An Ethnohistorical and Ethnographic Study of the Cod Fishery At St. Shotts, Newfoundland.
Nemec, Thomas Francis
1980
Abstract
Located on Canada's east coast, the Island of Newfoundland has a cultural heritage that can be attributed in large measure to West Country English migratory fishermen who came to fish for cod beginning in the sixteenth century but did not settle in any appreciable numbers until the eighteenth century when they were joined by emigrants from Southern Ireland . Ignoring the Island 's interior and settling in over one thous and sites along the six thous and mile coastline, they established small fishing villages which were based largely on subsistence production of sea, coast and l and resources. Concomitant with the increasing interest of sociocultural anthropologists in the rural sectors of western nation-states, ethnographic field studies of Newfoundland outports were first undertaken in the 1960s. Since those studies focused on communities whose residents were of West Country English or mixed descent, the present study adds to the knowledge of Newfoundland 's distinctive culture by focusing on a specific outport, St. Shotts, whose residents are descendants of first and second generation southern Irish. This study adds to the existing corpus of work by focusing attention on the environmental setting, technology, ethnohistory, and social organization of the inshore cod fishery. This was made possible by extending the duration of the field study to seven summer fishing seasons (1967-73). The thesis begins with a history of cultural adaptations on the Island 's southeast coast, especially the outport adaptation, and then moves to an examination of the migration of the Irish to Newfoundland, their subsequent dispersal along the coasts, and adaptive adjustments. Attention is then focused on St. Shotts, an Anglo-Irish outport on the southern Avalon Peninsula. By collating oral and documentary source materials with direct observations, an ethnohistory of the community is constructed. This diachronic perspective facilitates an analysis of culture change and modernization, including both physical and organizational change. Particular attention is focused on changes in informal as well as formal organization, because of the pre-eminent role that patronage, brokerage and clientship have played in the lives of St. Shotts' fishermen, both past and present. The thesis concludes with a detailed study of the community's inshore cod fishery. Particular emphasis is placed on an analysis of the interplay of environmental factors, fishing technology, and the behavior and organization of fishermen. A complex functional interrelationship is recognized between various cultural and natural components. Consistent with the small-scale, labor-intensive, tradition-oriented, semi-mechanized character of the fishery, its social organization remains largely informal and kin-based. Thus, crews are most commonly founded on immediate family ties (fathers and sons or brothers). Partnerships between fishermen are subject to stress as meager technological means are employed in the face of harsh and dangerous circumstances to secure catches of cod for which fishermen received less than three cents per pound before the 1970's. While focusing on crew behavior and organization, a number of matters are discussed, including recruitment, relations between crewmen at sea and various categories of co-residents on the l and , crew development cycle and stages in a fisherman's career, the role of inheritance, and the effects of adult out-migration on crew composition. Results clearly indicate that brotherhood is the optimal basis of intra-crew relations.Types
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