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nothing could save him. This belief helped to support them in danger, for
its corollary was "Ye'll not die, son, till yer time is come,"1
Canon G. Earle was "lucky" enough to appreciate the fortunate application of this
belief in actual context:
CE: AnOlher time I was caught on Bonavista Bay on a boat, nOI a very big
boat, but we got caught, suddenly. The barometer was going down.
We got caught in a tenible storm and everything was washed :.lway.
Same kind of a storm that a lot of schooners got lost in years ago: and
the captain, he brought us through. He didn't know how because the
next morning when daylight carne, we were in the shelter of an island.
He looked out and we didn't know how we gOl in, but it was all shoals
and rocks, but we got through it and stayed there. and I said to him-you
see there was quite a bit of fatalism. I said to him, "wcrc you
scared at all that you wouldn't make it?" "No," he said, "ifmy timc has
come, I'm going." They were fatalists, they believed that. "But," I
said, "there were seven of us alx>ard." "Yes," he said, "seven; the time
has to come for all seven." If I had known that, I wouldn't have cared
al all, because that's so coincidental, seven people, the time has to
come, that is somewhere back in eternity. You were Ix>rn to die at a
cenain point in a certain way. It just strikes me as crazy still, you
know, but he firmly believed that and 1wouldn't argue with him under
those conditions. (pause] A lot of people assumed that when a ship was
wrecked their time had come and you accepted these tragedies. 2
5.3. "God's will be done"
The border between providentialism and fatalism is thin in Newfoundland, both
encouraging the acceptance of death and even tragedy.3 Father O. recalls a mother's
comment on burying two young men, one her son, the other her son-in-law, who had been
caught in a stom1 while hunting and were found frozen in the ice. He explains:
FO: "Well," she said, "Father, God's will be done, He wanted them, so
...." But they were good living people, you know. Well, they had a
real deep sense of faith, so they knew that death is a pan of life. And, a
fisherman knows that. Fishermen by and large don't know how to
swim and refuse to learn because they'll tell you: "Father, when I hit the
salt water it won't be long, so what's the point?" 'Cause if omebody
feU overlx>ard today outside 51. John's, he wouldn't last five minutes in
the water, eh, it's too cold. He'd die of hypothermia. So, they don't
Ix>ther, they go out in a small boot ten or founcen or fifteen feet long and
they go au( three or four miles, you know with their fishing lines. They
know that if the motor stops, that they may very well not come back, so
I Brown 50.
2MUNFLA 87-1591CI2032.
3K. Goldstein, "Fate" 84-94.