Robert C. Parsons received the Coast Guard’s Polaris Award in December 2009

When the Canadian Coast Guard (Alumnus), Newfoundland and Labrador division, called me in November 2009 to ask if they could present me with their “Polaris” award on December 17, 2009, I was honored by their gesture. Not an annual award, it had been given out only two previous times in the years of the Alumnus’ existence.  

The citation reads: “In Recognition of the Outstanding Contribution to the Preservation and Public Awareness of the Marine Heritage and History in the Province of Newfoundland and Labrador” and was presented in the Coast Guard building on St. John’s South Side.  

In my twenty-three years of research and writing of North Atlantic ships and sailors, survivors and victims, especially those of Newfoundland and Labrador, this is the first public recognition I’ve received for writing about the sea and shipwrecks.

Meanwhile research and writing continues unabated from my keyboard here in Grand Bank. In the fall of 2009, Courting Disaster: True Crime and Mischief on Land and Sea became my twenty-second book.

For ten years I published a monthly newsletter online, but through technical difficulties it and the website folded. I’m delighted to announce a new website which among other items has a newsletter and button bar listing over 1200 persons lost at sea at http://www.atlanticwrecks.com.

My father, Charles, was a seaman all his life (1915-1950s), and was shipwrecked once, on the Mary D. Young, at the entrance to St. Pierre harbour, in November 1918. In later years he was a cook on foreign-going schooners, banking vessels and draggers. I remember in my teenage years I recall that he could rhyme off all the vessels that were “lost with crew” in Grand Bank (there were twenty-five in a one-hundred year span).

Because of my family background and the fact that Grand Bank was a great fishing community, some say the third largest after Gloucester and Lunenburg, I suppose the feeling for wooden, sailing ships was instilled in me. I didn’t realize this until about the mid-1980s. The catalyst for my initial research was a list of all schooners once owned in Grand Bank. The list was comprised of about 300 ships giving the name, owner and a brief history. I thought at the time that it was a shame that all these ships were lost and lives gone with them and that not much has been recorded.’

As a hobby, I began to search out what had happened to the rest: some burned or sank, others were beached, wrecked, abandoned in mid-ocean. I put this information on file index cards at first, then in exercise books. Some stories were brief, others much longer.

In 1988-89, I connected all stories chronologically with lead-in information between stories or chapters, e.g. World War One, the advent of three-masted schooners and later engines, Prohibition/Rum Running, the decline of the salt fish trade and so on.

I sent a draft of my work to a friend and asked him if he thought it had the potential to be a book. His answer was, “No, not one book, but two.” And so it was. I was wisely led to Creative Publishers and Don Morgan who produced Lost at Sea, Volume One in 1991 and Lost at Sea, Volume Two in 1992. Both of these were mainly centered around Grand Bank, with some stories from other places: Burin, Fortune, Garnish, Belleoram, Ramea, and Burgeo.

There have been five reprints of the book, the last one entitled Lost At Sea: A Compilation. And that was how it all came about. Now, I’m anticipating my newest offering Wrecked and Ruined, slated for release in the spring of 2010.    

My latest work Sandy and Ruff: The Missing Glasses is a children’s book slanted to the 3-10 year old and has a definite Newfoundland Labrador folktale slant. Courting Disaster: True Crime, Mischief and Murder on Land and Sea was published in October 2009. I am currently working on Newfoundland and Labrador sea stories tentatively titled, Rock and Tempest, Fire and Foe: From the Shipping Files of Robert C. Parsons.