Kean was a very relevant part of The Commission of Enquiry report regarding the 1914 Sealing Disaster, which was submitted on February 27, 1915, to Hon.
Once elected he was subsequently appointed to the upper house of Newfoundland, which played a similar role as the Senate of Canada.
[2] Growing up in such a small town and community, Kean was deprived, like many children in Flower's Island, of knowing the importance of education and schooling.
[8] Kean's career started off in the cod fishery but shortly after he began to focus more of his attention to the seal fishing industry.
On March 1, 1872, Kean participated for the first time in the sealing season and set off as a member of a crew of 70 men.
[9] He sailed for three years as a common man before his promotion to master of watch and then later to second-in-command on his brother Edgar's vessel.
[10] In 1882, Kean was accepted by Baine Johnson, a Scottish merchant living in St. John's, Newfoundland for the captaincy of a brigantine named Hannie & Bennie.
[11] Subsequently, he sent a request to Moses Monroe [1], who was a merchant at the Sealing and Whaling Company in St. John's, Newfoundland, to captain the SS Esquimaux.
[12] His request was initially refused by Monroe with the proposal that Kean spend the following two sealing seasons as bridge master under Captain Joe Barbour on the SS Esquimaux.
[19] Kean had dropped the crew more southeast than what would have been ideal, forcing the sealers to travel away from their vessel to find the patch.
The first of these being his involvement in a similar Greenland incident in 1898, wherein he was accused of stealing the seal pans which caused the sealers to have to return to the ice when a blizzard hit.
[26] Additionally, he discarded the fact that there were signs of bad weather such as light snow fall, a southeast wind and a dropping barometer.
Abram Kean was not convicted of any felonies or held responsible in any way, legally, for the deaths of the 78 men on March 31, 1914.
Nearly three thousand people demanded that Kean should be arrested and serve jail time because of the fatal error he made during the sealing disaster.
[33] Shortly after the sealing disaster, a relief fund was put in place to aid the families and survivors involved in the incident.
In the weeks upon returning to port, he received the Order of the British Empire and a medal from the Bowring Brothers.
He mentions in his autobiography, Old and Young Ahead, written in 1935, that his son's death filled him with grief: I looked at it from every angle, but insurmountable difficulties seemed to be blocking the way.
During this time, Kean served as acting minister of the marine and fisheries, playing a significant role in Newfoundland legislation.
The present-day population of Newfoundland has a wide range of both positive and negative opinions concerning Kean.