Provenance:

Private Collection, Montreal

Literature:

William Gough, The Art of David Blackwood, Toronto, 1988, n.p., plate 11 (chapter entitled The Ice Fields), illustrated in colour.
Farley Mowat, Wake of The Great Sealers, Prints and Drawings by David Blackwood, Toronto, 1973, page 118, illustrated.

Note:

Considered to be one of Canada’s best and most well-known printmakers, David Blackwood was born in Wesleyville, Newfoundland in 1941. Wesleyville was a major sealing community with Blackwood himself coming from a long line of sealers and sealing captains. Wesleyville presented Blackwood not only with a long tradition of the sealing tradition, but also a proud history, kept alive by the story-telling of the habitants of the Atlantic outport. The rich heritage which surrounded the artist’s upbringing would greatly affect the subjects of his world-famous prints.

Blackwood’s largest theme-related series, The Lost Party, focused on the hope and tragedy of the sealing industry, including one of Newfoundland’s darkest and most tragic events, the sealing disaster of 1914.

On March 30, 1914, Abraham Kean (Newfoundland’s most famous ship captain and the subject of works by Blackwood within The Lost Party series) was commanding The Stephano while his son, Westbury, commanded The Newfounland on a hunt. When the younger Kean received a signal from his father that a patch of seals had been located, Westbury sent his crew across the ice field to The Stephano for instruction and lodging from his father. Abraham provided the crew with directions to the seals and instructed them to return to their own ship once the hunt was complete. However, a severe blizzard caught the crew during their return to The Newfoundland, leaving both captains to assume the crew had returned to the other vessel.

‘There was no way for anyone to discover the truth. Although all the other ships were fitted with wireless and could communicate with one another, the Newfoundland’s wireless had been removed before she sailed, by orders of her owners. The owners did not feel that its presence added to the profits from the seal fishery. They were wrong. It’s absence this spring was to deprive the company of a considerable profit.’

Blackwood’s Lost Party series includes fifty etchings capturing the desperation and dismay of the stranded sealers and those awaiting their return. Lost Party Waiting presents a group of the lost sealers sprawled across the unforgiving ice. While the centre of the work gives the hope of rescue as two men raise a torch into the blizzard, the foreground gives the image of despair as one sealer sits with eyes closed and a fellow hunter lies face-down in the snow.

The crew were left abandoned on the ice (without food or adequate protection from the elements) for over fifty hours. Of the 115 men and boys who set out for The Newfoundland, only 37 survived, 11 of which were permanently disabled.