Tales from St Anthony Part XVII –George the Bard, Family Ties and $25 lobster dinners

Hello Mr Lobster, would you like a new home in my belly?

"Do you come from a big family George," I asked Cow Head’s friendliest local bard as I tried to prevent my rickety plastic lawn chair from toppling over.

George had rushed up the road to the Dr Henry N Payne Community Museum where he had been boiling lobsters at the Anglican Church all morning.

As strange as that sounds, it was all part of the 29th annual Cow Head Lobster Festival on the weekend and George was multitasking.

"Oh yes, a big family, seven brothers and a sister," he said as the summer sun slapped me upside the head while the ice box chilled wind kicked me in the shin.

"My daughter asked my father there once, she said, why do they have such big families around these parts and my father said, 'well you know, we’ve got to keep warm in the winter somehow'," George grinned and chuckled to himself.

For about an hour George did what he does best, he spun some yarns regaling us tales of his family and that of the region, stories that would have been told years ago around the camp oven, or in the kitchen to traveling strangers.

This time around it was just four of us huddled together on the lawn of the historical society.

He told us about his fishing days, local folk lore, maritime disasters and the death of modern society.

"When you buy a piece of lumber 2¼ inches and what you actually get is a piece 1¾ and you pay seven times its worth, well things aren’t looking good," he said, "we are in a bad way, a bad way," he concluded of modernity.

The talk of families was poignant as I had only that week bid farewell to my own who had journeyed from Australia to the northernmost point of Newfoundland.

I hadn’t seen them in about 18 months so there was plenty to talk about and for almost two weeks we showed them all that the Northern Peninsular had to offer and by the end, my father had developed a guttural Newfoundland laugh, my sister and mother had been made honorary Newfies after being ‘Screeched in’ and the entire lot had grown scales and gills because of all the cod and seafood they had digested.

A family portrait, not my family portrait but one nonetheless.

On the last night though, my parents in typical dramatic form, brought the whole trip crashing to a low.

At this point I must point out that my parents can be kind of dramatic. If mum has some bad news she usually starts the conversation with, “now don’t panic” or “before you get upset” my dad normally just comes out and speaks his mind.

“It’s been good to see you,” my mum said as she wiped at her face in a bid to make it look like she was scratching an itch that scuttled about her face like a snow crab. She was crying, but she didn’t want me to know. But I did and put an arm around her.

“Don’t make it sound like it’s the last time we’ll see each other,” I said.

“But it might be,” she said, “we might never see you again.”

“Sure you will it’s not as though we are that far away from you. We are only in Newfoundland.”

“You don’t know that,” she muttered, repeating it under her breath, “you don’t know that.”

Moments earlier over a tasty chunk of halibut my dad averted his eyes from my gaze when we had concluded the very same conversation.

“This might be it mate,” he said, “we might not ever see you kids again.”

“Don’t be silly,” I retorted.

“I’m not,” he grunted, jack blunt as always.

And therein lays the difference of generations. While we think it’s nothing to jump on a plane and fly around the globe as if we are packing the campervan and heading to the local beach for a holiday, for my parents it is a big deal, this trip to Newfoundland was a big trip, a once in a lifetime trip if I am to believe them.

I know the locals around St Anthony feel the same. With job opportunities limited, most of the extended family has been forced to move away to Alberta or further afield to make ends meet but each summer they try to make it home and celebrate as a family unit.

As each year rolls on and families expand and contract with numbers, a new baby here is offset by the loss of a grandparent there, many of us wonder if this will be the last time they will see a family member again.

My grief at not seeing my parents again for a while is tempered by the knowledge that I am lucky.

My family is still alive and currently driving around Ireland.

Sláinte.

How much noose would a hangman lose if a hangman loosened noose? Departure T-minus 25 days

Axe murderers are, on a whole, interesting characters, John Pelley is no different.

I came across his name researching each of the towns between Corner Brook and St Anthony, the story of the Cow Head double axe attack piquing my interest and after a quick trawl through the Google-box machine's tangled tentacles of information, I tracked down court documents and at least three different accounts of events surrounding the murder of Joseph Rendall and Richard Cross.

For those worried about the morbidity of my interest to my defence a) I am Australian hence I almost certainly come from convict stock myself and; b) I am a writer who has just found a muse in Pelley for an upcoming piece.

The synopsis of the story is thus (the full story can be found here at the great CanadaGenWeb.org:

Joseph Rendall and Richard Cross were mates, actually they were almost family, Cross's sister, Sarah Cross Singleton was engaged to be married to Rendall.

Pelley was a strange kitten with a shady past, some said he had murdered his wife in Ireland before fleeing across the Atlantic to escape capture. Whether there is any truth to that no-one knows but it adds an extra dimension to the story.

All three men were trappers around the remote Cows Head region. Rendall and Cross worked together and Pelley worked alone and when they all met one fateful day, Pelley was the only survivor, the other two had their heads cleft in twain.

Sarah, who was a maid for ex-Navy officer John Paine, became alarmed when neither men came home so she and Paine travelled 28 miles to find them eventually coming across Pelley who was was camped out at Rendall's lodging.

Pelley denied ever seeing Cross and said Rendall was hunting however the pair found enough evidence to suggest they had met their end in the foulest way possible. A pool of blood next to Cross's shoes were one giveaway, another was Sarah's fiances mittens, which she had knitted, were hanging up to dry. At that time of the year you would have been a fool to brave freezing conditions without mittens, or a head.

Anyway, the maid and her boss fled and came back with a lynch squad who captured Pelley who denied any knowledge of the murders. The lynch mob built a fire and threatened to burn Pelley alive so he recanted his tale and told them where to find the body.

They hauled him back to St John's where he was hanged.

See, what an interesting story. Anyway the story opened up more questions than answers like:

What did your average Newfoundland hangman do when he wasn't readjusting spinal columns, how much did he earn and was his line of work profitable and I even tried to find out the answer to the eternal question: How long is a piece of string?

If you are talking about a hangman's rope it's between 1.2m and 1.8m.

As long as his Mr Hangman's (come on, he deserves an honorific) profession wasn't based on a per head basis, 1809 was profitable with just one customer and as far as I can work out from court documents I traced down, the hooded figure made five pounds and five shillings to end one John Pelley's life.

According to my research five shillings would have purchased 2lbs of refined salt or three tongues or five pounds of marmalade and nine shillings would have got the faceless judicial executioner 10 dozen Portuguese anchovies.

That's a tasty combination right there.

Up until September 5, Mr Hangman had very little to do, he had very little to do the nine preceding years and six years after and while there is an argument hangings were enough discouragement for those who disagreed with those tiny things called judicial norms, it can certainly be argued that the gibbeting of criminals was icing.

The gibbet isn't anything special, just a couple of pieces of timber but it was more of the ornament hanging from it - the dead criminal in chains or a body-shaped iron cage and in some cases when they really wanted to make an example of someone, the authorities would coat the body or its parts in tar.

The man who signed the death warrant was visionary traditionalist, Governor John Holloway, an allegedly compassionate man, and the first Governor of Newfoundland to issue a proclamation against mistreating the native Beothuk people and offering rewards for information about atrocities. He also allowed Newfoundland's first paper to be published.

Swings and round abouts I guess.