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Come all you people far and near, come listen to my song,
In language I'll explain to you, it won't delay you long;
Come hear about Captain La Fosse so lately has took command
In a schooner named the Danny Goodwin from New Harbour, Newfoundland.
They sailed away from New Harbour, to the western shore did go,
To risk their lives in dories through frost and wind and snow;
Saying good-bye to friends at home and all whom they adored,
Never dreaming that they would meet their doom upon the western shore.
It was on a Monday morning they got her under way,
The sixth of December, a creak-cold winter's day;
She carried a crew of six fishermen and dories she had two,
The Danny being a noble boat, built over spankins new.
On Rose Blanche Bank that morning, 'twas there he brought her to,
His dories they were lowered away as he oftentimes used to do;
Before those trawls were taken back a heavy storm did rise,
It was a hard and a trialing time on those poor fishing b'ys.
The wind sprang from the east-southeast and bitterly did blow,
The sea it was rolling mountains high in a blinding drift of snow;
No one can tell if she came to land or under close-reef sail,
Or if she got disabled in the dreadful winter's gale.
A captain from another boat those words we heard him say,
"He did not have his dories when we got under way;
He might have got his dories, yet we do not understand,
Perhaps he got them safe on board and shaped her up for the land."
To come to land that evening in a blinding drift of snow,
This captain was a stranger and those harbours did not know;
No doubt he might have come to land or else here on the shore,
Perhaps he drifted far out to sea to never return no more.
This blow was hard for friends at home and sad news for to hear,
The loss of sons and husbands, the ones they loved so dear;
Likewise their aged mothers oh bitterly will cry,
To see their sons all leaving their homes and wishing them all good-bye.
There are five poor widows left behind who bitterly will cry,
All thinking of their loved ones who in the deep do lie;
But we must all remember they fought hard for their lives,
To sea they had to go and leave their children and their wives.
So now my song is to an end, I have nothing more to say,
Trying to earn a living those b'ys were called away;
Their wives and little children they'll never see no more,
But now they gave up all hopes to land on the western shore.
Collected in 1959 from Kenneth Pink of Rose Blanche, NL, by Kenneth Peacock and published in Songs Of The Newfoundland Outports, Volume 3, pp.942-943, by the National Museum of Canada (1965) Crown Copyrights Reserved.
Kenneth Peacock noted that there are three 'New Harbours' in Newfoundland, but Ken Pink told him the one in this ballad is on the south coast east of Rose Blanche at the southwest corner of Newfoundland. The waters off the south coast are particularly treacherous, and a large percentage of south coast traditional material is concerned with shipwrecks.
A variant was collected in 1977 from Jerry Fudge of McCallum, NL, by Genevieve Lehr and Anita Best and published as #26, The Wreck Of The Danny Goodwin, in Come And I Will Sing You: A Newfoundland Songbook, pp.44-45, edited by Genevieve Lehr (University of Toronto Press © 1985/2003).
Genevieve Lehr noted that New Harbour is presumably the New Harbour on the Southwest Coast, a particularly dangerous and treacherous area of the coastline where countless ships have been wrecked and lost without a trace.
According to Clarence Vautier Jr. and Marina Bateman of LaPoile, NL, the M.V. Danny Goodwin was built in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia in 1907, and had been used as a fishing vessel ever since. A Rose Blanche fisherman, Samuel Billard, brought her to Newfoundland in 1912, where he operated her for 14 years. In 1926, John William La Fosse of New Harbour took his first command of the 49-foot skiff, which was owned by the local merchants of Rencontre West and recently had smaller steamed frames (spankins) installed between the original large sawed frames.
The M.V. Danny Goodwin was lost on December 6, 1926 at Rose Blanche Bank. The crew onboard with Captain La Fosse at the time of the vessel's disappearance were Frank Cox and Benjamin Parsons of New Harbour, and Joseph Harris, George Marks, and James Marks of Rencontre West.
