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4 unusual facts about SS Viking


SS Viking

To obtain additional footage, both Frissell and Penrod returned to the front the following spring in Viking, this time with Captain Abram Kean.

The SS Viking was a ship used by the film producer Varick Frissell in the making of the 1931 film The Viking.

In 1930 and 1931, Viking was chartered by Varrick Frissell and Alexander Gustavus Penrod (previously cinematographer of Down to the Sea in Ships) to make a film of the annual seal hunt off the coast of Newfoundland.

Viking was a wooden-hulled whaling ship built by Nylands at Christiania, Norway in 1881, the same location where another famous Newfoundland vessel, Southern Cross, was constructed.


Louise Huntington

Director Varick Frissell, cinematographer Alexander G. Penrod, and almost all the film crew were killed on March 15, 1931, when the sealing ship SS Viking, from which they were shooting additional footage, exploded in ice off the Horse Islands on the northern Newfoundland coast.


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