ålesund on 29 March with twelve men. The Arctic, built-in 1912 from Ålesund, left shore on 02 April with twelve men. The Aslak, built-in 1913 from Ålesund, sailed on 28 March with twelve men, and the Ceres I, built-in 1912 from Tønsberg, went out on 29 March with twelve men. The Heim, built-in 1879 from Ålesund, cast off on 02 April with thirteen men, and the Lunheim, built-in 1912 also from Ålesund, set sail on 22 March with thirteen men. They were all hunting in the ice northeast of Jan Mayen Island when a north-easterly storm with hurricane-force winds arrived during nightfall on 08 April.
Five other boats were in the same area but managed to sail away as far as they could from the raging seas and ice floes over several terrible days. One of these lucky boats was Lysningen M-139-A from Brandal. The crew could tell that the Orkan (hurricane force winds) (from the Spanish ‘huracan’, one of the Mayan civilization’s creator gods, who blew away parts of the sea and thus created dry land) “was so ‘grådig’ (greedy and hungry) and blew so ferociously that the ship did not react to either engine or rudder.” All five vessels that escaped had damage from the ice the Orkan threw at them.
At the time, investigators concluded that the most likely fate of all seven missing boats was that they were smashed to pieces when the ferocious winds blew them into the ice, probably on 09 April that year. Determining the exact reasons why the seven boats sank is mostly speculation, but there is little doubt that the hurricane-force winds were the main culprit. Add to that problematic ice conditions and a temperature down to minus forty degrees Celsius, and you have likely summed up most of the causation.
Skipper Severin Hessen on Polheim M-89-A from Ålesund believed that icing had most likely devastated the missing vessels. Another explanation could be that they were hit and crushed by large ice floes in a wild dance on the hungry sea. It was early in the season, and all ships were heavy with bunkers and provisions in preparation for several months of hunting in amongst the ice floes.
This weight was in addition to the enormous weight increase due to icing. Perhaps the ships became so damaged inside the ice during the Orkan that they later succumbed while in the open sea when the worst strength of the storm had blown over. Perhaps the ships were crushed inside the significant ice floes. Or maybe the explanation the old-timers often talk about is that the vessels could have backed down onto Jan Mayen’s rock shoreline during the Orkan and been destroyed that way. Other boats have been on the verge of being crushed against the volcanic island in lesser storms.
Search parties searched for months, but the only piece of wreckage ever found was a small wooden boat used by the seal hunters to row towards the ice where the seals basked, located washed ashore on Iceland’s northeastern coast. Sadly, this was not the only catastrophic year.
When the onboard barometers alarmingly plummeted
First-hand accounts of the 1917 devastating Orkan written by survivors tell riveting spine-chilling tales. One of the ships that made it through the storm afloat was Driftig M-127-A from Ålesund, with a crew of fourteen men. When the boat returned home from Vestisen, the sailors told what they had experienced. Before the storm came, the weather was good, but the seal catch was otherwise lacking. Driftig M-127-A lay deep in the ice northeast of Jan Mayen. The crew was about to take a break from work and celebrate Easter when the barometer began to drop sharply. Skipper Ragnvald Abrahamsen was restless and contacted a couple of skippers on boats nearby. But they wanted to wait and see if the situation worsened.
The Driftig M-127-A skipper set a course out of the ice, but the Orkan arrived before the boat could reach the open sea, and she was nearly crushed between vast ice blocks that were pressed together. A large slice of the ice floe pressed onto the deck broke the railing supports on one side but stopped against the machine deck housing. Fortunately, the schooner laid over, and the ice sheet slid off.
The next day, the ship and crew escaped the trap into the open sea. As little coal had been used, the boat lay heavily in the ocean and suffered terribly from icing. At its coldest, the temperature was down to minus forty degrees centigrade. The wind-driven sea spray immediately froze to ice on the rigging and superstructure. The crew had to dump much of the coal overboard to save themselves. They managed to knock away most of the ice on the ship when the worst of the polar cold front had passed, but the danger was not over.
In the open sea, another enemy threatened. The polar sea current, combined with the ferocious prevailing wind, created ice stretchers that repetitively came close to sending Driftig M-127-A into the depths. Peaking, breaking seas hit and rolled over the vessel like cannon shots. The crew shot and captured two small whales on the way into the ice, so they had whale oil on board. Skipper Abrahamsen gave the order to fill sacks with whale oil and engine oil, attach them to the runners of the whale line and tow them in the sea behind. The holes in the sacks let the oil leak out and dampened the worst of the breaking white seas. When the bags emptied, they were pulled back in and filled with more oil.
The crew continued with this work for several long days. When the storm died down, the team managed to plug a minor hull leak and continued with the catch until they returned home at the turn of the month, April-May, but it was a poor season. The Driftig M-127-A sank, ending her days on 05 April 1931 in the West Ice after ice damaged her propeller and axle shaft sleeve.
Peder K. Eikrem was a crew member aboard the seal hunter Skansen M-123-A from Ålesund. He told the newspaper ‘Møre’ forty-five years after the dramatic perilous, deadly days of the 1917 Easter Orkan that what scared them most were the floating sea mines before they set sail. He said 1916 had been a good year on the Arctic Ocean with high income; therefore, many men wanted to partake in 1917. No one spoke of storms or difficult ice as dangers. On the other hand, the German submarines and mine belts supposedly laid in the sea caused much concern. Therefore, some were not allowed by their relatives to travel to the Arctic Ocean that year.
Skansen M-123-A was a steam-driven ship. She departed late and only reached the ice edge on Easter Sunday morning in glorious weather. The ice there lay flat and delicate as if it were a mountain lake, said Eikrem. At noon it started to blow, and the ship maintained her bow into the wind.
Eikrem went on to say that when he came on duty at midnight, the wind was howling like the devil. Skansen M-123-A turned around and went relatively safely through small dense ice. It was pitch dark and bitterly cold, down to minus forty degrees Celsius. Around 02:30, they came out into the open sea – it looked upset and ugly. The sea boiled and bubbled like a cascading pot of potatoes – like lying on a volcano. The ship took in a lot of water when breakers came tumbling inward over the vessel’s sides. The drain gates along the deck’s lower railings could not evacuate the water on the deck – as they were frozen solid – and the pumps in the engine room could not pump out the water fast enough. They had to punch a hole in the railings plank, but she was so armoured by ice that even that wasn’t easy.
When daylight arrived on the second day of Easter, they searched into the ice to possibly find calmer waters in the lee, but at daybreak, they came into thick ice and had to turn back. They then tried to lie inside the ice edge in sections of open water. Here they strived to hide from the storm along with the small ice. But there, they also met a new enemy – the big ice. They had to use both the engine and occasionally some sail to manoeuvre away so as not to be crushed by these ice colossuses. Outside the ice edge, we could see terrible mountainous breakers.
The old hands on board said with gravity that if such beasts had swamped them, they would be buried in a watery grave in the blink of an eye. Therefore, they did not dare go out into the open sea, although they also feared the night inside the ice. But luckily, it was a light night, so they could spot the giants as they approached. The terrible cold had also subsided. But the Orkan’s havoc persisted.
On the third day of Easter, the end was near. A colossal ice section came chasing down toward the boat. The skipper tried to get the ship away, but a large wave came and threw her towards the ice wall, nearly crushing her. Instead, she avoided it and slipped by.
On the night of the fourth day of Easter, the Orkan was still raging but with less force. They turned the ship and set the bow into the weather. However, the ferocious winds lasted two more days. By then, the vessel had been blown all the way close to Jan Mayen Island.
After the storm, they tried to restart the seal catch, but the ice floes were utterly shattered and broken, and the seal gatherings had vanished, leaving only the occasional seal to get. Tens of thousands of seal pups had drowned. They did not see other schooners until four or five days later, when they met the schooner Øst M-112-A from Ålesund, which, among other things, had her mainmast sheared off by the Orkan. Skansen M-123-A was in such poor shape and leaking so much that they dared not let the other schooner out of sight for a couple of weeks.
On 12 April 1930, the Skansen M-123-A rescued the Kvitis M-11-HD ship’s crew, who mostly came from Brandal, when they had to abandon ship upon her sinking. In 1935, during seal hunting and hake fishing near Jan Mayen Island, it was Skansen’s M-123-A turn. The skipper said afterwards that he had not seen worse ice conditions. She was stuck in the ice, drifting towards an iceberg in an easterly storm. On 11 July, they had no choice but to leave the ship before she sank. The Skansen M-123-A crew managed to climb on board Rundøy M-153-A from Ålesund.
Three other schooners also wrecked around the same time. The Rundøy M-153-A sank in the Norwegian Sea on 29 April 1969 on the way home from the West Ice with a cargo of nine hundred seal skins and twenty-five tonnes of blubber. The loss was due to a leak in a cooling water pipe. The crew was picked up by Eskimo M-64-A, who had been able to follow them from the ice edge.
By 1918 about seventy-five boats with around one thousand men participated in the seasonal seal catch. (On 4 July 1918, Vesterhavet M-67-HD, skippered by Mikal Marø, came upon the battered reminisce of Saltdalingen N-5-SL, later re-numbered T-44-I then re-numbered T-6-G. She had been built at Johan Drage’s shipyard, Rognan, and delivered that same year to the owners Johan Drage and merchant Næstby, Rognan, Saltdal, Norland County, Northern Norway. It was her first season on the hunt. They found her abandoned drifting six nautical miles off the coast of (Aust-Grønland) East Greenland. The crew had deserted her while locked in the ice when there was no further hope.
The forsaken, battered, barely floating wreck was drifting half full of water with broken propeller blades and her rudder missing. They pumped out the water and towed her to Iceland, where she underwent temporary repairs to make her seaworthy. Vesterhavet M-67-HD continued towing her to Ålesund, Norway, where they arrived on 28 July. The salvagers did not want to hand over the Saltdalingen N-5-SL to her owners until receiving a bank guarantee for salvage wages. They never received payment, and Saltdalingen N-5-SL was sold at a public auction for thirty-one thousand NOK. (Mikal Nilssen of Gratangen purchased the boat in 1924 from Norland Privatbank (Norland Private Bank). Lundberg Sørensen, Ågard Dinessen’s brother-in-law, would be her skipper from 1924 to 1939).
When the demand for furs in Europe and further away arose a few years later, Sigvald Brandal’s experience led the hunting fleets to the White Sea ice fields. In 1918 the schooners made another attempt to get into the ice masses in (Lake Kvitsjøen), the White Sea, to catch the newly (cast) born Greenland seals. They were very successful, and it was the start of more than twenty years of adventurous hunting accompanied by numerous terrible shipwrecks in that vast, barren, inhospitable area.
In 1919 two hundred and three vessels from Norway were active in the hunting fields. The post-WWI crisis arrived in 1920, with low profitability, many bankruptcies, and few new builds. Between 1924 and 1928, sixty-one vessels were wrecked and floundered, affecting especially Troms, Northern Norway and Sunnmøre, Western Norway. The community that suffered the most loss of life and boats over the years between the two world wars was Ibestad. In some of the darkest years, from twenty-five, up to forty percent of the annual sealing fleet was wrecked and lost. Most of the losses occurred in the White Sea and the West Ice.
1928 was a particularly dark year for the Arctic sealing fleet. There was a large turnout for the season, as eighty-six vessels from home ports along the Norwegian coastline were cleared and set sail for (Kvitsjøen) the White Sea. Skin and blubber prices showed an upward trend, and it seemed to be a promising season. However, the ice and weather conditions were extremely challenging. A storm arose from the northwest and west, accompanied by bitter-cold temperatures. Hard turns in the ice were a daily occurrence.
As a result of these unfavourable conditions, twenty-one of the eighty-six boats that entered the ice in early March shipwrecked before the end of April. It was primarily the smallest vessels that suffered dire straits; seventeen of the twenty-one vessels lost in March and April of that year were from northern Norway. No other ice hunt field has had so many schooners wrecked.
In the fifteen years from 1924 to the end of hunting season in (Lake Kvitsjøen) White Sea in 1939, a staggering one hundred and fifteen vessels went down. Sixty per cent of all registered seal-hunting shipwrecks occurred in this field. In 1928, seventeen ships sank there. Eleven of the seventeen were lost during a single day. Never before had so many sloops been destroyed in the same season. Despite the grim vessel losses, all seventeen ship crews were miraculously rescued.
The motor cutter Ravnen T-9-G from Gratangen was one of the smaller boats that failed to get into the ice. Together with several others, they crossed back and forth between Sviatoi Nos and Kap Kanin to, if possible, find enough slack ice to enter the areas where the seals (Kaster) throw (give birth). Kvitbjørn F-7-H from Tranøy, formerly named Alfred Edvard F-7-H and belonging to Finkenhagen of Hammerfest, was among them. At twenty-seven and a half meters in length with an eighty-horsepower Bolinder engine, she was the largest ship in the fleet.
The Skipper, Ingvald Nilsen, had offered to help Ravnen T-9-G and Aaland T-37-TN from Harstad into the ice. Nilsen later bitterly regretted this offer of assistance. They pushed forward between the stubborn ice floes, but it was slow, often only inches at a time. Kvitbjorn F-7-H repetitively had to reverse course and assist the two smaller boats. They couldn’t stay in the (råken) opened wake and kept getting stuck. A few days passed in this manner, and the ships rocked and pried forward, but mainly the ice hindered their advance. Adding to their dismay, there were few or no seals to see.
On Sunday, 18 March, a storm from the south-southwest caused strong ice screwing. The ice pressed together into heavy screw yards around the boats. The crew of Kvitbjørn F-7-H worked hard to clear the rudder of the gathering rising ice to no avail. The immense ice forces crushed the rudder. Even though the hull was apparently undamaged, the crew still considered the boat lost.
The following day before noon, the ice pressure increased, and a large ice foot went through the forward side amidships. The pumps were started, but the water nevertheless rose rapidly, and at 14:00, the water stood over the wooden barrels in the hold. The midship’s (Skandekket) scan deck was crushed, and the crew had to abandon the wreck. Some provisions, as well as necessary equipment, were transported onto the ice. The floundering occurred approximately twenty-eight quarter miles south-southwest of (Kap Kanin) Cape Kanin Nos.
The crew on Kvitbjørn T-7-H then walked towards Aaland T-37-TN and Ravnen T-9-G, both also locked in the ice two hundred meters distant. However, both the Aaland T-37-TN and Ravnen T-9-G fates were dark. The violent ice movements lifted and pushed Aaland T-37-TN over the stern of Ravnen T-9-G so that her bow was into the wheelhouse of the Gratang schooner.
As the ice so severely damaged these boats to be unusable, the three crews together continued in the direction of Lance I T-36-G, which was positioned eight-quarter nautical miles further South. Lance I T-36-G was locked in the ice for thirty-six days before floating free. (She would be lost to the ice floes four years hence on 03 April 1932.) The three shipwrecked crews remained on the ice. After much toil, they made it up to Youkanski on the Murmansk coast. The two Tranøy schooners and the Gratang schooner were wrecked within hours of each other on the same day.
From 1923 to 1939, the small communities of Gratangen, Ibestad and Andørja in northern Norway lost twenty seal-hunting boats combined. During an orkan (Beaufort scale 12, over sixty-four knots speed-hurricane force winds) on 9-10 April 1933, seven schooners sank, and thirteen men perished. The entire eleven-man crew of Håkon T-6-T of Herøy, Tromsø, died along with skipper Olaf Eriksen. Two men were knocked overboard and lost, one from Susan F-26-H of Hammerfest and Anders Vik from Hillesøy on the Tromsø ship Selis ex Malula T-91-T, which did not sink.
The Selis ex Malula T-91-T, along with the icebreaker Isbjørn, were on a military mission to Svalbard in 1942. The expedition was named Operasjon Fritham (Free Harbour). On 14 May 1942, four German planes from Banak airfield appeared and attacked the two vessels when they had almost entered Grønfjorden, Barentsburg Svalbard. Both ships were destroyed. Fifteen Norwegian seafarers and soldiers died during the bombing and the following hardships.
During this period, relations with the Russians in the (Kvitesjøen) White Sea area were complex. The Russians confiscated several hunting boats. In 1923 the Winge agreement was ratified, first for Winge & Company’s (Oslo) vessels Vesleper K-6-K from Vartdal (Wrecked in the White Sea on 19 March 1933) and Veslekari K-5-K (Wrecked on 07 April 1961 at Twillingate in Newfoundland with five thousand six hundred animal skins on board. The crew of twenty-five was rescued by Polarbjørn III M-88-HD from Brandal after having to walk about a Norwegian mile (ten kilometres) across the ice, according to the lifeboat’s compass, five hours of marching in gales and drifts of snow.)
The tentative hunting licence agreement was broadened and applied to all Norwegian seal hunting boats the following year. However, several episodes between Norwegian hunting boats and Russian guard vessels arose, including schooner seizures, skipper arrests, and occasionally live fire shots between the Norwegian and Russian vessel crews.
In 1924, one hundred and fifty-four boats from Norway were involved in the annual seal catch. In 1939, the number had fallen to sixty-four. In 1938 the Polarbjørn I M-251-A and Polaris I M-10-HD opened for the Norwegian seal catch at Newfoundland. A Norwegian state guarantee enticed several small northern Norwegian schooners to participate in 1939. The final year of hunting in the White Sea was 1939. No further seal catches have been allowed or recorded in this area following the start of WWII hostilities. During WWII, seals were only caught on the West Ice and Newfoundland fields. Arktos R-110-H and Polaris M-10-HD were both lost during WWII, as were several other seal-hunting vessels while sailing for the allies.
Gratangen and Foldvik have suffered many disasters throughout the decades. One particularly horrendous storm arose in February of 1939, a couple of months before my father, Sverre, was born. Eight Norwegian boats, all motorised with diesel engines, ranging in size upwards of twenty-one metres, departed from their home harbours to Newfoundland waters for the second seal catch season in that area by Norwegian boats. Three vessels never returned.
On the fateful morning of 06 February, two sealing boats from Gratangen, Nyken T-36-G and Saltdalingen T-6-G earlier N-5-SL that had been refurbished and extended in length by ten point four meters at Rognan shipyard, Norland in 1937, were accompanied by Isfjell T-23-T from Tromsø. (During the 1938 hunting season, Isfjell T-23-T had been abandoned after damage sustained in the West Ice flows. Her crew was rescued by Hisø M-156-VD and Furenak M-8-VD. However, the boat did not sink as she was kept afloat by her water-tight storage tanks. The wreck was salvaged and repaired and made seaworthy again that year).
Together, the three boats set sail from Harstad towards Newfoundland and immediately hit terrible weather. Five days later, in a battered state but still within hail of each other, they managed to sail into Seyisfjord on the eastern coast of Iceland for repairs. On 13 February, they set sail again, resuming the transit towards Belle Isle, Newfoundland. On 15 February, the weather again increased to storm force from northwest and west. The tempest continuously blew until 23 February.
On 24 February, mother nature’s immense, ferocious fury erupted from the west-northwest and built upon the massive seas that had been ever-growing since 15 February. The rage of such a terrible upheaval is impossible to comprehend unless you have physically experienced it. Blessedly, most people are spared the acquaintance of such exposure.
On the twenty-sixth, hurricane-force winds and mountainous seas smashed the vessels, ripping off the forward sections, bridges, hunting boats, and masts, caving in the railing sides. All three ships sank. Tragically all eighteen of Nyken’s T-36-G sailors perished. The youngest ship’s hand was just sixteen years old.
The final radio messages from Nyken’s Captain Arnt Nilssen reported that they had emptied the engine room with pumps and buckets. Still, they had damage to the stern, but he thought they should be able to stay afloat until the Swedish-registered America-Line passenger ship SS Drottningholm arrived. But then, another massive sea came over them.
A short final radio broadcast from Nilssen was barely heard through the howl of the wind, with the message, “Hello, Isfjell and Drottningholm. If you hear me, answer immediately! If the people of Saltdalingen are saved, then ask them to pass a message to my four children, Aslaug, Gunvor, Rut and Gjermuld, asking them to be good to their mother. If there is anyone who can help us, you must come now.” Those who heard the distressed message tried to call them again, but this was the last sign of life from the Nyken T-36-G skipper and crew. A deafening silence followed, and no further radio communication was received from the doomed men.
The eighteen men aboard the Saltdalingen T-6-G were miraculously rescued by Polaris M-10-HD and Polarbjørn M-12-HD, two seal-hunting ships from Brandal Sunnmøre, Western Norway, that had set sail from Brandal. During the worst days of the storm, the highest monster asymmetrical waves were well over twenty-three, if not twenty-six, metres in height. The mountainous wave heights were stipulated by the crew of the Polarbjørn M-12-HD, who, when on a wave crest, could look down into and see the bottom planks of the Polaris M-10-HD mast barrel (crow’s nest) when she angled slightly over down below them in the trough of the wave.
The Swedish passenger ship SS Drottningholm rescued the eighteen crew from Isfjell T-23-T. The lifeboat deck on SS Drottningholm was seventeen metres above the waterline. The immense seas reached there, breaking several davits and smashing one of the aft lifeboats. The lifeboats from SS Drottningholm were more extensive than the smaller hunting rowboats and were crewed by nine men. SS Drottningholm’s men said it was like riding an elevator. One moment, they were down by the keel swinging on the davit ropes. In the next blink of an eye, they were elevated to the height of the boat deck.
The first launch attempt was unsuccessful and terrifying. They decided to try something else. They let the lifeboat trail out on a line behind the SS Drottningholm aft towards Isfjell T-23-T. There the crew stood, ready to jump into the lifeboat as soon as it came alongside. This risky operation was successfully performed twice. The entire Isfjell T-23-T crew was rescued and recovered on board SS Drottningholm.
By 1939, ships had onboard radios, and they could be used to call for help. If not, all three boat crews would most likely have succumbed. The rescue of the Satltdalingen T-6-G crew in such weather using small rowboats showed unbelievable heroic acts of seamanship. When launched, the first open rowboat from the Polarbjørn M-12-HD was smashed to bits. Undauntedly a second rowboat was lowered, accompanied by one of the Polaris M-10-HD rowboats, each with three men onboard. The two open small hunting rowboats measured five and a half metres in length. Over an intense, heroic hour, these six courageous men made five return trips to rescue all eighteen of the Saltdalingen T-6-G crew.
The six dauntless men who performed this rescue feat deserve to be named and remembered. In the Polarbjørn M-12-HD rowboat, Knut A Johannessen – 29, Peder Runne Brandal – 23, and Jon J Egset – 23. In the Polaris M-10-HD rowboat, Einar Liavåg – 34, Lauritz M. Brandal – 20, and Sevrin S Brandal – 32. These six men were awarded the King’s Service Medal in Silver for Edel deed from the King of Norway.
Eleven rescued men were aboard Polarbjørn M-12-D, and seven were aboard Polaris M-10-D. One week later, both vessels reached the ice pack, where six of the eighteen men transferred to the Arktos M-14-HD, six remained aboard Polaris M-10-HD, and six men remained aboard Polarbjørn M-12-HD, assisting with the catch until 10 April. All eighteen of Saltdalingen’s original crew were united on 11 April upon boarding the Arktos M-14-HD that sailed to St. John, Newfoundland, to procure provisions. The eighteen men sailed aboard the DS Dromore passenger ship across the Atlantic to Liverpool, England, departing St. John on 02 May. They sailed from Newcastle aboard the passenger vessel DS Venus to Harstad, returning home to northern Norway on 07 May 1939.
In the documents from the maritime court of enquiry held on 15 April by the Norwegian Consulate in St. Johns, Newfoundland, two months after Saltdalingen T-6-G sank, several well-known, respected people from Foldvik are mentioned by name, including Lundberg Sørensen, Magne Nilssen and Trygve Ingebrigtsen. Understandably, not much was said.
Just before the vessel departed from Harstad, Northern Norway, thirty-year-old Magne Nilssen, the boat’s engine operator, realised that he had to go to the ship’s dealer and buy a steel plate. It was one-meter square, and he placed it in the machine room. Magne used the steel plate as a cover over the top of the engine to protect it from the seawater that came cascading down and would have cooled down the engine top. Thus, he managed to keep the engine running. There is no doubt that that steel plate helped save them. Magne was given food and coffee through a small hatch in the bulkhead, which he made himself. He also managed to keep the bilge pump running; had either failed, it would have spelt their doom.
The crew made drift anchors out of their clothes by tying them to a rope trailing behind the boat. They had no steering after the storm seas took the rudder. In this way, they avoided getting the breaking seas into and against the vessel sides. We probably cannot fathom how Magne felt in the engine room alone for several days. Most of the crew were probably marred by this for the rest of their lives. There were no crisis teams at the time. Men had to get on with their job and livelihood on their own accord.
A new storm arose three weeks after the Newfoundland horrors of February 1939. Vesterhavet M-67-HD, the vessel that had salvaged Saltdalingen N-5-SL, later re-numbered T-6-G in 1918, was lost on 20 March 1939 while she was on her way to the West Ice floes. She had departed Harøysund, Western Norway, along with several other hunting boats on 16 March in a south-easterly breeze. On 17 March, the wind turned and came from the west, drastically increasing in strength. On 18 March, the wind shifted from the northwest, with heavy storm winds accompanied by enormous seas.
At 01:00 on 19 March, a massive breaking storm wave crashed over the ship with a force that laid her nearly ninety degrees over to starboard. Plank and railing supports were shattered, wrapped inboard on the port side from the stern to the most forward davit, and the heavy top railing beam broke. The main deck was partially broken up and opened on the starboard side, and the boat deck on the same side was ripped loose from the solid supports and twisted. The fore rig was also severely damaged, and there was a danger it would go overboard.
The sea cascaded into the hold and engine room. The coal bunker scale in the storage hold washed down into the bilge wells and blocked the bilge system. Coal stoker Sigmund Brandal ducked into the bilge well and turned or bent the bilge suction pipe, enabling the bilge pump to suck again. He also kept the donkey pump going.
They managed to keep the engine running for a few more hours, but another breaking sea smashed down, filling the engine room and extinguishing the boiler fire. At that point, there was nothing else to do but to prepare for evacuation.
They first made contact with Signalhorn M-9-HD from Brandal by radio at 01:30. However, the weather was so horrendous the crew decided to wait until daylight before disembarking into the rowboats. Luckily, Vesterhavet M-67-HD had installed a new radio set that year. The Flemsøy M-44-HD also had a radio signal locator device. Not many boats had that technology at the time. With it, Flemsøy M-44-HD could find them in the vast North Sea’s expanse when they spoke on the radio.
Rundøy M-153-A from Brandal, Western Norway, was the first boat to arrive in close range at 07:00. The crews assessed the situation determining it was inadvisable to try and salvage the schooner as the sea was too rough. Flemsøy M-44-HD from Hareid, Western Norway, arrived at 17:00, and Fangstmand M-23-HD from Brandal, Western Norway, arrived at 21:00 on the evening of 19 March.
The seas were still harsh and dangerous. At first light, 06:00 on 20 March, the evacuation started. Two boats positioned themselves on the leeward side and one on the lee side of the battered and doomed Vesterhavet M-67-HD. Oil was hand pumped into the sea from Vesterhavet M-67-HD to dampen the boiling disruption, and they did the same from Rundøy M-153-A stationed on the windward side.
The other two boats, Fangstmand M-23-HD and Flemsøy M-44-HD were stationed on the leeward side. Vesterhavet’s M-67-HD crew scrambled into the hunting rowboats and rowed to the other ships without incident. At 07:30, skipper Nils L. Brandal was the last to leave the wreck. Fangstman and Rundøy took six men each, and Flemsøy took four men. The position was 68.25 North and 2.30 East.
In addition to Vesterhavet M-67-HD from Brandal, four other vessels on their way to the Western Ice were wrecked and lost during this gruesome tempest. The Vestad M-16-VD from Vartdal and Heimland I T-165-TD from Tromdalen sank due to the immense seas. Miraculously, both crews were saved. However, two ill-fated vessels went down with their full accompaniments of men.
The same vicious storm caught the two seal-hunting boats, Polar T-22-T from Tromsø and Vikfjell T-184-TD from Tromsdalen that were tragically lost, taking twenty-eight men into their watery graves. Both ship’s crews, numbering fourteen men on each vessel, perished. Newly instated, Skipper Albert Bergesen on Polar T-22-T had been rescued from Isfjell T-23-T, which sank in the North Atlantic just a few weeks earlier during the dramatic rescue operation when the entire Isfjell T-23-T crew was saved by the Swedish passenger ship SS Drottningholm.
Between 1917 and 1939, twenty-one seal-hunting vessels from Gratangen, Rolla and Andørja multiplicities were wrecked and lost in the North Ice, White Sea, King Karlsland and Newfoundland.
Fifty years later, several of these men involved in the terrible April weather of 1939 met each other again in Foldvik, Gratangen, for a reunion to mark the rescue mission. During the last breakfast together, Bernt Brandal told Roald Hansen, we did everything we could to save the crew on Nyken T-36-G, but we couldn’t. Bernt cried when recalling those memories.
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Over several generations, trappers found their livelihood under extreme conditions in desolate, forsaken areas where the Gods could be merciless with all their might. The extreme dangers and hardships these brave Norwegian and Northern European seafaring seal hunters regularly faced on the seas and ice floes are difficult, if not impossible, for later generations to fathom. The coastal communities suffered countless losses at sea. Numerous Norwegian seal-hunting and fishing boats were shipwrecked in the (Vestisen) West Ice and (Østisen) East Ice floes.
No other maritime profession has lost as many vessels measured as a percentage as the sealing fleets. From the counties of Gratangen, Rolla and Andørja alone, from 1917 to 1939, twenty-one hunt vessels (Ishavsskuter) were lost to the ice and seas, the vast majority in the White Sea ice. During the period 1925-1929, eight-point-nine per cent of the registered Norwegian Arctic ships sank. Between 1930-1934 six per cent of the fleet was shipwrecked, and between 1935-1939 seven-point-one per cent of the hunting fleet was lost. In fifteen years, from 1923 to 1940, one hundred and twenty-six Norwegian sealing vessels were wrecked and lost to the seas or the ice.
In 1950 a total of one hundred and forty-nine thousand seals were caught on the ice by Norwegian boats.
Fifty-three Norwegian vessels would participate in the seal hunt in the West Ice pack during the annual 1952 hunting season that officially started on 24 March. On 22 March, the Vestis M-352-HØ from Tjørvåg Village, Møre, Western Norway, built in 1948, got caught in the ice floe when the wind direction drastically changed. On the evening of 22 March, Vestis M-352-HØ and several other schooners had moored for the night in the lee of a large strip of ice. They were in open water with very loose ice surrounding them. Suddenly the wind speed increased drastically, and they became surrounded by large ice floes on all sides.
All the boats started their engines in a hurry to escape the trap. All but Vestis M-352-HØ managed to sail clear of the danger in the nick of time. Vestis M-352-HØ was the furthest inboard between the forelands, and suddenly an ice floe came under their stern, which damaged the rudder. It took about half an hour to get this repaired. By then, the situation had drastically worsened. The ice had locked them in, and there was no way for them to get out. Orders were issued to prepare the small hunting boats if they had to disembark.
Ever larger ice floes constantly came with the sea swell towards the ship. The Vestis M-352-HØ captain called Sjannøy T-9-T from Tromsø, requesting them to monitor the situation. At 12:00 on 23 March, the entire port side aft was crushed, and the water cascaded in. There was no alternative but to abandon the ship. Filled with urgency, they immediately began walking towards the ice’s edge to try and reach the Sjannøy T-9-T before nightfall. Over the following four and a half hours, the victims struggled through a strenuous clamber across the broken, moving ice, with the swell energy ever-increasing the closer they got to the ice edge. The distance increased as new ice kept coming in, extending the ice edge.
Walking straight on board the Sjannøy T-9-T from the ugly jagged moving ice edge was impossible. Sjannøy T-9-T had to launch a motor-driven dory to pick them up as they reached the ice edge. The dory could not go to the jagged principal to pick them up but drove along the ice floe slowly, so the men had to run and jump on board. There were many such trips for the dory operator before all sixteen men from Vestis M-352-HØ were rescued.
The Vestis M-352-HØ crew remained on board Sjannøy T-9-T until 29 March, when Veslekari M-20-VD picked them up when she had to cancel her hunt and sail home, having suffered ice damage. Veslekari M-20-VD was herself wrecked and sank in Newfoundland waters on 7 April 1961). The rescued crew arrived back in Norway on 04 April, the same day the Orkan arose in the (Vestisen) West Ice, terrible weather which took five boats and every man and mouse onboard those ill-fated vessels to a watery grave. Several captains took the chance of sailing further southwest, a dangerous area with much larger washed blue ice and winds that came from a direction that hindered safe Lee behind the ice.
On 05 April 1952, a terrible storm, a polar vortex with hurricane-force winds accompanied by temperatures down to minus thirty and forty degrees centigrade, arose in the area east of Greenland and north of Iceland, causing a “Sea of Slaughter” that created numerous widows when five of seven crews perished aboard seven seal-hunting vessels that sank.
Originally, twelve boats followed the same course, Westover. Myregga T-6-G from Gratangen, Asbjørn T-2-G from Gratangen, and Polstjerna T-80-T from Tromsø turned around and headed Eastover and saved themselves. The skippers aboard Fangstmand M-23-HD from Brandal Møre and Eskimo M-58-B from Borgund Ålesund, also on their way Westover, turned around when the barometer started falling. They told of the wind that was so strong that the crew had to crawl along the boat deck to avoid being blown overboard.
Five of the remaining seven vessels disappeared entirely without any trace in hurricane-force winds from 06 to 14 April. Of the seven Norwegian boats lost that season, the first vessel to shipwreck was the Møre boat Vestis M-352-HØ mentioned above. However, the entire crew of Vestis M-352-HØ was rescued, as were all the ship hands of the battered Ungsel F-114-T from Talvik, which had barely managed to sail to Skagafjord Island for temporary repairs. She later sank on 22 May due to a leaking hull nine nautical miles south of (Bjørnøya) Bear Island on her return sail to Norway.
Five vessels, Ringsel T-25-T from Trømsø, Brattind T-78-TD from Tromsø, Vårglimt II T-44-B from Hammerfest, Buskøy M-17-VD from Sundmøre and Pels M-170-OH from Tjørvåg on the Møre coast, with combined seventy-eight men on board (not including the crew member washed overboard from Arild T-2-T), disappeared in a position approximately sixty-eight degrees north and eighteen degrees west in the (Vestisen) West Ice area, east of Greenland. None of the ships managed to send an emergency message.
Arild T-2-T from Tromsø was with Brattind T-78-TD and Vårglimt T-44-B when the storm arose. Arild T-2-T suffered extensive damage to the rigging and superstructure in the raging orkan. They lost their radio equipment, and their engine room filled half full of seawater. The engine was built-in and had a high-lying air intake. This intake enabled it to remain running while the engineers stood in waist-deep water in the engine room compartment. They escaped with difficulty to Iceland. However, two crew members were washed overboard while setting out drift anchors during this hazardous journey. A great wave threw one of these men back aboard the ship. The other, Skipper Wilhelmsen’s father-in-law Oluf Kaspersen, washed away and was never seen again.
The Selfisk T-31-T from Tromsø was also in the West Ice but had a mechanical engine gear coupling problem. Until the storm arrived on 02 April, there was a good catch. On the night of 04 April, they were in good shape, but the ice was getting closer and closer, sometimes at great speed. At the same time, the engine stopped, and they had to stop to make repairs. After four hours of repairs, the ice had settled tightly around the ship, and the need to blast with dynamite around Selfisk T-31-T arose.
They continued having trouble with the engine and did not dare to proceed into the open sea. They maintained contact with other boats in the area in case they had to give up and abandon the vessel. Late in the evening, an ice foot under the stern broke off the rudder stem and the coupling flange. But they managed to repair it adequately, enabling them to use the rudder with care. But the engine could only move the vessel ahead. The gears’ aft function was rendered inoperable.
The following day they were hit with mother nature’s full wrath. The front edge of the forward housing was turned in, and one railing support and some railing planks were broken inboard. The ship iced up, and the crew was kept relentlessly busy breaking ice in the hurricane-force winds.
On 06 April, the tempest decreased to between a full gale and gale force, so they prepared to operate the pumps and sail away to Iceland. They did not trust the rudder steering system and remained on the lee side of giant ice formations for as long as possible. But on the morning of 08 April, they set out for Iceland and arrived the same day. Following repairs, they arrived back in (Vesterisen) West Ice ready for capture on Easter Sunday. On 21 April, they came ashore with twelve hundred seal skins in the hold.
“Selfisk T-31-T spent ten seasons fishing in the (Vesterisen) West Ice before her time was up. On 7 April 1959, the schooner was stuck in the ice alongside Norland 1 T-72-I. In the afternoon, a small narrow channel opened, and they planned to try and manoeuvre out in the open sea. But after a couple of hours, they encountered a belt of large ice that hindered further advancement. They lay down to wait for the ice to open, but instead, at 17:30, the ice suddenly pressed together. A corner of a large ice block prevented the ship from being pushed up, as the Arctic Sea ships are built to allow. Within five minutes, the starboard side amidships was pushed in four meters in length. The boat deck was forced upward, and the crew was ordered to prepare for evacuation.
“The ice continued to press, and at 18.00, the port side was also pressed inboard. Pumping and bailing were of no help. Just fifteen minutes later, the starboard side was further crushed inboard, and the water level in the vessel’s bow became as high as the sea outside. If the ice now released its grip, the ship would immediately sink. At 21.45, the ice came again under tremendous pressure and was close to cutting the schooner in half. First, the ship’s stern became pressed under the ice, and then the forward part. At 21.50, the wreck disappeared entirely under the ice. The crew of sixteen now moved to Nordland 1 T-72-I, where the last of them came on board around midnight.”
On 08 April, Siglufjord radio in Iceland offered help. They rapidly got the American air force at the Kjeflavik base near Reykjavik to send two planes to search. On Wednesday, 09 April, the aircraft started their first grid search. More aeroplanes and several vessels were dispatched to the search field in the following days, but no life signs were ever seen. No wreckage or bodies from the five ships were ever recovered. The lost boats were between twenty-one and thirty-seven metres in length, with engine sizes between sixty and five hundred horsepower.
The disaster involved the whole country of Norway, and approximately one hundred and thirty million Norwegian Kroner in today’s monetary value was donated and collected for the bereaved. Ninety-eight adolescent children lost their fathers, and forty-six widows lost their husbands during mother nature’s anger. In retrospect, meteorologists and historians have strived to determine whether there was an orkan in the area during those tragic Easter days. This was before the low-pressure polar vortex phenomenon was understood and known by metrologists.
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Here are Magne Eklund’s experiences and thoughts during the nine-day battle against the forces of nature in the (Vesterisen) West Ice in 1952. Magne was on board Myregga T-6-G from Gratangen. Magne’s children found his diary after his passing in 1994.
Saturday, 6 April; We have full-storm raging on the second day. Now we are lying in the lee of a narrow ice strip and hope to abstain until nightfall, but it looks sad, but we can hope that it will go well. A consolation is that there are more vessels here. Drott and Altenfjord are a few meters from us. All is well, Magne.
Sunday, 7 April; The storm is still raging with full force. We have found a little better restraint, so we are in a little better position for as long as it lasts.
Monday, 8 April; The storm rages as before. The worst thing is that it’s night, dark and pitch black, and we can’t see anything.
Tuesday, 9 April; The storm rages even worse and not better. We have received a telegram from Astrup (Nilssen) that we have to end the catch, given the catching conditions are as bad as they are. We are seventeen boats in the team. All is well, Magne.
Wednesday, 10 April; The storm is still raging, and there is nothing to hear from the missing boats.
Thursday, 11 April. Still the same weather and no news from those who are missing, yes “Arild” has recovered but has lost a man.
Friday, 12 April, The storm rages with renewed strength. The barometer is reading storm, so we don’t know how this will end. The planes have been looking for the missing ships, but nothing is to be seen. No one knows what those people have suffered, but it is probably the case that no one can wonder at death. I hope they get on well where they go.
Thursday, Easter Eve, 13 April, Today, there is a terrific snowstorm. Asbjørn and Heimen are here. Today there have been three planes in the air, but nothing has been seen. So those who had girlfriends at home are probably no more. And Asbjørn (Magne’s brother) was onboard Vårglimt. His smile and laughter will probably not be heard among us anymore.
Friday, Easter morning, 14 April; The weather has calmed down a bit. We, Heimen and Asbjørn, are now going north. Flussøy skipper has spoken to Siglarfjord radio station (Iceland), and there is good weather and clear skies there, so today, the planes will get good weather and search again, but I believe there is no more hope, I think. This time it’s them, and next time us.
There is no telling when death will arrive. I have to say that; unfortunately, there was no one there who could give notice. I wonder how my dear mother is doing at home. I hope that my beloved wife can get comfort, even if it is through phone or letter. Yes, dear good brother, if you are now resting at the bottom of the sea or dead on an ice sheet, you must be thankful for everything and what you were to your mother, father, and siblings. I hope we can meet again one day when no storms are raging. Yes, rest in peace, dear brother, good son, and uncle.
2. Easter Day, Now, we are on our way home, but there are many who do not get to see their loved ones anymore. They have “closed” their eyes forever. The American planes have returned home, and they have stopped searching. There is probably nothing left of the brave boys who found death out here in the cold depths – End. (Translated copy of the diary of Magne Eklund – Easter days 1952). Over the years, Magne had twenty-nine expeditions in the Arctic Ocean on board Myregga T-6-G and Vårglimt II T-44-B. The crew from Myregga T-6-G and Asbjørn I T-G-2 saved themselves. Magne said that this was the worst weather he had ever encountered.
Sadly, it was not only the earlier generations of Gratangen’s seafarers in smaller vessels who suffered hardships. On 20 April 1970, Asbjørn II T-G-2, a thirty-nine point two meter-long steel ship with a gross tonnage of three hundred and eleven tons from Foldvik Gratangen, sank in Newfoundland waters. She had been capelin fishing before they departed Tromsø for the seal hunt on 11 March. The vessel took in water, and however hard they strived to pump out the seawater, it only delayed the inevitable.
Her entire ship’s crew of twenty-one men were saved by the Melshorn M-32-HD from Brandal Møre. During the annual Newfoundland seal catch of 1970, fourteen Norwegian sealing ships participated, Veslekari II M-20-VD, Veslemari V-3-VD, Polarhav M-89-HD, Polarstar M-14-HD, Polarbjørn III M-88-HD, Polaris II M-10-HD, Kvitungen B-16-B, Melshorn M-32-HD, Heimen I T-84-T, Kvitbjørn T-103-T, Harmoni T-74-T, Norvarg T-527-T, Asbjørn II T-G-2 and Lance II T-95-G.
In the seal catch report from 1970, it can be read that a combined one hundred and sixty-three thousand seals were caught during the season in all hunt areas. Of these, one hundred and nineteen thousand five hundred and twenty-seven animals were slaughtered in Newfoundland waters. One hundred fifteen thousand two hundred were harp seals, and the quantity of blubber the Norwegian ships took home was 2,361 tonnes. On average, each boat had nine thousand one hundred and ninety-four animals.
The duration of each hunting trip, on average, was sixty-one days. The settlement value was, on average, 708,000 Norwegian Kroner. In 1980 the Norwegian catch number dropped to sixty thousand animals. By 1990, only fifteen thousand seals were caught by four ships, two boats from Sunnmøre and two from Troms. With such a meagre result, the seal catch was no longer profitable or viable. Norwegian government state aid was provided to carry out hunting in the 1990s. This subsidising ended in 2014 after international and national pressure from Greenpeace and other environmental groups.
Continues in volume one of the biography’s three volumes………
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