Sealing

“Tis jest a dog’s work while it lasts, but somehow there’s an excitement in it, that sets young fellers kind o’ restless in the spring….a man, ’ll go for swile where gold won’t drag ‘un.” A quote by fishermen John Saunders in Newfoundland and Her Un-trodden Ways 1907. The industry itself was known as swilling (sealing) and between the 1830s and 1930s it occupied the minds and bodies of 20 thousand or more Newfoundland sealer/fishermen and 400 vessels, usually half the male population between Notre Dame Bay and Trepassy Bay. During the peak years of the 1840s an astonishing 500,000 seal pelts would be taken annually. For comparison, during the same period, fur seals in the north east pacific were hunted to near extinction. The business …show more content…
John’s. Although it was squashed, it did lead before long to the elimination of a number of exploitative practices in the sealing industry, of which charging for a berth to the ice certainly was one. Sealing was a hard currency earner for poor inshore fishermen of Newfoundland’s outports where cash was very hard to come by in the oppressive medieval “Truck” system of fish trade.
In modern times many reforms were introduced by the Canadian Government, of which, most importantly, was the highly controversial white coat hunt which was banned in 1984. Just a few years later, in 1987, the ‘large vessel’ hunt to the ice fields itself was also banned. Of course the EU’s banning of the importation of all seal products in 1984 had a huge impact on the industry, practically obliterating it, with only a modest land based hunt for local hunters now …show more content…
The industrial scale seal hunt also came to fill the otherwise “unproductive” months of March and April along the north-east coast, when heavy coastal ice conditions for all intents and purposes closed down the fishery until late April. The Hunt, as I said above, came to be regarded as a rite of passage for Newfoundland outport youth, perhaps beginning as early as 14 years of age, and before long it became an Island wide tradition. An activity that before 1790, had only been family based, grew within a single generation, to become a major occupier of the Island’s male workforce. It had come about as a result of the successful American Revolutionary Wars in the 1780s, a result being that England became cut off from a previously steady source of quality whale oil, a commodity desperately needed for lighting, heating and the just beginning industrial