The Vanguard was one of the best known of the older wooden wall sealing steamers, and in 37 years "to the ice" brought in nearly half a million seals. She was registered at 550 tons, measured 160 feet long, and was owned by Baine Johnston & Company, St. John's. The Vanguard was crushed in heavy ice and went down without loss of life at the seal fishery on April 12, 1909, with 7,000 seals on board. Note the barrels high on the main mast and fore mast used for sighting seals and for navigating through the ice fields. She is shown here leaving for the ice fields in 1902.
The wooden walls were a remarkable brand of ship. In many cases they were built for other purposes such as Arctic whaling out of Dundee but once purchased by Newfoundland merchants, they were massively refitted and rebuilt to make them into the finest of ice breakers. Many of them engaged in Arctic whaling during the summers and they were in particular demand for Arctic exploration expeditions. Probably the most widely known voyage of this nature by a wooden wall was that of the Terra Nova which carried Robert Scott on his expedition to the Antarctic in 1910-1913. Similarly Newfoundland sealers - both officers and crews - were in international demand for navigating the ice fields. Robert Peary somewhat reluctantly illustrated this point when he wrote of his famous "All American" Polar expedition of 1908-1909:
It is a great satisfaction to me that this whole expedition, together with the ship, was American from start to finish. We did not purchase a Newfoundland or Norwegian sealer and fix it over for our purposes, as in the case of other expeditions. The Roosevelt was built of American timber in an American shipyard, engined by an American firm with American metal, and constructed on American designs. Even the most trivial items of supplies were of American manufacture. As regards personnel almost the same can be said. Though Captain Bartlett and the crew were Newfoundlanders, the Newfoundlanders are our next-door neighbours and essentially our first cousins. This expedition went north in an American-built ship, by the American route, in command of an American, to secure if possible, an American trophy.
Even the most accommodating reader would find difficulty in trying to reconcile Peary's contradictions. Of fifty-eight wooden walls that served the sealing industry in the past century about fifty were lost at sea, most in the ice fields. The ironclad steamers proved to be uneconomical as the seal harvest declined, and most were disposed of during World War I.
