The small boats of Straitsview

Hopping across his community's last stage, 80-year-old John Hedderson recounted his years in the fishery and the lives that form the history of Straitsview.

He was one of the small boat fishermen who migrated about the Northern Peninsula and Southern Labrador, chasing cod during brief summer months and heading out to the ice, hakapik over his shoulder, for the fall and spring seal hunts.

"I used to know just about everybody in Goose Cove," said Mr. Hedderson of the fraternity of fishermen that populated the coast.

The histories of Straitsview and the small boat fishery are inseparable. But Straitsview, or by its previous moniker, Spelts Cove, only exists today after a long struggle with the French.

Thomas Spelts built a failed sealing factory there in 1776. Seal fat was rendered in large boilers, the remnants of which Mr. Hedderson played with as a child while kicking around the beaches.

"We used to do the same thing, though mind you, we didn't have boilers," said Mr. Hedderson of rendering seal fat with the same technology some 200 years after Thomas Spelts left. "We'd take three or four oil drums and light a fire under them to render the fat. It was hard work."

Once sold, the seal fat would cross the wide Atlantic, bound to fuel the lamps of Europe.

The cove would keep the entrepreneur's name until a post office was erected in the community during the 1960s and the government asked for a new name to avoid confusion with another Spelts Cove in the province. The new name, Straitsview, comes from the view afforded of the Strait of Belle Isle.

After Thomas Spelts and his factory were driven from the cove by the tribulations of French/English colonial relations, the area remained unsettled until Jacob Hedderson arrived with nine sons and a daughter from Conception Bay.

The family settled Noddy Bay, Straitsview and Hay Cove, creating a dynasty of Heddersons in the three neighbouring communities. Spring followed winter as winter had followed fall and the routines of the seasons filled the lives of Heddersons, Blakes and Tuckers during the following decades. Long winters of net mending and boat building ended with the spring seal hunt. The swelled with fish, noddy birds laid their eggs and sheep calved as life and warmth returned to the bay.

The hard work of getting and splitting fish filled summer until the annual chill of fall brought berries and the perpetual anxiety to fill the stores before the land was blanketed in white.

Life continued this way for over 100 years, only the players changed, as generations came into the world with wide-eyed wonder and passed from it among hushed whispers and tears.

But change caught up with Straitsview as it did with all rural Newfoundland when the cod fishery collapsed, emptying the flakes that gave purpose to each cove in the province.

Much that once was is now lost.

The discovery of an ancient Viking settlement in neighbouring L'Anse aux Meadows brought new hope during the 1960s. Tourism became a side industry, allowing many of Jacob Hedderson's descendants to find enough work to stay around the bay.

And if you visit the government wharf in Straitsview during the summer months you'll find a few fishermen ready for a laugh and a few words about the price of fish before they head out in small boats after capelin, mackerel or lump roe.

Young Dillon Hedderson is one of those fishermen.

The 17-year-old resident is one of eight youth under 18-years-old who is the next generation. But he, like the others, might not stay for long.

"There's no big lot of people - not much to do besides go fishing and stuff," said Dillon. "I would stick around and fish - it's the best kind of work - but there's nothing in to it."

(Do you have an idea how your community was named? The Pen wants to hear about the origin of placenames on the Northern Peninsula and in Southern Labrador? Write and tell us about it. E-mail info@northernpen.ca or fax your submission to 709-454-3718).