Abstract
Newfoundland-born seafarers stood out from others aboard nineteenth- and twentieth-century vessels by the relative frequency with which they used an ‘x’ to sign a crew agreement. According to historians’ conventions, this identified them as illiterate. Inadequacy in reading and writing skills is often construed as ignorance, a supposition David Alexander challenged in his 1970s study of social and economic inequality. In a more concerted analysis of Newfoundland seafarers’ literacy skills, I argue against the binary understanding of literate and illiterate people. In a place where maritime activity has spawned a strong oral culture, the groundwork of researchers based in Memorial University has facilitated an understanding of the dynamic and robust nature of vernacular knowledge. Nevertheless, a lack of education can operate ideologically and materially as discriminatory. While the evidence comes from a predominantly male workplace, I take into account the methods by which seafarers acquired reading and writing capabilities. Considering women’s higher literacy rates and their role in education in Newfoundland bridges seafarers’ lives onshore and at sea.
Twenty-year old Paddy [?] Carey signed on the Madeline Constance on 14 March 1919 in St. John’s, Newfoundland, bound for Bahia, Brazil. 1 ‘Signed’ is a generous term as he clearly had great difficulty writing his barely legible name. On the same saltwater-stained page is the signature of 10-year old cabin boy F. Coward, whose writing looks suspiciously similar to that of the vessel’s master, Samuel Coward, with the identical local address. An ‘x’ denotes that John French, who at 55 years of age was the oldest crew member, could not provide a signature. In a crew of 16 males, the requirement to sign aboard a vessel exposes seafarers’ diverse writing capacities.
While a signature does not necessarily imply literacy, wide-ranging studies have used the ‘x’ inscription as a measure. During the longstanding British colonial occupation of Newfoundland there was a common perception that illiteracy equated with ignorance. This article rejoins an earlier effort to discern the truth of the matter from the seafaring records located at Memorial University of Newfoundland (Memorial). In my approach I question a limited construction of literacy by refining the relationship of reading and writing to a range of skills in the lives of seafaring workers during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. With few printed materials available, people overcame an inability to read or write in other ways. Onshore, seafarers learned through formal, albeit irregular, school education and more importantly, in the informal oral sharing of local and experiential knowledge by family and community members. Aboard vessels, seafarers’ vernacular knowledge was largely specific to their workplace and commonly acquired over time through oral transmission. Both aspects of the maritime sphere – land and sea – jointly crafted the meanings and uses of literacy, and the researcher should take this into account to better understand the dialectic of literacy, orality and culture.
Maritime labour has been the largest occupational sector in Newfoundland for centuries, and seafaring is central to many aspects of the island’s history. 2 The original indigenous inhabitants subsisted on the bounty of the sea, as did Vikings arriving in longboats over 1,000 years ago. Subsequently, Britain, France, Portugal and Spain harvested the plentiful cod stocks, and fought to control the ‘fishing station’ strategically located between Europe and North America. 3 Eventually, year-round European inhabitants survived on the stormy North Atlantic by learning the nuances of winds, tides, and seasons. The emerging mercantile class largely consisted of fish merchants, and men became such proficient seafarers that the colony was considered a nursery for seamen. In time, females settled on the island, raising families, provisioning households, and working to dry and salt fish as part of the inshore family fishery. Maritime customs and practices continue in many communities today.
In his influential work The Decay of Trade (1977), Memorial economic and social historian David Alexander explored the deterioration of the Newfoundland salt cod trade, a topic seemingly distant from literacy. He began with the assertions of the Amulree Commission 4 in 1933 that the sizeable reduction of Newfoundland salt fish exports could be ascribed to the local government and business community. 5 While colonial authorities had failed to properly manage resources, Alexander argued that the eventual collapse of the industry had more to do with not making sufficient use of the local population’s skills and resources. He then commenced a new line of analysis that linked economic issues and cultural factors, with the goal of ‘measuring’ literacy because he viewed it as an increasingly essential tool.
The British Registrar General of Shipping and Seamen (RGSS) created the Crew Agreement collection that Memorial acquired in 1971 for a cliometric study of Canadian merchant shipping (the Atlantic Canada Shipping Project). 6 The Agreements were a legally-binding contract between seafarers and ship masters. They documented personal data on all crew members, as well as wages, scale of provisions and regulations for maintaining discipline. 7 The passing reference to them being ‘rather good indicators of the literacy of masters engaged in various trades’ (emphasis added) 8 in Keith Matthews’ initial review article gave few signs of the entirely unforeseen application his co-director Alexander would pioneer. To investigate human resources and social mobility, Alexander quantified the contractually-required seafarer’s name, place of birth, and rate of signing, cross-referencing this to age. 9 In his view, the most important resource of a country was its people, and seafaring had long laboured under the presumption that it drew from a society’s least capable.
Alexander performed multi-factoral analysis to compare literacy rates across the various nationalities present on the sampled vessels of one part of the Canadian fleet. Despite his complex and comprehensive analysis, he emphasized the need for further national fleet studies in concert with landward sources to contextualize seafarers’ literacy acquisition and the ways it affected their careers. Alexander appreciated the rarity of being able to use their work records to make an industry-based study of literacy. By naming his subjects ‘working men who got wet’ in this essay, he ensured seafarers’ centrality in any study of the maritime economy and society of colonial Newfoundland. He died prematurely before resolving the theoretical and practical challenges that came with using an entirely new source for examining Newfoundlanders’ illiteracy. My project answers his call to enhance our understanding of one of the under-analyzed characteristics of seafarers with the first quantitative and qualitative study of the crews recorded in the Newfoundland Crew Agreements, 10 now possible because the Maritime History Archive (MHA) has acquired them. Remarkable advances in database manipulation facilitate my analysis in a way that Alexander’s team, tethered to mainframe computers, could only have dreamed of. Significantly, because of digitalization, readers can now instantaneously view the referenced Agreements. This article places literacy in a social and labour context. It provides some of the earliest observations about the character of the province’s shipping, but does not offer a lengthy discussion of fleets, deployment, or voyage patterns. The questions I bring to this study are: what levels of reading and writing did seafarers possess and how did they acquire these skills? Was literacy a requirement in Newfoundland’s most common workplace – aboard ship – or was functional literacy gained through work sufficient for seafarers to earn a living? How do we as historians now understand the processes of informal transmission of knowledge, taking into consideration that non-codified learning continues to be respected and preserved in Newfoundland?
These seafarers moved between home, the community and the sometimes global workplace, functioning within varied hierarchies and cultures. Sociologist Pierre Bordieu has given social scientists a resonant term for the set of relations and knowledge accumulated in operating within particular fields: social capital. 11 If, like Bourdieu, we consider methods of navigating the world in terms of language and power, the term ‘field’ encompasses such spaces as the school and the community, the ship, and the ports of call; sites that brought into play the relationship of language and power and created a need to adapt to shifting conditions. With a thriving oral tradition in the Newfoundland community and aboard the vessel, it is conceivable that seafarers performed capably, gaining knowledge and experience with each voyage. Far from unintelligent, they held vast amounts of crucial information in memory and were able to recall it and take immediate action in life-threatening situations. Those needing literacy, such as masters and mates, attained the required skill levels by whatever means available. An analysis of signature rates in a work document supplies a good starting point for reconsidering functional literacy.
Archival research is not a passive method, but an active search to find meaning in records. Archives are spaces of power and inclusion, highlighting specific narratives and records, but there are omissions, erasures, and silences. Carolyn Steedman has a glorious way of envisaging what remains unsaid: ‘How lucky the historian whose subjects say how they read and write – what rules and procedures they follow, and what they believe they are up to when they write!’ 12 Each time historians interpret primary evidence, they implicitly treat it with an awareness of the period-specific social purpose and meaning of writing. Taking on a study of the functionality of literacy means we do not overlook these considerations.
Quantitative analysis and qualitative reasoning are not binaries but increments on a broad continuum. Literacy specialist H. S. Bhola puts the two in tension when he scolds historians for attempting to apply a single definition of literacy across time and space, attributing this to the ‘positivist compulsions’ of signature-counting historians. 13 While signature data are a useful minimal indicator of literacy, they assume literacy is simply defined – a person either is or is not literate. The data do not reveal more about the signatories’ degree of literacy, 14 and an ability to sign ones’ name may have been the only writing skill that a person possessed. Conversely, pioneering historical demographer Roger Schofield’s defence of a signature as the best measure of literacy still holds. He argued it is standard and direct as a mid-range measurement; in general, more people could read than write and fewer could write fluently than could sign their name. 15 Utilizing the Agreements to enumerate literacy is a sound strategy, but my approach goes beyond ‘simply counting’: just as there is more to literacy than a signature, there is more to knowledge acquisition and transmission than reading and writing competency.
Crew agreements
Numbers are neutral and only reveal their stories through manipulation. 16 Alexander’s original study contained numerous tables, and mine has a total of six. I provide statistics on vessel size and voyage destination. Using signature rates as an indicator of literacy, I analyze age group, capacity served, and birthplace. Performing an educational cohort analysis, I group seafarers based on the period in which they were aged 10 to 14, when they would likely have been in school and considered to have obtained literacy. This is necessary if I am to compare seafarers’ literacy rates with statistical data on attendance rates and competency scores for the general school-aged population. Analysis becomes a richer proposition in the cross-referencing between various elements in the Agreements and extraneous documentation. Readers should note the intervals are not entirely uniform. Agreements pertaining to the years 1865, 1875, 1885, 1895, and 1905 17 are held at the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich, UK and I was unable to travel to access them. Therefore, each table is constructed without these records, and four-year groupings suffice for the second half of each pre-World War I decade.
The Agreement sample I analyzed consisted of 225 voyages for 176 vessels, all accessible online. Table 1 conveys vessel sizes in Gross Registered Tonnage, which ranged from 73 to 4,272 with a median of 214. There are substantially fewer Agreements prior to 1914, and therefore my sampling techniques are different for pre- and post-war records. I examined the Agreements for each year between 1863, the first year they are available at Memorial, and 1914 for the existence of crew signatures. 18 Post-World War I, my analysis consists of a selective sampling of voyages terminating in 1919, 1924, and 1929. Although there are seafarers from Denmark, Chile, Singapore, and many other countries, my object of analyzing the literacy rates of Newfoundland crew meant identifying and selecting out seafarers who declared themselves Newfoundland-born (at a time, to be clear, when they were British subjects and not subjects of a confederated Canada).
Vessel size.
Despite the standard requirements for completing Agreements, there may be a number of documents in a bundle that were generated during various stages of a voyage. 19 In the course of this research it became clear that some agents in the colony of Newfoundland took leeway in compiling an Agreement, 20 but most tried to secure the contractual signature or ‘x’ on at least one occasion. In the earlier years, ‘crew lists’ were often an actual list written by one person. For example, Newfoundlanders comprised 13 of the 18 crew members on the Wolf voyaging from St. John’s to Greenock in 1868, 21 and eight of the nine crew members aboard the F H Odiorne travelling the same route in 1880, 22 but neither Agreement contains actual signatures. In other Agreements, such as for the Brothers in 1873, 23 the entire 12-man crew is listed on page one, but there is an additional ‘Colonial Articles’ page on which an ‘x’ denotes those who could not sign their name. If a crew member left a vessel en-route for any reason, there are detailed notes in the ‘Certificates’ section attesting to cause and to payment of wages. Seafarers were also contractually required to ‘sign-off’ each vessel at the end of a voyage, providing an additional accuracy check.
There were two main kinds of voyages and two corresponding types of Agreements – foreign-going and coastal. Coastal voyages remained in close proximity to the colony, while foreign-going voyages travelled beyond those boundaries. 24 Table 2 shows that the majority of Newfoundland voyages were destined for the Mediterranean and Brazil, and most of these would have been involved in transporting Newfoundland (and Labrador) salt cod to its principal markets (Table 2). James Murray, a fish merchant and political figure in the late nineteenth century, wrote several articles on the colony’s commercial life. In explaining that Portugal, Spain, Italy, Greece, and various Mediterranean ports took bulk cod laden ‘naked’ (unpacked) in the hold of the vessel, he used a vernacular term that would be understood on the gangways and beaches of Newfoundland. ‘The Brazils’ purchased small fish packed tightly in drums (112 lbs.) or half drums, and the West Indies took fish of inferior quality, provided that it was hard and dry 25 (to feed slave populations). Agreements contain British consul endorsement stamps for Caribbean ports, such as the Clutha returning from a voyage to Gibraltar in 1920. 26 These stamps are evidence of voyages stopping over at several ports of call on wide-ranging, multi-leg voyages. The world became highly globalized in the nineteenth century, and many regions were integrated into the international economy through maritime trade. Merchant shipping was always a global activity, involving the transport of goods bought and sold on world markets. 27 With the consular stamps on an Agreement comes a reminder of British mercantile supremacy, built in this case upon Newfoundland’s expertise in the Mediterranean, South American and Caribbean trades.
Voyage summary.
Each of these vessels was active in the British Imperial merchant marine.
Voyages to various Newfoundland ports, such as Carbonear, Harbour Grace or Belleoram, as distinct from St. John’s.
A few log books accompany these Agreements. On the 1870–71 voyage of the Courtenay to Pernambuco, Brazil 28 the captain reported very good ‘general conduct’ and ‘ability in seamanship’ for each seafarer. All entries were signed by the Master and witnessed by the Mate, both displaying refined penmanship. Rather than an Agreement, the Sea Nymph links to a log book dated September 1867 29 , revealing the master of this vessel took sick and died in hospital. The vessel’s owners apologetically advised the Superintendent of the Shipping Office in Liverpool that the Captain’s death was not properly recorded because the crew had been dismissed and there was no one to note his death. The Registrar General of Shipping’s reach stretched far: owners and their representatives jumped to provide the required documentation, and not even death could offer a reprieve. In a further article in this collection, Meaghan Walker highlights an untapped potential for the official log books in her study of deceased British merchant seafarers’ inventories.
‘X’ as his mark
The Agreements are an unparalleled archive, not least because this consistently-compiled labour source is unmatched in any other time or place worldwide. Alexander astutely noted that ‘[I]n the case of seamen the need to sign one’s name probably occurred more often than was the case in the vast bulk of manual occupations.’ 30 Using a signature as a measure of literacy for workers of various nationalities aboard Yarmouth, Nova Scotia vessels in the late nineteenth century, he compared these with national literacy rates 31 in order to test whether seafarers were drawn from society’s lower classes. Newfoundlanders ranked among the lowest group with literacy rates of 44 per cent. 32 Table 3 treats this point from the 1,850 Newfoundland seafarers in my sample. Prior to 1899, an average of 38.5 per cent of seafarers could sign in every decade, slightly lower than Alexander’s rates, but these numbers improved substantially in the twentieth century. Disaggregating by age group, literacy rates are inversely related to age across the entire period: they are lowest for the 60 to 69-year age group and rise progressively with each group to those aged 10 to 19 (Table 4). 33 This means that younger crewmen had a higher likelihood of being literate, and had more options in terms of work onshore or promotion aboard ship.
Total crew signature rates.
Crew members’ signature rates by age group.
Analyzing seafarers by birthplace and capacity employed allows a comparison of officers and crew by location. As part of the job requirements, masters had to communicate with a variety of people, from ship owners and shipping agents to port authorities. The Board of Trade instituted mandatory officer’s competency exams in the mid-nineteenth century, so superior literacy and numeracy skills were essential. Table 5 shows that officers residing in St. John’s had a 98 per cent signature rate, while outport 34 officers signed aboard at 97.5 per cent. The rates in each location are comparable, and exceptionally high as was expected. Non-officers living in St. John’s signed on at 46 per cent and those from the outports at 63 per cent. There is a significant difference when disaggregated by this geography. Nearly one-fifth more rural-born and educated non-officer seafarers provided a signature than their St. John’s counterparts. However, outport seafarers often travelled to the city in order to find work aboard the more plentiful vessels departing that port, and the numbers may simply reflect a high concentration of rural seafarers re-classified as urban. This diaspora 35 is evident not only in St. John’s, but in the scores of seafarers signed aboard foreign vessels worldwide whose birthplace is simply recorded as Newfoundland.
Signature by location and capacity engaged.
Education and literacy
If the methods by which seafarers acquired reading and writing capabilities are to be given due consideration, this analysis must bridge their life onshore and at sea. To determine whether literacy skills were all that prevalent throughout the colony, assiduously collected data on Newfoundland children’s school attendance and performance in Board competency exams prove valuable. These rates are compared with seafarer’s signature rates to establish if these workers were less literate than the general school-aged population during this period, or whether literacy skills affected employability. In the 1970s, Newfoundland’s most prominent education historian, Phillip McCann initiated a study of education, considering class, gender, and religion in Newfoundland. In an effort to determine why Newfoundlanders did not become literate in larger proportions, he explored the centrality of the family fishery, dominated by merchant capital and the truck system. 36 Boys and girls worked continually during the fishing season, which interrupted their schooling and precluded many attaining higher literacy levels. By age 15, boys generally worked full-time in the fishery and girls often left the community to enter domestic service. McCann analyzed school enrolment as a percentage of children age five to 15 in the general population in Newfoundland, finding that 27.9 per cent of children in the colony were registered in 1861, and this rate almost doubled to 52.9 per cent by 1906. 37 After 1893, this may have been due to the efforts of the Council for Higher Education, mainly composed of educators in St. John’s, who introduced annual exams based on a consistent colony-wide syllabus. 38 As the elite were intensifying efforts to create a literate population, Newfoundlanders were becoming more aware of the benefits of education. However, due to war, economic depression and ongoing hardship, many children’s education was interrupted or terminated when they became helpers in the household-based fishery workforce.
Alexander used an educational cohort analysis of non-officer crew to determine if fleets were forced to select from less well-educated populations. Concentrating on crew members aboard Yarmouth, Nova Scotia vessels, he found that their overall literacy rate improved between 1865 and 1899, although not in a linear progression. 39 Cohort analysis starts with recognizing that the educational make-up of a crew is more complex than the historian observes in one fixed moment – examining literacy acquisition necessitates a diachronic regression. This means that we must not only consider these seafarers as ‘working men who got wet,’ but also project backwards to look at their experiences as boys by the particularities of place and time, in this case between the ages of 10 and 14. Adapting Alexander’s educational cohort analysis became a key part of my evaluation of seafarers’ literacy acquisition.
For example, assuming that children acquired literacy skills between the ages of ten and fourteen, 40 the peak school years for a seafarer in the 20–24 year age group working aboard a vessel in 1860–1864 would have been 1850–54. To compare Newfoundland seafarer’s literacy rates with those of the overall school-aged population, I limited my analysis to non-officer Newfoundland-born seafarers aged 15 to 59. In each decade prior to 1889, an average of only one-third of the sampled seafarers in the educational cohorts in Table 6 would eventually provide a signature when signing aboard. In comparing these rates with McCann’s enrolment figures, while 27.9 per cent of the school-aged population was enrolled in school in 1861, a mere 7.5 per cent met advanced Board reading standards. The Newfoundland seafarers in my cohort analysis for the same period signed aboard with a 33 per cent signature rate, which is curiously close to the corresponding attendance rate, but five times higher than the competency rates.
Literacy of educational cohort.
Point from which more seafarers continually provided a signature rather than an ‘x’.
For those seafarers in my analysis whose period of schooling happened later than 1890, literacy rates invert when compared to earlier groups. A higher percentage of this cohort of seafarers provided a signature, while an average of one third marked with an ‘x’. This is an abrupt reversal of rates, and is significant because signature rates remained higher for the remainder of the analysis period. In considering McCann’s attendance rates, in 1906 52.9 per cent of children in the colony aged five to fifteen were enrolled in school, and a shockingly low 6.8 per cent met advanced reading standards. Seafarers in the same educational cohort had a signature rate of 70.5 per cent. Based on these numbers, either the children who went on to work as merchant seafarers later in life were considerably more literate than their classmates, or an ability to sign their name does not in fact reflect reading and writing competency for many. The latter conclusion seems the most likely.
How do the educational cohort literacy rates compare to the Canadian crew members (excluding officers) that Alexander treated? He found evidence that cohort literacy rates between 1835 and 1884 rose from 54 per cent to 95 per cent, considerably higher than the rates for seafarers I analyzed. His identification of Newfoundland seafarers as among the most literacy deficient of the globally-constituted crews holds true across the analysis period. Nevertheless, commencing with the 1890–94 cohort, Newfoundland seafarers’ literacy rates increased, in fact more closely mirroring those of the seafarers 50 years prior in Alexander’s cohort analysis. We might infer that attempts to provide Newfoundland children with literacy skills were making progress, albeit more gradually than in most nations.
The archetypal concept of ‘seafarer’ is a rugged masculine identity, 41 which is forgetful of women. Alexander pointedly coined the term ‘working men who got wet,’ but my analysis of Newfoundland crews differs in that there were also ‘working women who got wet,’ the first appearing in 1904. Although fewer in number than their male counterparts, and considerably older with a median age of 36, they signed aboard vessels with a notable signature rate of 85 per cent. The majority were stewardesses 42 hired to tend fare-paying female passengers, and earning $35 per month compared to an Able Bodied seaman’s average monthly wages of $52.50. Many were seafarers’ widows supporting their family. Alexander was investigating the idea of residuum, a proposition about recruitment paths for the poorest classes, which likely precluded him questioning women’s shipboard work or their motives for going to sea. Ironically, women were more likely to be disparaged as the ‘lowest of the low’ aboard ship, having to struggle against their identification as women of ‘easy virtue’ in the predominantly male environment.
In his articles on literacy and its relationship to economic development, at no point does Alexander consider women’s substantial economic contributions or their role in helping seafarers gain and retain reading and writing skills. By the last decades of the 1800s, women in Newfoundland had reached the surprising state of being more literate than men, 43 if only marginally. McCann attributed this to girls’ higher school attendance rates coupled with a longer period of time in the classroom and fewer interruptions to schooling than boys. The percentages of boys enrolled in public elementary schools across the colony slowly declined from 61.2 per cent in 1861 to 53.4 per cent in 1906, while girls’ enrollment rates gradually increased from 38.8 per cent in 1861 to 46.6 per cent in 1906 44 , and girls’ rates continued to rise in comparison to boys. By 1901, 59.9 per cent of teachers in Newfoundland were female, 45 and women were instrumental in teaching reading and writing skills to the colony’s children. They had also found a means of earning wages and gaining independence outside the constraints of the family fishery, and merchant seafaring provided another option for a few in the 1900s.
Crucially, prolonged education was not the only method for, or indicator of, seafarers’ literacy acquisition. On Sloping Ground is a first-hand account of life in Notre Dame Bay in the early twentieth century. Written in the late 1970s during a period of renewed interest in preserving reminiscences and family histories in the province, author Aubrey Tizzard recounts that his family fished inshore for food and his grandfather crewed the Eagle in 1878. His mother earned cash one summer drying fish brought from Labrador, her only foray drying cod because she found it was a lot of work for little wages. Importantly, Tizzard emphasized that although neither his grandfather nor father attended school they both could read and write. His grandfather ‘learnt his first letters from the head of a Windsor patent flour barrel’ 46 , while his father purchased several ‘copy books’ at age 20 and became proficient in both reading and writing. This is one example that illustrates Newfoundland seafarers at the turn of the century acquired literacy skills outside of the classroom, at varying ages and by any available method. Therefore, perhaps more adult Newfoundlanders could read and write than the school attendance rates suggest.
While the oral tradition was respected, literacy acquisition was still thought a noteworthy accomplishment. Tizzard was extremely proud that his self-taught grandfather and father both worked as the local postmaster, a job that called for correspondence with college-educated superiors, members of parliament and lawyers, among others. Illness postponed the author’s education in Grade X, but he ‘sent for every free book that was ever advertised in a magazine or newspaper’ 47 to maintain his reading skills. Once a person acquires reading and writing skills, they are preserved through usage. We cannot assume that a child was able to read or write because they were registered as attending school up to an age when literacy might be expected, or assume this correlates to their retaining those skills throughout adulthood. As Alexander speculated, ‘some fraction of the crew who signed had learned this simple skill while never acquiring, or forgetting through infrequent use, the more general skills of literacy.’ 48 How then were they able to find work, and have captains commonly rate their conduct and seamanship skills as very good? Life’s practical education better equipped seafarers for most workplace activities.
Knowledge acquisition and orality
Harvey Graff and Walter Ong argue that literacy is along a continuum rather than a divide, and many societies have varying levels of orality and literacy interlaced. In many Newfoundland outports oral tradition was strong, and a few residents who could read and write and were able to meet a community’s needs. Newfoundland educator Dennis Mulcahy traced the processes of formal and informal education in the early 1900s in a small Newfoundland outport. The importance of the informal transmission of knowledge is evident in one resident’s statement that school began at age six, but learning how to be a fisherman began at birth. All areas of the community were de facto classrooms, where the ‘seasoned professionals, knowledgeable and wise in the ways of the sea and the land’ 49 taught the boys through observation, demonstration, participation, and practice. The focal point of the community was the fishing store, ‘a place of activity, dialogue and story-telling’ 50 , where most knowledge was acquired orally, through informal conversations and specific instructional narratives. According to Alexander, ‘[s]ince illiteracy was so pervasive in Newfoundland, it is unlikely that many regarded it as a matter of social stigma.’ 51 Knowledge was commonly communicated within an oral culture that developed and endured despite, or perhaps in part because of, the irregular access to formal education and sporadic instruction in reading and writing.
Newfoundland intellectual Patrick O’Flaherty also made a case for the importance of functional knowledge, furthering the argument that islanders in fact reached the level of education necessary to function in their society: ‘[T]here are men in plenty who without being able to read and write can make a model of a schooner, build the vessel according to scale, and then sail her as master.’ 52 If a task called for basic literacy, someone was found to assist. 53 If further education was necessary, people acquired it. Scholarly works, such as those discussed above, reveal knowledge gained in the community and working the inshore fishery from childhood prepared these seafarers to easily transition to ocean-going voyages. Seafarers provided for their families and attempted to improve their social and economic position without writing skills. For those unable to ‘sign’ aboard a vessel, contractual obligations were met with a simple ‘x’.
Functional knowledge likely remained more important than book learning for seafarers, and was more than adequate to hold down a seaman’s berth, though not to progress to master. Seafarers depended on the master to guide them safely. He stood at the top of the hierarchical maritime workplace – ‘Master under God’ according to charter parties and insurance policies. 54 Insurance and official inspection requirements remind us that shipping operated in a regulated, institutional context; one based on the reading and writing of reports. The Board of Trade instituted mandatory competency testing for officers in 1850, but Newfoundland issued its first certificates only in 1877 55 , meaning aspirant officers went elsewhere to be tested and perhaps even to study. In smaller sailing vessels, the master typically navigated with a chart, loran, compass, and a deep sea lead, and the majority would have been literate as they reckoned the readings with log book entries. Newfoundland masters skillfully guided their vessels in deep fog and heavy ice, and it was these navigation skills as distinct from seamanship that elevated masters above accomplished seafarers. 56 To persevere as a merchant master required intelligence, cumulative experience, and a lifetime of knowledge acquisition, regardless of the extent of early schooling.
Conclusions
Newfoundland seafarers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century have long since sailed to Fiddler’s Green 57 , and it is not possible to question them about their everyday activities. The Crew Agreement sample allows us to draw some inferences. Prior to 1900, less than 40 per cent of seafarers in the sampled Agreements were able to sign aboard a vessel, but the numbers increased significantly in the twentieth century. They were taught to read and write by teachers, relatives, and neighbors when it was convenient, accessible or vital – for example, when faced with a Board of Trade examination. Unexpectedly, rural seafarers had considerably higher signature rates than those from the capital city. Further investigation for sectarian and/or differential education provision would prove useful. Although the only writing skill that some seafarers possessed was an ability to sign their name, they nevertheless found work and provided for their families. The local knowledge and practical skills gained as young men in the in-shore fishery were transferable in navigating maritime environments that changed hourly. For most seafarers, other than a master or first mate, gaining expertise and functioning proficiently might happen in the absence of reading and writing skills. There is little evidence that Newfoundland-born officers were drawn from a substantially different social class, yet they were highly literate: only eight of a total 379 officers signed aboard with an ‘x’ during this 70-year span. Their exceptionally high signature rates lend credence to the argument that Newfoundlanders acquired education at a level necessary to function in their society, and attained further reading and writing skills when necessary. Additionally, seafarers looking to advance through the ranks may have acquired knowledge by attending a navigation school 58 between voyages.
As for the three seafarers we saw signing aboard the Madeline Constance in 1919, this is the only record for Paddy [?] Carey of Witless Bay in the Newfoundland Agreement collection and we cannot follow him further. A supplementary notation reveals that the oldest seafarer, John French of Carbonear, ‘failed to join’ this voyage as Steward/Cook but later that year made his mark again on the Esther Hankinson for a multi-leg voyage to Gibraltar, Cadiz, and Seville. Then he disappeared from the Agreements. It seems likely that the master signed for young ‘Fred’ Coward of St. John’s. Yet, by age 17 he had risen through the ranks to Assistant Engineer and provided a clearly legible signature. In short, he acquired writing skills while pursuing a seafaring career alongside his older relative, thus providing yet another clue to the diverse methods of acquiring literacy. Seafarers from particular communities appear together in multiple Agreements, which can be taken to indicate that ties of paternalism and kinship were not restricted to their onshore lives.
Bourdieu elaborated on the term social capital, referring to the connections within and between social networks where an individual’s social and economic standing improves by way of benefits accessed through the group. 59 In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, the vast majority of Newfoundlanders were born in seafaring communities to families of little means. As there were few avenues of social mobility, parents saw no advantage to their offspring becoming educated. Working-age boys went to sea, and one of the few choices available to them was whether they remained in the inshore fishery or moved on to jobs further offshore. A lack of education, specifically reading and writing skills, did not hinder them in accessing seafaring jobs. Although most would not become wealthy, they were able to maintain or improve their social status through membership in seafaring networks. Nevertheless, colonial Newfoundland was an unequal society where the wealthy and powerful maintained their social standing through furthering their children’s education and careers.
Canada’s newest province remained a class-divided society in the 1970s when Newfoundland educator George Story sharply criticized the formal education system. He claimed that it was elitist, exploitative and discriminatory, and observed that the majority of children struggled to be educated in overcrowded one-room schools with poorly trained teachers. As Alexander’s confidante, Story further complained that Newfoundland’s existing educational system was designed to supply ‘trained manpower for the resource crunching engines of industrial enterprise or the purveyors of service to a passive consumer society’. 60 Disavowing an education tied to marketable skills as narrowly defined by business, Story thought Newfoundlanders should be educated to a higher level than the labour market dictated. Alexander’s perspective coincided with that of Story, and he insisted that the province must expect its residents ‘can do more than provide semi-skilled labour and middle-management for international corporations.’ 61 He believed that providing citizens with the skills to progress beyond merely ‘making a living’ was the key to both personal growth and economic expansion.
In the wake of the precipitous decline of cod stocks following the 1992 moratorium, there is new respect for local knowledge, evidenced in such work as that of Barbara Neis and John Lutz. 62 They focus on the intersection of fishermen’s ecological knowledge with science in conceiving recommendations for rebuilding collapsed fisheries and threatened communities. On the basis of Neis’ Newfoundland work, they contend knowledge exists in a social context, in a specific place where a ‘knower’ has the relevant experience to interpret and disseminate information. Literacy matters for university researchers, but many at Memorial also hold the conviction that long-term solutions can only emerge when traditional expertise becomes part of the discourse. Recently, artist and educator Pam Hall worked with residents of Newfoundland communities to overturn the usual hierarchy of knowledge-making. Her Encyclopedia of Local Knowledge profiles the marginalized ‘knowers’ and knowledge practices Newfoundlanders employ in navigating everyday changing environments. 63 Focusing on social and vernacular practice, she argues that local knowledge is not isolated from interaction with dominant knowledge systems – it is simultaneously local and global.
For several centuries, Newfoundland seafarers were a very mobile labour force, but many returned to home ports between voyages and those fortunate enough to retire often settled down in communities surrounded by family. The province’s seafarers today continue to comprise a portion of the local workforce in sectors varying from the inshore fisheries to the Coast Guard and the offshore oil industry. As Alexander argued four decades ago, these workers are not ‘illiterates from the dregs of society’ but typical men and women. A changed economy in the twenty-first century means another kind of mobility, and thousands now work in the oilfields of Alberta and on offshore oil rigs around the world. Nevertheless, reading and writing levels in the province have not changed much since the early twentieth century. In the most recent national assessment of literacy and numeracy levels, Newfoundland and Labrador’s scores were the lowest of all Canadian provinces and territories with an astounding two of every five adults in the province deemed illiterate. 64 Demonstrating the non-linear nature of history, it appears that we are once again asking the same question Story posed: how can education be adapted so that it responds to the province’s specific needs?
My research takes place in a much different intellectual world than that of Alexander. 65 As a practitioner of neo-classical economics, like many of his generation he was enamoured with the newness of computers and their ability to perform complex analyses. Ultimately, however he realized that it was essential to integrate human dimensions with the mass of data in order to comprehensively consider the illiteracy dilemma. He did not have to time to fully revise his ‘working men who got wet’ article, but disjointedly reworks the ontology of his essay by admitting a female autodidactic voice in the final paragraph.
Significantly, his tentative examination of Newfoundland seafarers’ signature provision suggested low literacy rates, and my more concerted investigation of the Agreements confirms it. The dilemma now, then, is that this adds a new acuteness to efforts to resolve illiteracy, but at a time when we are even more challenged to incorporate experientially-acquired, orally-transmitted knowledge in academic paradigms. We exist in a differently ordered society than the one in which colonizers placed formal reading and writing skills at the top of the knowledge hierarchy. While the current illiteracy rate is lamentable, and disdain for the informal transmission of knowledge persists, functional literacy skills enable many Newfoundland residents to earn a living. This article has reconceptualized illiteracy, highlighting Newfoundland’s enduring oral culture and the value of local knowledge in resolving problems underpinning the social and economic inequality in our maritime society.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
Thanks to the staff of the Maritime History Archive at Memorial University of Newfoundland, in particular Heather Wareham and Vince Walsh. Thanks as well to Dr. Asokan Variyath, Department of Mathematics and Statistics at Memorial University for his assistance with educational cohort analysis. Special thanks to Dr. Valerie Burton.
Funding
This article is drawn from research for my SSHRC-funded MA thesis, currently in progress at the History Department, Memorial University of Newfoundland. The author received no financial support for the authorship and/or publication of this article.
1.
2.
Although including Labrador would enrich the discussion, and many of the seafarers in Crew Agreements fished ‘the Labrador’ in summertime, it is not incorporated into this analysis.
3.
See Peter E. Pope, Fish into Wine: The Newfoundland Plantation in the Seventeenth Century, (Williamsburg, VA, 2004).
4.
Due to a prolonged period of economic crisis and severe budgetary deficit, riots brought down the government. On 16 February 1934 the Commission of Government was sworn in, ending responsible government, and the legislature was not convened for 15 years.
5.
David Alexander, The Decay of Trade: An Economic History of the Newfoundland Saltfish Trade, 1935–1965, (St. John’s, 1977).
6.
Cliometrics is a type of quantitative history that links Clio, the muse of history, and metrics or measurement. During this period, historians primarily focused on statistical analysis of the economy and economic growth.
7.
‘”What Were Crew Agreements?” A History of the Agreements’, More Than a List of the Crew (MTLC), (St. John’s, 2011).
8.
Keith Matthews, ‘Crew Lists, Agreements and Official Logs of the British Empire 1863–1913’, Business History 16, No. 1 (1974), 79.
9.
David Alexander, ‘Literacy among Canadian and Foreign Seamen, 1863–1899’, in Rosemary Ommer and Gerald Panting (eds.), Working Men Who Got Wet: Proceedings of the fourth conference of the Atlantic Canada Shipping Project, (St. John’s, 1980), 1–33..
10.
While the majority arrived at Memorial in the early 1970s, other Agreements were accessed later, and recently the MHA acquired 60 Newfoundland Agreements dating between 1919 and 1938. Without these records, the ACSP analyzed Agreements for four mainland Canadian ports while Alexander’s key work strictly used vessels registered in Yarmouth, Nova Scotia.
11.
Pierre Bourdieu, The Social Structures of the Economy (Cambridge, 2005), 9–10.
12.
Carolyn Steedman, ‘All Written Up’ (review of ‘Unsettling History: Archiving and Narrating in Historiography’ by Sebastian Jobs and Alf Lüdtke), History and Theory 50, No. 3 (2011), 439.
13.
H. S. Bhola, ‘Literacy Discussion for the International Literacy Year, 1990', History of Education Quarterly 30, No. 4 (1990), 658.
14.
Carl F. Kaestle, ‘Introduction’, History of Education Quarterly 30, No. 4 (1990), 488.
15.
Roger Schofield, ‘Dimensions of Illiteracy, 1750–1850’, Explorations in Economic History 10, No. 4 (1973), 440–2.
16.
John Sutton Lutz and Barbara Neis (eds.) Making and Moving Knowledge. Interdisciplinary and Community-based Research in a World on the Edge (Montreal, 2008), 32. They make the case that computers provide growing opportunities to access data and ‘information, but they do not provide context, they do not make us wise. They may not even make us better informed’.
17.
Matthews, ‘Crew Lists’, 79.
18.
Matthews, ‘Crew Lists’, 78–80. ‘In theory every vessel, whether registered in the colonies or in Britain, was supposed to submit these returns, but it is apparent that … many colonial ones, especially small Newfoundland fishing and coastal vessels, did not'.
20.
21.
MHA, Wolf, O.N. 34488, 1868.
22.
MHA, F H Odiorne, O.N. 55522, 1880.
23.
MHA, Brothers, O.N. 50946, 1873.
24.
Sealing and in-shore fishing vessels are excluded. Seafarers working closer to shore are underrepresented in the sample, where only 18 of the Agreements comprise ‘coastal voyages’.
25.
James Murray, ‘The Fisheries of Newfoundland', The Newfoundland Quarterly 29, No. 4 (1930), 31. See also: Shannon Ryan, Fish Out of Water: The Newfoundland Saltfish Trade, 1814–1914, (St. John’s, 1986).
26.
MHA, Clutha, O.N. 79429, 1920.
27.
Sarah Palmer, ‘The Maritime World in Historical Perspective', International Journal of Maritime History 23, No. 1 (2011), 7.
28.
MHA, Courtenay, O.N. 51149, 1871.
29.
MHA, Sea Nymph, O.N. 26210, 1867.
30.
Alexander, ‘Literacy among Canadian and Foreign Seamen, 1863–1899', 6.
31.
Generally male-only literacy rates. Alexander used sources varying from bridegrooms’ signature rates in marriage registers to army recruitment signature levels.
32.
Alexander, ‘Literacy among Canadian and Foreign Seamen, 1863–1899', 16.
33.
Excluding two seafarers in each of the outlier groups aged 1–9 and 70–79 with a 100 per cent signature rate.
34.
Small Newfoundland towns and villages are collectively referred to as ‘outports', i.e. other than St. John’s.
35.
Any Newfoundland discussion should recognize the repeated ways that the population has been displaced. This began with denial of permanent settlement for early migratory fishermen, continued with U.S. migration in the early twentieth century, through resettlement programs in the 1960s and 70s, and most recently for work in the Fort McMurray, Alberta oil sands and drilling platforms worldwide.
36.
In the spring, a local merchant supplied a fisherman with fishing gear and provisions for his family, against the guaranteed earnings of his future catch. The merchant set prices to his advantage in the fall, the fishermen rarely saw cash, and generally were permanently indebted to the merchant.
37.
Phillip McCann, Schooling in a Fishing Society, Education and Economic Conditions in Newfoundland and Labrador 1836–1986, Companion Volume Tables (St. John’s, 1994), 124–5, 262.
38.
Fred W. Rowe, The History of Education in Newfoundland (Toronto, 1952), 102–03.
39.
Alexander, ‘Literacy among Canadian and Foreign Seamen, 1863–1899', 14.
40.
Alexander stated ‘It can be roughly assumed that he (seafarer) acquired literacy … while aged 10–14 years'. I use the same range for literacy acquisition for computational and comparative purposes.
41.
See Miriam Wright, ‘Young Men and Technology: Government Attempts to Create a “Modern” Fisheries Workforce in Newfoundland, 1949–1970’, Labour/Le Travail 42 (1998), 143–59.
42.
43.
McCann, Class, Gender and Religion in Newfoundland Education, 8 and Table 1-1.
44.
McCann, Schooling in a Fishing Society, Companion Volume Tables, 108–9, 258.
45.
McCann, Schooling in a Fishing Society, Companion Volume Tables, 77.
46.
Aubrey M. Tizzard, On Sloping Ground. Reminiscences of Outport Life in Notre Dame Bay, Newfoundland (St. John’s, 1979), 9.
47.
Tizzard, On Sloping Ground, 127.
48.
Alexander, ‘Literacy among Canadian and Foreign Seamen, 1863–1899’, 6.
49.
Dennis M. Mulcahy, ‘Fishing and Informal Education in Fair Haven, Placentia Bay 1911–1958', Newfoundland Studies 11, No. 2 (1995), 298.
50.
Mulcahy, ‘Fishing and Informal Education', 300.
51.
David Alexander, ‘Literacy and Economic Development in Nineteenth Century Newfoundland', Acadiensis 10, No. 1, (1980), 8, fn. 13.
52.
Patrick O’Flaherty, Lost Country, The Rise and Fall of Newfoundland, 1843–1933. A Narrative History Focusing on Politics (St. John’s, 2005), 213.
53.
54.
Allan Villier, The Way of a Ship (New York, 1953), 191.
55.
‘Shipmasters/Sail & Steam', MTLC website (2011).
56.
See R. S. Craig, ‘Printed Guides for Master Mariners as a Source of Productivity in Shipping 1750–1914', Journal of Transport History 3, No. 2 (1982), 23–35.
57.
In Irish legend, Fiddler’s Green was a place old sailors travelled to when they wearied of seafaring life.
58.
For an example of a Newfoundland instructor, see: ‘Principal in the Making of Masters and Mates for our Mercantile Marine Service', Newfoundland Quarterly 12, No. 4 (1913), 22.
59.
Pierre Bourdieu and Jean-Claude Passeron, Reproduction in Education, Society and Culture (London, 1977), 176 fn. 44.
60.
George M. Story, ‘Education’s Future in Newfoundland', The Book of Newfoundland, vol. 5 (St. John’s, 1975), 351–354. Story joined Memorial’s English Department in 1954, where he pioneered the study of Newfoundland language, history and culture.
61.
David Alexander, ‘Development and Dependence in Newfoundland', in Atlantic Canada and Confederation: Essays in Canadian Political Economy, compiled by D. Alexander, L.R. Fischer, S.O. Pierson and E.W. Sager, (Toronto, 1983), 25.
62.
Lutz and Neis, eds., Making and Moving Knowledge, 8.
63.
Pam Hall and community collaborators, Towards an Encyclopedia of Local Knowledge website: 
. See also Nicole Power, What do They Call a Fisherman? (St. John’s, 2005). Power studied seafarer’s attempts to secure employment following the moratorium, finding evidence that local workers ‘tended to invert the official hierarchy of knowledge that placed formal ways of knowing on top', and local knowledge was more valuable.
64.
65.
For example, Memorial’s Folklore Archives () is a remarkable resource with collections of oral histories and Newfoundland vocabulary indices among its extensive holdings, and work is progressing on a provincial linguistic atlas. Newfoundland is the only province to record and publicize the location–specific myriad of word variations in The Dictionary of Newfoundland English, which presents readers with definitions and pronunciation guides.