Silk Sails

by Calvin Evans

  Was women’s ownership real? The evidence suggests a resounding “Yes.” Apart from the few instances cited previously, the records show that fewer than 100 women in the five Atlantic provinces inherited a ship and sold it within one or two years, opting not to carry on the venture. The vast majority of women held on to inherited ships and pursued the business, several for many years. Quite apart from that, women were active in buying ships or even in having ships built for their ventures. I have a copy of the bill of sale dated May 30, 1872, in which Cecilia Brown, widow of Stromness in the County of Orkney, executress to the late William Carpenter Brown, bought 16 shares in the 131-ton brigantine Annie, which had been built in Murray Harbour in Prince Edward Island in 1867. Cecilia paid 331 pounds 15 shillings sterling for the shares and held them for 14 years, her agent selling them on behalf of her estate when she died in February 1886. So women’s ownership was real and is thoroughly documented.

  Other appropriate questions are: How did women buy ships? Where did they get the money? Many women had their own money, especially those who came from well-to-do merchant or planter families, and many of these brought this money into their marriages. The wills of Newfoundland women and the Crown Lands Registry, both of which I have searched, reveal that many women were rich in lands, houses, property and bank accounts. Grace Anderson’s will of 1856 leaves 230 pounds sterling to her niece. The will of Catherine Mahar, widow of St. John’s, in 1884 refers to three dwelling houses, a shop on Water Street, and property on Forest Road, and makes provision for her grand-children’s “maintenance and education” until they marry or become of age. The will of Ellen Dawe in 1885 refers to six houses, which she leaves to various family members, and additional property and annual financial provision for her grandchildren. Mary Ann Voisy, widow, in 1912 left four houses, two of these with two tenements each. And Martha Nichols’ will of 1918 states that “my money in the Bank is intended by my wish when I part this world for my husband and children, my husband to draw right away signed by myself… Also money left me in any other way my wish is for my husband and children to have it.”

  Several women in Newfoundland were sawmill operators and held timber and mining licences, and even licences for a salmon fishery. Mary Winsor, widow of James J. Winsor, merchant of St. John’s and Exploits, Burnt Islands, after her husband’s death in 1889 became a co-partner with David Lewis in the very large sawmill at Dominion Point, Peterview, and continued in this capacity until the mill closed in 1892. That mill had been in existence since 1869 and was the catalyst for the settlement of the entire Botwood area. Thomas Raymond Murphy started a sawmill at Glenwood in 1927, and when he died in 1942 his wife Katherine partnered with Zipporah Steele, the local telegraph operator; they operated the mill until 1966 when they sold it. Prior to her marriage, Katherine had been a bookkeeper at the Crosbie Hotel in St. John’s for 17 years.

  Mrs. Martha Cottman, “a subject of Great Britain,” in 1751 applied for a grant of the North-east Arm of Placentia to carry on a salmon fishery “and the more effectively to complete the same.” The record continues: “…that she desires the property of the grounds from the West Side of the two Islands commonly called Salmon House Island and Crasous Island and for half a mile around the same… and the peaceably and quiet possession of the same without the least hindrance or molestation in the enjoyment thereof.” She was covering all the bases! E. Brown, J.P., awarded Martha Cottman the grant “by virtue of the power and authority to me given by Admiral…Drake.” The widow of Joseph Hornett (probably Ann) held a licence for a salmon fishery on the Campbellton River from at least 1861 to 1875, inheriting it from her husband and passing it on to her son. It is probable that Charlotte Rhodes, widow of Richard Rhodes of St. John’s, who was awarded 29 acres, 3 roods, and 8 perchas of land at Salmon Brook, Northwest Arm, Clode Sound, on January 3, 1898, at a cost of $8.95, was also intending to pursue a salmon fishery.

  Women were also awarded mining licences. Mary J. Verron, widow of Placentia, sometime before 1883, was awarded a licence “to Occupy and also to dig, mine and work, all and every the ores, mines and minerals contained in the Track, Piece and Parcel of land…” On October 12, 1883, Mary transferred by deed one half of her interest in the licence to Daniel J. Henderson, Gentleman, of St. John’s. The record continues: “We grant them all the minerals with the exception of gold…one square mile…South-east Arm of Placentia.” In 1895 they jointly held 45 acres, including Verron’s Island, so obviously Mary had the distinction of naming the island after herself. In 1901 Elizabeth Browning of Rogue’s Harbour was granted mining licences at South-West Arm (Point Leamington) and Seal Bay, Notre Dame Bay. Selina S. Sullivan of Presque, Placentia Bay, “acquired certain mining rights from the estate of C. F. Bennett on the West side of Placentia Bay…she has now applied for a Fee Simple mining grant…at Red Cove and Great Bonia…(and) on Presque Arm, St. Kyran’s.” This was in 1904. Annie Oxley in 1920 held seven mining licences in the Nichollsville, District of St. George, area. She was now applying for a grant in fee simple (given ownership of the land with unrestricted rights of disposition), and it was noted that she had spent more than $6,000 on each site and had “fully complied (with the terms of) the grant.” It is noted further that she was a native of Washington in the County of Durham, England. It appears that she may have been the widow of John J. Oxley. Annie Oxley was also a joint holder of a timber licence, as described later. In 1923 two women, Elizabeth M. Tobin and Mary A. Tobin of St. John’s, “did obtain a 99-year lease for two mining locations between Frost’s Cove, Moreton’s Harbour, and Western Head, North-west Island” and pledged to spend $6,000 on the project.

  And then there were timber licences. On June 22, 1908, Jane Taylor of St. John’s was awarded 136 square miles in several areas around Sandy Lake and near Mount Seemore, Seemore Lake and Birchy Ponds. She sold the licence just six months later, on December 9, 1908, to Frank A. Begent. William H. Taylor of St. John’s was also buying timber licences at the time and may have been a relative of Jane. One of six names involved with a timber licence at Crabb’s River Island from Bay St. George when the licence was sold in 1906 was that of Annie Oxley. The names of John J. Oxley and William H. Taylor appeared on the sale document. Annie Hender was a partner with Samuel J. Foote in a timber licence at St. George’s River in the District of St. George’s on June 18, 1918. The area consisted of 40 square miles, bounded on three sides by the Reid Newfoundland Co. and on the fourth side by the St. George’s River.

  The Crown Lands Registers contain many references to women purchasing property, lands and houses. These were widows, spinsters and married women. One was a shopkeeper, another a seamstress. Two or more women purchased land together. Women purchased with husbands and with men other than their husbands. I was constantly surprised by the number of women noted in these transactions.

  It is not surprising then that when James Evans, merchant of Adam’s Cove, died in 1919, his wife formally announced that she would carry on the business. The following notice appeared in the Evening Telegram on October 18, 1919: “Notice is hereby given that the business carried on during his lifetime by James Evans, late of Adam’s Cove, merchant, deceased, will be continued by his widow, Mary Ann Evans, who will be responsible for all the debts due or to become due in respect of said business and to whom all persons indebted to the said business are required to make immediate payment. Dated October 17, 1919. Eastern Trust Co. Administrators Cst.a. of the Estate of James Evans, deceased.” This was a substantial business in Conception Bay dealing with large cargoes of lumber and coal, as well as a wide range of general merchandise, and there are many references to it in the newspapers of that period.

  And so, back to ships. Some women bought or were given as little as one share in a new ship that was being built, and this share was used to produce a profit for the individual involved. That invested money usually grew, though sometimes there were losses. When I lived in Grand Bank in the mid-1960s I talked several times with Charles Forward, o
ne of the principals involved in the firm of Forward and Tibbo. Mr. Forward was then an elderly man and he liked to talk about the fishing business on the Grand Banks and his successes in concert with his partner Felix Tibbo. Their wives, Mary Florence Forward and Eleanor Tibbo, were also shipowners. Mr. Forward showed me both his and his wife’s personal financial record books. Mary Florence was then deceased. Their records were entirely separate and Mr. Forward described to me in detail how his wife had divided her financial holdings among family members, friends and charities in preparation for her impending death, and how he had already done the same thing in his separate will. I am sure that the same thing was true of Eleanor and Felix Tibbo and countless women in Grand Bank and in the entire Atlantic region.

  We should not underestimate the initiative of women even in poorer families in making and saving money towards the survival of the family. Like many a woman in Newfoundland, my mother had a special container for “egg money,” and all earnings from selling eggs, milk, cream, berries, and special baking went into this container. My mother-in-law loaned such money to young people going away to find work and was always repaid. These small earnings in families often made the difference between survival and poverty. A recently published book, Egg Money Quilts by Eleanor Burns, pays tribute to three of the author’s female forebears and their industry and initiative in using “egg money” to meet family needs.

  Women with money bought ships and shares in ships, but they also became mortgagees, securing loans for others to buy ships and charging interest to make a profit. The fact, for example, that women were sometimes designated “co-partners in trade” emphasizes the reality that women had money, made money and shared in the profits from fishing and trading ventures.

  Women and Property

  It would be appropriate at this point to consider the law and practices that governed women’s inheritance of property, particularly during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. There appears to have been some erosion of rights in practice from the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, which is ironic in view of the fact that it was a British queen, not a king, who ruled through much of the period under study.

  In his thesis, Economic and Social Relations of Production on the North-East Coast of Newfoundland, with special reference to Conception Bay, 1785-1855, Sean Cadigan quotes some examples which seem to reflect a pessimistic view of how women actually fared in cases where they inherited property from their husbands. He writes: “Widows usually inherited little property from their husbands’ estates. Those who did, like Mary Sheppard in 1788, were not allowed to alienate what little women did inherit from the husband’s patriarchal line.” It is true that many husbands’ wills tended to disinherit the wife from the estate in the event that she remarried, but perhaps because of the preeminence of the family as an economic unit and the wish to guarantee that it would remain so in law; also, if the wife remarried, she joined another economic unit which might in some cases have been in competition with her children’s. I would interpret differently some of the examples Cadigan gives because many widows seem to have been adversely affected by contentious, quarrelsome sons and stepsons or sons born of other marriages. Even in Mary Sheppard’s case, she was obligated only to pass on her late husband’s “goods” to her son Adam after she died, but Adam died before she did, so “the watch and feather bed,” which Adam had apparently taken, were to be returned to Mary and “the said Adam’s Heirs to pay the sum of 6 pounds to said Petitioner for the use of what goods he enjoyed during his Life and which belonged to his Mother…”

  The example of Ann Mugford, wife of the deceased Robert Mugford, planter at Port de Grave, was a case in which Ann violated the terms of her husband’s will, which stated that she had inherited his property for her natural life and then it was to pass to their eldest daughter Frances. Before her death in 1813, Ann Mugford had sold the property to John Walsh, and in 1817, Nicholas Newell, a planter in St. John’s, petitioned the court to recover the property since he was married to Frances. The Chief Justice acceded to this request.

  There is no doubt that the rules governing inherited property were patriarchal, but in actual fact, when good relationships existed between the widow and her children (as was usual), the family as an economic unit survived and flourished and the widow often continued to play a leadership role in guiding the family fortunes. In fact, Cadigan pays tribute to women “who could take on important economic roles as estate managers and temporary household heads throughout the Anglo-American world in this period,” and he acknowledges that women like Jane Cook of Harbour Grace acted for other women in leasing property to planters and handling women’s accounts with merchants and that “women managed property and accounts left to them by their husbands.”

  Cadigan builds a very strong case for the way in which “…Newfoundland households integrated women’s work into commodity production…” as contrasted with Upper Canada. From the very earliest times up to the 1950s, as long as the salt-fish trade existed (i.e., the preparation of salted, dried codfish for foreign markets), women and men worked together as co-producers in family units. Every other activity in the fisherman’s household was subordinate to the salt-fish activity. Women had to be prepared to set aside everything else they were doing when the fish arrived, for they were acknowledged to be the experts in salting and curing the fish to meet the strict demands of the market.

  Nowhere is this specific activity better described than in Hilda Chaulk Murray’s More than Fifty Percent: Woman’s Life in a Newfoundland Outport, 1900-1950. She writes: “In Elliston, in the period prior to 1950, the women were full participants with their menfolk in wresting a living from the sea and land, and were directly involved with all the economic, as well as social activities, in the community. The role of the fisherman’s wife was completely intertwined with that of her husband.” Women participated fully in every aspect of the fishing operation except in the catching of fish. Even the making of sails for the boats was a cooperative venture: the men cut the sails, the women sewed them, and the men roped them. When accounts were settled up in the fall, the money was brought home to the woman who “handled the cash and managed the day to day running of the household.”

  The routine that Murray described for Elliston was not entirely uniform throughout Newfoundland. For example, when the fish for the large business firms was brought into communities like Grand Bank it was transported by horse and cart to one of the beaches and placed in large piles where the curing process became the exclusive responsibility of the “beach women.” They worked in teams with a boss woman in charge of nine others. Their distinctive attire was characterized by white aprons and white sunbonnets. The fish was spread each day for a month or more until it was dry, then graded, then moved into sheds for inspection by the culler. It must have been one of the striking early examples of assembly-line production.

  The St. John’s newspaper Free Press of November 25, 1913, gives a wonderful example of the cooperation between husband and wife in a fishing venture: “Patrick Tobin of Gray Islands holds the record as an individual fisherman in Newfoundland for having made the biggest bill in the shortest season. A mercantile firm paid him $1,050 for his season’s work – July 7 to September 15 – he landed 160 quintals of cod, fishing ‘cross-handed.’ The fish was split and cured by Tobin’s wife and self, who also made the oil ready for market. This is the largest individual bill to be made by any fisherman in Newfoundland.” Though Tobin fished “cross-handed,” i.e., alone, his wife on shore split and cured all the fish and made the oil ready for market. These were important skills which ensured the family’s survival. There is no mention of children helping with the work, but the example serves to confirm the conclusions of other similar sources.

  There are, as well, much earlier examples of women’s involvement in the fishery in a hands-on manner. Noel H. Bowen, writing in 1855, decries the lack of women along the Labrador coast, citing an 1852 report that there were 364 men settled on the coast
and only 62 women, suggesting that the situation should be remedied by emigration or some other plan, and arguing that “the more the coast is settled the better are its natural resources developed.” He writes further: “The fisherman’s wants are few, and he can easily support a wife; moreover she could assist him in his calling as much as one of his own sex, and it often happens that the larger a fisherman’s family becomes, the better are his prospects…” But Ephraim Tucker, an American who had spent five months on a voyage to the Labrador in 1838, actually saw women at work in the fishery: “But they engage in the hard and laborious toils of fishing with as much zeal and activity as the males. When the salmon and trout fishing commences, the women and children employ themselves assiduously in the sport, and are often out night and day while the season of this fishery lasts. At the fish stands, while the cod fishery is in the full tide of operation, the women are seen among the most constant and dextrous in dressing the fish, thrown up by the fishermen. Some of these females will dress two or three thousand fish in a single day…” While it may have been “sport” to Tucker, who was at the Labrador for his health, it was mighty hard work for women, men and children. What is most interesting about his words, however, is the confirmation that women were the experts at handling, curing and “dressing” the fish.

  The merchants of Newfoundland who used (and preferred) the barter or credit or “truck” system found it in their interests to maintain the patriarchal nature of the fishing business. They preferred to deal directly with the male head of the household. They were at least consistent in this, for in cases where they sued the family, it was always one man or a small group of two or three men, but never a woman. Since the headquarters for the settling of accounts was not always in the same community where the fisherman lived, the merchant seldom had to deal with aggrieved women. In at least one case in which a merchant had to deal with a woman, she was victorious. Mary Reed in 1835 worked for a planter, Thomas Davis, who claimed not to have sufficient money to pay her. When Reed charged that Charles Nuttall, a merchant at Harbour Grace, had received Davis’ fish and oil from the voyage, Nuttall was ordered by the court to pay Reed both her wages and damages.