Master-Watch, The

DESCRIPTION: While men are preparing for the seal hunt, an old man reminisces in a long nostalgic monologue about the days when he used to go sealing. He dies at the end of his recital.
AUTHOR: Dan Carrol
EARLIEST DATE: 1940 (Doyle-OldTimeSongsAndPoetryOfNewfoundland, 2nd edition)
KEYWORDS: recitation age hunting
FOUND IN: Canada(Newf)
REFERENCES (4 citations):
Doyle-OldTimeSongsAndPoetryOfNewfoundland, "The Master-Watch" (1 text): p. 77 in the 2nd edition, p. 68 in the 4th
Blondahl-NewfoundlandersSing, pp. 81-82, "The Master-Watch" (1 text, 1 tune)
Ryan/Small-HaulinRopeAndGaff, p. 118, "The Master Watch" (1 text, 1 tune)
ADDITIONAL: Farley Mowat, _Wake of the Great Sealers_, with prints and drawings by David Blackwood, Atlantic Monthly Press, 1973, p. 63, "(No title)" (1 text, probably an excerpt and very likely rewritten)
ST Doy77 (Partial)
Roud #4423
RECORDINGS:
Omar Blondahl, "The Master Watch" (on NFOBlondahl06)
NOTES [418 words]: The author, Dan Carrol (1865-1941), was a wood carver and poet from St. John's. He seems to have published poems mostly in local newspapers and they have a collection of these at the Memorial University of Newfoundland library. - SH
Starting around the 1860s, when steamers took over the Newfoundland seal hunt, and lasting until the decline of the hunt in the 1930s and 1940s, it was customary for sealing ships to carry several hundred sealers who could be sent away from the ship to hunt. (The ships were big enough that they often could not navigate close to where the seals pupped, so men had to walk the distance.) It became customary to divide the gangs of sealers into four "watches" (even though they did not stand watch); each watch was commanded by a Master Watch. These were the senior sealers; the only people on the sealing ship higher in the chain of command were the ship's captain and the Second Hand (first mate), who could give orders to the watches but normally did not participate in the sealing themselves. So Master Watch was the highest post a sealer could really aspire to (some managed to go on to become Second Hands, but a Master Watch did not have to have any sailing skills; he might not be capable of managing the ship). If, as seems not unlikely, we are to view this poem as being set around 1915 or 1920, the Master Watch of the poem would have been a sealer for almost the entire era of sealing steamers and Master Watches up to the time of the poem.
The statement in the first line that there were three thousand sealers going to the ice is about right; in the early decades of the twentieth century, there were fifteen to twenty sealers going out each year, each with 150 to 200 sealers. On the other hand, they weren't "Vikings" (Newfoundlanders were descended from the English and Irish, plus some French and others on the west coast of the island). Indeed, the "Vikings" might have been seen as their adversaries -- in later years, Norwegians often encroached on Newfoundland waters. Nonetheless, the most famous book about the sealing life, George Allan England's The Greatest Hunt in the World, was also sometimes known as Vikings of the Ice; perhaps the author lifted the idea from the book title.
Strangely, another Carrol song, "Freshwater Bay," is found on p. 62 of Johnny Burke (John White, Editor), Burke's Ballads, no printer listed, n.d. (PDF available on Memorial University of Newfoundland web site). The author's name is there spelled "Carroll." - RBW
Last updated in version 6.4
File: Doy77

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