Recently some efforts have been made by the Canadian Salt Fish Corporation to re-establish the Newfoundland Labrador fishery. During 1975, eighteen medium size fishing boats (35 to 65 feet in length), commonly referred to as Longliners, operated on the north side of Hamilton Inlet where a Corporation barge was stationed for the summer. This barge is a self-contained floating fish plant; the workers live on board and process the catch. The fish is split by an automatic splitter and salted for export undried as salt bulk. It seems that most Iongliners were successful during the 1975 season and this program will probably be continued and possibly extended. The Newfoundland-Labrador fishery may thus survive in a different form.
The Labrador and seal fisheries were two very different operations but they were, at least originally, dependent on each other and they had certain characteristics in common. They were both migratory and they created a certain independence of spirit among those who engaged in them. Although these operations can be compared to some degree with the great Metis and Indian buffalo hunts of the last century, the comparison is only superficial for another element sets them firmly into a different catagory. That element is the sea. Something about the sea affects people spiritually. In Moby Dick, Herman Melville explained:
...Why is almost every robust healthy boy with a robust healthy soul in him, at some time or other crazy to go to sea? Why upon your first voyage as a passenger, did you yourself feel such a mystical vibration, when first told that you and your ship were now out of sight of land? Why did the old Persians hold the sea holy? Why did the Greeks give it a separate deity, and own brother of Jove? Surely all this is not without meaning. And still deeper the meaning of that story of Narcissus, who because he could not grasp the tormenting, mild image he saw in the fountain, plunged into it and was drowned. But that same image, we ourselves see in all rivers and oceans. It is the image of the ungraspable phantom of life; and this is the key to it all.
Therefore if the Labrador and seal fisheries are to be categorized, they must be listed among the epics of the sea - with the New England whaling industry, the Norwegian Finmark fishery, and the Grand Bank fishery. They created, if only by the harsh process of elimination, a physically strong people. In 1852 Arthur Cochrane, Commander of the H.M.S. Sappho wrote of the Labrador fisher folk, "A stronger and more healthy set of men and women, I have rarely seen." In 1924 George Allan England dedicated his book on the Newfoundland seal fishery, which was published under the title Vikings of The Ice, "To the strongest, hardiest and bravest men I have ever known: The Sealers of Newfoundland." Those two activities were fraught with danger and death as has always been the case with great migrations, voyages, and industries dependent on the oceans. Numerous crafts were lost annually in the Labrador fishery and often many lives as well. In an October gale in 1885, eighty schooners and 300 lives were lost and 2,000 people were rendered destitute - and that during a time of year when most fishermen had already returned to the Island. In 1914 there were two major sealing disasters. The S.S. Southern Cross, with 173 men on board, disappeared without a trace one night while returning from the ice and the S.S. Newfoundland lost 77 men in a snow storm. These industries with their hardships and triumphs created a distinctive way of life in Newfoundland and out of this grew a folklore and culture which have always dominated the whole Island. The drama that the seal and Labrador cod fisheries instilled in outport life was at the core of Newfoundland's North Atlantic nationhood.
