We Will Always Have Our Sealers

DESCRIPTION: "We will always have our sealers While there's a ship to sail, While sturdy crews have fish and brewis, While there is rain and hail." The poet admits that there are many changes, but affirms that there will always be a need for the seal hunt
AUTHOR: Otto P. Kelland (1904-2004)
EARLIEST DATE: 1960 (Kelland); reportedly written 1945
KEYWORDS: hunting technology
FOUND IN:
REFERENCES (2 citations):
Ryan/Small-HaulinRopeAndGaff, p. 155, "We Will Always Have Our Sealers" (1 text)
ADDITIONAL: Otto P. Kelland, _Anchor Watch: Newfoundland Stories in Verse_ (privately printed, 1960), pp. 89-90, "We Will Always Have Our Sealers" (1 text)
Roud #V44718
NOTES [227 words]: For information about Otto Kelland, the author of this piece, see the notes to "Western Boat (Let Me Fish Off Cape St Mary's)."
This reportedly was written as Kelland watched the sealing fleet set out in 1945 (although Kelland printed it in Anchor Watch without any commentary or explanation). An old sealer commented that the few ships sailing would be the last (apparently meaning that they would not be replaced when they broke down). Kelland wrote this piece as a counter-argument.
Obviously the truth was somewhere in between. The steam sealers that had been the heart of the fleet since the 1860s were almost gone by 1945. The ships that had anchored the fleet for half a century, the Neptune, Ranger, and Terra Nova, had all been lost in the early 1940s, leaving just one of the old steamers. That very last steamer, the Eagle, was scuttled in 1950; see "The Ice-Floes." In that sense, Kelland was wrong; the sailing of the fleet would never again be as majestic as it was in, say, the 1910s and 1920s, when Kelland was first watching it.
Kelland was right in that seal-hunting continued, and still continues in a small way, but between the over-harvesting that has destroyed the herds, and the general changes in the economy, and environmental protests, it seems likely that the seals of Canada will soon be safe -- such of them as remain. - RBW
Last updated in version 5.0
File: RySm155

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