Launched in 1945, the schooner Norma & Gladys illustrates the best qualities of Newfoundland and Labrador’s industries of shipbuilding, the Labrador fishery, the Grand Banks fishery, and coasting freight to remote seaside towns. Her story also illustrates the worst examples of the province’s favourite bloodsport: partisan politics.
In 1973, she was purchased by the provincial government and refitted as a floating maritime museum; her political legacy soon included innumerable blunders and cover-ups, mutiny, a stowaway, and perhaps the ghost of a sealing captain.
In 1975, Canada’s External Affairs appointed Norma & Gladys as a roving ambassador to promote fisheries management within a 200-mile coastal limit. But she was unseaworthy; Clarenville Shipyard had installed the wrong masts, and her itinerary to sail around the world was scrapped. After a frontal assault by the media and political partisans, she nevertheless promoted the province to 78,900 visitors in nineteen European ports. She returned with her reputation restored, her signal flags flapping like a hundred gypsy scarves on the breeze.
“On Friday, January 16, 1976, at nine o’clock in the evening, Liliana Wagner stowed away under the canvas of one of the port dories.”
“Eight pumps could not keep her afloat. Norma & Gladys had sprung a perfect leak.”
Of her coasting years: “You’d know when Norma & Gladys was in port. Every man would be dodging up the road with a bologna on his back.” Alan Hillier
On the world tour: “I was in Captain Jack’s bad books. . . . I had to put in the pigs. It was the worst day of my life.” Charlie Parsons
“In the face of critics and storms, Norma & Gladys does represent something romantic, something glamorous, and it’s been a job well done.” Premier Frank Moores, August, 1976

In 1905, Mi’kmaq prospector Matty Mitchell found a strange rock in Sandy River, running into Red Indian Lake, Newfoundland. This rusty brown and yellow outcrop was rich in sulphides of lead, zinc and copper, but it took twenty years of scientific advancement before the secrets of the complex minerals were unlocked. In 1926, the Anglo-Newfoundland Development Company signed a pact, establishing one of Newfoundland’s richest mines at the sire they called Buchans.The Lucky Strike Glory Hole and the underground mines were not the only legacies that Buchans left to Newfoundland. As soon as the mine and mill had begun production, the pioneers turned to recreation, turning and iron ore shed into an ice arena, and the town became famous for its hockey team, climaxing in the “Glory Days” of senior amateur hockey in Newfoundland, when The Buchans Miners hockey team cross-crossed the province in pursuit of sports glory.Here is an account of the Buchans miners – the underground drillers and the hockey players – told by a Buchaneer who worked as a prospector and in the underground mines.Garry Cranford is the author of the bestselling book, Newfoundland Schooner: Norma & Gladys, and co-author of Potheads & Drum Hoops and From Cod to Crab. He lives in St. John’s, Newfoundland.

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