This is a book that needed to be written. Unfortunately, it needed to be written by someone who truly understood its subject -- and Farley Mowat was not a Newfoundlander, and he didn't understand it.

Mowat admits his failure to comprehend. He several times says that it is inexplicable that thousands of men would go to desperate lengths to get the chance to go aboard sealing ships that were overcrowded to the point of danger, to go out and hunt animals in very harsh conditions, with poor food, subhuman sanitation, and great danger, for small pay that was manipulated by the rich businessmen of Water Street (the Newfoundland equivalent of Wall Street, sort of -- the place where the bankers and bosses worked).

Mowat is absolutely right about the horrid conditions. Sealing ships were basically floating sweatshops. And men died aboard them -- sometimes in great numbers, as in the Greenland disaster of 1898 and the Newfoundland and Southern Cross tragedies of 1914; sometimes by ones and twos as they were crushed or lost on the ice; sometimes in long, slow ways as the poor conditions and lack of medical care drained their lives away. Half a century before Mowat, George Allan England -- who was far closer to the sealers than was Mowat, for he sailed aboard the Terra Nova to see the life -- had told the same story of death and dirt and backbreaking work.

But Mowat saw Newfoundland in the 1960s and 1970s, after it had become part of Canada and the economy entirely changed. To understand sealing, you have to see Newfoundland before Confederation. Sealers weren't just a sort of anti-Greenpeace movement of people who went out and clubbed defenseless, beautiful seal pups to death for their fur, or just out of pure sadism. They were looking back on a tradition that had kept Newfoundland alive.

There is a reason they call Newfoundland "the Rock." And the reason is, rock is what most of it is. Most of it can't be farmed, and it has few natural resources. It really has only two valuable things, both found in the waters off its shores: cod and seals. The island was colonized as a place to dry cod for shipment to Europe. Survival was hard. When the settlers discovered the seals, it made their lives far easier. Seals were food. Their hides made clothing. And their fat -- the fat that was so thick on the baby seals that needed it to stay warm on the ice -- made an oil that could power lamps and -- as it turned out -- all the industries of Europe. Sealing was, after cod, Newfoundland's greatest export.

Mowat, in trying to understand, suggests that Newfoundlanders were desperate to go sealing as a rite of passage. True, in a way; a man who had been sealing did gain a certain amount of respect in the Outports, especially those on the northern side of the island. They could boast of the captains they'd served under, and the ships they'd sailed on -- the Terra Nova, that took Robert Scott to the Antarctic; the Neptune, that brought in a million seals; the Eagle II, that was the very last; the Ranger, that went sealing for almost three-quarters of a century. But what they were really boasting of was not that they had sailed under the great and murderous Abram Kean in the Florizel, or the profane Billy Winsor; they were boasting that they were part of the tradition of Newfoundland that went back centuries. They were a part of Newfoundland history in a way most of us, now, cannot be.

This is not to defend sealing today; its time is past. We don't need seal oil any more, and we certainly don't need psychopaths like Abram Kean ordering men to their death so that he could try to kill more seals than any other captain! I am no more a Newfoundlander than Mowat, and I know this is true. But I've heard their songs and read their stories -- such few as there are recorded, for many Newfoundlanders could not write, and few had the time, or indeed the store-bought paper, to record their stories. So I deeply feel their history, and wish it could be told. Sadly, there is no complete book about the sealing industry. Shannon Ryan and James Candow looked at the economics; Ryan also collected oral histories and published a book of songs and poems. John Felton wrote essays about the most famous sealing ships, and Chafe's Sealing Book recorded their results. George Allan England gave us a view of life aboard a sealer. Abram Kean's autobiography gave us the view of a sealing captain (and in the process showed just how awful he was). Cassie Brown and Gary Collins wrote accounts of the Newfoundland disaster. But there was never a book that was a good overview. Mowat tried to supply it. But he just doesn't feel either the tradition or the tragedy of the seal fishery.

To top it all off, you never know what to trust in this book. Mowat started with eyewitness accounts, but he rewrote and filled in and added his own material, and he never identifies which is which. So you don't know what is history and what is Mowat. Having read all the other books mentioned above, and more, I can't help but think that the amount that is Mowat is far too high. Two examples: his account of the Viking explosion of 1931, and the Diana fire of the decade before, both include details I have seen nowhere else. Could they be true? Perhaps. But they seem awfully pat.

I should add: All those comments are based on the text. There are also the illustrations by David Blackwood. These did so little for me that, as you can see, I made no reference at all to them before this. A good set of photographs -- of sealing ships, of sealers themselves, of the captains, of the ice and the dead seals -- would have been a great addition. Drawings of men working, or dying, on the ice, may be useful to those who can appreciate them (I truly have no ability to understand art). But they add no information not in the text. I would have left them out -- particularly since they took what could have been a small book and turned into a large, expensive volume that doesn't even fit well on a shelf.

In the end, I can only call this work a great idea but a tremendous disappointment. ( )