National Network for Equitable Library Service

Fishing is the most dangerous occupation in the world: in Atlantic Canada, an average of one person dies every month while working at sea. The Deadly Sea by bestselling author Jim Wellman contains twenty-five stories about men and women who work in the Atlantic Canadian fishing industry, ranging from biographies of professionals to tales of tragedy at sea. In Atlantic Canada, the sea has given generously of its riches. Tens of thousands of men and women make a living from its resources.

In the snowy predawn of February 18, 1942, a convoy of three American ships zigzagged up the North Atlantic toward Newfoundland, heading for one of the worst disasters in naval history. The ships were under radio silence to protect their position from the threat of German U-boats. A storm was raging, visibility was zero, and the currents had turned wildly unpredictable. With only unreliable soundings to guide them across the jagged ocean floor, all three vessels ran aground on the sheer rock coast of Newfoundland.

Many people on Canada’s east coast, the maritime regions, have experienced the temperament of the North Atlantic Ocean: beautiful, moody, mysterious. The cold Atlantic has a capacity, with its tremendous force and power, to take human life seemingly at will; however, it has also spared lives and allowed miraculous escapes. Since the phenomenon of the 1997 hit movie Titanic, more people than ever have been captivated with Titanic trivia and still thirst, seemingly at an ever-increasing rate, for facts about the great ship operated by the renowned White Star Line.

The fishing industry in Atlantic Canada has gone through massive change in the last twenty years. Now, even small inshore vessels are outfitted with fishing equipment that would astound those mariners who passed on just a generation ago. But still, despite the incredible advances in technology, dozens of fishermen continue to die each year doing what they know best. Simply put, fishing is still one of the most dangerous professions in the world.

Sails Over Ice picks up where The Log of Bob Bartlett left off. Between the years 1925–1933, Captain Bob Bartlett and the Morrissey explored coastal Greenland and much of Northern Canada, harvesting scientific specimens and Inuit artifacts for North American societies and museums and collecting Arctic mammals for zoos. This world-famous captain from Newfoundland never lost a single soul on either of these trips. Most believe that Bartlett’s contribution to exploration and natural science is without equal.

The fishing industry kills more people than any other job in the world. On average, Atlantic Canada loses one fisherman every month. From the pages of the Navigator magazine comes a collection of more than twenty sea stories from Jim Wellman’s widely acclaimed series, Final Voyages. This volume marks his fourth venture onto the cold Atlantic waters, to stand alongside captain and crew and tell the stories of these unsung heroes: small-boat fishermen.

Fishing has long been documented as being the most dangerous occupation in the world. That is especially true in the harsh, and often bitter, marine environment of Atlantic Canada. These perilous conditions have caused the sinking and loss of hundreds of Atlantic Canadian fishing vessels, claiming enormous loss of life. Former host of CBC Radio’s “Fisheries Broadcast” and now managing editor of The Navigator, Jim Wellman recounts some of those gripping tales as part of his regular monthly feature in The Navigator.

On Easter Sunday, 1908, Dr. Wilfred Grenfell was summoned to treat a boy with osteomyelitis who had been operated on two weeks earlier. The young man needed immediate attention to save not only his leg but his life, so the doctor set out from St. Anthony, Newfoundland, with his komatik and his eight best dogs. To save a few miles, Dr. Grenfell took a shortcut across a bay, but the ice broke up beneath him, his komatik sank, and one dog drowned. He and the other dogs climbed out of the water onto an ice pan, which drifted out to sea in an offshore wind.

Setting out to visit his friends in Woodstock, New Brunswick, and with all intentions to return to the United States to attend Columbia University in the fall, Tappan Adney, at the age of 18, embarked on a trip that would ultimately set the course of his life. Tappan Adney's writings, illustrations, and photographs were published in Harper's Magazine. This follow-up journal to 2010's first volume, takes us back to a time when wildness was still something easily accessible and wildlife abundant.

In 1887, at the age of just 18, intellectually and artistically gifted American Tappan Adney embarked on his first trip to New Brunswick. He had plans to enrol at Columbia University in the fall, primed for a meteoric rise in academia — but fate intervened. He fell under the spell of the wilderness of Maine, New Brunswick, and Nova Scotia, and the local Maliseet people.