Word: keane
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...hard, just, God-fearing man is Abram Kean. A devout Wesleyan Methodist, he neither drinks nor swears. Even if pious Newfoundland's law did not forbid it, he would no more think of letting one of his "swilers" (sealers) crack a seal's skull on Sunday than he would think of failing to impose a 10? fine for any cut or tear in a seal "sculp" (fat-lined pelt) one of them brought in. He got his first schooling after he was 25 and rose to be Minister of Marine & Fisheries in his country's Cabinet. Three...
...years of sealing Captain Kean has seen wooden sailing ships crunched like peanuts in the jaws of the ice floes. He has sent his men hopping out over the ice and later, when a blizzard blew up, known that some of them would not come back. He has seen survivors carried in blue and stiff as corpses. And each year for 66 years he has seen swilers trudge happily back, dragging their sculps in a long crimson trail across the glare-white...
...Abram Kean is no gaffer doddering over his memories by a cottage fireside. Last week from the desolate ice fields off Labrador flashed the news that Captain Kean, having piled 4,000 sculps aboard his ship Beothic that day, had become the first skipper in history to bag 1,000,000 seals...
...sealer's life has eased since Captain Kean first went out. Now ships are powered to escape grinding ice and most of them are built of steel. Airplanes fly .ahead to spot seal herds from the sky. Daily weather reports radioed from Toronto and Washington tell the skipper when to keep his men off the ice. But sealing is still no sport for milksops as any sealer will attest when, huddling behind an ice pinnacle after a ducking, he strips to a cutting wind, wrings out his icy clothes and tugs them back...
Eight ships went up this year, against six last year, and the catch has been the best in a decade. By last week, with the hunt almost over, 190,000 sculps were piled in stinking holds. Captain Kean can remember when the fleet brought back 700,000 sculps in a good season, but yearly slaughter has dwindled the herds. Some naturalists view this destruction with alarm, but Newfoundlanders say that if they did not keep the herds down the seals would eat up all their cod, capelin and herring...