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humanitarian. Even when the spirits of lost sailors are heard screaming on the shore, their
footsteps heard walking on the cliffs and their naked bodies seen washed ashore,1
helplessness and compassion for kinsmen cry louder in these narratives than the laments of
damned souls.
This lay treatment of the motif, showing feelings of human solidarity lasling beyond
death regardless of individual moral integrity, indeed, reveals a "traditional" elhos owing
lillie if anything 10 Christianity. As Me aughton points Qut, the very belief of the dead
coexisting wilh the living in a physical way departs from Christian dogma. The examples
above show the de,ld making contact with their occupational kinsmen for the benefit of the
latter. While their manifestation under whatever form arouses natuml anxiety, in all cases,
their intervention secures the preservation of the living from the menace of the chaotic
environment which their dead comrades now inhabit. Sea ghosts along with omens,
therefore, can be qualified as liminal agents; as SUCh, they give vital warnings or direct
assistance to the living on a terrain shared by live and dead fishemlen concretely and
symbolically.
With regard to the Newfoundland character, the Canadian writer, Norman Duncan,
who made several visits to the province at the beginnning of this century, noted the contmst
between the fanner's and the fishennan's lot:
Now the wilderness, savage and remote, yields to the strength of men. A
generation strips it . .. a generation tames it and tills it, a generation
passes into the evening shadows as into rest in a garden, and thereafter the
children of that place possess it in peace and plenty, through sllcceeding
genemtions, without end, and shall to the end of the world.... BUI the
sea is tameless: as it was in the beginning, it is now, and shall be--mighty,
savage, dread, infinitely treacherous ... yielding only to that which is
wrested from it, snarling, raging, snatching lives, spoiling souls of their
graces.... The deep is not ... sulx1ued; the toiler of the sea ... is born
to connict, ceaseless and deadly, and, in the dawn of all the days, he puts
fonh anew to wage it. 2
The preceding observations concerning the phantom tradition suggest some qualifications
to this hard fact. While the Newfoundland coastline is sadly reputed for its dangers-­
weather, rocks and, up to the 1840s, the absence of lighthollses--these verb'll traditions
"mark" this hostile "unknown" territory. They sustain Ihe view that one is never left 10
I MU FLA ms 72-025. p. 17 and MUNFLA 6S-005A.
2poolc 92-3 quoting from Norman Duncan. The Way 0/ the Sea (New York: McClure. 1903)
309·10.