A Whale For The Killing Read Online Free

had preserved its own identity through a century and more.
    Confederation with Canada put an end to all that. In 1948 Newfoundland was still nominally a self-governing Dominion in the British Empire; but in 1949, goaded and harried by a messianic little man named Joseph Smallwood (some called him satanic), Newfoundland was stampeded into joining Canada. Smallwood won the decisive vote by the slimmest of margins as islanders of all classes fought desperately for the retention of their independence, impoverished as it was. For these dissenters, independence was of greater worth than flash prosperity. Smallwood, on the other hand, regarded independence as an insufferable barrier to progress. Most Newfoundlanders, he once contemptuously said, did not know what was good for them and would have to be hauled, kicking and screaming, into the twentieth century. He was just the man to do the hauling.
    He became the island’s first provincial premier and during the next twenty-two years ran Newfoundland almost single-handedly, according to his personal concept of what was good for it. It was a simple concept: industrialize at all costs. This meant that all the island’s mineral, forest and human resources were to be made available, virtually as gifts, to any foreign industrial entrepreneurs who would agree to exploit them. Smallwood demanded that Newfoundland turn its back on the ocean which had nurtured the islanders through so many centuries.
    “Haul up your boats... burn your fishing gear!” he shouted during one impassioned speech directed at the outport men. “There’ll be three jobs ashore for every one of you. You’ll never have to go fishing again!”
    Many believed him, for he was a persuasive demagogue, and he had the silver tongue.
    One of the first hurdles he had to overcome was to find means of concentrating the “labour resources” (by which term he described the people of the outports) who were dispersed in about thirteen hundred little communities scattered along some five thousand miles of coastline. Smallwood’s solution was “Centralization,” which, translated, meant the forced and calculated merger of the outports so that labour pools could be formed from the transported occupants. The methods used to destroy the small outports were devious, usually deceitful, sometimes brutal... and almost always effective.
    Along the Sou’west Coast the “moving fever,” implanted and cultured by the Smallwood men, soon began to take effect. One by one the outports sickened and died. Even in the Burgeo archipelago, where everyone already lived within a four-mile radius of everyone else, the fever raged with such fury that in a few years all the off-lying communities had moved to Grandy Island.
    Although Smallwood rejected the sea and scorned fishing as a way of life, his was not an absolute rejection. Even in his most sanguine dreams he appears to have realized that there were parts of Newfoundland which could not be turned into facsimiles of Detroit or Hamilton. The Sou’west Coast was such an area. Smallwood’s answer to how best to exploit its labour potential was to heavily subsidize construction of a fish-freezing plant on Short Reach, at the east end of Grandy Island. This plant was “sold” for a ridiculously small sum to the son of a St. John’s merchant prince who found himself in the happy position of being able to pay what he chose for labour while setting his own price for the fish he bought.
    There were some initial difficulties. Not many men could be persuaded to abandon their way of life in order to become wage employees at as little as ten or twenty dollars a week. However, as the people of the neighbouring outports began to converge on the “growth centre” of Burgeo, a surplus labour force developed. It consisted of people who had always hated the very thought of welfare—the dole, they called it—and were willing to work at almost anything, for almost any wage, rather than accept