Cassie Brown’s account of the 1914 sealing disaster is a classic. A tale of greed, callousness, suffering and heroism, it paints a grim portrait of the expendability of “swilers,” Newfoundland fishermen who endured deplorable conditions on board ship and off as they supplemented a subsistence living by killing seals for the colony’s merchants. For two days and nights in the winter of 1914, 132 men were stranded without food and shelter on an ice field. Two thirds of them died before one of the nearby ships came to their aid.