A Winter's Tale: The Wreck of the Florizel

By Cassie Brown

It was a snowy, stormy night, that February 23, 1918, when the sturdy S.S. Florizel steamed out of St. John's harbour, bound for Halifax and New York. Captain William Martin, a cautious and competent skipper, encountered thick ice and heavy winds as he headed down the treacherous Newfoundland coast. But these circumstances did not account for the ship's slow speed.

Just before dawn, over nine hours after leaving port, Captain Martin ran his ship full steam onto the rocks just north of Cape Race.

But that was only the beginning of a long and gruelling drama. As the ship slowly disintegrated, the passengers and crew desperately tried to save themselves. Men, women, and children were washed overboard, or killed from exposure, or fatally trapped below deck. From the shore helpless fishermen watched in horror. Twenty-seven hours after striking the reef the daring rescue took place. Of the 138 on board, seventeen passengers and twenty-seven crew members survived.

In A Winter's Tale Cassie Brown retells in chilling detail the story of the wreck, the rescue, and the enquiry that followed. And she proposes, for the first time, the real reason for this senseless disaster.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Flanker Press
• Release date: Jul 1, 1997
• ISBN: 9781771170475

Cassie Brown

Cassie Brown was a Newfoundlander, born and bred. A successful writer of stage and radio plays, she was also a reporter and columnist for the Daily News in St. John's for seven years. She is now considered one of Newfoundland's most respected authors.

Reviews for A Winter's Tale

[laurenbdavis · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Although the writing here may be a bit dated and perhaps not as inspired as one might hope for, the portrait these short essay paints of life on the North Atlantic is riveting. Ms. Brown, who died in 1986 was a journalist, author, publisher and editor born in Rose Blanche, Newfoundland, Canada, in 1919, and moved to St. John's with her family in the 1930s. She is best known for her books "Death on the Ice" and "The Wreck of the Florizel." (Although I haven't read those books, I'm now most curious to do so.)Life on "The Rock", as Newfoundland is known, is hard, and the people tough. In this collection Brown focuses on the various tragedies at sea and on the ice during the seal hunts and the second World War, as well as one particularly poignant account of a terrible storm taking the lives of two lighthouse keepers. For someone like myself, who was raised far from the sea, the power of the sea as well as the courage of those who make their living upon it is both heart-breaking and astounding. Brown writes in the matter-of-fact way of newspaper writers in the early 20th c. There is little romance, nothing of the 'creative non-fiction' approach readers are now accustomed to, and there is power in the unadorned method, juxtaposed again these terrible events. The most personal essays come early in the book when Brown writes about her strict, children-should-be-seen-and-not-heard upbringing in Rose Blanche, and the three times the sea nearly claimed her as a child. All in all a wonderful introduction to life on "The Rock" during the period and the bravery of those who go down to the sea in ships.