Suckled by the sea: A Whitmanesque tribute 
to the spirit of Newfoundland and Labrador

In 1962, as a lowly freshman called to appear before the Education Department to straighten out some piece of class business, I was relieved to meet the acquaintance of Prof. O.K. Crocker from Winterton. Crocker was a veteran teacher and (I believe) school superintendent who had learned the knack of putting you at ease by sizing you up through puffs on his pipe.

	"So your last name is Earle, 
 	 and where are you from?"
	"Carbonear," I replied.
	"Oh, Carbonear. And are you related 
	 to the fish Earles of Carbonear?"
	"The fish Earles." I immediately replied 
	 in the affirmative. 

In late 1999, Fred Earle, the last of the famous brothers who put life into such enterprising firms as The Earle Freighting Service, Earle Brothers Fisheries, and Earle's Protein, passed away at age 74. Fred's older brother, Guy, had died in 1968 at the age of 49. Guy had crammed a lot of life into his years and always reminded the wife of the Moravian missionary in Happy Valley of a modern-day descendant of Francis Drake or Long John Silver.

"All he needed was a parrot on his shoulder," she once told me. At 6' 3" and around 240 lbs., Guy Earle was an imposing figure. Dashing, swashbuckling, earner of a captain's ticket at age 18, and with the nerve to sail a small schooner to Portugal with a cargo of fish through the submarine-infested waters of the Second World War, he was no friend of activist governments. He went on to carve out a thriving relationship with Scandinavians, sealers and others who plied the North Atlantic waters for their livelihood.

Fred was his younger brother. By turns mischievous and dynamic, he was the salesman/promoter of the duo and unforgettable in his own right. A community man to the hilt, Fred also served in the Second World War, was a charter member of the Legion, a member of the Fisheries Association of Newfoundland and Labrador and the Fisheries Council of Canada. He was described in The Carbonear Compass as a "fishing industry pioneer." His passing strikes a chord.

The insightful David Pitt claimed in our English 405 class (Romantic Poets, back in 1965-66) that most Newfoundland youth could easily relate to those scenes in Wordsworth's Prelude where the poet strapped on his "runners" in the clear purple twilight of the Lake District and skated away to his heart's content.

Over the years I have felt the same way about Walt Whitman's "Song For All Seas, All Ships," especially as filtered through the lilting and strident notes of Ralph Vaughn Williams "Sea Symphony," a choral production that strikingly matches Whitman's words to the score. A Long Islander, Whitman knew Atlantic Canada well, and his "chant for the sailors of all nations" doing business in great waters is a screen for his deeper meditation on transcendental spirituality. Under Vaughan Williams' forceful but lyrical score, with enough of the Irish hornpipe in it to give it authenticity, "Song For All Seas, All Ships" comes alive as a "rude recitative." The composer's spirited composition is a paean to a world "of dashing spray, and the winds piping and blowing  "words that anyone looking out from Signal Hill on certain days can understand.

Whitman's fitful world "of waves spreading and spreading far as the eye can see" is peopled by those he considered a special Elect:

	"Of sea-captains young or old, and the mates, and of all intrepid
	 sailors,
	Of the few, very choice, taciturn, whom fate can never surprise
	nor death dismay,
	Picked sparingly without noise by thee, old ocean, chosen by thee…
	Suckled by thee, old husky nurse, embodying thee,
	Indomitable, untamed as thee."

That says it nicely, if romantically, as a handsome tribute to a fading race of master mariners and desperate shipmates dicing with death along the often unforgiving coasts of home. Just as well that Whitman inscribed it so well, for Newfoundland and Labrador has had much more than its share of "unnamed heroes in the ships," anonymous names too numerous for even Memorial's indefatigable Folklore Department to sort out and categorize.

"Sail forth," counselled Whitman in another poem, "steer for the deep waters only," thus neatly echoing Memorial's own bold motto.

Yes, the last of the great "fish Earles" is gone, but the waves of their passing roll majestically into that far greater ocean of a culture of larger-than-life lives that prime-time television could never contain and whose spirit Hollywood could not begin to evoke.

Neil Earle is a 1966-1967 Memorial graduate, a journalist and editor based in Los Angeles who has written articles on Newfoundland and Labrador for a wide range of publications. He can be reached at Neil_Earle@wcg.org.