Bruce Stagg

The prefix "non," as in "non-fiction," is only three letters long. You'd think more authors would understand it.

Newfoundland was the site of many, many shipwrecks, and many families lost loved ones to the sea -- some died on the rocks of the island itself, and some just disappeared, never to be seen again. The Ella M. Rudolph was one such shipwreck, lost in 1926, with eight of the nine people aboard dying. Most of them were members of the Blackwood family by descent or marriage, which accounts for the name "The Blackwood Schooner." Other than that, the Rudolph wasn't much different from hundreds upon hundreds of other schooners wrecks. But the Rudolph was commemorated in a song, "The Ella M. Rudolph," which was popular enough to have been collected at least five times from traditional singers. And so it was remembered, and so Bruce Stagg became interested in the tale -- although so long after it happened that the primary witnesses were all dead. It's too bad this book wasn't written fifty years earlier, but that certainly isn't Stagg's fault.

Initially he wrote a play about the incident. Nothing wrong with that, except that of course he had to dramatize the events to put them on stage. It may have been a good play -- I don't know, never having seen it, but Stagg seems to be a fluent writer.

Having done the play, he decided to turn it into a book. Nothing really wrong with that, either, particularly since he brought in more additional information.

That's the good news. The bad news is -- close to half the book is dialog. Dialog between people who died in the shipwreck, whose words were not heard by anything except the waves. In other words, it's fiction. Since the back cover claims it's a "true story," I consider that false advertising. This may not bother you as much as it bothered me; I have no use for historical fiction. Since I was trying to get actual facts out of the book, much of it was obviously useless to me.

There are some other oddities. There are a couple of genealogies presented in very strange form. There are a lot of photos, mostly too dark (whoever put together the book didn't realize that you need to lighten photos for printing on plain paper) -- and some of them, I am sure, cut out of group photos by someone who neither understood human physiology nor how to use Photoshop or whatever program he used; human skulls just don't come in that shape!

That said, this seems to be the only book there is about the Ella M. Rudolph. If, like me, you want to know more about the background to the song, this is the book for you. Just be prepared: It's not what it claims to be.… (más)