Uncle John -- The Sealer, 1951

DESCRIPTION: "Among the sealers who came home... was... Uncle John, As mad as he could be." John complains of the new law which allows sealing to begin before March 13, forcing them to take seals too young. He will not rest till the old law is restored
AUTHOR: Solomon Samson?
EARLIEST DATE: 1963 (A Glimpse of Newfoundland in Poetry and Pictures)
KEYWORDS: hunting political
FOUND IN:
REFERENCES (1 citation):
Ryan/Small-HaulinRopeAndGaff, p. 154, "Uncle John -- The Sealer, 1951" (1 text)
Roud #V44702
NOTES [391 words]: The song does not give enough details to be sure who the "Bradley" mentioned is, but I suspect it's Frederic Gordon Bradley (1888-1966), who first joined the Newfoundland government in 1924 as a Minister without portfolio and held several high offices after that. He was opposed to Newfoundland's loss of self-government in the 1930s. He helped arrange for Confederation with Canada after World War II, and was the first Newfoundlander to join the Canadian parliament (DictNewf, pp. 29-30). Whether he had anything to do with the changes in the sealing season I don't know.
Gordon Higgins (1905-1957) was one of the seven members of the first class of Newfoundlanders to join the Canadian parliament -- ironic, since he opposed Confederation. He represented St. John's East, which might be why the song appeals to him -- but it might just be that he was a staunch opponent of policies imposed by Ottawa. "Mr. St. Laurent" is presumably Louis St. Laurent (1882-1973), the Prime Minister of Canada from 1948-1957, and so presumably the head of government at the time this piece was written.
The law in Newfoundland had for long required sealers to stay in port until 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), and the sealing season did not start until after that. This was an attempt (only partly successful) to maintain the seal population. But, in the 1950s, the Newfoundland sealers found themselves being displaced by sealers from the Maritimes and even Norway (Candow, pp. 110-111). In 1952, Canada and Norway -- despite advice that the seals were being driven to extinction, with the researchers wanting to shorten the season -- instead informally agreed to lengthen the season, allowing hunting to start at dates from March 5 (in the Gulf of St. Lawrence) to March 10 (Candow, p. 114). Presumably that is the event to which this poem refers.
The argument that the song makes -- that whitecoats taken on March 5 were too young -- is certainly true from the old-timers' standpoint; young seals wouldn't have any fat. But the value of the seal fat was declining fast; by the 1950s, furs were becoming more valuable, so the time of harvesting mattered less. Of course, killing seals for their coats soon provoked a backlash of a different sort. - RBW
Bibliography

Candow: James E. Candow, Of Men and Seals: A History of the Newfoundland Seal Hunt, Canadian Parks Service, Environment Canada, 1989
DictNewfLabrador: (Robert H. Cuff, managing editor), Dictionary of Newfoundland and Labrador Biography, Harry Cuff Publications, 1990
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)

Last updated in version 5.0
File: RySm154

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