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Liens personnels, réseaux, solidarités en France et dans les îles Britanniques (xie-xxe siècle)

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Bates David
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Gazeau Véronique

Partie I. Liens de parenté et solidarités familiales

Storytelling and networking in a Breton fishing village (1879-1885)

David M. Hopkin

Résumé

L’auteur nous propose d’entrer dans la vie d’un village de pêcheurs bretons des débuts de la Troisième République – « l’Île » de Saint-Cast, non loin de Saint-Malo – en confrontant les approches anthropologique, sociologique et historique, grâce à l’étude conjointe des travaux du folkloriste Paul Sébillot et des dossiers de l’Inscription maritime.

Au travers des récits des terre-neuvas, nous voyons se constituer les équipages, fonctionner les hiérarchies et les solidarités et se nouer les conflits en pleine mer. Les histoires racontées par les marins distillent l’essence de l’ethos maritime, produisent le modèle du « vieux loup de mer » et contribuent, elles aussi, à forger les solidarités à bord comme à terre.

Texte intégral

  • 1 The research for this paper was made possible by a Royal Society of Edinburgh/Caledonian Research F (...)
  • 2 R. Estienne and P. Henwood, “Archives et patrimoine maritime: l’exemple de la Bretagne”, Le Chasse- (...)

1This research might be termed an exercise in historical participant observation.1 It looks at the life of a Breton fishing community in the early Third Republic through the eyes of a particularly diligent observer, the folklorist Paul Sébillot. It is fundamentally concerned with the personal relationships, networks and collective identities that allowed that community to function. Participant observation is not, of course, a methodology usually associated with history, but rather it is the preserve of anthropologists and sociologists. Reliant as historians are on written sources we cannot even pretend to immerse ourselves in the entire life of a community. We know that archives are produced for particular ends, and ignore or distort those aspects of social life that do not interest their creators (tax-collectors, clergymen, magistrates...). However, in practice anthropologists and sociologists run into similar problems when engaged in participant observation in contemporary societies. Not only do they arrive in the community with their own preconceptions, but they also have to set up their own network of contacts, and to do so often rely on introductions from some sort of sponsor in the community (frequently their host as well). The danger is that the observer therefore replicates his or her sponsor’s understanding of the workings in the community, and will neglect or misconstrue other relationships. There is no real solution to these methodological conundrums, although one can try and avoid the more obvious pitfalls by comparing the participant’s observations with another set of sources, a process sometimes called ‘triangulation’. In this case I will be comparing Sébillot’s observations with the records of the Inscription maritime. This bureaucracy, set up by Colbert in 1668, kept a register on every man who made a living from the sea, and every vessel on which he sailed. Its purpose was to ensure a supply of seamen and ships for the state, but as a consequence it is possible to say where every French fisherman or sailor was for almost every day of his active life.2 Thus Sébillot’s network of informants can be shadowed through the ledgers of the Inscription maritime.

  • 3 There is, as yet, no full biography of Sébillot. The most detailed account of his transformation fr (...)
  • 4 P. Sébillot, Contes populaires de la Haute-Bretagne II: contes des paysans et des pêcheurs, 2nd ed. (...)
  • 5 I have counted 365 tales collected in Saint-Cast, scattered through thirty-three separate publicati (...)
  • 6 Despite Sébillot’s own attempt to provide a guide to posterity (Autobibliographie, Libraire de l’ar (...)

2From 1879 to 1882 Paul Sébillot lived for at least part of the year in the village of Saint-Cast on the north coast of Brittany, not far from Saint-Malo. More specifically he stayed in the hamlet above its little fishing port known as the Isle of Saint Cast (not in fact an island but a peninsular). This was familiar territory to him: he had been born in the nearby market town of Matignon where his father was the doctor. Like his father, who had been Matignon’s mayor during the Second Republic, Paul was a committed Republican and a political journalist (he married the sister of the deputy Yves Guyot). But he came to Saint-Cast not to further his political career but to paint the lowtide landscapes for which he had established a certain reputation. He was also keen to follow up a longstanding interest in folktales, with the immediate aim of providing material for an illustrated collection planned by one of his artist friends, Léonce Petit.3 So he asked his landlady, Rose Renault, whether she knew any stories. Bom in 1819, Rose Renault had lived her entire life on the Isle. She was elderly, rooted in her community, and illiterate, she therefore fitted the stereotype of the storyteller. According to Sébillot she was also intelligent, lively, generous, and had an excellent memory. Over the following four summers she would provide Sébillot with forty narratives, and she would also introduce him to numerous other narrators, as well as collecting tales on his behalf.4 He would end up with informants in more than a quarter of the Isle’s 101 households. And thus, in four years, Sébillot would collect over 350 narratives from sixty-one named individuals.5 (The commune of Saint-Cast numbered 1592 inhabitants in 1881, but Sébillot seldom ventured among the agricultural population, he only concerned himself with the fishing hamlets around the port such as the Isle, Les Rots, La Fresnaye, La Ville Norme and La Ville Orien). The information gathered during these summers would form the basis for at least a dozen books, and would help establish Sébillot as France’s leading folklorist during the discipline’s pioneering years before the First World War.6

  • 7 Numerous British studies have made this point, but in order not to wander too far from Saint-Cast, (...)
  • 8 Information on the Piron family and the other inhabitants of Saint-Cast is drawn from the état civi (...)

3Every one of the 101 households on the Isle of Saint-Cast drew part of its living from the sea. Rose had briefly kept a shop, but otherwise she was no exception: she was the daughter of a fisherman, her brothers were fishermen, and in 1846 she had married a fisherman, her next-door-neighbour Étienne Piron. They had three sons together: Étienne (it was the absolute rule in maritime families for the eldest son to take his father’s rather than his godfather’s name), Victor and Jean-Marie, all fishermen (a fourth son, Pierre, died in childhood). There was a strong matriarchal cast to social life on the Isle, as is often the case with maritime communities.7 It was, for instance, markedly matrilocal; Étienne Piron followed the custom and moved into his wife’s home after their wedding. And so it comes as no surprise that most of Rose’s introductions were to women. These included relatives such as Rose Piron, her sister-in-law (50 years old and working as an agricultural day-labourer), neighbours such as the fisherman’s widow Scholastique Plessier together with her daughters Élisa and Anne-Marie, and shopkeepers such as ninety-year-old Marie Chehu who sold cider, and her daughter Anne Jagu, both fishermen’s widows. Widows headed a third of all households on the Isle; the people of Saint-Cast paid a high price for the livings they drew from the sea.8

  • 9 M. Warner, From the Beast to the Blonde: on Fairytales and their Tellers, Chatto & Windus, London, (...)
  • 10 P. Sébillot, Contes populaires de la Haute-Bretagne II: contes des paysans et des pêcheurs, 2nd ed. (...)

4So far, therefore, the contributors to Sébillot’s collection conform to the Mother Goose ideal of storytellers in western literature from Apuleius onwards: mostly women, mostly old, and mostly poor.9 Sébillot helped reinforce the stereotype: like the Grimms and so many other nineteenth-century folklorists, he had been introduced to folktales by his childhood nurse. He therefore expected narrators to resemble her model. And Rose Renault provided narrators in this mould. In his introduction to the second volume of Contes populaies de la Haute-Bretagne, published in 1881, Sébillot wrote of his informants, “J’ai eu la bonne fortune d’en trouver d’excellents, surtout parmi les femmes qui, en Haute-Bretagne comme ailleurs, conservent mieux que les hommes le dépôt des vieilles traditions.”10 However, by the time Sébillot left Saint-Cast the situation would be reversed and Sébillot’s most numerous and most fluent narrators would be young men, usually apprentice sailors or cabin-boys. Sébillot would be one of the first folklorists to appreciate that storytelling was as much the art of migrant male workers such as sailors as it was the art of the feminine domestic fireside. Hence the third volume of the Contes populaires de la Haute-Bretagne was subtitled Contes des marins. Intertwined with the largely female circle of contacts Sébillot established through Rose Renault was another network of male work relationships. And it was in this milieu that the art of storytelling flourished precisely because those relationships, vital to the community’s survival, were reflected, discussed, criticised and reinforced through the medium of stories.

  • 11 See, for example, D. Besançon’s introduction to P. Sébillot, Contes populaires de la Haute-Bretagne (...)
  • 12 SHM Brest, Inscription maritime, quartier de Saint-Brieuc, syndicat de Plévenon: matricule des insc (...)
  • 13 AD Ille-et-Vilaine, Inscription maritime, rôles d’embarquement Saint-Malo, 1879, 4 S 719-23.
  • 14 P. Sébillot, Contes des provinces de France, Leopold Cerf, Paris, 1884, p. 105: Le navire des fées (...)

5So where were the men? They were so absent from Sébillot’s first volume that later generations of folklorists have described Rose Renault as a widow.11 She was not, Étienne Piron was still very much alive, and telling stories, though not in same quantity as his wife. Like most of the male population of the Isle he had spent the larger part of his working life on the Grand Banks of Newfoundland fishing for cod, with winter months spent inshore fishing around Saint-Cast. In 1868, after thirty “campaigns” (as the eight-month voyages to the Grand Banks were called), he drew his pension-the recompense that gens de mer received for their services to the state-and spent his days fishing around Saint-Cast on his own boat the Trois Frères. This boat was named after his three sons as was common practice.12 But the children themselves had bigger ambitions. In 1879, two of the brothers were captains of small (100 tonnes) cod-fishing brigs registered in Saint-Malo but on campaign on the Grand Banks. Étienne Piron commanded the Vedette, Victor Piron commanded the Augusta.13 The third brother, Jean-Marie, would be promoted to captain the following year. This represented a considerable social advancement for the family: both parents were illiterate and from noticeably poor backgrounds. Their sons’ success must have represented years of sacrifice and commitment on all their parts. And the sacrifice was not over, for although they had their certificates none of them had yet found a ship-owner to give them regular employment. It was vital for young captains to develop good relations with a ship-owner, often cemented by marriage with their daughters. The issue weighed on their minds and not surprisingly the issue surfaced in their stories (for both Étienne and Jean-Marie were storytellers). Étienne’s tales start “Il était une fois à Saint-Cast un jeune capitaine… bien qu’il fût connu pour un bon marin, il ne trouvait pas de commandement”, while Jean-Marie actually mentioned Monsieur Thomazeau, a well-known Malouin ship-owner, by name in one of his tales.14 In 1881, Étienne Piron tried to remedy this insecurity by buying his own small cargo ship, the Agathe, a venture that would end in disaster for the whole family... but that is another story. In 1879, they all had bright futures to look forward to: it was Étienne’s fifth command, Victor’s second, but both had new ships from new ship-owners. Both set sail in the first week of March: Victor did not return until the end of October; Étienne, probably due to damage to the ship, limped into port on the 19th December. So, like most of the male population of the Isle, the younger Pirons were absent during Sébillot’s summer visit, but nonetheless one can detect traces of their presence.

  • 15 P. Sébillot, “Contes de la Haute-Bretagne”, Revue des traditions populaires, 11 (1896), p. 516-18: (...)

6The first trace is Sébillot’s own initial contact with the Piron-Renault family. Sébillot apparently noted one of Étienne Piron’s tales in 1877, two years before he went to stay at Saint-Cast.15 If this date is not simply a misprint, the connection was probably made through Sébillot’s brother Charles, the mayor of Matignon and the nearest notary to Saint-Cast. Ship-captains were his regular winter customers when they came to draw up contracts with their crew for the following year’s campaign to Newfoundland. Another potential connection was through Sébillot’s schoolfriend Auguste Lemoine who was related to the owner of Etienne Piron’s ship the Vedette.

  • 16 J.-M. Grossetête, La Grande pêche de Terre-Neuve et d’Islande, Presses de Bretagne, Rennes, 1921, p (...)
  • 17 P. Sebillot, “Sobriquets et superstitions militaires”, Revue des traditions populaires, 2 (1887), p (...)

7More significantly, one can follow the networks mobilised by the brothers to recruit their crews through the introductions effected by Rose among her female friends and neighbours on Sébillot’s behalf. It was usually not the ship-owner’s but the captain’s task to hire the crew, and it was a difficult one.16 There was strong competition for experienced hands (as long as they were not yet ruined by the work or the alcoholism associated with it); captains were sometimes forced to search along the entire littoral from Paimpol to Fécamp to fill their complement. Consequently Câtins could be found on board cod-ships sailing from all the northern ports: the Piron brothers themselves had mostly sailed out of Granville in Normandy before 1879. The crews of the Pirons’ two ships were fairly homogeneous compared with others sailing out of Saint-Malo that year: there were, for example, no Breton speakers among them, nor any Normans, indeed only two sailors came from east of the Rance. But even so the crews were drawn from a fair number of villages and hamlets within a ten-kilometre radius of Saint-Cast. Yet if we look at the ships’ muster-rolls we can see that in both cases the key personnel came from the Isle. Conditions on the banks were rude in the extreme, discipline was consequently a major problem, and so every captain needed to have around him some men he could rely on. “Le camarade de plat passe avant le camarade de bord” as the saying went in Saint-Cast.17 In the case of Étienne’s ship these men included the first mate François Marquer and the fishing master Joseph Sicot, and it is also noticeable that among the dory skippers (because fishing for cod was not conducted on the ship itself but in two-man skiffs called dories that operated up to five kilometres away from the ship) those from Saint-Cast got paid more than skippers from other localities. In the case of Victor’s ship, his first mate was his brother, and the fishing-master Joseph Durand. Two of the dory skippers were from Saint-Cast, whereas all the junior posts were taken by novices from Matignon and Plévenon. While the Câtins were professional sailors, those from more inland villages were likely to be peasants, or the sons of peasants, hoping to earn in a couple of voyages enough capital to pay off debts or acquire land (a dream rarely realised).

  • 18 Sébillot gave quite a lot of detail about his informants, at least compared to other folklorists, y (...)

8Several of these key personnel were related to Sébillot’s informants. François Marquer was probably the son of the narrator Jeanne Macé, and possibly the father of François Marquer, cabin-boy, Sébillot’s most prolific informant.18 Joseph Sicot was married to Marie Renault, one of Sébillot’s earliest contacts. Joseph Durand was the son of another early contact, Rachel Quéma, and the brother of third, Adèle Durand. Francois Depays, one of the dory skippers, would become an informant himself, as would his father, his mother and two of his brothers. Sébillot tells us that his informants came to his lodgings to visit Rose, and that he recorded stories during the convivial discussions that followed. It is easy to understand why these relatives would be regular visitors to the Piron home, as they shared any letters that made it back across the Atlantic, sought news from the ship-owner, traded information about other ships and the profitability of the campaign, and enquired about future engagements. Motivated no doubt by concern for the conditions of their loved-ones, the population of the littoral appears to have been very knowledgeable about the respective qualities of ships and their officers. But a sailor’s family also had a direct interest in these matters because half of the advances agreed with the owner (often the equivalent of several months’ wages) would be paid directly into their hands, after the ship had sailed.

  • 19 SHM Brest, Inscription maritime, quartier de Saint-Brieuc, rôles des désarmements, 1881, 4 P 7 333. (...)
  • 20 Prior to its loss, the Quatre Frères had been captained by at least two Câtins, Charles Hesry and L (...)
  • 21 P. Amiot, Histoire de Saint-Cast-Le-Guildo des origines à nos jours, Pierre Amiot, Carrien, 1990, p (...)

9The muster rolls also suggest some of the networks of relationships that helped the community to function. Family was one such network: Victor Piron engaged his brother Jean-Marie as his first mate, thus once one brother was established as captain he helped his siblings up the ladder. However, the Pirons apart, family connections are not that obvious in each ship’s compliment. They do exist – Pierre Depays’s wife, for example, was the cousin of Joseph Beaudouard – but there are no other brothers, or fathers and sons, or even cousins serving on board. Given how tight knit was the maritime population of Saint-Cast the absence of close family ties on board is surprising, and it is very different from the pattern on the small inshore boats operating out of the harbour of Saint-Cast. On Étienne Piron’s boat the Trois Freres, for instance, one would regularly find the three brothers themselves when back from Newfoundland for the winter, together with their god-parent Victor Dameron, also a captain.19 However, if we put the two muster-lists for the two ships together we can see that family ties were used by the Pirons in their recruiting: there are two Dupail brothers, two Boulard brothers and two Veillet brothers. In each case the elder joined Victor’s crew and the younger Étienne’s. Splitting each pair of brothers was a necessary strategy. It was rare for every one of one hundred or more French ships on the Grand Banks to make it back to port in the autumn, and in some bad years maybe as many as four or five ships might be lost. Had too many members of one family shared the same berth their families risked losing all their bread-winners in one go. It is possible that similar calculation affected the overall composition of the crew, for it was not just the Pirons who recruited in several locations. Other ships captained by Câtins, such as the Quatre Frères (shipwrecked in 1889), would likewise only have a handful of fellow villagers on board.20 Terrible though the loss of the Quatre Freres or the Rocabey in 1886 (a ship on which practically every Câtin, including the Pirons had sailed at some point, and on which Francois Marquer, Étienne’s first mate, would die) were for Saint-Cast, the community was not simultaneously economically devastated. Perhaps surprisingly the pattern was very different among the smaller crews of the yachts which, although recruited in Brittany, worked on the Grand Banks from their base at Saint-Pierre-et-Miquelon. These often consisted of men from one village, or even one family. Presumably maritime families had some sort of mental hierarchy of risk which dictated their actions, although in practice the yachts could be just as dangerous: in 1891 two yachts registered in Saint-Pierre crewed by Câtins, the Auguste-Léontine and the Évelyne, were lost “corps et biens”.21

  • 22 AD Ille-et-Vilaine, Inscription maritime, rôles d’embarquement Saint-Malo, 1879, 4 S 722.
  • 23 Amiot, op. cit., p 575-76.
  • 24 SHM Brest, Inscription maritime, quartier de Saint-Brieuc, roles des désarmements, 1881, 4 P 7 337

10The generational solidarity, with all the older brothers on one ship and the younger in the other, is harder to explain, although it is quite marked on many Newfoundland ships. One can, through the registers of the Inscription maritime, track several teams of men of a similar age who served alongside each other year in year out. For example, in 1879 the ship Auguste (also owned by Lemoine and presumably named after Sébillot’s schoolfriend), commanded by Victor Dameron, the Piron family’s closest friend (he was Victor Piron’s godfather, and the Piron brothers would in turn stand as godfather to his children). Under him served four other Câtins who provide a clear example of generational solidarity: Raphaël Cado (bom 1839), François Pluet (bom 1837), Auguste Poilpré (born 1836), and François Michel (born 1833).22 (It is plausible that Victor Dameron’s connection to the Pirons provided Sébillot with a number of further leads, for Auguste Poilpré and François Michel were both fathers of informants.) So friendship, as much as family ties, may have been a mobilising force. Many of the men recruited by the Pirons had served together on previous ships. To take a striking example, Victor Piron and Joseph Beaudouard had served together on the Éponine in 1868. While fishing on the banks in one of the ship’s dinghies with five other men, three of them Câtins, a sudden storm drove them away from their ship. When the storm subsided the captain could find no trace of the dinghy, and shortly after set sail for France where he reported the men lost at sea. Few ships returned from Newfoundland with a full complement but to lose so many, and from one village, was a terrible blow. The following Sunday the entire village turned out for the mass for the dead. But one week later and all the sailors were back in Saint-Cast. They had had the extreme good fortune to be picked up by an American ship after only 48 hours adrift.23 It is hard to know what significance sailors attached to relationships forged during such experiences. They were not, after all, that uncommon: Victor was only nineteen at the time and this was already his second shipwreck. Yet what is certain is that the Piron and Beaudouard families, although not related, were close (they were, in fact, next-door-neighbours). When Étienne bought his own ship in 1881 Joseph’s son, also Joseph Beaudouard, was his second officer, and it was he who guided the Agathe back to Saint-Cast to bring news of Étienne’s death at sea in 1882.24

  • 25 P. Sébillot, Les joyeuses histoires de Bretagne, first ed. Charpentier, Paris, 1910, new ed. Philip (...)
  • 26 P. Sébillot, Blason populaire de la Haute-Bretagne, Maisonneuve & Leclerc, Paris, 1888, p. 18,20.
  • 27 M. Ledun, Ma vie de terre-neuva. Souvenirs recueillis par Joseph Perrin, 2nd ed. Association Fécamp (...)
  • 28 M. Duval, Ni morts, ni vivants: marins! Pour une ethnologie du huis clos, Presses universitaires de (...)

11One final comment on the communal identities underlying these muster-rolls: although Câtins were clearly quite happy to serve alongside sailors from Matignon and Plévenon, sailors from villages equally within range of a recruiting captain were not sought after. There was no one on board from Notre-Dame-de-Guildo, for example, even though this small port was close by (it is now part of the same commune). Indeed there was no one from any of the maritime villages to the east of Saint-Cast such as Saint-Briac and Saint-Lunaire, and in particular no one from Saint-Jacut, the Câtins nearest neighbours and bitterest rivals in the fight for good fishing spots (the history of this rivalry provided Sébillot with many of his stories).25 The populations of these villages were, like the men of Saint-Cast, professional sailors who might therefore feel able to contest their Câtin officers’ decisions, something the farm-boys from Matignon were unlikely to do. No one was recruited from Pléhérel, “les voleurs” as they were known in Saint-Cast where they had a reputation for stealing lobster pots; no one from Henanbihen either, an inland village but a popular recruiting ground for other captains. But there had been a series of battles between the so-called “fous” of Henanbihen and the Câtins during the annual conscription lottery which left a legacy of bad feeling between the villages.26 It was known that rivalries on land could lead to more serious mishaps at sea, and so the mix of the crew had to be carefully considered. For example, while Bretons served on most Fécampois and Granvillais ships they were always deliberately kept in a minority.27 (Territorial rivalries still affect recruiting for the merchant marine: some ship owners today will not mix Bretons and Provençals28.)

12The two networks called on by the Piron-Renault family in 1879, the male network mobilised by the Pirons when recruiting and the female network mobilised by Rose Renault to provide storytellers for Sébillot, were clearly intertwined. It is impossible to say which came first, or whether any distinction was obvious to the participants. Were Rose Renault and Rachel Quéma friends because their sons worked together, or did Victor Piron use his mother’s connections to recruit Rachel’s son Joseph? However, there were occasions when the male and female networks went their separate ways. No member of either the Dameron or the Beaudouard family provided a tale for Sébillot’s collection, even though they were clearly among the Piron brothers’ closest associates. It may simply have been that they were not very good storytellers-it is not a talent given to all-but another possibility is considered below.

  • 29 R. Convenant, Galériens des brumes: sur les voiliers terre-neuvas, L’ancre de marin, Saint-Malo, 2n (...)

13While it has proved possible to uncover some of the relationships affecting recruitment, in many cases the individuals who made up the ship’s complement were neither friends nor family nor even neighbours. They may have had no previous contact with each other before the February day when they appeared before the Syndic des gens de mer to have their names inscribed on the ship’s muster, the “revue d’armement”.29 That day might be full of religious and secular ceremonies designed to create a sense of solidarity among them, but one cannot pretend that the crew of a cod-fishing brig was a band-of-brothers waiting to be called to action. Nor might any relationship between last longer than the duration of the campaign. Some did stand the test of time, such as that between Louis Charlot and Louis Veillet, who were novices when they sailed with Victor Piron in 1879 and who subsequently served together on other ships with another member of Victor’s crew, Pierre Depays. But with the exception of some close associates, few of the Pirons’ men in 1879 would appear among the crews of their subsequent commands. One could argue, therefore, that crewing was basically a product of the labour market – men in need of work, a captain in need of hands-more a Gesellschaƒt than a Gemeinschaƒt. However, even if the links between the men were weak at the beginning of the voyage, they were obliged by the nature of their occupation to become closer at least for the duration. Cod-fishing was both tough and dangerous work, and if the crew did not generate some sort of solidarity the entire voyage could become imperilled. Storytelling flourished among terre-neuva sailors because it offered a way of building and maintaining relationships even within a competitive and frequently brutal environment.

  • 30 At the beginning of the twentieth century, when pressure was mounting on the French government to r (...)
  • 31 Grossetête, op. cit., p. 122-27.

14Life on the Grand Banks was, even by the standards of the time, appalling. Twenty or more men were confined together on a tiny boat for eight or nine months. They might never touch land in that time, except perhaps at Saint-Pierre for repairs or loading bait. Otherwise they were dependent on passing ships for contact with the outside world. The occasional visitors to ships on the Banks, usually naval doctors, were literally nauseated by the conditions in which the men lived. Fifteen men might share an unheated cabin, two to each bunk, their only mattress sodden straw, and the floor covered in fish entrails. The only light was a lamp fuelled with smoky fish oil; the only food for most of the voyage was ships-biscuits together with a soup of cod heads. Before the end of the campaign cases of scurvy could be expected. Medical assistance was minimal. The men were a mass of sores from the constant chaffing of wet clothes which they could never really dry or clean or even take off, their hands were lacerated by their lines and hooks.30 The men were up at dawn and, without any other breakfast than a cup of brandy, they rowed out four kilometres in their two-man dories to pull up from the ocean floor the lines they had laid the night before. It could take several trips to unload one line’s worth of cod, and in all weathers – rain, hail, snow. There was no summer on the Grand Banks. Once back on board they would eat, then bait up to a 1,000 hooks before setting out again to lay the lines. Twelve hours of arduous labour would be considered a light day.31 Not only arduous but dangerous: if a sudden fog or storm arose the dory could miss its ship and be left to wander endlessly on the open ocean. (This would have been the fate of Victor Piron and his comrades if they had not had the luck to be picked up by another ship.) And that was in addition to the regular dangers of sailing ships in such dangerous yet busy waters: storms, fire, icebergs, collisions with transatlantic liners… Étienne Piron was lucky in 1879, he returned to France with a full complement, but Victor had already lost one crew-member, Auguste Fromont, before he left the Channel. The novice sailor had fallen from the rigging and disappeared under the ship.

  • 32 Cuny, op. cit., p. 24. Later historians of the ogrande pêche”, such as M. Desjardins who himself sa (...)
  • 33 Grossetête, op. cit., p. 330-73.

15The terre-neuvas were men pushed to the limit of their physical and mental endurance, and sometimes beyond into madness or alcoholism. According to doctors at Saint-Pierre the average daily intake of eau-de-vie was nearly half a litre.32 If, in such circumstances, the bonds between the men were weak it is not difficult to imagine how the basic discipline that underwrote the safety of the ship could break down. The relationships between the men that had been mobilised for recruitment became even more important on board because they helped keep the lid on the simmering tensions that were bound to arise among men cooped up in such conditions for so long. And there were other pressures at work which exacerbated those tensions. Ship-owners favoured contracts and systems of remuneration that deliberately fostered competition among the crew. Not only did they lead to a better catch and therefore better profits, but they allowed for a policy of divide and rule which slowed the development of syndicalism among the terre-neuvas.33

  • 34 SHM Brest, Inscription maritime, quartier de Saint-Brieuc, correspondance 1873-1879, 4 P 2 14.
  • 35 Ledun, op. cit., p. 147.

16The hierarchy of the vessel created tensions. For example, on both the Pirons’ ships we find a so-called fishing-master, sometimes called a supercargo. This was a kind of alternative command, often used by the ship-owners who doubted that young captains like the Pirons would have the necessary ruthlessness to get the men out into the dories in all weathers. Once the anchor dropped on the banks, therefore, the fishing-master assumed command of operations. As one can imagine this left plenty of room for conflict: fishing-masters had no navigational training, but they had the authority of the owners behind them. The Commissaire de l’Inscription Maritime for Saint-Brieuc (the quartier that included Saint-Cast) believed that this system was responsible for most shipwrecks, because in moments of crisis the crew no longer knew to whom to turn.34 Captains who had served under this system, such as the Fécampois Marcel Ledun, concurred.35 It was therefore particularly important that the relationships between the Pirons and their fishing-masters were good ones.

  • 36 For details of the systems of payment operating on Newfoundland ships see: Cuny, op. cit., p. 61-6; (...)

17The systems of payment also sowed dissension, although those practised on Breton vessels were not as competitive as payment “par queue de morue” preferred on Norman ships. Crews were not waged, instead they shared in the profits of the campaign.36 Victor’s crew divided one third of the profit (minus various deductions) into twenty portions which were distributed among them according to rank (the captain drew three portions, a dory-skipper one portion, the cabin-boy a third of a portion). But each dory-skipper could also expect an extra 10 francs per 1,000 cod caught in his dory. Every dory was therefore in competition for the best fishing grounds. Étienne’s crew received something more like a salary, in that they got advances before they sailed which could not (as was the case on Victor’s ship), be reclaimed, and in addition shared a fifth of the profit. But it was still common practice to institute rewards for the largest catch of the day or week, normally in the shape of alcohol.

  • 37 See, for example, L. Soublin’s preface to Ledun, op. cit. As Président de la Fédération des Armateu (...)
  • 38 Ledun, op. cit., p. 20, 49-52, 84-6, 102-4. For an equally moving account of the real-life sufferin (...)

18In addition there were conflicts between the men in the dories and the men gutting and salting the fish on board, usually the task of the officers assisted by the most junior crew members, the novices and cabin-boys. And the latter were never fast enough, never careful enough. Life for cabin-boys in particular could be cruel. The “mousse martyrise” became something of an iconic figure in music-hall songs (such as the weepy Prière d’un mousse), postcards and Breton regionalist novels leading up to the First World War. Perhaps because of his literary ubiquity, some historians have suggested that their suffering has been exaggerated, and the few well-reported cases of death and suicide (such as the murder of Léon Bertrand by the captain of the Gabrielle of Granville in 1895) were the fault of “brebis galeuses”.37 In fact violence against cabin-boys was standard practice, as the memoirs of terre-neuvas make very plain. Before Marcel Ledun embarked for his first voyage he was repeatedly told “Quand tu seras mousse, il y en a qui te dresseront!”, a warning entirely bom out by the brutal treatment he received both from the men but more particularly from the officers.38 The neglect and occasional cruelty suffered by the cabin-boy at the hands of the men can be explained by their own misery, fatigue, isolation, frustration and hunger. Brutality by officers was, however, built into the system. A captain who wanted to demonstrate his severity to the crew without directly confronting them, could make a show of his authority on the back of his cabin-boy. The junior members also served as scapegoats in disputes between officers and crew. If, for example, the crew went on strike over their conditions (usually food), the captain would put the blame on the cabin-boys and novices who were responsible for cooking, and he would thrash them in front of the crew. The crew would feel their complaints had been heard, but in fact nothing would be done to remedy the underlying problems. And this is not to mention the practice of beating cabin-boys to get a wind in calm weather (or a respite in a gale), a superstition well-attested in the eighteenth century, but which seems to have lingered aboard the Newfoundland fleet, and which haunted the nightmares of Sébillot’s young informants.

  • 39 Desjardins, op. cit., p. 101.
  • 40 Duval, op. cit., p. 93.

19Given the strains under which the crew worked it was vital to maintain existing relationships and to forge connections with newcomers. Solidarities do not simply come into existence through shared institutions, they have to be constantly soothed, renewed and reinstated through some form of communication. On the Grand Banks one form of communication was... silence. Despite the reputation fostered by Breton sailors’ choirs, these ships were not full of music and conviviality; on the contrary, they were sullen places. As one terre-neuva explained, “quand les gens sont vraiment fatigués, le chant s’éteint vite”39. Sailors, by-and-large, kept their thoughts to themselves, because discussions involving politics, religion or family affairs could very quickly turn to quarrels and even violence when the men’s nerves were already frayed. This remains the case on board long-haul cargo ships.40

  • 41 Capitaine Desury, “Notice sur la navigation et la pêche de la morue à la côte de l’île de Terre-Neu (...)

20The few occasions on which terre-neuvas did sing at sea were usually associated with work, such as the shanties to accompany shovelling salt in the hold. These collective songs served several purposes: they regulated the tempo of the work; they established a communal identity among the crew (for if one knew and participated in the rituals of the sea, then one qualified as a true seaman); but they also acted as a form of communication between the crew and the captain. In the disciplined atmosphere of the ship any direct criticism of the officers by a crew-member could be treated as a challenge to their authority. A wise sailor therefore refrained from airing his grievances except through collective and sanctioned forms. For example captain Desury, recalling the songs that animated the work on board the Newfoundland brigs he commanded, remembered that “cette fameuse chanson: Quand la belle au moulin s’en va, n’est jamais oubliée, car un des refrains est: ‘a boire, à boire’, ce qui peut faire rappeler au capitaine qu’un coup de vin ne serait pas de trop.”41 It was impossible for him to take offence, for the men were simply singing the words of a song, but nonetheless the message was delivered.

  • 42 Ledun, op. cit., p. 76.
  • 43 P. Sébillot, “Formules initiales, intercalaires et finales des conteurs en Haute-Bretagne”, Revue c (...)
  • 44 For an analogous situation, see the description of slaves telling tales in their masters’ presence (...)

21Fairytales likewise served as a mask of fiction behind which sailors could address their relationships with each other and with their officers. Storytelling was not an everyday on the Grand Banks, because the men were usually isolated on their dories or exhausted in their bunks. It was an activity reserved for the voyage out and back, when there might be little to do for days at a time, and for the so-called “marées d’aornie” or “marées de paradis”, when the weather was so rough that even the fishing-masters could not get the crew out. The “marées de paradis” offered the crew a respite from the gruelling labour, but they were also anxious times: the longer the men were kept on board the poorer the catch, the smaller the profit, and the longer the campaign.42 Confined to their fetid bunks, bored and anxious, this was the moment when long suppressed resentments could blow up into full-scale fights, if the men had not found a release through storytelling. They could speak their minds in the ritual space and time demarcated by the traditional opening formula: “Je passe par une forêt où il n’y avait point de bois, par une riviére où il n’y avait pas de maison. Je frappe à la porte et tout le monde me répond: Plus je vous en dirai, plus je vous mentirai, je ne suis pas payé pour vous dire la vérité.”43 Having made it clear that what followed was fantasy, no one listening could feel insulted. After all this was a traditional tale, expressed in conventional language, no one could take it personally. And yet through the tale the sailor could express his own desires, his expectations of his fellow crew-members, and indirectly negotiate with his officers. Nineteenth-century maritime authors, such as Auguste Jal, Henri Corbière and Guillaume La Landelle, often used the officer listening to his men’s tales as a plot-device to introduce a story within a story. But all these men were also experienced sailors, and there is every reason to believe that this was indeed a real practice. Rigid hierarchies, such as those that operated on board ship, do not allow for much free expression, yet captains needed to be forewarned of mutinous situations, they needed to learn of rivalries before they unbalanced the crew. Captains could not directly solicit their men’s opinions for this would undermine their authority, but they could eavesdrop.44

  • 45 M.-Y Delisle, “Le tabou du lapin dans une communauté de pêcheurs de la région de Saint-Malo”, Anthr (...)
  • 46 L. Martin, Forçats de l’océan: La grande pêche de Terre-Neuve aux Kerguelen, éditions Hermé, Paris, (...)
  • 47 Duval, op. cit., p. 101-103.

22Sébillot found this recourse to fantasy rather frustrating. He had wanted to hear historical legends about life at sea, of shipwrecks, battles and adventures. But only two of tales he collected made any direct reference to the Grand Banks, and these were more black jokes than stories. Sailors’ stories had plenty of maritime elements in them-magic islands, fairy crews, demon ships-but they rarely dealt realistically with the genuine perils that surrounded them. Yet if one peels away the metaphors and the marvellous, the issues dealt with in fairytales, such as exclusion, injustice and survival, were not that far from the realities experienced by the men, but they could not be faced directly, they had to be recast into story form. The sea could be cruel, as the fate of the men who accompanied Étienne Piron demonstrated. By 1883 not only was the captain himself dead, so were his first mate François Marquer and his fishing-master Joseph Sicot, both drowned in the North Atlantic. But just as First World War soldiers could not speak the truth about the trenches, so sailors kept mum about the dangers they faced. Sébillot’s desire to talk about the reality of their lives marked him out as a tourist in this world. The men’s reticence was itself a form of solidarity. It was like the taboos still observed on most sea-going vessels, the best known of which is against the invocation of rabbits.45 French sailors still take the threat of « les longues oreilles » seriously.46 Yet despite this an ethnologist working on board cargo-ships in the 1990s found that no animal was more frequently referred to, albeit in round-about ways, than the rabbit. The sailors were demonstrating, by this regular reference to, but simultaneous observance of, the taboo, that they partook of the culture of the sea, they observed its rules, they were insiders.47

  • 48 As an example of how such informal rules might work see J. Sidnell, “Primus inter pares: Storytelli (...)
  • 49 Ledun, op. cit., p. 54.
  • 50 Letellier, op. cit., p. 23.

23As in any disciplined situation there were formal rules about who could talk and when, but as in any group of men there were also informal status hierarchies of those allowed to speak and those obliged to listen, which no doubt overlapped, but was not contiguous with, the official hierarchy on board.48 Those at the bottom of the pile, the newcomers and the youngsters, might not even be permitted to hear the storyteller. Marcel Ledun remembered how, as a cabinboy in 1900, he had wandered as close as he dared to the young sailors gathered on the deckhouse roof who “se laissaient distraire par les bavardages d’un blagueur.” Excluded, he said to himself “Pour toi aussi, le jour viendra où, franchi le cap des douleurs, tu auras droit à t’amuser, aprés ton travail!”49 Listening was one way of being accepted as a part of the crew, but being allowed to speak in their company really established one’s credentials. It is noticeable that, as Sébillot continued his visits to Saint-Cast, he found his most prolific informants among the population of cabin-boys and novice sailors, such as the brothers Joseph and Auguste Macé, aged fifteen and eighteen respectively in 1880, and who narrated thirty-five stories between them. These young men had not yet sailed to Newfoundland, but expected to in a year or two, and one can sense that they were preparing a store of cultural capital that they could bring to cabin. Through their narrative talents they might earn, if not the crew’s respect, at least their tolerance, and thus stave off the worse brutalities practised on newcomers to the Grand Banks. This was exactly the strategy adopted by the miserable cabin-boy Letellier, outward bound from Granville in the spring of 1876. The only way he found to soften the crew’s cruelty was by telling stories, in particular the Comte de Monte-Cristo, which he spun out over several watches.50 Perhaps Victor Dameron and Joseph Beaudouard did not tell Sébillot any stories because, as established members of the maritime community, they no longer felt the need to. Their cultural capital took other forms.

24The stories told by the sailors of Saint-Cast distilled the essence of the maritime ethos. The audience thus learnt the behaviour they were supposed to adopt and the customs they were supposed to observe if they too were to become “vieux loups de mer.” The solidarity of the crew was based on this shared identity. Young boys imbibed it when they first went to sea, usually with their grandfathers on the small inshore boats operating around Saint-Cast. By narrating in their turn they could demonstrate to their audience that they had understood the expectations of the shipboard culture they inhabited. Their stock characters such as Jean-le-matelot, Tribord Amures and Père-le-Chique, embodied the qualities expected of the seaman. It was to these characters that young Câtins looked as they moulded themselves to the environment of the sea.

25These observations on the roles played by storytelling on board ship can only be sustained by a close examination of the tales themselves, something which I hope to have the opportunity to do in the near future. The purpose of this essay is merely to suggest some of the ways that networks and solidarities were generated and affirmed in a maritime community, and which only the good fortune of Sébillot’s presence allows us to perceive. Contemporary historians are sometimes too ready to dismiss Sébillot and his fellow folklorists as just another example of the Victorian passion for collecting and classifying. And it is true that too many folklore publications have been robbed of their meaning because deprived of their context. Although Sébillot was more generous with information on his informants and their lives, like most folklorists he looked on folktales as a treasure-chest, a heritage, rather than as part of the functioning of a community. But read in conjunction with the archives of the Inscription maritime Sébillot’s collections are not just dead texts, but a marvellous opportunity for the historian to glimpse the inner workings of nineteenth-century society.

Appendix

The crew of the yacht Vedette, owned by M. Lemoine. Commissioned at Saint-Malo 5 March 1879; decommissioned at Saint-Malo 19 December 1879.

Name

DOB

Domicile

Rank

Piron, Étienne
Julien

25/11/46

Saint-Cast

Capitaine

Narrator, son of narrator-parents (Étienne and Rose Renault), brother of narrator Jean-Marie

Marquer,
François Jean
Étienne.

27/12/39

Saint-Cast

2ecapitainc

Possibly father of narrator (François
Marquer), possibly son of narratormother (Jeanne Macé)

Lechien,
Mathurin
Pierre

31/1/40

Plancoët

Saleur

Sicot, Joseph
Marie

10/4/46

Saint-Cast

Maître d’équipage et patron de doris

Married to narrator (Marie Renault)

Goudé,
Maurice?
Pierre

29/5/41

Saint-Malo

Patron de doris

Rouault,
Pierre Marie

20/9/59

Saint-Cast

Patron de doris

Nephew of narrator (Julien Rouault)

Dupail,
Marie-Ange

10/2/60

Saint-Cast

Patron de doris

Dagorne,
Louis Marie

25/3/53

Pleboulle

Patron de doris

Boulard.Baptiste-Marie

25/7/52

Pléboulle

Patron de doris

Jean, Jules
Marie

19/11/61

Saint-Cast

Avant de doris

Uncle of narrator (Pierre Menard)

Cocheri,
Pierre Marie

9/5/62

Saint-Cast

Avant de doris

Troniou,
Joseph Marie

8/3/62

Saint-Cast

Avant de doris

Laurent,
Joseph Marie

4/6/55

Matignon

Avant de doris

Mahé,
François
Marie

12/11/52

Pleudihen

Avant de doris

Roulié, Jean
Mane Julien

5/1/60

Matignon

Avant de doris

Ruellan, Jean
Marie

7/8/60

Dol

Novice et décolleur

Veillet, Pierre
Marie Ange

2/3/64

Matignon

Mousse

The crew of the brig Augusta, owned by J. L. Vincent et Cie. Commissioned at Saint-Malo 1 March 1879; decommissioned at Saint-Malo 23 October 1879.

Name

DOB

Domicile

Rank

Piron, Victor
Marie

27/9/49

Saint-Cast

Capitaine

Son of narrator-parents (Étienne Piron and
Rose Renault), brother of narrators (Étienne and Jean-Marie Piron)

Piron, Jean-Marie Joseph

28/8/53

Saint-Cast

2e capitaine

Narrator, son of narrator-parents (Étienne
Piron and Rose Renault), brother of narrator (Étienne Piron)

Durand,
Joseph Marie

6/9/48

Saint-Cast

Maître de pêche

Son of narrator (Rachel Quéma) brother of narrator (Adèle Durand)

Droguet,
Ange Marie
Paul

16/3/52

Plévenon

Patron de doris

Deriac, René
Ange Louis

26/7/37

Matignon

Patron de doris

Beaudouard,
Joseph Marie

15/8/39

Saint-Cast

Patron de doris

Depays,
Pierre Marie

10/9/54

Saint-Cast

Patron de doris

Narrator, son of narrators (François Depays and Marie Pean), brother of narrators (Françis and Eugène Depays)

Dupail,
Mathurin
Yves Marie

14/8/47

Saint-Cast

Matelot

Boulard,
Augustin Jean
Marie

20/10/49

Pleboulle

Patron de doris

Rouault, Jean
Marie

9/7/60

Plévenon

Matelot

Samson,Victor-Octave-Marie

21/8/43

Saint-Cast

Maître saleur

Lequeret,
René Louis
Marie

9/11/59

Plévenon

Matelot avant de doris

Foyer, Eugene
Marie

12/5/53

Plévenon

Novice avant de doris

Grande,
Eugène Mane

11/11/60

Plévenon

Novice avant de doris

Veillet, Louis
Mane Piene
Joseph

15/6/62

Matignon

Novice avant de doris

Durand,
Charles Pierre
Émile

23/10/62

Matignon

Novice avant de doris

Charlot, Louis
François
Marie

7/9/61

Pleboulle

Novice avant de doris

Closier, Jean
François Yves

4/5/44

Matignon

Mousse

Fromont,
Auguste Aimé

13/10/60

Plévenon

Matelot

Cado, Marie
Ange
François

7/7/48

Saint-Cast

Patron de doris

Manuscript Sources

Bibliographie

AD Côtes d’Armor, dénombrement de la population: listes nominatives des habitants de la commune de Saint-Cast, 1876, 1881 et 1886.

AD Côtes d’ Armor, 501 J 148/3, Saint-Cast: Table des manages (1683-1885).

AD Ille-et-Vilaine, 4 S 721-737, Inscription maritime, rôles d’embarquement, quartier de Saint-Malo, 1879-82.

Mairie de Saint-Cast, état civil, 1826-85.

Service historique de la Marine, 4 P 7 329-337, Inscription maritime, rôles de désarmement, quartier de Saint-Brieuc, 1879-83.

Service historique de la Marine, 4 P 3 59-354. Inscription maritime, syndicat de Plévenon, quartier de Saint-Brieuc, matricules des inscrits définitifs et provisoires, 1826-94.

Service historique de la Marine, 4 P 3, Inscription maritime, syndicat de Plévenon, quartier de Saint-Brieuc, inscriptions provisoires 1826-94.

Service historique de la Marine, 4P2 14, Inscription maritime, quartier de Saint-Brieuc, correspondance, 1873-9.

Printed Sources

R. Convenant, Galériens des brumes: sur les voiliers terre-neuvas, L’ancre de marin, Saint-Malo, 2e éd. 1998.

M. Desjardins, Léopoldine: souvenirs du mousse, association Fécamp-Terre-Neuve, Fécamp, 1998.

Capitaine Desury, “Notice sur la navigation et la pêche de la morue à la côte de l’île de Terre-Neuve”, in C. Le Maout, Bibliothèque bretonne, collection de pièces inédites ou peu connues concernant l’histoire, l’archéologie et la litterature de l’ancienne province de Bretagne, Saint-Brieuc, imprimerie de C. Le Maout, 1851, p. 639-81.

M. Ledun, Ma vie de terre-neuva. Souvenirs recueillis par Joseph Perrin, 2nd ed. Association Fecamp Terre-Neuve, Fecamp, 1998.

L. Letellier, Sur le Grand Banc. Pêcheurs de Terre-Neuve. Récit d’un ancien pêcheur, Union pour l’action morale, Paris, 1896.

L. Martin, Forçats de l’océan: La grande pêche de Terre-Neuve aux Kerguelen, editions Hermé, Paris, 1986.

P. Sébillot, Autobibliographie, Libraire de l’art indépendant, Paris, 1891.

P. Sebillot, Blason populaire de la Haute-Bretagne, Maisonneuve & Leclerc, Paris, 1888.

P. Sébillot, “Contes de la Haute-Bretagne XXXIV”, Revue des traditions populaires, 11 (1896), p. 516-18.

P. Sébillot, Contes des provinces de France, Léopold Cerf, Paris, 1884.

P. Sébillot, Contes populaires de la Haute-Bretagne I: contes merveilleux, first ed. Paris, 1880, 2nd ed. Terre de Brume, Rennes, 1998.

P. Sébillot, Contes populaires de la Haute-Bretagne II: contes des paysans et des pêcheurs, first ed. Paris, 1881, 2nd ed. Terre de Brume, Rennes, 1999.

P. Sebillot, Contes populaires de la Haute-Bretagne III: contes des marins, first ed. Paris, 1882, 2nd ed. Terre de Brume, Rennes, 2000.

P. Sébillot, “Formules initiales, intercalaires et finales des conteurs en Haute-Bretagne”, Revue celtique, 6 (1883-5), p. 62-6.

P. Sebillot, Les Joyeuses histoires de Bretagne, first ed. Paris, 1910, new ed. Philippe Camby, Paris, 1983.

P. Sébillot, “Notes pour servir à l’histoire du folklore en France”, Revue des traditions populaires, 28 (1913), p. 49-62.

P. Sébillot, “Sobriquets et superstitions militaires”, Revue des traditions populaires, 2 (1887) p. 128-130.

Bibliography

P. Amiot, Histoire de Saint-Cast-Le-Guildo des origines à nos jours, Pierre Amiot, Carrien, 1990.

L. Coquin, Hygiène et pathologie des pêcheurs de morue, Bordeaux, 1900.

H. Cuny, Essai sur la condition des marins pecheurs, Giard & Briere, Paris, 1904.

M.-Y. Delisle, “Le tabou du lapin dans une communauté de pêcheurs de la région de Saint-Malo”, Anthropologie maritime, 3 (1988), p. 113-130.

M. Duval, Ni morts, ni vivants: marins! Pour une ethnologie du huis clos, Presses universitaires de France, Paris, 1998.

R. Estienne et P. Henwood, “Archives et patrimoine maritime: l’exemple de la Bretagne”, Le Chasse-Marée, 73 (1993), p. 87-98.

J.-M. Grossetête, La Grande pêche de Terre-Neuve et d’Islande, Presses de Bretagne, Rennes, 1921.

Y. Guichard-Claudic, Éloignement conjugal et construction identitaire: le cas des femmes de marins, L’Harmattan, Paris, 1998.

C. Joyner, Down by the Riverside: A South Carolina Slave Community, University of Illinois Press, Urbana, 1984.

L. Kerlo et R. Le Bihan, Peintres de la côte d’Émeraude, Douarnenez, La Chasse-Marée-ArMen, 1998.

J.-Y. Ruaux, “Paul Sébillot, le notaire de la memoire d’un peuple”, Le Pays de Dinan, 5 (1985), p. 115-137.

J. Sidnell, “Primus inter pares: Storytelling and Male Peer Groups in an Indo-Guyanese Rumshop”, American Anthropologist, 27 (2000), p. 72-99.

M. Warner, From the Beast to the Blonde: on Fairytales and their Tellers, Chatto & Windus, London, 1994.

Notes

1 The research for this paper was made possible by a Royal Society of Edinburgh/Caledonian Research Fund Visiting Research Fellowship. I am very grateful to these institutions. I am also grateful for the warm welcome I received in Brittany, particularly at the Service Historique de la Marine (SHM) Brest, and the Centre de Recherche Bretonne et Celtique, Brest.

2 R. Estienne and P. Henwood, “Archives et patrimoine maritime: l’exemple de la Bretagne”, Le Chasse-Marée, 13 (1993), p. 87-98.

3 There is, as yet, no full biography of Sébillot. The most detailed account of his transformation from painter to folklorist is his own “Notes pour servir à l’histoire du folklore en France”, Revue des traditions populaires, 28 (1913), p. 49-62. For details of his political and journalistic life consult J.-Y. Ruaux, “Paul Sébillot, le notaire de la mémoire d’un peuple”, Le Pays de Dinan, 5 (1985), p. 115-137; for examples of his art, see L. Kerlo and R. Le Bihan, Peintres de la côte d’Émeraude, Douarnenez, La Chasse-Marée-ArMen, 1998, p. 236-37.

4 P. Sébillot, Contes populaires de la Haute-Bretagne II: contes des paysans et des pêcheurs, 2nd ed. Terre de Brume, Rennes, 1999, p. 19.

5 I have counted 365 tales collected in Saint-Cast, scattered through thirty-three separate publications. Any final tally is complicated by the range of journals and collections to which Sébillot contributed.

6 Despite Sébillot’s own attempt to provide a guide to posterity (Autobibliographie, Libraire de l’art indépendant, Paris, 1891), his bibliography is very confusing, numbering well over a hundred items, culminating in a four volume encyclopaedia of the Folklore de France, Paris, Maisonneuve & Leclerc, 1904-7.

7 Numerous British studies have made this point, but in order not to wander too far from Saint-Cast, see Y. Guichard-Claudic’s contemporary study of the wives of the Concarneau tuna-fishermen, Éloignement conjugal et construction identitaire: le cas des ƒemmes de marins, L’Harmattan, Paris, 1998.

8 Information on the Piron family and the other inhabitants of Saint-Cast is drawn from the état civil, the dénombrements de la population for 1876 and 1881, and the registres de la catholicité, held either in the AD des Côtes-d’Armor or in the Mairie de Saint-Cast.

9 M. Warner, From the Beast to the Blonde: on Fairytales and their Tellers, Chatto & Windus, London, 1994, p. 12-26.

10 P. Sébillot, Contes populaires de la Haute-Bretagne II: contes des paysans et des pêcheurs, 2nd ed., Terre de Brume, Rennes, 1999, p. 18.

11 See, for example, D. Besançon’s introduction to P. Sébillot, Contes populaires de la Haute-Bretagne III: contes des marins, 2nd ed., Terre de Brume, Rennes, 2000, p. 11.

12 SHM Brest, Inscription maritime, quartier de Saint-Brieuc, syndicat de Plévenon: matricule des inscrits déƒinitifs, 4 P 3 80, 4 P 3 121, 4 P 3 163. When a young man registered for the first time as a cabin-boy the Inscription maritime registered him with a specific number. The number changed as the cabin-boy progressed to qualified sailor, captain or pilot, and finally when he retired, but as each separate ledger was cross-referenced it is a relatively easy matter to follow any individual’s career.

13 AD Ille-et-Vilaine, Inscription maritime, rôles d’embarquement Saint-Malo, 1879, 4 S 719-23.

14 P. Sébillot, Contes des provinces de France, Leopold Cerf, Paris, 1884, p. 105: Le navire des fées (no name of an informant is given with this tale, but it has noticeable similarities to Étienne Piron’s other stories); Paul Sébillot, Contes populaires de la Haute-Bretagne III: contes des marins, 2nd ed., Terre de Brume, Rennes, 2000, p. 305.

15 P. Sébillot, “Contes de la Haute-Bretagne”, Revue des traditions populaires, 11 (1896), p. 516-18: Le faux moine.

16 J.-M. Grossetête, La Grande pêche de Terre-Neuve et d’Islande, Presses de Bretagne, Rennes, 1921, p. 60.

17 P. Sebillot, “Sobriquets et superstitions militaires”, Revue des traditions populaires, 2 (1887), p. 128.

18 Sébillot gave quite a lot of detail about his informants, at least compared to other folklorists, yet it is sometimes difficult to be certain about their identities given the limited number of names in use on the Isle. The name of the thirteen-year-old cabin-boy François Marquer appears under more than 100 of Sébillot’s narratives, but unfortunately there were, in 1879, three François Marquers who might fit this bill. Two of them were the eldest sons of different François Marquers, and the same two were also grandsons of different Jeanne Macés. One of these seems the obvious candidate because Sébillot subsequently got him a job in the Ponts-et-Chaussées when his brother-in-law was minister of Public Works in the 1890s. Yet this François Marquer was not a cabinboy, and never seriously went to sea, while the other François Marquer, son of Étienne’s first mate, was a terre-neuva all his life. It is possible that Sébillot collected stories from both of them.

19 SHM Brest, Inscription maritime, quartier de Saint-Brieuc, rôles des désarmements, 1881, 4 P 7 333. Breton captains very often took jobs over winter on inshore fishing boats, normally in the company of other captains. I had imagined this pattern of “status solidarity” was in order to avoid meeting members of their crews in less disciplined settings, but the Commissaire des gens de mer for the arrondissment of Saint-Brieuc took a less charitable view, repeatedly complaining that Câtin captains were involved in “navigation Active”, in order to earn their pension early: SHM Brest, Inscription maritime, quartier de Saint-Brieuc, correspondance 1873-1879, 4 P 2 14.

20 Prior to its loss, the Quatre Frères had been captained by at least two Câtins, Charles Hesry and Louis Pierre. Like the Pirons, they recruited key personnel from the Isle, but few of their other sailors were Câtins. Three Câtins died with the ship in 1889, an event recorded in the church of Saint-Cast.

21 P. Amiot, Histoire de Saint-Cast-Le-Guildo des origines à nos jours, Pierre Amiot, Carrien, 1990, p. 574.

22 AD Ille-et-Vilaine, Inscription maritime, rôles d’embarquement Saint-Malo, 1879, 4 S 722.

23 Amiot, op. cit., p 575-76.

24 SHM Brest, Inscription maritime, quartier de Saint-Brieuc, roles des désarmements, 1881, 4 P 7 337

25 P. Sébillot, Les joyeuses histoires de Bretagne, first ed. Charpentier, Paris, 1910, new ed. Philippe Camby, Paris, 1983, p. 15-63.

26 P. Sébillot, Blason populaire de la Haute-Bretagne, Maisonneuve & Leclerc, Paris, 1888, p. 18,20.

27 M. Ledun, Ma vie de terre-neuva. Souvenirs recueillis par Joseph Perrin, 2nd ed. Association Fécamp Terre-Neuve, Fécamp, 1998, p. 104.

28 M. Duval, Ni morts, ni vivants: marins! Pour une ethnologie du huis clos, Presses universitaires de France, Paris, 1998, p. 100.

29 R. Convenant, Galériens des brumes: sur les voiliers terre-neuvas, L’ancre de marin, Saint-Malo, 2nd ed. 1998, p. 18-20.

30 At the beginning of the twentieth century, when pressure was mounting on the French government to regulate the conditions under which the terre-neuvas worked, several critical medical and legal theses, based largely on the observations of naval officers and doctors, were published, such as L. Coquin, Hygiène et pathologie des pêcheurs de morue, Bordeaux, 1900. and H. Cuny, Essai sur la condition des marins pêcheurs, Giard & Brière, Paris, 1904. This summary collates their negative comments which, it should be said, may have based on the worse cases rather than the general conditions.

31 Grossetête, op. cit., p. 122-27.

32 Cuny, op. cit., p. 24. Later historians of the ogrande pêche”, such as M. Desjardins who himself sailed on cod-fishing brigs in 1930 and 1931, have rejected the accusation of alcoholism levelled at the terre-neuvas: Léopoldine: souvenirs du mousse, Association Fécamp-Terre-Neuve, Fécamp, 1998, p. 9. However, his own experiences were conditioned by a very different statutory regime introduced in 1907 and repeatedly tightened in the following decades.

33 Grossetête, op. cit., p. 330-73.

34 SHM Brest, Inscription maritime, quartier de Saint-Brieuc, correspondance 1873-1879, 4 P 2 14.

35 Ledun, op. cit., p. 147.

36 For details of the systems of payment operating on Newfoundland ships see: Cuny, op. cit., p. 61-6; Grossetête, op. cit., p. 257-99.

37 See, for example, L. Soublin’s preface to Ledun, op. cit. As Président de la Fédération des Armateurs it is hard to imagine that Soublin was unaware that what he calls the customary measures of protection accorded to cabin-boys were in fact legal requirements introduced in 1907 after a series of appalling barbarities had come to public attention.

38 Ledun, op. cit., p. 20, 49-52, 84-6, 102-4. For an equally moving account of the real-life sufferings on which the iconic figure of the “mousse martyrise” was based see L. Letellier, Sur le Grand Banc. Pêcheurs de Terre-Neuve. Récit d’un ancien pêcheur, Union pour l’action morale, Paris, 1896.

39 Desjardins, op. cit., p. 101.

40 Duval, op. cit., p. 93.

41 Capitaine Desury, “Notice sur la navigation et la pêche de la morue à la côte de l’île de Terre-Neuve”, in C. Le Maout, Bibliothèque bretonne, collection de piéces inédites ou peu connues concernant l’histoire, l’archéologie et la littérature de l’ancienne province de Bretagne, Saint-Brieuc, imprimerie de C. Le Maout, 1851, p. 639-81.

42 Ledun, op. cit., p. 76.

43 P. Sébillot, “Formules initiales, intercalaires et finales des conteurs en Haute-Bretagne”, Revue celtique, 6 (1883-5), p. 63-4.

44 For an analogous situation, see the description of slaves telling tales in their masters’ presence in C. Joyner, Down by the Riverside: A South Carolina Slave Community, University of Illinois Press, Urbana, 1984. p. 173-195.

45 M.-Y Delisle, “Le tabou du lapin dans une communauté de pêcheurs de la région de Saint-Malo”, Anthropologie maritime, 3 (1988), p. 113-130. In Sébillot’s day the taboo was more likely to fall on cats.

46 L. Martin, Forçats de l’océan: La grande pêche de Terre-Neuve aux Kerguelen, éditions Hermé, Paris, 1986, p. 245.

47 Duval, op. cit., p. 101-103.

48 As an example of how such informal rules might work see J. Sidnell, “Primus inter pares: Storytelling and Male Peer Groups in an Indo-Guyanese Rumshop”, American Anthropologist, 27 (2000), p. 72-99.

49 Ledun, op. cit., p. 54.

50 Letellier, op. cit., p. 23.

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Lecturer in Social History, University of Glasgow.

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