Voyage to the Grand Banks: The Saga of Captain Arch Thornhill

Melvin Baker is an archivist and historian at Memorial University of
Newfoundland, and the co-editor of Dictionary of Newfoundland and
Labrador Biography.

Voyage to the Grand Banks features the memoirs of a fishing captain and
deep-sea fisherman whose working life spanned the period from his first
voyage in 1918 to the late 1960s. Thornhill’s memoirs provide a richly
detailed account of the working conditions for fishermen; of the
relationships among ship owner, captain, and crew; and of the economic
and fishing history of Placentia Bay and environs.

Raoul Andersen first became interested in Newfoundland’s offshore
trawler fishery as a graduate student in 1967. His efforts to understand
it led him, in 1975, to Thornhill, retired and a legend among
south-coast fishermen. Andersen conducted several interviews with
Thornhill and persuaded him to write his memoirs, which he completed (up
to 1951) before his death in 1976. Andersen’s keen interest in
Thornhill’s life and the fishery is evident throughout the book. Each
chapter contains an introduction by Andersen, and the generously
annotated text places the memoir within the larger socioeconomic context
of Newfoundland’s history and the international fishery off the Grand
Banks in the first half of the 20th century.

For anyone interested in Newfoundland’s fishing history, this book is
a must.