Free The Doryman by Maura Hanrahan

Butlers, Drakes, Smiths, and Mannings. They had winter houses on the Burin Peninsula where they could better access wood and hunt rabbits and partridge from December through to March. Eventually some of them began to stay on the peninsula year-round, but others returned to prosecute the summer fishery from Oderin. Then Spurrier descended into bankruptcy. Injecting a bit of glamour into Oderin life, local rumour had it that Spurrier’s wife frittered his fortune away at the gaming tables in England.
    Spurrier’s place was taken by an Irish-born merchant called James Furlong, who set up shop with another man called Hamilton. Irish settlers followed Furlong to the island: the Murphys, Powers, and Clarkes, people who had had enough of being itinerant or tenant farmers for English landlords, others who’d been driven off the land, a few in search of adventure.
    Late in the nineteenth century, a young Mr. Edward P. Morris, the brother of the local priest, came to Oderin to take up his first teaching position. Later, he would become prime minister of Newfoundland, something in which the island people would take pride.
    Politics was not new to Oderin, though. Richard McGrath was elected the Member of the House of Assembly for Placentia and St. Mary’s Bays in 1861. More than twenty years later, his son James F. was elected to the position. Oderin became the hub of the bay and certainly its most important island. The way officer was stationed at Oderin, so that letters might be sent and received. So was the police constable, and the customs officer. Early in the twentieth century, Dr. McCullough came to the island; he was the only doctor on the Placentia Bay islands.
    In those days, the sea was a highway and Oderin was one of its main stops. Every fall, huge shipments of fishing gear – nets, dories, navigation equipment for schooners – came in from the St. John’s firms of Job and Bowrings, who bought the island’s renowned fish. Men carried crates of supplies from ships to wharves and fishing premises: tea, molasses, sugar, pork, and flour. Local schooners went to Prince Edward Island in Canada to buy beef and farm produce that they sold all along the South Coast, stopping first in Oderin where they knew there was a good market for it. Spirits, tobacco, and rubber boots were brought in from St. Pierre. Gear for the five lobster factories on the island was landed. This was a prosperous place.
    At the centre of Oderin society was Lady Day, the annual devotion to the Blessed Virgin Mary and garden party held in August. On the morning of Lady Day, the harbours of Oderin were chockablock with dories, western boats, and tern schooners. People came from all over the bay, whether they were Catholic, Church of England, or Methodist, to celebrate and see each other in the middle of the summer fishery. There was food, games, and dancing, and for a young woman, the chance to meet the man who would become her husband.

Chapter Fifteen
    A ngela Manning was a native of Oderin, the great granddaughter of William Manning who had come to the little island from Bristol, England with his wife Margaret in the early 1800s. She had just returned to Newfoundland from New York, where she had worked as a maid for four years. She wanted to see something of the world before she settled down and got married back home, as she always knew she would and as she wanted to. Lots of the young women from Oderin were going into service in New York and Boston then. They used the connections their fishermen brothers and uncles had from fishing out of Gloucester, Massachusetts to get good situations. It was more exciting than going to St. John’s, as so many of the unmarried women of the South Coast did.
    In New York, Angela worked for the Spurrells who lived in a Brooklyn brownstone. They were a family of English descent whose father had spent some time in Newfoundland with a fishing enterprise in Trinity Bay. The Spurrells still had