Winspiff

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User:Mikereichold | User_talk:Mikereichold 19:29, 3 August 2006 (UTC)

St. John's water dog

Thank you for the wonderful edits on this article. You have explored the subject in much greater depth than other editors. I especially appreciate your emphasis on history. I am a history hobbyist with a genealogical interest in Atlantic Canada. My 5G-grandfather was an Acadian trader who joined the Mi'kmaq tribe to avoid the Acadian expulsion. You may have noticed I took the 1971 color photo of the water dog. I thought I might mention a few observations I made, but have been unable to include in the article because of prohibition on original research.

My father and I spent a week in La Poile while I was on leave from my duties as a naval officer aboard a cruiser off the coast of North Vietnam. In retrospect, I wish I could have spent longer, for it was a last glimpse of a disappearing way of life. My father bred Labrador retrievers in Maine, and bought dogs from Nova Scotia to reduce the inbreeding of American strains. We were offered one of the water dogs by the local fishermen, but didn't have time to make veterinary arrangements for importation to the United States. I had to return to my ship for the next combat deployment, and my father died before I returned to the United States from Vietnam. Water dogs were numerous and ubiquitous in La Poile during our visit. I was stunned to read they were now extinct. Collapse of the Atlantic cod fishery fundamentally changed the economic status of these coastal outports, and I guess the water dogs were among the casualties.

The fishermen we stayed with in La Poile indicated Farley Mowat had visited the outport and taken one of the dogs which I assume might have been his dog, Albert. The Canadian government was offering financial incentives to depopulate the outports at the time, but La Poile seemed determined to prevail. I observed a fishing boat arriving at La Poile with the wall of a house lashed to the mast. They had dismantled an abandoned home in one of the other outports to reassemble it in La Poile. The Canadian government had built a substantial wharf in La Poile where a refrigerator ship arrived weekly to buy the catch of the local fishermen. They paid 5 cents per pound for cod and 7.5 cents per pound for halibut. The village diet emphasized fish and local wild animals like ptarmigan and rabbits with a wild berry they called partridge berries for vitamin C.

La Poile fishermen seemed to routinely take their water dogs aboard their small fishing boats on trips of several days at sea, and I fairly frequently find historical references to dogs as mascots aboard naval vessels as recently as the second world war. It was my impression these fishermen regarded their water dogs as close companions similar to many dog lovers we observe ashore who never travel without their dog. I suggest considering the possibility the water dogs and their ancestors may have been seafarers rather than the land dwellers we have more frequent opportunity to observe. Thewellman (talk) 18:36, 28 April 2020 (UTC)

I have very little knowledge of the Newfoundland breed, but I recall the dogs we purchased in Nova Scotia were larger than typical Labrador retrievers in the United States. My impression of the water dogs of La Poile was that they were smaller than most Labrador retrievers and tended to have a larger chest in proportion to their hindquarters than most Labrador retrievers.

While my US history education emphasized the conflict between France and England, my genealogical study of Atlantic Canada indicates the Acadians were a more cosmopolitan population who truly wished to remain neutral from the European conflict. This article mentions my 5G-grandfather. I had wondered if he might have married a Mi'kmaq, but I found a direct matrilineal descendant whose mitochondrial DNA haplogroup M1b1 was from Timbuktu, so I assume Captain Toney's wife was from a Portuguese fishing family descended from the Moorish occupation of the Iberian peninsula. She would be the only source I have discovered for my very small percentage of sub-Sahara African DNA and larger percentage of Iberian DNA.

Surviving Acadian homes often include architectural features normally associated with shipbuilding, so they were likely a maritime population rather then the English and French farmers associated with the more permanent settlements. One of my 2G-grandmothers was born aboard a ship in 1845 when a few coastal New England families still lived afloat. I observed three-generation families living aboard boats along the southeast Asian coast a half-century ago; but I think that way of life has largely disappeared, so I can only speculate about how the fishermen and their dogs might have lived prior to establishing permanent residences ashore. I suppose the dogs would have come ashore with the fishermen while the boats were undergoing routine maintenance; and, like most sailors, enjoyed the sexual companionship of any dogs they encountered in that port.

From observing the La Poile water dogs and from recollections of my time at sea, it would be very useful to have a dog aboard who could retrieve items which might be blown or washed overboard while the people remained aboard to man the helm and assist the dog getting back aboard. I can only assume that might have been a significant selective factor in the Labrador retriever's legendary proficiency in retrieving from the water.

I recall observing our Labrador retrievers in a couple of situations illustrating the breed's comfort in the water. We would routinely take our dogs to locations where they might swim to retrieve thrown objects. A favored location was a little-used railroad fill across a coastal bay. On one occasion there was a fairly swift tidal current through the bridged opening of the fill, and the thrown object drifted closer than we intended to that rip. As the dog swam back with the object, the current sucked him beneath the surface. We were afraid he would drown, and certain he would panic; but as we looked down through the clear water, the dog never released the object he was retrieving and didn't even break his swimming stroke as he continued paddling until his head again broke the surface and he swam ashore. Another time a pup completely inexperienced with even shallow water became excited as an older dog retrieved a thrown object. The pup jumped into deep water and for a time all we could see were the pup's hind legs moving with the head submerged. We were again concerned the dog might drown, but within a few seconds the pup was instinctively swimming with its head above water. Neither dog demonstrated any evidence of trauma from their experience. Thewellman (talk) 22:26, 28 April 2020 (UTC)

On his return voyage in 1536, Cartier left one of his larger ships' boats at Renewse Harbor, Newfoundland, indicating the outport was already in use as a used boat exchange for fishing vessels needing boats for inshore fishing, but not wanting to transport them across the Atlantic. Renewse is on the southeast corner of Newfoundland, south of Saint Johns. As you may know, the coast of Newfoundland is largely exposed granite bedrock with numerous deep, sheltered bays, but very little soil, and therefore few beaches. It was patently unsuitable for agriculture, and never attracted the type of farming settlements commonly envisioned as the homes of the first settlers. North Atlantic weather is notoriously bad, and Grand Banks fishermen would seek shelter in these virtually uninhabited bays during storms or to repair ships damaged by those storms. There was such a storm while I was in La Poile, and we awoke to find factory fishing ships from a dozen nations had taken shelter in the bay overnight.

The outport fishermen had much smaller boats; and while the Grand Banks had supported their limited fishing efficiency for centuries, the cod population could not survive the efficiency of these fishing factories. As recently as my 1971 visit, the residents of La Poile did not own the land upon which their homes were built. Their homes were simple wooden frame buildings with a wood stove, but no plumbing, supported by wooden posts resting on the exposed granite bedrock. Their toilets resembled pit privies built at the seaward end of the short wharves of their fishing stages. There were no roads in the community, only simple footpaths, for there were no automobiles, horses, or bicycles. I suppose there may have been a few handcarts, although I don't recall seeing any. Every family owned a boat, and that was their livelihood and communication with the rest of the world. Clean water from the inland tundra flowed in cascades over the granite coastal cliffs as individual water supplies. There were scattered groves of scrub conifers inland, but none were large enough to be useful for pulpwood or lumber. The largest trunks formed the posts supporting the small fishing stage wharves, and the smaller limbs and pieces fed their wood stoves.

I suppose that pattern of temporary shelters on undeveloped land was easily tolerated by the First Nations native Americans who enjoyed trading their furs with these fishermen for manufactured goods the fishermen brought from Europe. While Renewse would be a very convenient spot for a boat exchange for European fishermen, I suspect virtually every harbor along Newfoundland's south coast, and probably on Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, would have been used for fish-drying and shelter during storms -- whichever might be closest to the area being fished, or en route to boatyards or First Nations villages visited for trade, repair, or resupply. The time invested in building fishing stages, fish-drying flakes, storage sheds, and shelters might be lost if someone else occupied them before the builders returned, so there would be incentive for someone to over-winter there to maintain the facilities and have them ready for the next season. They may have been protected by First Nation residents where good trading relationships existed, but that does not appear to have been the case with Newfoundland Beothuks. Since these were not self-sufficient communities, but relied upon other sources for food and manufactured goods, there would have been incentive to trade with whoever had the needed supplies regardless of their nationalities, which might explain the neutrality of the Acadians. Much of this in conjecture, of course, for it seems virtually unrecorded by the clergy and government officials who inhabited the major trading ports and agricultural settlements.

My cruiser's PIRAZ patrol station in the shallow Gulf of Tonkin was the historic fishing grounds of Asians variously known as Tanka or Đàn. During good weather, my ship would be surrounded by sailboats crewed by a family usually including a married couple with a few children, and often one or more grandparents and possibly a sibling. That boat was their home. It was more difficult for me to see the places where these boats moored when not at sea, because it was low value real estate distant from the port cities my cruiser visited, and generally viewed as unsafe locations for foreign tourists. I found one spot where the boats were moored closely in a sheltered bay on the Kowloon peninsula adjacent to the railroad connecting Hong Kong to communist China. I suppose the earliest outport fishing and trading families similarly regarded their boat as their real home and the various places where they might find shelter ashore as second homes or hotels. What I observed in La Poile was a transition of people who had become accustomed to living ashore with more reliable sources of groceries and hardware; but the real history of the water dogs was probably afloat rather than ashore. Thewellman (talk) 20:29, 29 April 2020 (UTC)

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