Hunting Seals

DESCRIPTION: "With knife and fork, with kettle and pan, With spoon and mug, and glasses.... For we are swoilers fearless, bold, As we copy from pan to pan, sir." The singer describes hunting seals, facing polar bears, and enticing girls with furs
AUTHOR: probably James Murphy (1868-1931)
EARLIEST DATE: 1925 (Murphy, Songs Sung by Old-Time Sealers....)
KEYWORDS: hunting courting animal
FOUND IN:
REFERENCES (2 citations):
Ryan/Small-HaulinRopeAndGaff, p. 133, "Hunting Seals" (1 text, tune referenced)
ADDITIONAL: James Murphy, editor, _Songs Sung by Old-TIme Sealers of Many Years Ago_, James Murphy Publishing, 1925 (PDF available from Memorial University of Newfoundland web site), p. 14, "Seal Hunting Song" (1 text)
Roud #12526
CROSS-REFERENCES:
cf. "The Rigs O Barley" (tune, according to Ryan/Small-HaulinRopeAndGaff)
NOTES [413 words]: There is a good bit of sealing usage in this song, some of it slightly obscure. "Lasses," in the first verse, is not young women but molasses (StoryKirwinWiddowson, p. 331, citing this piece); sealers often used molasses to sweeten their tea.
"Swoil/swile" and "Swoiler/swiler" are dialect for "seal" and "sealer," respectively.
A pan is a sheet of flat ice; sealers who were away from their ships often gathered seal pelts into pans for later recovery (StoryKirwinWiddowson,p. 367). The pelts themselves are the skins with the fat still attached (StoryKirwinWiddowson, p. 373; for most of the time Newfoundlanders hunted seals, the fat, which could be made into a fine oil, was the part of the seal most sought after). A panning staff, or pan flag, was a marker to say which ship the seals in a pan belonged to -- although not every sealing captain could be trusted to respect another ship's flags.
Bats and gaffs are tools for killing seals and managing the ice.
Frosters were cleats on a boot (or a horse's hoof) to prevent sliding on ice (StoryKirwinWiddowson, p. 204).
In the nineteenth and early twentieth century, the sealers usually left St. John's on March 10 (according to Greene, p. 94 n. 1, out of 71 seasons from 1863 to 1933, the fleet set sail on precisely March 10 in 44 of them); they were supposed to start sealing on or around St. Patrick's Day.
"Harps" are harp seals, the main target of the hunt, which were easy to fight; "hoods" were hooded seals, the other Newfoundland species, and they were indeed "the devil for fighting"; much heavier than a man, they would defend themselves and their young, as the harps would not. A "dog harp" is a male harp; "dog" was a term for a male animal (StoryKirwinWiddowson, p. 144).
A "white coat" or "whitecoat" is a baby harp seal, the primary object of the hunt, because they had lots of fat and made no attempt whatsoever to fight or flee (the fact that they were cute, helpless, intelligent, and endangered rarely entered a sealer's mind).
Bedlamers are second year seals, not yet fully mature but able to care for themselves -- sort of the seal equivalent of teenagers. The title is a description of age; a bedlamer may be either a "harp" or a "hood." The origin of the name is uncertain; some connect it with "bedlam," because they create bedlam, others with French "bête de la mer," "beast of the sea" (Young, p. 33; StoryKirwinWiddowson, p. 37, prefer the "bedlam" sense, and first cite the term from 1766). - RBW
Bibliography

Greene: William Howe Greene, The Wooden Walls among the Ice Floes: Telling the Romance of the Newfoundland Seal Fishery, Hutchinson & Co, London (PDF available on the Memorial University of Newfoundland web site)
StoryKirwinWiddowson: G. M. Story, W. J. Kirwin, and J. D. A. Widdowson, editors, Dictionary of Newfoundland English, second edition with supplement, Breakwater Pres, 1990
Young: Ron Young, Dictionary of Newfoundland and Labrador, Downhome Publishing Inc., 2006

Last updated in version 5.0
File: RySm133

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