Excerpt: Vikings of the Ice by George Allan England (excerpt#2)

The unabridged audiobook edition of Vikings of the Ice narrated by Frank Holden is available online from Rattling Books or as a mail order MP3 CD .


On my northward trek aboard the Rosalind I acquired a little advance information about seal hunting that just a trifle moderated my ideas concerning brass buttons and smart little staterooms.

"Not much real danger of your ship sinking in the ice a few hundred miles from land," a St. John's merchant explained, "though once in a way it does happen. The sealing ships are built of greenheart and oak, to meet the ice pressures. Of course, " he sank the barb, "we've had some pretty appalling disasters. Sometimes sudden blizzards catch the men on ice, far from the ships, and wipe them out by the dozen and the score. I should advise you not to wander more than two or three miles from the Terra Nova, especially if the barometer's down."

"Oh, I don't think I will - not over three or four miles, anyhow," I hastened to reassure him.

"Well, then, the chances are you'll come through alive. That is, if your ship doesn't burn or blow up. Seal fat is enormously inflammable, and the men are wonderful careless with fire and blasting powder. As a fact, not one of our sealing ships is fit to go to the icefields. They're all worn out. The Terra Nova was condemned years ago. I've heard it said that a good strong man with a pair of stout boots could kick a hole in her boilers anywhere. Still, I don't want to make you worry."

"Certainly not!" I agreed, relighting my pipe, which had gone out.

"As for the men - oh, you'll get along with them all right. Rough? Well, rather! But treat them free and easy and call them 'Uncle,' and you'll have no trouble. A hard crowd, that! Most of them never wash or shave, on the sealing racket. They butcher all day and come in off the ice a reek of blood and grease; but you won't mind that. Dirt doesn't hurt them and neither does hardship. Why, they're half seals themselves! They'd die with decent treatment. The tough trip just fattens them. They come back with hides four inches thick - and so will you!"

Thus indeed it befell. I did!

The next Newfoundlander to encourage me - a carpenter - had been sealing many years.

"Goin' swilin', is ye, sir?" he asked. "Me dear man! Ye'll be rale hearty. If y'r luck's in, ye'll take no harm. I was on de Florizel, time she an' ninety-four men was lost. 'Tis a wonnderful fine racket. I'd like to be goin' in collar meself, agin, wid me rope an' gaff an' sculpin' knife! I'd like to year de ole cry: 'Starburd over!' an' year dem whitecoats bawlin'. I would, so."

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And so continues the beginning of George Allan England's tale of sailing to the ice with Captain Abram Kean on the Terra Nova in 1922.

Vikings of the Ice, being the log of a Tenderfoot on the Great Newfoundland Seal Hunt was published in 1924 by Doubleday.

The unabridged audiobook edition of Vikings of the Ice narrated by Frank Holden is available online from Rattling Books and in downtown St. John's Newfoundland or as a mail order MP3 CD .

Excerpt: Vikings of the Ice, being the log of a Tenderfoot on the Great Newfoundland Seal Hunt by George Allan England

CHAPTER I
PRELUSIONS

St. John's, Nf.,
Feb. 9, 1922

Sealing trip arranged on Terra Nova with famous sealing captain. No passenger accommodations. You will be quartered with three junior officers. Be prepared to rough it.

EDWARD J. PENNEY

This telegram of good hap put a spur to my preparations and set me packing my warmest kit. It arrived as the climax to long negotiations, for this matter of getting permission to go out with the sealers of the Newfoundland fleet had been rather a business.

Observers and writers are not wanted by the seal hunters. Nobody is wanted among those men of bood and iron, in those far and frozen vacancies - nobody who cannot actively take part in the Saga of Slaughter.

"Three junior officers" sounded encouraging. The words seemed to couple with brass buttons and a smart little stateroom.

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And so begins George Allan England's tale of sailing to the ice with Captain Abram Kean on the Terra Nova in 1922. Vikings of the Ice, being the log of a Tenderfoot on the Great Newfoundland Seal Hunt was published in 1924 by Doubleday.

The unabridged audio edition of Vikings of the Ice narrated by Frank Holden is brought to you by Rattling Books.

"Vikings of the Ice": American Writer George Allan England's Newfoundland Seal Hunt

Just before American writer and adventurer (remote islands were his specialty) George Allan England went to the Newfoundland seal hunt in 1922, he was told that the ship he was about to spend six weeks on in the northern icefields "was condemned years ago."

The last of the old "wooden walls," the SS Terra Nova (top photo) had indeed been condemned, but that didn't stop her owners from sending the ship out on the lucrative chase after seals. In 1922, as England recorded in Vikings of the Ice, the seal hunt was worth nearly $200, 000, a significant sum in those days.

England was the first and only person to observe the Newfoundland seal hunt first hand and to write about it. A committed socialist (England ran for governor of Massachusetts on the Socialist ticket in 1908), this is one of the things he wrote:

If a hunter makes $50 or $60 dollars, he's doing well. That comes to $10 to $12 dollars a week, and board . . . for hardships, perils, and toil beyond anything we know here at home. I have never known a country where employers enjoyed such a sinecure as in Newfoundland. Labour, there, has hardly begun to dream that it has any rights. And the game of exploitation goes merrily on.


England's admiration and sympathy for the sealers of Newfoundland (bottom photo) is evident in Vikings of the Ice. His fascination with their culture - in particular, its idiosyncratic habits of speech - and his ability to place the reader or listener right on the icy, bloody deck of a 1920s' wooden wall make Vikings of the Ice a compelling experience. Veteran narrator Frank Holden's seamless handling of Rattling Books' Audie-nominated audio book version of Vikings of the Ice's many voices and accents - individual sealers, ship's officers, England himself - brings the book alive. It gives England's experience directly to the listener : six hard weeks of blood, sweat and, despite the circumstances, humour. (One reader described Vikings of the Ice as a "strange admixture of implacable cruelty toward animals [and] . . . man-to-man, human warmth.")

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George Allan England was born in Nebraska in 1877. His father, George Allen England, was a U.S. Army chaplain who served on bases from Virginia to Nebraska (including Fort Nebraska, General George Armstrong Custer's base of operations against Native Americans). The family moved to Boston when England was a child; he attended Boston English High School, and was accepted at Harvard. England graduated from Harvard in 1902 with Phi Beta Kappa honours, and a special award for writing. After he obtained a master's degree from Harvard in 1903, he married and began work at an insurance company, where (he once wrote) he honed his ability to write fiction.

England soon quit the insurance business, and spent the rest of his life as a freelance writer, and a traveller (except for failed attempts at chicken farming and treasure hunting in the Caribbean). Besides writing articles for popular publications of the day (e.g., Collier's, The Saturday Evening Post), England wrote fiction, including Utopian novels based on his socialist ideals. The most famous of these is his Darkness and Dawn trilogy.

George Allan England died on June 26, 1930, in Concord, New Hampshire. His New York Times obituary compared Vikings of the Ice to Kipling's Captains Courageous.

Rattling Books On CBC's Weekend Arts Magazine

Click here to listen to WAM's interview with Rattling Books owner Janet Russell, and actor Frank Holden, narrator of Vikings of the Ice, Rattling Books' 2011 Audie contender.

Rattling Books' "Vikings Of The Ice" Up For Audie Award

Rattling Books is the only Canadian contender for a 2011 Audie, the audio book industry’s Oscar equivalent. Vikings of the Ice, RB's unabridged audio edition of George Allan England's 1922 eyewitness account of the Newfoundland seal hunt, is a finalist in the history category.

Presented annually by the Audio Publishers Association, an American organization representing audio publishing companies and allied suppliers, distributors and retailers of spoken word products, the Audies honour the best in audio books. Last year’s winners included Nelson Mandela’s Favourite African Folktales, narrated by Samuel L. Jackson, Helen Mirren, Don Cheadle and Alan Rickman, and Booker-prize winner Wolf Hall, narrated by Simon Slater.

Over 1,100 audio books were entered in this year’s competition. Winners will be announced at the Audies Gala on May 24, 2011, at the Times Center in New York City. (We've got our fingers, toes, arms, legs and hearts crossed.)

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Vikings is not only a chronicle of the early twentieth-century industrial seal hunt, but of the speech, folklore and beliefs of rural Newfoundlanders of that period. These long gone and never to return voices of the men who plied the spring seal fishery are rendered vividly by Frank Holden, veteran playwright, actor and narrator. Like Chaucer's pilgrims on the way to Canterbury, the "swilers" offer us their stories about a hard-scrabble life valiantly faced, on both land and sea.

Vikings of the Ice is available from Rattling Books as an MP3 audio book CD and an MP3 download.