The Caribou Disaster and Other Short Stories

Les Harding is the author of The Voyages of Lesser Men: Thumbnail
Sketches in Canadian Exploration and The Journeys of Remarkable Women:
Their Travels on the Canadian Frontier.

Cassie Brown, who died in 1986, was a journalist with The Daily News
(St. John’s). The 12 reprinted articles that make up this collection
were written for that newspaper between 1963 and 1966. They deal with
Newfoundland’s rich sea-faring tradition. Shipwrecks, rescues at sea,
sealing, fishing, and pirate treasure, among other subjects, make for
interesting and often gripping reading.

Two of the articles became the basis for two popular books by Brown:
Death on the Ice, an account of the Newfoundland sealing disaster of
1914, and A Winter’s Tale, which concerns the tragic S.S. Florizel
disaster on Newfoundland’s Southern Shore. The title of the book
refers to the sinking of the S.S. Caribou (the Gulf ferry linking
Newfoundland and Canada) by a German U-boat in World War II.