Skipper: The Sea Yarns of Captain Matthew Mitchell

Skipper: The Sea Yarns of Captain Matthew Mitchell

Frances Jewel Dickson

Nonfiction: The Sea, Oral History
$15.95
112 pages
6" x 9" paperback
ISBN: 978-1-897426-10-4

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Skipper Matthew Mitchell was born on the Burin Peninsula of Newfoundland in 1917. Now a lively 92-year-old, he looks back on his lifelong relationship with the sea, from wooden dories to steel trawlers, to shore captain at the Fisheries Museum of the Atlantic in Lunenburg, Nova Scotia. The author has gathered his many stories into this exuberant volume.

Captain Mitchell's keen memory spares no details of his exceptional life and his recollections vibrate with his colourful native Newfoundland vernacular. We follow him from a boy of 12 watching his native village of Port au Bras devastated by the earthquake and tidal waves of 1929 to learning the secrets of salt fishing and preserving from his father and uncles. Later he is recruited on numerous schooners beginning at the age of 14, eventually taking command of fishing trawlers based in historic Lunenburg. He began his life at sea fishing in two-man dories, braving the rigours of the North Atlantic. Nova Scotia-based schooners took him to Lunenburg during the Great Depression, where he lived in boarding houses until he married and started a family in his adopted town. He fished through World War II, facing new dangers with submarines lurking off the East Coast. He would take command of his first fishing trawler when the captain of the Cape North retired.

When the sea agreed to let him go after 45 years, he was hired as shore captain at the Fisheries Museum of the Atlantic, where he would remain for another 30 years. As shore skipper he entertained thousands of visitors from all over the world with stories of the bygone days of sailing fishing vessels, when he and thousands of other fishermen risked their lives repeatedly to earn a modest living. Captain Matthew Mitchell's captivating memoirs stand as a monument to the era of wooden ships and iron men.


Frances Jewel Dickson, a native of Quebec, has lived on Nova Scotia's South Shore since 1987. She has held management positions in human resources administration, written personnel policy for the Speaker of the House of Commons and led audit teams in evaluating the performance of government departments across Canada. Her first book, The DEW Line Years: Voices from the Coldest Cold War, was published in 2007 by Pottersfield Press.