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  SILK SAILS

  SILK SAILS

  Women of Newfoundland

  and Their Ships

  CALVIN D. EVANS

  BREAKWATER BOOKS LTD.

  JESPERSON PUBLISHING • BREAKWATER DISTRIBUTORS

  100 Water Street • P.O. Box 2188 • St. John’s • NL • A1C 6E6

  www.breakwaterbooks.com www.jespersonpublishing.ca

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Evans, Calvin D.

  Silk sails : women of Newfoundland and their ships / Calvin D. Evans.

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  ISBN 978-1-55081-242-8

  1. Women in fisheries--Newfoundland and Labrador--History.

  2. Women fishers--Newfoundland and Labrador--History. 3. Fisheries--Newfoundland and Labrador--History. 4. Businesswomen--Newfoundland and Labrador-- History. I. Title.

  SH224.N7E93 2008 338.3’72708209718 C2008-905007-XISBN

  © 2008 Calvin D. Evans

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior written consent of the publisher or a licence from The Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency (Access Copyright). For an Access Copyright licence, visit www.accesscopyright.ca or call toll free to 1-800-893-5777.

  We acknowledge the financial support of The Canada Council for the Arts for our publishing activities.

  We acknowledge the support of the Department of Tourism, Culture and Recreation for our publishing activities.

  We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (BPIDP) for our publishing activities.

  Printed in Canada.

  “Let our sons in their

  youth be as grown-up plants, and

  let our daughters be as corner pillars

  fashioned as for a palace.”

  Psalm 144:12

  This book is dedicated to all

  women of the sea in general,

  and lovingly to two women in particular:

  my mother,

  Mary Jane (Lidstone) Evans,

  who died in 1949 at age 42

  and my mother-in-law,

  Minnie Goldie (Waterman) Locke,

  who died in 2002 at age 96.

  CONTENTS

  Foreword

  Introduction

  Chapter One: Women and the Sea

  Chapter Two: Women and Ships

  How this Project Originated

  Women as Shipowners

  Women and Property

  Advent of Married Women’s Property Acts

  Women’s Occupations in Canadian Ship Registers

  Chapter Three: Newfoundland Women and Their Ships

  The Seventeenth Century

  The Eighteenth Century

  The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries

  Ownership by Women

  Sole Ownership

  Joint Ownership

  Owning Ships Jointly with Husbands

  Owning Ships Jointly with Other Women

  Owning Ships Jointly with Men Who Are Not Their Husbands

  Women Who May Have “Staked” Planters or Shipbuilders

  Women as Executors and Administrators of Wills and Estates

  Women and Wills

  Designated as Co-partners in Trade

  Managing Owners of Ships

  Women and the Sale of Ships

  Women, Ships and Mortgages

  Owning Ships and the Value of Shares

  Occupations of Newfoundland Women

  Women Naming Ships After Themselves

  Ships, Irregularities, and Even Hints of Scandal

  Oddities and Noteworthy Women

  Women Who Went to Sea

  Later Newfoundland Women Shipowners

  Chapter Four. Summary and Conclusions

  Appendix A:

  Other Newfoundland Women in the Ship Registers

  Appendix B:

  Women in the Conception Bay Plantation Book of 1805

  Bibliography

  Index

  Acknowledgements

  Author

  FOREWORD

  Changes in the status of women during modern times – the right to own property, to vote and participate in public life, and to choose their own careers – tend to obscure achievements of individual women, and women generally, in the past. This has certainly been the case in Newfoundland and Labrador.

  Calvin Evans performs a most valuable service by researching the historical role of women as owners of ships and fishing properties (rooms) in Newfoundland. Additionally this book is a significant contribution to the recent literature focusing on the role of women in spheres of life traditionally reserved for men.

  Only recently has Newfoundland history, mostly written by men, begun to acknowledge the fundamental contributions of women in the settlement of Newfoundland and in traditional basic economic activities such as the fishery and shipping. Hilda Chaulk Murray’s seminal work More than Fifty Percent: Woman’s Life in a Newfoundland Outport, 1900-1950 (1979) helps redress this neglect by showing that outport women were fully involved in all aspects of earning a livelihood in the pre-Confederation era. Calvin Evans now illustrates how women participated and shared more fully in other “big events” of Newfoundland life than previously known or perceived even by scholars of maritime history. He also identifies these women personally and in the context of their families and communities.

  It could be argued that the arrival and continuing presence of women in the resident population played a crucial role in the successful establishment of early communities in Newfoundland. Among other influences, determined and resourceful women were collectively a major force, perhaps the most important, in ultimately helping undermine formal attempts to prevent and restrict the growth of a permanent population.

  Historically, seafaring and fishing were activities from which women were normally excluded because of gender proscriptions, often codified into legal systems, related to property ownership and inheritance. It was traditionally held, for example, that women, the so-called weaker sex, were not physically or emotionally capable of dealing with the challenges of seafaring or coastal and deep-sea fishing, and therefore had no place on ships, in fishing boats, or at sea. Despite these norms and English Common Law generally (giving husbands almost unlimited rights over property belonging to their wives), there were exceptions and circumstances in which women did assume and perform male roles. It is these exceptions in the context of the Newfoundland fishery that Calvin Evans identifies, analyzes and describes.

  Traditionally women had the acknowledged right to become owners or shareholders of ships when their husbands died without male heirs of sufficient maturity or suitability to assume these roles. Thus in eighteenth and nineteenth century England, female owners were most frequently widows who became temporary shareholders until any sons they might have were of age and experience to replace their fathers. In rarer cases shares were held by “spinsters.” Calvin Evans documents a much more complex pattern of female shipowners in Newfoundland. Although most were “widows” and “spinsters,” many were actively involved in fishing and shipping enterprises. Indeed, he found women in sundry roles as owners – sole owners, joint owners, co-partners in trade (with other women or men), and managing owners – and discovered it not at all uncommon for women to purchase shares as well as to inherit them.

  Silk Sails explores thoroughly, from ship registers, court records, wills and deeds, and field research (interviews), instances in which Newfoundland women from at least the time of Lady Sara Kirke of Ferryland in the 1650s formed part of the owners (and operators) of trading and fishing vessels and fishing enterpris
es. In modern times women have become even more prominent in these roles. In 1949, for example, upon the death of her husband, Marie Smart Penny of Little Bay assumed the presidency of John Penny & Sons of Ramea and directed the operation of a major fish-processing company. In 1967 she was elected president of the Fisheries Council of Canada, thus becoming the first woman to hold that position. But there were many more women like Marie Penny, not as prominent, but nevertheless influential in their own respective domains.

  In all, Silk Sails profiles more than 500 exceptional women who influenced the development, growth and maintenance of their respective fishing and seafaring communities, especially in Conception Bay, the Burin Peninsula, and along the South Coast. Their stories are well worth the telling and Calvin Evans does a splendid job of recounting them.

  W. Gordon Handcock

  Professor Emeritas, Memorial University of Newfoundland

  March 2008

  INTRODUCTION

  This book is about a piece of lost history: the knowledge that women played important roles in early fishing enterprises and made significant contributions to the early economies of the Atlantic region. The information presented in Silk Sails: Women of Newfoundland and Their Ships documents that women along the Atlantic coast were boat-owners in charge of fishing ventures for at least 300 years (since about 1650 and possibly earlier) and that women have been shipowners involved in both the local fishery and foreign-going business for at least 200 years (since about 1800).

  The problems encountered and conquered in the early maritime region produced hardy, durable, tenacious and feisty women, who have received far less attention in the historical records than they rightly deserve. Most history has been written by men, and, until the recent advent of scholarly research in women’s history, men have uniformly neglected to give women their rightful due. Perhaps this neglect was largely unintentional since women were usually little involved in the “big events,” and their essential roles in the background seldom played through into the foreground in obvious ways. The irony is that the public man so prominently depicted in history is often largely the result of being protected and sheltered from inner concerns while being championed and fitted for public affairs by women (mothers). Mothers tend to protect their sons from the inner struggles; daughters are expected and conditioned by mothers to endure the same stress that the mother has endured and to carry the same weight and the same burdens. Daughters are trained for the harder, tougher mental and emotional tasks. John Langdon-Davies suggested in 1927 in the book A Short History of Women that women possess “a greater singleness of purpose and a greater fund of imagination” than men, and in this dual possession is their unique strength. While women shamelessly mother their sons into privileged softies, they mother their daughters into enduring, strong women, modeled after themselves.

  Because of the lack, even non-existence, of a large body of documentation supplementary to the ship registers for Newfoundland and the Maritime provinces, it is difficult to substantiate women’s roles in early fishing economies. Court records, plantation books, occasional references in the literature, and oral sources all help towards this end. I used all these sources extensively in my research, which set out to show that: i) women were involved in a substantial way in the early economy and society of Newfoundland and that they were owners of boats, ships and waterfront properties associated with the fishery; ii) it was real ownership involving real money; iii) although it was real ownership, society has collectively forgotten that there was a time in maritime history when women’s substantial roles were being played out; iv) ownership was a natural activity and evolved out of necessity and opportunity; v) women possessed the requisite skills to be real partners in business ventures; and vi) older women modeled shipowning and property ownership for younger women.

  The women growing up along the Atlantic coast were durable women fitted to carry the world on their shoulders – forget about Atlas! They accomplished extraordinary things such as running businesses and owning their own ships in a period when, according to the accepted storyline, women were thought to have been “barefoot, pregnant, and in the kitchen.” The documentation presented in Silk Sails demonstrates conclusively that discarding the near-myth of the passive woman in early society is long overdue.

  CHAPTER ONE

  Women and the Sea

  It is a serious error to think of the sea as the exclusive domain of men. Indeed, men and women have shared work on the sea for many generations and in some most unusual partnerships.

  From earliest times, women have functioned on the sea as pirates, warriors, traders, whalers, workers, travelers, navigators, captains, and as working and supportive wives. They have even functioned at the edge of the sea as “fish-makers” and shipbuilders.

  Why are we surprised by this? Both because there has been a concerted effort to write history from a man’s point of view and a tendency to ignore women’s involvement, as if women were invisible or unworthy of mention, and because the writing of women’s history in a structured form is a relatively recent phenomenon. Attempts to depict the sea as belonging to men and the shore as belonging to women, and to depict the sailor and seaman as hard, tough and anti-domestic, appear to be myths perpetrated by shipowners and investors. It may well have served an exploitative purpose such as bolstering the mystique that helped attract the very best men to a kind of exclusive club and a select inner circle.

  The averred connection between women, ships and bad luck seems also to have been a fiction promoted by shipowners who wanted more consistent hard work from their male crews, without the added distraction of having women on board. The presence of women might have obliged men to act more decently and with less cruelty and would have required a curb on their infamous shipboard profanity. How the fiction of bad luck arose is uncertain. It seems not to have originated with sailors of European or American descent. Mary Chipman Lawrence, who sailed with her husband Samuel on board the whaler Addison from 1856 to 1860, wrote in her journal about the natives of the Marquesas Islands: “The women are not allowed to go in a canoe; it is ‘taboo’ to them. If they wish to go to another bay, they are compelled to go over rocks and ridges while their husbands go in a canoe. They may go in a whaleboat, however, when opportunity offers.” This may have been an interpretation on Mary Lawrence’s part, or the taboo may have been only occasional and associated perhaps with a woman’s menstrual period. Apart from such rare instances we may assume that women were associated with the sea in the same natural relationship as men. Only their physical differences would have affected some of the roles they played.

  There was a recognition in ancient Greece of a woman’s right to own a ship, but when she wished to sell or dispose of it she was required to request a man’s help if not also his permission. This requirement would likely have applied to a family member only.

  Even the titles of books have assumed a natural relationship between men and the sea: Wooden Ships and Iron Men; Men, Ships and the Sea; Atlantic Conquest: The Men and Ships of the Glorious Age of Steam; and Men and Ships in the Canada Trade. Actually, there were many women involved in the Canada Trade, and they will be included in a subsequent work about Quebec and the Maritime provinces.

  Men have always attempted to carry the mystic female presence to sea with them in the guise of naming their ships after women, having their ship christened by a woman, wearing tatoos of women, or designing a ship figurehead in the female form.

  Women, as well as men, have written about the sea from earliest times, and women’s diaries, journals and articles are being recovered and published to demonstrate their unique insights and observations and to form an essential component of women’s history. Unfortunately, there are not enough of these, and most of them deal with sea voyages rather than life at the edge of the sea.

  One of the very best books dealing with women’s historic relationship with the sea is Linda Grant DePauw’s Seafaring Women. The author demonstrates the amazing breadth of women’s involvem
ent with the sea as she writes about women as pirates, warriors, whalers and traders. I am indebted to her book for much of the information in this chapter, especially for the stories of Hannah Burgess and Mary Patten. Many additional sources have been consulted as well.

  Perhaps the earliest known female pirate was Alvida, who operated in the North Atlantic from a Scandinavian base and whose exploits were recorded by Saxo Grammaticus, a twelfth-century historian. Another was Lady Killigrew of Cornwall, wife of Sir John Killigrew, and a contemporary of Queen Elizabeth I. Grace O’Malley, an Irish pirate, operated during the same period. With her father’s support, Grace supplanted her brother as heir and commanded her family’s fleets and castles after her father’s death. Mary Lindsey of Plymouth, England, married a pirate, Eric Cobham, and became a pirate captain herself. They operated pirate ships out of Poole and Plymouth.

  Women also served on ships as warriors or as crew members on fighting ships. During the eighteenth century, Anne Bonny and Mary Read were crew members aboard a pirate ship. During the American Revolution, Fanny Campbell of Lynn, Massachusetts, captained a privately owned ship that fought against the British. About the same time, a woman was in charge of the French privateer La Bougourt in the West Indies where she attacked British ships. Throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, women either worked voluntarily as crew members of fighting ships (often disguised as men) or were pressed into service during crises aboard ship; in the latter case they were usually paid for their service.

  In 1730 Dame Suzanne, nee LeGros, widow of Nicholas le Pelley, purchased the Island of Sark from Sir Charles de Carteret. Dame Suzanne had been born on the Island of Sark and the le Pelley family were from Guernsey. About 1755 the widow of Daniel le Pelley, “Dame of Sark,” Dame Elizabeth Etienne, who had already served a term in an ecclesiastical position as “douzenier,” which would have been extremely rare for a woman in those days, dismissed a priest for misconduct and barred the door of the church. The controversy had to do with Dame Elizabeth’s decision to award “livings” (clergy, clerical wages, or lands) to lapsed Catholics. The Anglican Church disagreed. Though the Dean of Guernsey challenged Dame Elizabeth’s action initially, he relented in the end and the matter was resolved the following year. Sark remained a possession of the le Pelley family until 1852. Strong women such as these may have been rare, but there were women of such stature here and there, now and then. Dame Elizabeth had, in fact, taken over commercial operations in the Jersey Islands after her husband’s death. Because of the connection between these islands and Newfoundland, it is possible that civil law governing property may have been at least temporarily established in Newfoundland.