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One look at this book would probably give you a pretty good clue as to what Naboth Winsor's regular work is.

Winsor's other books all seem to be about the Christian Church and Newfoundland, but for this volume, he went back to his family's heritage (the Winsors were a family of famous sealing captains). Few authors could have had a stronger feeling for the subject of their work.

Physically, though, the book looks like some preacher's sermon notes. Printed on standard eight and a half by eleven paper, it is a reprint of a typed manuscript -- and not even a clean manuscript; the printed copy is full of erasures and letters inserted with a ^ mark! Even for a book printed in 1985, it is amazingly poorly done. If there were any real competition, it would be hard to imagine anyone wanting to buy this book.

But there really isn't any competition. The core of the feature is a series of capsule histories of sealing ships from Newfoundland. To the best of my knowledge, there are only two other books which cover this territory, John Feltham's Sealing Steamers and Shannon Ryan's Seals and Sealers. But Feltham's book, although it gives more details on the ships it covers, has only a relatively limited set of ships, and almost no photos; Ryan's book has photos (it's a photo history) but isn't very comprehensive as to ships. So there is much in this book that is not available elsewhere, or must be pieced together from many sources.

Of course, there is also the issue that this is a book about the Newfoundland Seal Hunt -- something that we can afford to look down on today (and I don't like it any better than you do), but that provided Newfoundland with food and fuel and one of its few export goods (seal oil) for many years. So I try to accept the volume for what it is, without condoning any attempts to hunt seals in the present century! Seals and sealing lore truly are foundational to Newfoundland culture. I wish there were better books than this to supply information about that culture. But there aren't. So I appreciate this book for what it is, while acknowledging its many flaws -- its incompleteness; its poor writing quality; and, of course, the horrid, un-typeset, not-even-properly-typed, text.
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waltzmn | Jun 3, 2020 |

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