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Gerald Hallowell

Autor/a de The Oxford Companion to Canadian History

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Since the days of sail, there has been an occasional tendency to take ships into port and lengthen them. It rarely does their structure any good.

This book feels as if the same thing happened to it. Just what is the purpose of the last third or so? I never really figured that out. The history was over; the rest was... I'm not sure what. Just sea stories, often quoted from tertiary sources or fiction.

That there was a place for a book about the August gales of 1926 and 1927 is not open to question. Newfoundland and the Maritimes have lost far too many of their men to the sea, but the 1927 storm in particular seemed to hit them hard -- there is at least one folk song sung in Newfoundland about that disaster, and more likely two or even three. People remembered. It is good to have a book like this to document it. For instance, the ships that were lost are listed, along with information about their crews. That information allowed me to prove that one of those aforementioned folk songs was about the 1927 gale, not (as its collector assumed) about a different gale in 1935. But the structure of this book was a little weak. It started out being about Lunenberg in the Maritimes, with a sort of a side glance at Sable Island, the graveyard of ships. Then it started on the 1926 and 1927 storms as they affected Lunenberg. Then the attention shifted to Newfoundland. Then to Gloucester in the United States. Then... came that disorderly last third.

I don't want to discourage you from reading this book. We should always remember the tragedies our sailors have faced as they sought to feed the people of Newfoudland and beyond. As Charles Kingsley reminded us:
But men must work, and women must weep,
Though storms be sudden, and waters deep....
That pretty well sums up the August gales. I wish this book could have done it as well.
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waltzmn | Sep 6, 2018 |

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