The story is about the enormous role of rum in early Atlantic Canada, with particular focus on how the truck system in the transatlantic cod fishery enabled captains and proprietors to sell large quantities of greatly marked-up rum to their employees so as to drive them into debt and avoid having to pay their wages.
The statistics are persuasive. Still, I'm not sure if it is Allan Greer or just the way the Star selected a bit from his book, but I have to be a little sceptical of the article's suggestion that every poor fisherman was inevitably driven hopelessly into rum-fuelled debt for the profit and convenience of their owner.
There are many anecdotal accounts of fishers in the records who made long careers -- sometimes credited with making forty or even more annual visits from European ports to the North Atlantic fishing grounds. Presumably at least some were not ruined every year, or the whole economy of the fishery would have collapsed. It was a grim proto-industrial business altogether, no doubt, but its survival for several hundred years suggests it was not a completely irrational economic system.
Still, a fun read on a Saturday morning. And for once major media runs a history op-ed that is about history, and not a diatribe against wokeness in history and how we are not doing enough to ram patriotic facts down the throats of school children so we can all forget about it later.
