Silk Sails (22 page)

In some of the very early census records, widows owning boats and plantations accounted for roughly 10% of the population. That seems unusually high, and the statistics above do not approach that figure. Again, by way of comparison, the
Conception Bay Plantation Book
of 1805 lists about 147 women property owners; these women had some kind of connection with 156 of the 1062 plantations or properties. However, not all of these women were boat owners and involved in fishing ventures. These were mostly waterfront properties but some were being leased to other tenants by women owners. There are several references to “on waterside,” “by the seaside,” “beach,” “wharf,” and so forth. There are specific references to flakes on 45 of the plantations, to stages on 39 and to “stores” on several. Some of the entries lack any kind of specific information, and at least one was not a waterfront property since it was said to be surrounded by woods on all four sides. It is impossible to be certain how many of these women were actually involved in the fishery, and there is no point in guessing.

And now, back to the ship registers for 1820 to 1990. When broken down into 20-year periods from 1820 onward, we find the following numbers of women shipowners:

1818.................................. 1

1820-1839............................. 19

1840-1859............................. 20

1860-1879............................. 10

1880-1899............................. 41

1900-1919............................. 81

1920-1939............................ 121

1940-1959............................. 81

1960-1979............................. 23

1980-1990............................. 11

Grand Total.............................. 408

Again, it must be said that this number covers women in the ship registers only. There is a scarcity of factual data from the earlier periods and a lack of precise documentation in all too many instances. Despite these problems, can we now say that the objectives of this research have been “proven” or substantiated in a satisfactory way when we consider the evidence presented? The research set out to show that:

i.
Women were involved in a substantial way in the early economy and society of Newfoundland and this involvement included ownership of boats, ships and waterfront properties associated with the fishery.

This is probably the easiest of the objectives to substantiate. There is clear evidence in court records, in the plantation books, in the early census records, in the ship registers, and in the general literature that women's role as owners was substantial. We do not need to belabour this point.

ii.
It was real ownership and we are dealing here with real money.

Obviously, there were many cases in which registration of a ship in a woman's name, and particularly in a wife's name, was a paper transaction. No money changed hands in this type of transaction. But the intent was sincere and honest, as we saw with Henry and Myrtle Hatcher of Rose Blanche, and with Simeon and Violet Blanche Butt of Harbour Le Cou. The intent was that, should the husband die, the woman and her children were provided for, and other members of the family were limited in their claims on the estate.

A widow who continued to partner with her deceased husband's male partners was risking her livelihood, often on dangerous ventures. A spinster who bought a ship or ships on her own was risking her fortune, even if it was inherited money.

The money advanced by women mortgagees was real money. Many of these women had their own money, were receiving shares from a family business, or were involved in business transactions independent of their husbands. We saw how this worked at Grand Bank between the husband and wife team of Charles Forward and Mary Florence Forward. Women who advanced large mortgages were unafraid to take the attendant risks.

At Rose Blanche in 1994, I was told by the former owner of a long-liner that not one of his crew members earned less than $80,000 a year before the cod moratorium was imposed in 1992. A young woman in Harbour Le Cou said that before the cod moratorium, young people graduating from high school were given a car or a truck as a graduation present. She had worked for years in the fish plant for good wages, and suddenly there was no work. In a few short months they had gone from prosperity to near-poverty. When the fish plant closed, this young woman was trained in Port aux Basques as a hairdresser, but suddenly there was such a surplus of hairdressers that there was no work for most of those recently trained. All the new houses in communities along the south-west coast, like the houses with elevators along the Northern Peninsula, were built when the fishery was at its peak. So, yes there was good money being made in the fishery and women had a hand in using and saving it.

iii)
Although it was real ownership, our society has collectively forgotten that there was a time in our maritime history when women's substantial roles were being played out.

Until very recently, even maritime historians seemed largely unaware of the significant number of women who owned
ships and of the significant role these women played in our early economy and society. At the same time that British public figures and parliamentarians were fighting for clear property rights for married women, several married women in Newfoundland and the Maritime provinces of Canada were already being listed in the ship registers as sole owners and joint owners. Widows and spinsters owned ships and shares in ships at least from the 1700s, and many owned boats and plantations long before that.

It is a tragic commentary on our history that we have forgotten these facts. This is “history forgotten.” Since I undertook this research project in 1993, I have had occasion to give public lectures and field questions on the subject and people have uniformly been surprised and unbelieving. When I found the first four women shipowners listed in the microfiche edition of the ship registers in 1992, my first reaction was “This must be an error. I will note it and check it out later.” Others feel similarly, I am sure.

Perhaps one of the reasons why we have forgotten this history (as we shall see in the next point) is that women stepped into roles of leadership as needed (for example, following the death of a husband) and then stepped back out of those roles as circumstances improved (for example, a prosperous voyage, sons taking over the business, remarriage). Women were better at multi-tasking than men (I think); a woman who remained at home when her husband and his crew went to sea still had to care for the family, look after the kitchen gardens and animals, organize and superviseall work on the property, help to cure the fish when it was brought home, and so forth. So, what was one more job? There is no better confirmation of this point than Hilda Chaulk Murray's book
More Than Fifty Percent: Woman's Life in a Newfoundland Outport, 1900-1950
. Sean Cadigan confirms this observation in his thesis.

The real history of this situation needs to be restored or reconstructed, and we must never allow our children to forget
what many women accomplished in the past, often under the most trying of circumstances. We must move past the comment that this was exceptional, understood in the sense that it was occasional, sporadic, and not to be taken seriously. People who make such assertions find it easier to forget the past.

As a rough parallel, I quote an experience I had with Robert Evans in 1955. As I sat down with the last of the great Evans shipbuilders, I asked him to give me the names of the vessels which the Evanses had built. Starting from 1870, about six or eight years before he was born, he gave me the names of practically every ship the family had built, the order in which they were built, their tonnage, their fate, and their association with events of the time and how this governed the names they were given. This information was all confirmed later by my research. Though he gave me the names of the seven ships he had built at Northern Arm from 1901 to 1909, he did not mention the two three-masters he had built: the 372-ton
Attainment
at Thwart Island in 1917 and the 149-ton
Nancy Lee
at Campbellton in 1920. These omissions would have been “history forgotten” had it not been for my conversations with him in 1955. And the amazing thing is that he thought that as a shipbuilder he was doing nothing remarkable. I am sure that he would have said, “But lots of other people were doing the exact same thing.” Is that, I wonder, why we have forgotten women's role in connection with ownership of boats, ships, and waterfront properties associated with the fishery? They were simply doing what a lot of others were doing, doing what needed to be done. This would be in accord with Mary Yarn's comment to me in 1994 when I told her I had come to visit her because she had been a shipowner. She said, “No, I never owned a ship.” I mentioned the name
Wagaymack
and she said, “Oh, that was a boat. I thought you meant a
big
ship.” But the
Wagaymack
was a decked vessel and was therefore classified as a ship and required to be registered. It is a sad commentary that these kinds of things may seem to have been less remarkable because they were being done by women. No one at the time bothered to record such happenings.

iv.
Ownership was a natural activity and it evolved out of situations of necessity and opportunity.

Perhaps the best example of natural ownership is described by Eric Gosse in his book
The Settling of Spaniard's Bay
. When Robert Gosse III died in 1863, he left his ship
Victoria
to his widow Mary. “She immediately took overall command” and for the next two years, ostensibly as the cook, she fished with her six grown sons on the French Shore. One of her first acts with her sons was to rescue the crew and passengers of a ship which had gone aground at Cat Harbour (Lumsden). After two years at the fishery Mary ran the operation from the shore and sent her young daughter as cook aboard the
Victoria
.

This was the pattern that women followed. When a husband died prematurely, often drowned at sea, the wife became the skipper of the fishing venture, hiring the crew, outfitting the ship, taking charge of curing the fish, dealing with the merchants, and sharing the profits and the risks. Women had certain advantages: they were the experts at curing fish, they generally had more schooling than their husbands, and they had a fierce determination to ensure that the family survived as an economic unit. For many women it happened that naturally. Those who survived were durable women indeed.

v)
Women possessed the requisite skills to be real partners in business ventures.

It has been clearly demonstrated from the literature and from oral sources that women were the real experts at “curing” or “dressing” fish. Whether it was in a small family operation or the kind of commercial venture that was undertaken through large business firms as in Grand Bank, it was women who usually took the main responsibility of curing the fish when it was brought home from the fishing grounds and thrown up on the stages or hauled to the drying beaches.

Women usually had more schooling than men and often kept the family's accounts, acting as bookkeepers and being in charge of the money. I have quoted many cases to substantiate this. Taken from the book
Never Done: Three Centuries of Women's Work in Canada
, this comment is very telling: “But women also had an important work role in family businesses in early Canada. Although only a small portion of the population was engaged in trade, among the group most of the married women took part as permanent partners or replacements when their husbands were away. This situation was so common that women in business were an accepted part of the culture of New France, as they were in France itself.” What was true of France and New France was correspondingly true of Great Britain and English Canada.

Women's work on the family property complemented the work of their men, whether it was raising children, keeping kitchen gardens, caring for animals, making hay, or taking leadership roles in the community.

vi)
Older women modeled shipowning and property ownership for younger women.

Several examples of this modeling were cited throughout this study. While modeling seems to have reached almost an art form on the south-west coast, it seems evident in other places as well. Perhaps one of the key figures on the southwest coast was Harriet Billard of Rose Blanche, wife of Samuel, who owned the ship
Ethel & Albert
from 1932 to 1939 and had an engine installed in the vessel in 1936. She may in fact have modeled shipowning for other women along the south-west coast. Maud Billard of nearby Harbour Le Cou, Harriet's niece, became a shipowner for most of the years between 1947 and 1983. Maud jointly owned the
Dolores Kaye
with her husband, Simeon Matthew Billard, from 1947 to 1953, and the
Austin & Dianne
from 1963 to 1983. Their partnership was described to me in 1994 in this
way: “Simeon handled the business and Maud handled the money. Simeon passed all the money over to Maud.” The example of such women would have been felt in the entire south-west coast area. Women who sold ships to other women, or couples who sold to other couples, were consciously modeling ownership patterns.

Women from 130 Newfoundland communities owned ships in the period under study, from approximately 1800 to the 1960s, according to the ship registers. Apart from discrete areas like the south-west coast where women's ownership would have become known by word of mouth, many women accompanied their husbands to St. John's by ship for at least an annual outing. This kind of information would have been spread as women went “gamming” (visiting) aboard other ships in St. John's harbour, and as they met while shopping on Water Street and Duckworth Street and especially in the milliners' shops.

It is clear that older women modeled shipowning for younger women, whether consciously or not. It may well be that early women thought they were not doing anything extraordinary, that they were, in fact, prepared to do anything both to prove and to enhance their natural abilities. It was the survival of the family or small community group as an economic unit that was their primary motivation.