Of Boats on the Collar: How It Was in One Newfoundland Fishing Community.

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

The author is a native of the small fishing community of Elliston, located at the tip of the Bonavista Peninsula on Newfoundland’s northeast coast. Since the village was first settled permanently in the early 1800s, Elliston residents have made their living from the sea, fishing in the abundant cod waters around Cape Bonavista.



This well-written and informative book provides a detailed picture of the settlement patterns of the community, showing where families lived along Elliston’s coastline to fish, and explaining the construction and use of their fishing premises. It is also a history of changing technology in the fishery in Elliston and Newfoundland, illustrating the usage of different boat types over time to reflect changing conditions in the fishery from the hook and line method to the cod trap and from rowboats to motorboats. She also provides information on how fresh codfish was prepared on land before being readied for market as sun-dried, salted codfish.



Murray attended Memorial University of Newfoundland in the 1960s, completing a master’s thesis in 1972 in Newfoundland folklore on the traditional role of women in a fishing community, with emphasis on her hometown. In her university studies, she also investigated the nature of boat-building in Elliston. She conducted extensive written and oral interviews with local boat-builders, including one builder who provided various diagrams to illustrate his explanations and which are to be found in this book. The result is an invaluable preservation of boat-building knowledge that tells much of how fishermen constructed boats to suit both their needs and nearby fishing waters.



For anybody wishing to know what life is like in a Newfoundland fishing community, Of Boats on the Collar is a good introduction. The book has many photographs of fishermen, boats, fishing premises, and residents’ houses, and informative maps of the harbour and community showing where people lived.