This article was originally published at Acadiensis.
The Labrador floater fishery was a migratory fishery that lasted roughly 200 years, from ca. 1750-1950, in which schooners sailed from the island of Newfoundland to the coast of Labrador to fish for the summer season. Ships crews stayed aboard their vessels for the duration of the fishing season, and were generally composed of 5-10 men, and often included a woman or girl (sometimes as young as 11 or 12 years of age) hired on as cook (and general labourer when required). Very little has been written about these women and girls, and so I am conducting archival research in hopes of storying the traces of their lives.
As I engage with the archive of the Labrador floater fishery it becomes apparent that attempts by colonial authorities to prohibit women and girls’ participation in this important, yet unruly, seasonal enterprise centered around anxieties over their moral corruption.
While there is nothing novel in acknowledging the crucial role played by gadus morhua in Newfoundland and Labrador’s colonial history, there is some compelling insight to be gleaned from thinking through the multispecies entanglements of Atlantic cod and settler women in this history. As I engage with the archive of the Labrador floater fishery it becomes apparent that attempts by colonial authorities to prohibit women and girls’ participation in this important, yet unruly, seasonal enterprise centered around anxieties over their moral corruption. Such anxieties reflect what Antoinette Burton and Renisa Mawani discuss as imperial “concerns about […] forms of affection that potentially threatened prevailing racial orders” (10) which were part of larger taxonomic projects delineating human/non-human hierarchies.
Attempts to control the interactions between male and female crew members existed alongside persistent attempts to claim and control access to Atlantic cod in the waters off Newfoundland and Labrador. If, as Burton and Mawani assert, “How we talk about the animalia of empire […] is crucial to how we narrate the force of imperial power” (1), then examining the interwoven histories of settler women and Atlantic cod will offer a nuanced account of how such power attempted to control and coerce disruptive human and non-human animals whose ecological destinies were inextricably linked in this colonial project.
Atlantic cod have the twin disadvantages of being supremely delicious and supremely ugly. From a conservation perspective, this means that until the horrifying realities of overfishing were made public and a moratorium imposed on their local catch in 1992, they had been largely ignored in international conservation circles. Now the poster fish for how humans decimate the ocean environment through hubris and mismanagement, the humble Atlantic cod is still not what is known as a “charismatic species,” an animal that due to its particular traits (perhaps excessive cuteness like the baby seal, or impressive size like the polar bear) tends to bolster interest in, and donations towards, their preservation.
While cod have never really been that likeable, in the colonial history of Newfoundland and Labrador, they are often discussed as the very raison d’être of the place.
While cod have never really been that likeable, in the colonial history of Newfoundland and Labrador, they are often discussed as the very raison d’être of the place. George Rose, is typical in this regard, in his study Cod: Ecological History of the North Atlantic Fisheries, Rose writes that “There are places and species that have become inextricably linked in human history and in the human mind have taken on mythic proportions. […] somehow the animal comes to symbolize and define the place. […] there is no stronger definition, no stronger attachment or symbolism, than Newfoundland and Labrador with the Atlantic cod.” (13). He goes on to say that “the full history of Newfoundland and Labrador has been written through the fisheries in one way or another, and it is impossible to separate the two into neat compartments” (14). Of course, I disagree that the “full history” of NL has been written through the fisheries, but it can appear that way, which makes it imperative to unsettle that appearance by reading for the gaps in the historical record and using innovative conceptual tools in historical analyses.
It is conventionally understood that Europeans came to the island of Newfoundland initially not to settle, but simply to plunder the embarrassment of riches that was the cod stock on its shores. The cod fish were said to be so plentiful that one could simply dip a net into the ocean and come up with it full. Fish were rumored to practically stall the passage of ships with their abundance.
European settler women, by contrast, were thin on the ground. In fact, their presence was actively restricted so as to discourage permanent settlement in this migratory fishing station throughout the 16th and 17th centuries. As debate in England raged over whether Newfoundland should have a permanent government, and thus develop into a more legitimately settled colony, one of the key issues was women. Historian Gordon Handcock found that those advocating for a continued migratory situation in 1670 railed against settlers who used “their womenfolk to debauch ignorant mariners” in efforts to make them stay, while those attempting to quell this disturbance, were confident that “so longe as there comes noe women they are not fixed” (32).
Thus, the push and pull factors of colonialism largely depended upon women and fish. From the very beginnings of this erstwhile colony, they were entangled in a complex net of boundary making enterprises that created the conditions of their lives and deaths. How this net was knitted together is what occupies my mind right now because as Donna Haraway points out in her treatise on multispecies entanglements, Staying with the Trouble, “it matters what knots knot knots” (12).
One of the crucial knots is settler colonialism. Working-class settler women occupy a paradoxical place in Newfoundland’s particular version of settler colonialism and its history. As the fishing station grew into a colony, women were crucial helpmeets in fishing operations and workers in their own right, they were simultaneously privileged by their association with settler men, as European mothers of the colony, and oppressed by its Christian, patriarchal, classist logic which attempted to suppress women’s public movements, and ability to work for wages, while couched in language of ‘protection’.
Such “tense and tender ties” of empire, as Ann Laura Stoler calls them, are visible in the moral panics over the participation of women in the floater fishery in the late nineteenth-early twentieth century. I discuss these moral panics and archival evidence of working women’s realities in the chapter “Salt Fish Maids: Untold Stories of Gender and Sex in the Labrador Floater Fishery.”
I picture the scholar trying to hold the slippery meanings of feminine experience in place much like a person trying to pin down a slippery cod fish on a splitting table.
Through this research I have come to see connections between the lives of fish and women in NL history as inevitable, if surprising. Joan W. Scott writes about the uses of gender as a category of historical analysis in ways that help me articulate these connections. Scott says that “It is precisely the futile struggle to hold meaning in place that makes gender such an interesting historical object, one that includes not only regimes of truth about sex and sexuality, but also the fantasies and transgressions that refuse to be regulated or categorized” (5). I picture the scholar trying to hold the slippery meanings of feminine experience in place much like a person trying to pin down a slippery cod fish on a splitting table. To “succeed” in either of these endeavors is to kill the object, not to free it. So, troubling women and cod together is not intended to fix their meanings in place, but to begin thinking about the knots that entangle them in settler colonial history, and the many ways that women and fish might escape a net.
Feature Image: Women putting washing to dry on fish flakes, laundry also hanging to dry in schooner’s rigging. Venison Island, Labrador. 1885. Credit: H.N. Robinson/Library and Archives Canada/PA-103076.
References
Burton, Antoinette, and Mawani, Renisa. “Introduction: Animals, Disruptive Imperial Histories, and the Bestiary Form.” Animalia: An Anti-Imperial Bestiary for Our Times. Duke UP, 2020. 1-19.
Hallett, Vicki. “Salt Fish Maids: Untold Stories of Gender and Sex in the Labrador Floater Fishery.” Gender at Sea: Yearbook of Women’s History/Jaarboek Voor Vrouwen-Geschiedenis 41. Hilversum, 2022. 145-158.
Handcock, Gordon W. Soe longe and there comes noe women: Origins of English Settlement in Newfoundland. Breakwater Books, 1986.
Haraway, Donna J. Staying with the Trouble: Making kin in the Chthulucene. Duke UP, 2016.
Rose, George A. Cod: The Ecological History of the North Atlantic Fisheries. Breakwater Books, 2007.
Scott, Joan W. The Fantasy of Feminist History. Duke UP, 2011.
Stoler, Ann Laura. “Tense and Tender Ties: The Politics of Comparison in North American History and (Post) Colonial Studies.” Journal of American History 88, 3 (2001): 829-65.
Vicki S. Hallett