Sculps & Swilers

A 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-c- 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 after Appomattox he sailed out with the fleet from St. John's on his first seal hunt.

In 66 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 ice.

At 78 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.

The 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 on.

Newfoundland law forbids the sealing fleet to put out until March 8, when the seals' whelping season is over. Then St. John's sends the ships off, each jammed by 100 to 300 swilers, with cheers, bunting, band music and cannon fire. Swilers work on shares and the trip to the seal herds is a bitter race. Arrived, the swilers swarm out over the ice with their long, hooked gaffs, begin bashing in seals' skulls right & left. Swilers never shoot seals, except in self-defense against an angry, sharp-toothed male, but they sometimes make the ice fly in front of their rivals in the race to the main herd, and sometimes a bullet goes astray. A swiler must be light on his feet, for a seal can lollop over the ice as fast as a man can run. A good swiler can skin a seal in 40 to 60 seconds, and may take as many as 120 sculps per day. He may drag his sculps back to the ship at the day's end, or may pile them on an ice pan to be picked up later.

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.

No ladies' backs are warmed by Newfoundlanders' seals. Four-fifths of the world's fur seals belong in the U. S. Government-controlled herds which migrate yearly up the Pacific Coast to Pribilof Islands, chaperoned by Coast Guards and harried only by the harpoons of Indians and Eskimos. On Pribilof only "bachelor seals" (males under seven years old) are killed. North Atlantic seals are fatter than those on Pribilof, are covered with coarse brown hair instead of fur, and lead a harder life. Each winter they swim 1,000 mi. into the Arctic, where they become food, fuel and clothing for Eskimos. Each spring they swim down to bear their young on the Labrador ice fields, be clubbed by Newfoundlanders, become soap, pocketbooks, slippers and knicknacks for citizens of the U. S.

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