Source of Information and History

While some of the local ice information has come from diaries or journals kept by community residents, most of the offshore conditions have been found in contemporary newspapers and shipping gazettes. The frequency of reports is a reflection on the technology of the times and the need to know. In the early part of the 19th century, ice records are scant at best. Everyone knew of the dangers and horrors presented by the ever shifting icefields to the wooden sailing ships, well illustrated in some of the records here, but the speed of travel and thus communication was exceedingly slow by today's standards. When a trans-Atlantic voyage was measured in weeks, an encounter or sighting of ice would often be outdated before it could be passed on as a warning to others. The second decade of the 19th century also marks the advent of local Newfoundland newspapers. While they contained little of what we expect of newspapers today, they did note ship arrivals and departures and any unusual obstructions and incidents.

The first steam assisted voyage across the Atlantic was undertaken in 1819 by the "Savannah", and by the 1850's paddle steamers were regularly ploughing their way through the waves between Liverpool and New York. Voyages that were measured in weeks by sailing ships were now accomplished in under 10 days. The telegraph had also been invented, and with ships progressively shortening their voyages, there was now a system which allowed easy communication of important information, first over land, and then with the laying of marine cables, from shore to shore.

The number of reports with ice information increases with each step in technology and the next significant but gradual step was the dominance of the screw propeller in the 1860's. Ocean going paddle steamers were prone to many disadvantages, but with the invention of the propeller, ships were born into the modern era and for the first time the trans-Atlantic voyage could be counted in days. As design efficiency increased, the ships became faster and ship owners vied for the prestigious Blue Riband as a reward for the fastest trans-Atlantic voyage. There was now a much greater need for the passing on of information relating to hazards, and newspapers and associated journals started publishing maps and columns of ice reports and other floating dangers. The fact that the warnings were heeded is evidenced by the established shipping lanes proposed by Matthew Maury (1858) being adjusted to the south in extreme ice years. Today we are conscious of the iceberg as being the significant danger to shipping, but in the late 19th century, as steel hulled ships replaced wood, it was the floating derelicts and debris of the latter that comprised as big a danger as icebergs to high speed shipping.

As the 19th century gave way to the 20th, the next major advent in communications was the radio. Now warnings could be given in real time and ships could give direct alert to others in the area or contact a shore station for further broadcast. As the golden era of trans-Atlantic liners dawned with the new century, record breaking speeds of more than 20 knots were achieved with ships that dwarfed those of a decade before. But amidst this first class luxury that only the richest could afford, there was also a sense of alarm. Editorials of the time decried the incessant demand for ever increasing speed with ships charging across the North Atlantic with undue care for safety in the hazards of fog and the hidden obstacles of derelicts and ice. In an often cited example of the paranormal, Morgan Robertson's book "Futility" otherwise named "Wreck of the Titan" (Robertson, 1898) describes the voyage of a triple screw steamer ploughing through the Atlantic in April in a fog and into an iceberg, and being short of lifeboats, most passengers perish. While Robertson's vision is truly outstanding and his story has remarkable coincidences, it has to be understood that he was a ship's officer and very cognizant of the shipping industry and standards of the time. Also, at about the same time, naval scientists and engineers were questioning the standard practice of avoiding potential head-on collisions by manoeuvring the vessel hard over to one side followed by reversing the engines. If it did indeed work for single screw steamers it had not yet been proven for ships with more than one, and there had been some recent incidents in which the manoeuvre itself may have caused the accident.

Inevitable or not, the disaster which occurred on the calm starlit night of April 14, 1912 was one of the greatest tragedies ever. More than 1500 people lost their lives in a ship touted by the press at the time as unsinkable, marking the end of an era and the birth of a legend that excites popular interest as much today as it did in the past. The enquiries and the aftermath of the sinking of the RMS "Titanic" had far reaching consequences for improved regulations for safety at sea. Almost immediately, patrol ships from the United States and the United Kingdom unilaterally undertook ice observations, and this was superseded in 1914 by the official inauguration of the International Ice Patrol (IIP). Henceforth and to this day, the IIP has unfailingly fulfilled its mandate of delineating the area in which ice hazards exist and in its 80 years or so of history, not one ship has come to grief by ice in the North Atlantic outside that area.

The IIP publishes annual bulletins. In its early years the bulletins contained brief descriptions of the ice extents illustrated with maps of the Newfoundland-Grand Banks area, but starting in 1923 the bulletins contained a tabulated list of all reported sightings. At that point the IIP had evidently reached considerable status, for ice reports were being dropped from other journals and there is little point in the author actively searching for ice information elsewhere. Initial ice observation by the IIP was carried out from aboard assigned patrol vessels. With the advent of the aeroplane this was augmented in 1946 by overflights from land bases in Newfoundland.

The presentation here displays annual ice charts from 1810 to 1958. After 1958 ice charts can be found fairly readily at a number of libraries or institutions. The main reason for redrawing the IIP maps up to that time was to extend the northern boundary of 50º N latitude to include the 55th parallel, an area included in many later ice charts, thus maintaining a degree of uniformity throughout the years. It also allowed plotting of data north of 50oincluded in the IIP bulletins but not displayed on their smaller maps. Current ice charts can now be downloaded virtually in real time from the Internet. Could the early mariners ever have imagined such technology?