A Whale For The Killing Read Online Free Page A

relief.
    The heaviest concentration of immigrants settled close to the fish plant. When all the available shoreline was occupied, newcomers were forced to build away from the sea on barren rocky ridges or on peaty muskegs. They built hurriedly and, contrary to their wont, many built badly. They had no money with which to buy materials and, since they were wage slaves, they had no time to do as their fathers had done and go into the country to cut and whipsaw their own lumber. All too many of the new residents, who had been forced or deluded into abandoning comfortable and well-built houses in the now deserted outports, were reduced to living in unsightly shacks. These proliferated until they produced the first true fruits of centralization—the Sou’west Coast’s first slum.
    The eastern end of Grandy Island turned into a wasteland of rusting cans, broken bottles, spilled garbage and human sewage. The surrounding waters were further defiled by the vast volume of effluvia from the fish plant, which discharged all its wastes and offal directly into Short Reach. Much of the shoreline was befouled by a belt of black sticky muck several inches thick and six to ten feet broad which, particularly at low tide, stank to high heaven.
    Apart from the physical degradation of what had once been a wholesome and natural environment, centralization also degraded the people who were its victims. The delicate interdependence of give and take was disrupted. As Sim Spencer once explained it to me:
    “Afore the plant come here, every little place was on its own. Every settlement was like a family; and all the families, all along the coast, they got along good, never rubbed nobody the wrong way. Every man looked after his own, but he looked to his neighbour when times was hard, and for certain sure he’d be quick enough to give a hand when anyone else was needy.
    “Now that’s all gone abroad. Shovin’ all hands into one big lobster pot done something to the people. Started fillin’ them up with badness. Turned them one agin the other. Started them wheening and growling like a pack of crackie dogs penned up on some little pick of an island.
    “These times, everyone’s jealous of t’other, and ’twas never that way before. People is uncontented. They don’t want nobody to get nothin’ unless they gits it too, and more of it. Truth to tell, people is turning right hateful in Burgeo, these times.”
    The independent people, and the egalitarian way of life, could not survive the tides of change as more and more people came to Burgeo from more and more “closed-out” outports. There was not nearly enough wage work to go around. The new men could not fish successfully for themselves because the local grounds were foreign to them and were by now seriously overcrowded and overfished as well. Consequently, scores of men, both young and old, were forced to leave their families behind and seek work, not only outside Burgeo, but outside Newfoundland, where the grandiose industrial schemes of Premier Smallwood had come to nothing. Some men worked seasonally in Nova Scotia; others spent eight months of each year manning Great Lakes freighters—eight months away from home.
    As if this were not enough, compulsive consumerism, the universal sickness of modern society, infected the dispossessed outport people. Men, women and children who had never cared much for material possessions became greedily acquisitive. They began to thumb avidly through the shiny mail-order catalogues. The solid, handmade furniture they had brought with them from the outports was now “condemned”—thrown over the ends of the stages to float away on the tides. It was replaced with chrome and arborite.
    The plant owner, ever anxious to develop consumer attitudes and appetites, opened a supermarket. Some of the befuddled victims of the new disease actually bought television sets even though there was no transmitter which could reach them.
    Electricity and roads spread