Winter 2009/10, Volume 102 Number 3

A popular guest speaker in the province’s schools following the publication of Death on the Ice, in the 1970s and 1980s Cassie Brown was many children’s first introduction to a Newfoundland author.

“The Making of Death on the Ice”

Death on the Ice - the compelling account of the 1914 sealing disaster in which 78 men from the SS Newfoundland died on the ice floes off the northeast coast of the island - is today among the most widely read depictions of Newfoundland in and outside the province. Written by Newfoundlanders - Cassie Brown (1919-1986), a journalist, publisher, and author based in St. John’s, and Harold Horwood (1923-2006), a nationally known fiction and non-fiction author - and published by Doubleday in Toronto and New York in 1972, Death on the Ice sold over 10,000 copies in its first eighteen months, with half its sales in the United States. It was serialized in the London (UK) Sunday Express in the fall of 1972, followed by other publications in Australia, the United States, and Norway, and abridged in the English-Canadian edition of Reader’s Digest in November 1974, with the Canadian Frenchlanguage version following in October 1975 and other translations appearing in the Finnish, Danish, Norwegian, French, Dutch, Japanese, Spanish, Latin American, Portuguese, Brazilian, Chinese, and South African editions of the magazine between 1974 and 1976. The full work also appeared in Spanish translation from an Argentinean press in 1976.¹ Never out of print and still selling briskly, Death on the Ice represents a milestone in the history of Newfoundland literature.

Published during the period that witnessed the intensifying international controversy over the Canadian seal hunt, Death on the Ice quickly became a source of pride in the public imagination as a respectful commemoration of a significant event in the province’s labour history and as an internationally successful cultural export. Numerous early readers of the book saw the text as an authentic expression of Newfoundland’s cultural inheritance. For novelist Percy Janes, the book was reminder that “the real or true history of Newfoundland is now beginning to be written,” while for dramatist and critic Michael Cook, it was “the blood and guts of Newfoundland’s own heritage.”² Another St. John’s reader, Mary B. Whiteley, writing to Cassie Brown in 1973, declared, “every Newfoundlander should read your book.”³ Evidently, the provincial Department of Education agreed: Death on the Ice was adopted as a core textbook in the high-school English program in the fall of 1974 and has remained on the curriculum to this day.

While the story of the Newfoundland disaster is familiar to many Newfoundlanders - few can forget the imposing Abram Kean, captain of the Stephano, who sent the Newfoundland sealers back out on ice at mid-day, miles from their own ship, at the outset of a blizzard; the master watch George Tuff, who meekly or unthinkingly accepted these orders; or the indomitable Cecil Mouland, the “cheerful, smiling lad,” who was one of the few to survive the 53 (or more) hours the sealers spent on the ice - the story of the making of Death on the Ice is less well known, though it too represents a significant moment in Newfoundland history, appearing at the forefront of a cultural “renaissance” that sought to document, preserve, and re-animate what was seen as the province’s unique culture and heritage. The collaboration between Cassie Brown and Harold Horwood teamed two writers who approached the project from different literary backgrounds and with differing, though not incompatible, views on the nature of the work and its audiences. Both approaches helped to shape the text into a vivid and emphatic account of the event as experienced by the sealers, the working men whose perspectives had rarely been included on the printed record.

This authorial collaboration was not, however, instigated by the writers themselves, but by a literary editor in Toronto, the then undisputed cultural centre of Canadian English-language publishing, whose significance was especially evident in this period before the widespread appearance of regional literary presses (including Newfoundland publishers such as Breakwater Books) in the 1970s. Cassie Brown’s negotiations with Toronto resulted in a writing and editing process that is revealing for our understandings of cultural production and the Canadian literary marketplace in the 1960s and 1970s. The making of Death on the Ice illustrates some of the challenges that faced Cassie Brown as a Newfoundland writer of her generation, including her struggle for recognition that continued even after the book’s publication. This discussion traces the development of Brown’s research into and writing on the Newfoundland disaster and describes her collaboration with Harold Horwood - a collaboration that was important for shaping the published text of Death on the Ice and would later have equally significant ramifications for Cassie Brown’s claims to its authorship.

Cassie Brown and the Literary Marketplace

Death on the Ice was Cassie Brown’s first published book, and it appeared when the author was 53 years old. To this point, Brown’s writing career had been based mainly in broadcasting and journalism, though she had also written both fiction and nonfiction for publications including St. John’s Woman (later, Newfoundland Woman), a magazine she edited and published between 1962 and 1965. While she had ambitions to write professionally in popular genres such as romance and adventure, it does not appear that she attempted to break into the wider Canadian or American markets with her early work, much of which was rooted in Newfoundland themes and subjects; rather, Brown took advantage of the local channels that were open to her as a young woman writer. She secured steady employment by working in radio (for example, by writing educational series for the Newfoundland and Atlantic School Broadcasts), and by contributing to and, later, becoming the Women’s Editor of the St. John’s Daily News.

As early as the 1950s, the strong local demand for non-fiction, particularly stories of Newfoundland, put Brown on the path that would lead to Death on the Ice and, eventually, establish her as the province’s best-known chronicler of marine disasters. Brown traced her first acquaintance with the Newfoundland disaster to a short paragraph in J. R. Smallwood’s The Book of Newfoundland (1937), which she had turned to in search of material for the radio program Newfoundland Story Hour.⁴ As the 50th anniversary of the tragedy approached in 1964, Brown, by then working at the Daily News, revisited this material in preparation for a feature story. “Death March” was accompanied by editorials, photographs, and personal reminiscences resulting from interviews Brown conducted with survivors Wesley Collins and Cecil Mouland. This piece was followed by a longer article, also called “Death March,” which appeared in the national magazine The Atlantic Advocate in September 1965.⁵ A radio play, a stage play, and a television documentary script followed in quick succession.⁶

Through her work at the Daily News, Brown was familiar with other local writers, including Harold Horwood and Farley Mowat, who were by the 1960s the best known literary authors of Newfoundland, and who were publishing in Toronto, Boston, and New York. Brown’s Daily News articles on sealing disasters had also attracted the attention of Newfoundland-born artist David Blackwood, who was by then living in Ontario and at work on his “Lost Party Series,” dramatic prints and drawings depicting the seal hunt and sealing disasters (Blackwood would later be commissioned to provide the cover illustration for Death on the Ice). The careers of these artists, who were gaining widespread acclaim with Newfoundland-themed work, were among the factors that led Brown to think about book publishing. In 1966, having resigned from the Daily News in order to concentrate on her own writing, she wrote to prominent Toronto publisher McClelland & Stewart with a proposal for a collection of non-fiction Newfoundland adventure stories, the “Death March” piece among them. When this proposal was unsuccessful, she began developing the “Death March” piece into a book-length manuscript.

The Writing of Death on the Ice

Historical accuracy appears to have been Brown’s priority as she embarked on this work. As she would approach her later book projects, such as A Winter’s Tale: The Wreck of the ‘Florizel’ (1976) and Standing into Danger: A Dramatic Story of Shipwreck and Rescue (1979), Brown conducted her examination into the Newfoundland disaster in the manner of an investigative journalist.⁷ She carried out much of her initial research at the downtown Gosling Library (1936-1996), which held, at the time, the only available archive of St. John’s newspapers. In the spring of 1965, in preparation for the Atlantic Advocate story, she requested and was granted access to the records of two public inquiries into the disaster, which were held by the provincial government in the attorney general’s law library. A thorough study of the witnesses’ testimony from 1914 allowed her to piece together a chronology of the disaster and the factors that had contributed to it. The verdict of the commission of inquiry, that the disaster was an “Act of God,” provided Brown with the question that guided her research, as well as her manuscript’s original opening line, “Was it an Act of God?”⁸

Brown’s effort to recreate the story of the disaster was aided by a stroke of luck. In 1967, her cousin, an antiques dealer, obtained a collection of photographs showing the rescue operation and the corpses of the dead men, taken in the spring of 1914 by an unknown photographer who had been aboard the Bellaventure. Convinced that fate had put these photographs into her hands, Brown likely felt that she was uniquely positioned to write the definitive account of the disaster.

Brown sent a 95-page manuscript entitled “Death March” to McClelland & Stewart on 26 November 1968. Within weeks, the publisher declined it, but encouraged the author to try elsewhere. In February 1969, Brown sent the work, now entitled “Death on the Ice,” to Doubleday Canada, the Canadian subsidiary of the New York-based Doubleday Inc. There, it reached the desk of editor Douglas Gibson.

Twenty-six years old and recently appointed head of the editorial department, Gibson was then at the outset of a distinguished career in Canadian publishing, one that would lead him, after Doubleday, to Macmillan of Canada and finally to the position of publisher at McClelland & Stewart, where he has published such preeminent authors as Alice Munro, W. O. Mitchell, and Mavis Gallant under his own editorial imprint. Personally committed to publishing Canadian literature (at a time when such publishing was often a sideline of subsidiaries such as Doubleday Canada⁹), Gibson gave Brown’s submission serious consideration. He saw potential in the 36,000-word manuscript (just over half the length of a standard book) and was struck by the dramatic and grisly historical photographs Brown had sent along with it. While the story was powerful and, given the prominence of the seal hunt in the news, timely, the manuscript needed to be reworked and expanded for a mainland audience unfamiliar with the natural and social setting.

As he envisioned the kind of work he believed would succeed on the North American market, Gibson’s thoughts turned Harold Horwood, who had recently published an engaging travel book on Newfoundland with Macmillan of Canada and whose novel, White Eskimo, would be issued by Doubleday in 1972.¹⁰ In the editor’s eyes, Horwood was an authority on Newfoundland history and society, a proven writer, and a recognized name in Canadian literature. If he could be brought in to finish the manuscript, Gibson had little doubt it would be both well executed and saleable. Gibson decided to approach Horwood about the project, and, on 22 August 1969, the editor’s assistant wrote to Brown expressing Doubleday Canada’s interest in publishing the book and suggesting, in light of foreseen marketing difficulties, a co-authoring agreement with Harold Horwood. The letter concluded with a request for permission to forward Brown’s manuscript to the other writer.¹¹

Not surprisingly, Brown was not keen to relinquish either her manuscript or her authorship of the text. Without accepting or rejecting Gibson’s offer, in a letter of 3 September she outlined her own credentials as a journalist and author in local and national venues, and requested more details about the creative and financial terms of the proposed arrangement.¹² On 25 September 1969, Gibson responded to her personally, offering his editorial assessment of the work for the first time. The manuscript would have to be developed in order to provide more contextual information, as well as further characterization of the central “characters.” Overall, Gibson wanted the text to read more like a novel than a work of journalism: in the current draft, despite the occasional use of dialogue, most of the thoughts and words of the sealers were given in flashforwards paraphrasing their testimony at the inquiries - a feature that decreased the suspense of the unfolding story. To remedy this, Gibson suggested that the thoughts and words of the sealers could “legitimately be fictionalised” with reference to the historical record and rendered into novelistic dialogue along the lines of that of Bruce Catton’s popular books on the American Civil War. Suggesting that Horwood would be the right person to handle this kind of literary revision, Gibson proposed that the eventual royalties be split 50-50 between the authors, whose names would be displayed with equal prominence on the jacket.¹³

By this time, Brown and Horwood were in contact about the manuscript, although both writers were hesitant to agree to any formal arrangement. Cognizant that Gibson had found merit in the story as she had presented it, yet aware of his enthusiasm for involving another writer, Brown found herself in the unenviable position of requesting permission to revise her own manuscript. In a second letter to Gibson, she made a case for her right to do so by stressing her personal involvement with the survivors, built up after years of research and previous publications centered on the event, and, indirectly, by advocating her own skills as a writer, as testified to by her audience:

[The story of Death on the Ice] has almost exclusively been my story because of the years of research and my knowledge of it. I know these sealers so thoroughly, that when I wrote it for the Atlantic Advocate... a survivor (Hedley Payne), who had been living in Florida for many years, wrote a letter to the editor, saying ‘Whoever Cassie Brown is, he (or she) must have been there with us’. So perhaps you can understand why I honestly feel a reluctance to share the honor of publication with anyone, if it is at all avoidable. What I am getting at is, may I not have the opportunity to try a rewrite on my own?¹⁴

Gibson’s response reiterated the marketing advantages of co-authorship and stressed the editor’s faith in Horwood’s abilities: Horwood had, the editor explained, “the really masterly touch” that few newspaper people were able to develop. However, as Gibson could not prevent Brown from continuing with the project she had begun, he expressed his willingness to receive her revised text.¹⁵

While Brown was not averse to involving Horwood in an editorial capacity at a future stage, it was not until she learned that Farley Mowat was also carrying out research on the seal hunt (for the Wake of the Great Sealers, McClelland & Stewart, 1973) that she would agree to Horwood’s involvement upfront. Having recently published This Rock Within the Sea: A Heritage Lost (Boston; Toronto: Little, Brown, 1968), Mowat was already well on his way to being regarded as “the chief literary interpreter of modern Newfoundland to the world at large,”¹⁶ and Brown was well aware of both his skill and the power of his reputation. Viewing Mowat’s project as one that would rival and perhaps overshadow her own, Brown’s “panicked” response was followed by some sober deliberation. In the end, she phoned Horwood and asked for his collaboration.¹⁷

A Question of Authorship

The extent of Harold Horwood’s involvement in the writing of Death on the Ice has in many quarters assumed to have been great, in part due to Horwood’s own commentary. While his foreword to Death on the Ice assures the reader that it is “Cassie Brown’s book, not mine. She did more than nine tenths of all the work on it,” in an autobiographical essay published in 1992 Horwood is less modest about his contribution: “At the end of 1970 [sic],” he writes, “I was able to turn my attention to Death on the Ice, a manuscript by Cassie Brown that Doug Gibson had put into my hands. The research on this story of Newfoundland’s greatest sealing disaster was impeccable, but the writing was impossible. I not only rewrote the book, I reshaped it and recast it, and Cassie and I published it as co-authors.”¹⁸ His commentary in his autobiography Among the Lions: A Lamb in the Literary Jungle (2000) is along the same lines, and it compresses the time period of the book’s composition, giving the impression that Brown submitted a bare-bones manuscript to Doubleday which Horwood immediately reworked.¹⁹

Horwood’s comments in both publications, however, are misleading. (Regarding his assessment that Brown’s writing was “impossible,” it may be worth noting that in the same article he also categorically declares 19th-century literature to be “unreadable.”) My study of the drafts of the manuscript reveals that, while Horwood certainly helped to shape the text into a suspenseful booklength narrative and enhanced aspects of the text (notably, the characterization of Abram Kean), it was Brown who was primarily responsible for the content of the work and the treatment of its subject matter.²⁰

Horwood’s greatest contribution to Death on the Ice is arguably a five-page list of points, in which he proposed ways of developing the initial draft and, significantly for Brown, conveyed his obvious enthusiasm for the project. He offered ways of framing the story and of keeping the suspense high by cutting between scenes, as well as reminders to explain details that would not be familiar to all readers (“Most of your readers may not even have any conception of what a ‘gaff’ actually is.”) Horwood’s suggestion of tracing the development of the storm as the villain of the piece was likely the impetus for Brown to undertake extensive meteorological research, and his seeming fascination with the character of Abram Kean resulted in his encouragement to draw “the Old Man” in detail. Horwood was adamant that more was needed on Kean “to keep the narrative going as a narrative...How he stalked [the seals], year after year. The knowledge that made him a master sealer. His inflexible purpose, and so on.” A handwritten comment added as an afterthought underscored his point: “Much more could be made of Abram Kean’s character - the fact that he was a puritan, an intolerant teetotaller, an old-line Methodist who prayed daily to the Jehovah of the Old Testament, and a slave-driver.”²¹

From the fall of 1969, with Gibson’s and Horwood’s editorial suggestions in hand, Brown worked on the manuscript alone, expanding her dramatization of the hours on the ice by incorporating more and more of the sealers’ perspectives gleaned from the inquiry testimonies, and contextualizing the hardships of 1914 through the contemporary commentary provided by William Coaker (1871-1938), founder of the Fishermen’s Protective Union and the “workingman’s hero of the time” (Horwood, “Foreword”), who was also on the ice that year as an observer aboard the Nascopie. Brown also continued collecting oral history relating to the disaster, conducting further in-depth interviews with the survivors. The expressive speech of these men was in sharp contrast to the flat and stilted prose of the inquiry records, which - as Horwood would later note in his foreword to Death on the Ice - rendered the witnesses’ speech into a formal Standard English instead of the Newfoundland dialects the men actually spoke, and were closely focused on determining legal questions. (It’s significant that Cecil Mouland, one of the youngest and least experienced sealers on the ice, did not testify at the inquiries.) From her initial interviews for the Daily News in 1964, Brown personally interviewed at least nine of the remaining survivors and relations of survivors, and engaged in correspondence with several others, dialogues sparked by the appearance of Brown’s earlier publications.

Later, Brown would describe the painstaking recreation of the events as an “agonizing process”²² that brought her closer to the men she wrote about: “to sort out the facts and present a true picture took considerable time, so that by the time I was finished I felt I knew these men well indeed, and had gone every inch of the way with them.”²³ A year and half after beginning the revision, in March 1971, Brown sent Horwood what she referred to as her fourth draft. If Brown’s writing at this stage was “impossible,” it was perhaps because there was too much of it - over 100,000 words, twice the length requested by Gibson. Exhausted and disheartened after three years of intensive research and writing, Brown was considerably relieved by Horwood’s positive response to the manuscript. Three days after handing it over, Brown reported to Gibson that Horwood “had read [the manuscript] and found the suspense ‘almost unendurable’. Naturally, my self-esteem returned somewhat.”²⁴

Horwood now set about cutting down the draft, paying special attention to the crucial opening and concluding chapters, slashing many pages and ultimately rewriting the first three and last two chapters by compressing and rearranging material provided by Brown. Horwood’s major cut in the opening chapters was to excise a long catalogue of the storms and natural disasters that had occurred around the globe in 1914; this Horwood deemed distracting and not as effective as immediately zeroing in on the action. In the concluding chapters, finding much of the material repetitive, he drastically truncated Brown’s reporting of the testimony provided at the inquiries, retaining just a few pages on the proceedings and ending the book on a brief note comparing the honours later bestowed on Abram Kean and William Coaker (an O.B.E. and a knighthood, respectively). In contrast, Brown’s original ending had been an epilogue outlining of the fates of a number of the “main players” - both men and ships - that concluded with the fate of George Tuff.²⁵ While Horwood’s revised ending invites a reading centred on the contrasting attributes and accomplishments of Kean and Coaker and their respective legacies in Newfoundland history, Brown’s ending did not privilege the lives and legacies of these leaders over those more private fates of the common men.

That Brown’s central concern was to realistically convey the sealers’ experience is evident in the chapters that describe the two days and two nights the men spent on the ice. In these chapters, the body of the manuscript, Horwood made few substantive changes (and very few changes in diction), but carried out extensive line editing focused on tightening the prose. On the rare occasion he cut material, Horwood explained his decision to Brown. Taking out a long passage describing the effects of a bad fishing year in Hant’s Harbour, for example, Horwood wrote, “Sorry. It’s a good yarn but it has got to go. The book’s main weakness is an inherent lack of tightness and we can’t afford to make it any looser than it is now.”²⁶ He made similar cuts in several other sections, mostly to material that presented a broader portrait of the sealers’ lives - references to their families on shore, for instance, or descriptions of their recreation on board the ships: what remained was Brown’s dispassionately rendered montage of the acts and exchanges of the lost sealers as they struggled to stay alive. (See illustration, p. 12. [Coll-115, file 9.02.003, first draft, p. 89])

Within two weeks of receiving Brown’s draft, Horwood sent the completed manuscript to Douglas Gibson, outlining his contributions and revisiting the subject of co-authorship: “If you think it essential then I would agree, but I would prefer that I simply contribute a foreword and receive a fee-for-service, because if it appears with my name on the cover as co-author, then the vast majority of people will relegate Mrs. Brown to a minor, research role, which is not the truth at all. It’s my role that has been minor.”²⁷ Concurring, Brown wrote:

I do appreciate Harold’s opinion and feelings about ‘co-authoring’, and naturally am most grateful that he feels his name should not go on the cover. My heart, body and soul have gone into this story over the years and even condensation of my labor hurt, although it was most necessary.
If you care to read the manuscript I passed to Harold, you have only to ask for it. You can see where his master touch cleared away the debris.²⁸

Gibson accepted Brown’s offer to send him a copy of the penultimate draft, and, in a deliberation and negotiation process not recorded on paper, accorded Horwood an “assisting” authorial role.²⁹ In the contract signed 18 November 1971, Horwood’s contributions were recognized with a 10 per cent cut of the author royalties.

Finalizing the Text

In the spring of 1972, as Death on the Ice neared completion, Brown and Horwood had their last chances to make changes to the text. In the final edited typescript, both contributed to the portrait of Newfoundland culture that would emerge. In each case, their changes were based on their own conceptions of place, genre, and audience. Horwood, for instance, was armed and ready to combat notions of contemporary Newfoundland that tied it to the fishery. Unsatisfied by Brown’s sentence, “Instead [of the soil] it is the sea on which they [Newfoundlanders] must rely; Newfoundland belongs to the sea” - a statement that may be said to reflect a psychological truth, if not one grounded in the GDP - Horwood wrote an explanatory note to the editor:

Paper-making is Newfoundland’s most important industry. Mining is the second among the extractive industries. Fishing is a third (a very bad third). Even in 1914 it is doubtful that the fishery ranked ahead of forestry in wealth, though it employed more men. And in that year Newfoundland was the world’s third largest producer of copper.³⁰

Ultimately, Horwood’s amended sentence, “For many generations Newfoundlanders relied mostly on the sea,” appeared in the book.

It is in the language used to describe sealing, however, that Horwood’s perspective is most evident. The author’s well-known criticisms of the sealing industry,³¹ as well as his awareness of non-Newfoundland readers, are apparent in his vigilance in eradicating euphemistic phrases for sealing, replacing “seal hunt” for “seal fishery” in all cases the latter phrase occurred, as well as substituting the word “kills” for “harvests” in the overview of Abram Kean’s sealing record.³² It is significant, too, that the one reference to “baby seals” - an anthropomorphic phrase used by anti-sealing groups that continues to rankle some Newfoundland readers³³ - appears in one of the opening chapters written by Horwood.

While Brown was not politicized about the present-day seal hunt (it seemed to her as if its final years were at hand, making the sealing controversy “a dead issue”³⁴), she was adamant that the book not draw conclusions not supported by her research. Viewing the book primarily as a work of popular history that would be read by Newfoundlanders, many of whom had personal connections to sealing, Brown resisted the pull to editorializing that Horwood sometimes exhibited. Among her final changes to the manuscript were to neutralize some of Horwood’s phrases that cast judgment on the men involved, especially Abram Kean. Toward the end of the manuscript (page 197 of the published work), for example, in the episode describing Kean’s command to his men to continue sealing after the discovery of the disaster, Horwood had added the sentence: “What sort of monster would give such an order?” Writing privately to Gibson, Brown asked that the word “monster” be changed to “man.”³⁵ The change, one of several such amendments to Horwood’s language, was important for maintaining the neutrality of the narrative voice. Although closely aligned with the sealers, through whom the action is largely focalized, Brown’s narrator consistently withholds judgment on the culpability of Abram Kean - though his thoughts alone remain hidden from the reader.

This open-endedness, the refusal to “close” the examination into the causes of the disaster, is, I suggest, one important indication of Brown’s authorial control in Death on the Ice. While it is true that in some respects Horwood’s interventions may be said to have “recast” and “reshaped” the narrative, it is equally important to note that the text owes its tone - and, it follows, much of its affective power - to Cassie Brown. The hallmark stylistic elements of the work - the detached journalistic perspective, the use of dialect, and the vividly drawn vignettes of individual sealers and their captains - are all present in Brown’s early drafts. While Brown’s main concern throughout the writing process may have been the “death march,” from the beginning her detailed attention to the sealers’ experiences moved Horwood as a reader as well as a co-author. Horwood’s foreword (written, according to the published text, from the vantage point of “Toronto”) reflects his reading of Brown’s portrait of the sealers and expertly brings the book’s political commentary on pre- Confederation Newfoundland society into focus.

It has not been my purpose here to argue for or against the appropriateness of attributing a co-authorship role to Harold Horwood. (Did his work go beyond the processes that normally occur behind the scenes in 20th-century publishing, where authors routinely workshop material with peers, writing instructors, agents, and editors? It is difficult to say.) Rather, in addition to reaffirming Brown’s own claim to authorship (which has been called into question by Horwood’s published commentary), I have attempted to examine the Brown-Horwood collaboration as a strategy that was successful in overcoming some of the challenges of writing and marketing a “regional” story for a mainstream audience.

From this perspective, Horwood’s roles as a mentor, editor, and collaborator are not to be undervalued. Few people were as skilled, as knowledgeable about the subject, as sympathetic to its political dimensions, or as well positioned in terms of contemporary Canadian publishing as Horwood to serve as one of Brown’s first readers, and his response to her work throughout the process heightened her confidence and intensified her focus. For Brown as a first-time book author, Horwood was also an important mediating figure in her dealings with Doubleday Canada: as I have shown, knowing that his critical opinion carried weight with her publisher, Brown often relayed to Douglas Gibson Horwood’s positive comments on her progress and her material. As the book neared completion, she also routinely consulted Horwood about the terms of her contracts, as well as other aspects of the business side of publishing, and, writing to him directly, warmly thanked him for his encouragement of her next book.³⁶

While it was clearly a successful formula for making Death on the Ice a culturally significant and popular work – much to Gibson’s delight, the American and first serial rights were purchased even before the appearance of the first Canadian edition - the co-authorship arrangement (conveyed through the confusing “Brown with Horwood” construction, which is open to numerous interpretations) would cause increasing friction between the two writers in the years to come. Even by 1979, responding to Brown’s complaint that he was being publicly credited as the author of Death on the Ice, Horwood acknowledged that the misattribution was happening with some frequency, and, as an example, drily referred to a recent national review that had unfavourably compared his Bartlett: The Great Canadian Explorer (1977) with the earlier work.³⁷ Here perhaps lies a partial explanation for why the question of the authorship of Death on the Ice became an increasingly fraught issue during the authors’ lifetimes: the very success of the book, whose significance only continued to grow to the point of overshadowing the other works by both writers. Nearly 40 years after its publication, Death on the Ice remains a significant work for the newest generation of Newfoundland authors³⁸ and a touchstone in discussions of the province’s social and cultural history.

Nancy Earle held a postdoctoral fellowship in the Faculty of Arts, Memorial University of Newfoundland, in 2008-2009.

¹ Cassie Brown with Harold Horwood, Muerte en el hielo (Buenos Aires: Editorial Cuarto Mundo, 1976).
² Memorial University of Newfoundland, Archives and Special Collections, Cassie Brown Papers, Coll-115, file 9.04.003, Percy Janes to Cassie Brown, 27 February 1973; and file 9.04.002, Michael Cook, “Sealing Disaster Tale: An Absolute Must!” (clipping). All further archival references are to this collection.
³ File 9.04.003, Mary B. Whiteley to Cassie Brown, 7 January 1973.
⁴ See Alexander Parsons, “Tragedies of the Ice,” in The Book of Newfoundland, ed. J. R. Smallwood (St. John’s: Newfoundland Book Publishers, 1937), 2: 255-6.
⁵ Cassie Brown, “Death March: The Story of a Sealing Disaster,” Daily News (St. John’s), 31 March 1964, pp. 11- 12, reprinted in Writing the Sea (St. John’s: Flanker Press, 2005), 34-59; and Cassie Brown, “Death March,” Atlantic Advocate (September 1965): 51-66.
⁶ The radio play, “Death March” (4.10.003) was written in 1967; a later version entitled “Death on the Ice” was produced by the CBC in 1974. The stage play, “Death on the Ice” (4.15.001; date unknown) has not been professionally produced, nor has, to the best of my knowledge, the television documentary, which was commissioned by the CBC in 1970.
⁷ Thanks to Joan Sullivan for this observation.
⁸ File 3.03.004, “‘Death March’ book manuscript submitted to M&S, Toronto, 196[8],” p. 1.
⁹ A George Parker points out, Canadian-authored texts accounted for a small percentage of works on the Canadian market in this period, when most commercial firms saw such publishing as a cultural sideline to the main business of distributing imported titles (George Parker, “The Agency System and Branch-Plant Publishing,” in History of the Book in Canada, Volume Three: 1918-1980, ed. Carole Gerson and Jacques Michon [Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007], 163). Brown’s publisher, Doubleday Canada, which ran a multi-milliondollar- a-year business largely through the subsidiary publishing of American titles, had only 45 active Canadian authors in 1971 (Tom Saunders, “Good Guys and Bad Guys,” Quill & Quire 37.12 [November 1971]: 15).
¹⁰ Harold Horwood, Newfoundland (Toronto: Macmillan of Canada, 1969); and White Eskimo: A Novel of Labrador (Toronto and Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1972).
¹¹ File 9.03.001, Jennifer M. Glossop to Cassie Brown, 22 August 1969.
¹² File 9.03.001, Cassie Brown to Jennifer M. Glossop, 3 September 1969.
¹³ File 9.03.001, Douglas Gibson to Cassie Brown, 25 September 1969.
¹⁴ File 9.03.001, Cassie Brown to Douglas Gibson, 28 September 1969.
¹⁵ File 9.03.001, Douglas Gibson to Cassie Brown, 30 October 1969.
¹⁶ Patrick O’Flaherty, The Rock Observed: Studies in the Literature of Newfoundland (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1979), 177.
¹⁷ File 9.03.001, Cassie Brown to Douglas Gibson, 11 November 1969.
¹⁸ Harold Horwood, “Harold Horwood,” in Contemporary Authors Autobiography Series, no. 15 (Detroit: Gale Research Company, 1992), 250.
¹⁹ Harold Horwood, Among the Lions: A Lamb in the Literary Jungle (St. John’s: Killick Press, 2000), 138-40.
²⁰ While Brown’s papers do not retain the first manuscript sent to Doubleday Canada in February 1969, they do contain a copy of the November 1968 manuscript, “Death March” submitted to McClelland & Stewart (file 3.03.004). Judging from Douglas Gibson’s comments on the length and content of the Doubleday submission, I assume that these manuscripts are very similar. The contributions of the two writers to the later drafts (none of which, unfortunately, are dated) are clear from the typewriters used, the handwritten comments, and commentary of both authors in the correspondence at the time.
²¹ File 9.03.002, Harold Horwood, “Death on the Ice” [editorial notes], pp. 1, 2.
²² File 9.03.001, Cassie Brown to Douglas Gibson, 31 August 1970.
²³ File 9.01.017, Cassie Brown to Hedley Payne, n.d.
²⁴ File 9.03.001, Cassie Brown to Douglas Gibson, 28 March 1971.
²⁵ The original concluding lines read, “George Tuff continued sealing until he was in his forties. He died on 21 August 1937, at 56 years of age” (file 9.02.004, first draft, epilogue). The rejected epilogue would have served another purpose for Brown in the literary marketplace: it created a link to her next work, A Winter’s Tale: The Wreck of the ‘Florizel.’
²⁶ File 9.03.004, final typescript, p. 42.
²⁷ File 9.03.001, “Copy of a letter from Harold Horwood to Doug Gibson, Doubleday (Canada) Ltd.,” 27 March 1971.
²⁸ File 9.03.001, Cassie Brown to Douglas Gibson, 28 March 1971.
²⁹ Douglas Gibson, personal correspondence, 15 June 2009.
³⁰ File 9.03.004, final typescript [part 1], p. 8.
³¹ Horwood first called for greater environmental scrutiny of the then-unregulated hunt in “Tragedy on the Whelping Ice,” Canadian Audubon 22.2 (March-April 1960): 37-41.
³² File 9.03.004, final typescript [part 1], p. 8F, note.
³³ The phrase was noted by two readers participating in a book club focusing on Death on the Ice conducted on CBC’s Radio Noon Crosstalk (4 April 2008). Available at: www.cbc.ca/radionoonnl/cross_archives/2008_apr_w1.html, accessed 19 January 2009.
³⁴ File 9.03.001, Cassie Brown to Douglas Gibson, 28 December 1971.
³⁵ File 9.03.001, Cassie Brown to Douglas Gibson, 19 March 1972.
³⁶ File 9.03.002, Cassie Brown to Harold Horwood, 4 December 1971.
³⁷ File 9.03.002, Harold Horwood to Cassie Brown, 14 June 1979.
³⁸ The 1914 sealing disaster is revisited in Wayne Johnston, The Colony of Unrequited Dreams (Toronto: Alfred A. Knopf Canada, 1998); Michael Crummey, “Newfoundland Sealing Disaster,” in Hard Light (London, ON: Brick Books, 1998), 114; and Paul Butler, Hero (Halifax: Nimbus Publishing, 2009).