Merchant's Song, The

DESCRIPTION: "You are put under... by the merchants and the government right here in Newfoundland." The season is over. Fishermen go on the dole in winter. Merchants sell cheap necessities at high prices. Government won't help but say "go home and sell your cattle"
AUTHOR: unknown
EARLIEST DATE: 1951 (MUNFLA-Leach)
KEYWORDS: greed poverty clothes commerce fishing hardtimes nonballad canal commerce factory farming
FOUND IN: Canada(Newf)
Roud #26131
RECORDINGS:
Leo Martin, "The Merchant's Song" (on MUNFLA-Leach)
CROSS-REFERENCES:
cf. "The Rigs of the Times" (subject: Newfoundland's truck system)
cf. "Squarin' Up Time" (subject: Newfoundland's truck system)
cf. "The Merchants of Fogo" (subject: Newfoundland's truck system)
cf. "The Merchants" (subject: Newfoundland's truck system)
NOTES [502 words]: Newfoundland, because it was so capital-poor, had few proper banks and little ability to invest. As a result, fishermen and others had to operate on the "truck system," where merchants advanced merchandise to fishers and farmers in return for their produce, which the merchants bought at whatever rate the merchants set (Major, p. 186).
O'Flaherty, pp. 4-5, describes it this way:
"The wage system that emerged in the Newfoundland fishery was also curiously tilted one way. In this system the merchants provided credit that enabled the fisherman to obtain the gear he needed and supplies for his family from that merchant's store; the fisherman then brought him his fish, thereby repaying what was owed. The 'settling up' time, when the fisherman's earnings from fish and the debt he owed the merchant were adjusted, was the fall, normally toward the end of October. A balance toward the fisherman might be settled in goods -- again at merchant-controlled prices from his store -- a combination of goods and cash, or (certainly by 1858) just cash. In some cases the fisherman might use the merchant as a banker, and simply leave any balances accruing in his hands. A balance in favour of the merchant, too often the case, would be added to the fisherman's debt, which of course increased when he was supplied anew. (If he was supplied anew. Withholding supplies could be as productive of distress as a poor fishery.)
"This 'truck' or credit system -- the terms came to be used synonymously in Newfoundland -- had some benefits to the fisherman as well as the merchant. Obviously, the availability of credit meant that the fisherman didn't have to draw on his own savings, supposing he had any, to get his voyage underway. The system also forced the merchant, to some degree, to share the risks of catching the often elusive cod.... The fact that this credit/wage method operated, though in a reduced and altered form, into the 1950s and that efforts to end it, in particular the assault on it in the early 20th century by W. F. Croaker [for whom see 'Croaker's Dream']... were resisted not just by the merchants but by the fishermen themselves, may indicate that it was less of an enslavement than many have claimed. [Or it might indicate that most Newfoundlanders flat-out hated anything that smacked of progress!].... Yet the credit system as it operated in Newfoundland offered the merchant ample room for the exercise of arbitrary power, and it would be disingenuous to suggest that such power was not often abused."
Like most such systems, those who had to live under it resented it. (Compare the complaints in "The Farmer Is the Man." It's the same problem.) In fact the merchants seem to have been only moderately rapacious. But it was hard for the fishermen to see that, given that they lived their entire lives in alternating between poverty (in years when the fishing was good) and possible starvation (when it was not).
For more examples of the effects of the truck system, see the cross-references - RBW
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File: ML3TMeSo

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